Embedded Systems

How best to take technical support advice to the designer is one of the questions which have vexed semiconductor suppliers for many generations of their products. As costs of providing tech support increased more of the function was shared with distributors. Some of which were better equipped for the task than others. Online tech support is now changing the way ...

Atmel is offering an evaluation kit for its AVR XMEGA microcontroller family priced at $29. Called the Xplain kit, it contains a speaker with an audio amplifier, a potentiometer and temperature sensor, which are all connected to the 12-bit DAC or ADC on the ATxmega128A1 device. The external memories include an 8Mbyte SDRAM and an 8Mbyte serial data flash, and ...

ARM is getting interested in motor control applications and the potential of using ARM processors to improve the energy efficiency of the motorised systems from washing machines to car windows. But is it a case of finding new markets and customers in a downturn or is it a logical fit for the low power 32-bit processor technology? “The area of ...

STMicroelectronics has licensed the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and ARM’s Mali-400 graphics processor for its next generation set-top-box and digital TV system-on-chip (SoC) ICs. ST is already a significant user of ARM processor technology in its ST-40-based SoCs and Cortex-based microcontroller products. The significance of the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor is that it can be used as a scalable high performance ...

Richard Barry, head of innovation at Wittenstein High Integrity Systems and creator of FreeRTOS.org, talks to Electronics Weekly about important trends in the embedded market, the challenges faced by developers, and the industries creating the most innovative designs… 1. Describe in two sentences what Wittenstein HIS does in the UK market. Wittenstein HIS is best known for OpenRTOS and SafeRTOS, the ...

Customising silicon is the proven way to add differentiation to electronic products. When manufacturing volumes are very high, it’s easy to see the economic logic of ASICs. However, for many products demand is either more limited or less predictable, so the ASIC route is fraught with risk and programmable silicon is the only way forward. Programmable hardware comes in the ...

The performance of even the best sensor can be degraded by poor design of the signal conditioning circuit that interfaces its output to the digital processors at the heart of the system. Equally, over-specifying analogue devices can add cost. In designing a battery-powered analogue signal conditioning board with a ZigBee communications interface, we evaluated a range of different analogue front-end ...

Amino Communications has used a Intel Atom processor for an IPTV set-top box design. The Cambridge-based developer is aiming the set-top design at new types of interactive TV applications including on-demand and open Internet “over-the-top” (OTT) services. Amino has been working with Intel processors since 2006. According to Amino CTO Dominique Le Foll: “This builds on our relationship with Intel ...

Power consumption is becoming an increasingly important variable when it comes to calculating a carbon footprint for tele­com infrastructure projects. For example, on average, each fully loaded 3G cell site costs approximately $1,600 a year in the US or $3,200 a year in Europe. This suggests a typical European operator running 20,000 cell sites would consume 58MW, which translates to ...

Companies from the UK’s embedded system design community met in Farnborough this week at the ESC UK conference and exhibition. As a representative from embedded software company Green Hills Software pointed out: “The success of an event such as this is important for the embedded community in this country.” “A conference with internationally recognised speakers alongside the exhibition is a ...