The article describes the context and need for embedded operating systems that are more responsive to the power management demands placed on today’s electronic devices. It reviews the design objectives for the two main types of power management, reactive and proactive, and examines how both can be implemented. For system developers designing portable electronic devices, […]
The consumer sector has become a reliable bellwether for the state of the electronics industry. However you slice it, the latest data does not paint a pretty picture. With the publication of its latest U.S. market forecast, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) provided data that put the typical knock-on effect of a recession into concrete […]
The Texas A&M team describes an FPGA embedded system design project intended to assess the technology’s suitability for use in real-time, high-performance applications. The test application is a speech encryption system intended for use in military and high-security environments. The team used a Xilinx Virtex II Pro platform FPGA for the project, and was also […]
Green design will be one of the enduring themes of 2009, or so we are told. As hard-faced as it might sound, though, it is hard to see this theme getting the attention it needs right now. My problem with the whole concept is that it currently seems to attract a premium at just about […]
Consumers want high-end GUIs on portable devices, but most MCUs—even those at 32bit—do not have the capacity to support embedded versions of these on their own. The article outlines the collaboration between Atmel, which has a family of customizable MCUs, and Amulet Technologies, a specialist in GUIs based on a compressed version of HTML. It […]
The complexity of delivering full system products means that more and more companies are looking to outsource some activities to concentrate engineering resources on areas that enable greater product differentiation. For small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in particular, outsourcing provides access to resources and skills that allow them to undertake projects that would be otherwise […]
Lane Mason Marc Greenberg DDR3 DRAMs still languish around the edges of the market despite their supposed attraction in terms of power and performance, the widespread availability of product, and the presence of a supposedly ‘evolved’ ecosystem and implementation infrastructure. Just over 18 months ago, Intel launched a major Go To DDR3 market initiative at […]
Sharing industry-driven best practices in parallel programming is the only way to unlock the benefits of efficient use of multicore silicon platforms and dramatically increase their rate of adoption. It is now widely agreed that the largest single brake on the adoption rate for multicore platforms is the ability of software developers to program them. […]
The dependability of high-volume embedded systems, such as consumer electronics devices, is threatened by a combination of rapidly increasing complexity, decreasing time-to-market, and strong cost constraints. This environment poses challenging research questions that are being investigated in the Trader Project, following an industryas- laboratory approach. This paper describes the vision behind the project and reviews […]
The Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) initiative aims to help resolve the difficulties that arise today when modeling multicore systems-on-chip (SoC) so that designers can perform early and timely test of the embedded software that will run on the end devices. As architects continue to add more cores to meet hardware design goals, the complexity of […]
