Embedded Systems

Maxim is to reveal a ‘wellness platform’ for body-worn devices at electronica 2014 – a suite of design hardware and software centred on a new ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontroller, the MAX32600. “The wellness platform provides power and battery management, digital processing, integrated sensors, low-power communications, and security,” said the firm, adding that security comes through on-board public key authentication, data encryption, ...

These days it feels like everyone is talking about wearable technology – and rightfully so.

Today Dialog announces availability of two new audio DSP codecs – DA7322 and DA7323 – targeting applications with up to four analogue or digital microphones respectively.

An adaptor for the RIoTboard development platform from Farnell element14 is designed to significantly expand the board’s interface capability.

Intel has tweaked its SD card-sized embedded processing development board, dubbed Edison, which is its attempt to break the x86 processors into hobbyist and low cost prototyping, currently the domain of ARM-based Arduino, BeagleBone and perhaps Raspberry Pi. The original SD card-sized module had a 400MHz Intel Quark processor, now the Edison module is shipping with a dual-core Atom CPU and single core microcontroller. Open source includes OS ...

Automotive applications beckon as ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontrollers get AEC-Q100 grad1 certification in Freescale’s Kinetis EA series. The 32bit MCU cores run at 48MHz and operate over -40 to 125°C and 2.7-5.5V (including flash write). “This family of microcontrollers from Freescale offers robust EMI performance and extended, automotive-grade temperature range,” said David Shen, CTO at Farnell, which is stocking the MCUs ...

Hot on the heals of Imagination’s first 64-bit MIPS core, the I6400, the prpl foundation has announced QEMU (CPU emulation and virtualisation) support for MIPS Release 6 (r6) architecture. I6400 is one of Imaginations Warrior-class cores, and the first to execute r6 code. As with ARM, for ‘new architecture’, read ‘new instruction set’. The 32/64-bit r6 architecture adds instructions to ...

Imagination Technologies has released the first complete 64-bit MIPS core for many years. Although the MIPS64 instruction set has been licensed in the past, it is less common for the complete core to be licensed in RTL form. Remarkably, the 64-bit core will be half-way down the firm’s performance range – and will be the first of its I-Class Warrior ...

Renesas has announced  its RX111 motor control kits. These inverter reference solution kits are designed to drive any three-phase permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM), also called brushless AC motors. The RX111 inverter kits enable engineers to save time by eliminating the need to tune their motor parameters and evaluate the best tuning algorithm coefficients. As a result, they can rotate a ...

Imagination Technologies has entered the student/hobbyist development board arena with a computing module based on a MIPS processor which it claims has more than twice the performance of the Raspberry Pi ARM CPU. To encourage take up of the boar,d called MIPS Creator CI20, the company is giving away the first batch of these boards for free to application developers. ...