Embedded Systems

Philips and Freescale have agreed to share technologies they have developed for FlexRay, the next-generation high-speed automotive bus standard. The companies will use a common protocol engine, and a common SystemC-based reference software model. Although FlexRay is an open standard, Ross McOuat, European automotive MCU marketing manager for Freescale, said that customers are concerned its complexity will lead to problems ...

MontaVista Software is set to take on the might of Symbian and Microsoft as it moves to drive Linux further into use as an operating system (OS) in mobile phones with the launch of the Mobilinux Open Framework programme. The programme is intended as a means of bringing semiconductor firms, mobile software and phone integrators together to create reference architectures ...

Cambridge Consultants has designed an intelligent radio transceiver architecture claimed to have a new level of power economy and performance for in-body medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications. “Combined with the opportunities offered by the MICS frequency allocation – which is emerging as a worldwide standard endorsed by the FCC and ETSI – we see great demand for an optimised single-chip ...

The battle for operating system dominance in the embedded world is heating up as markets formerly driven by other industries such as corporate IT or industrial applications come increasingly under the purview of consumer demand. With almost every device now requiring connection to the Internet and pervasive concerns such as power management, that has pulled Microsoft and Wind River into ...

A battle for dominance in the embedded operating system world is gaining steam, pitting Wind River on one side and Microsoft on the other. Until now, these two companies have existed largely in separate worlds. But as a number of end markets continue to converge and Wind River has repositioned its business away from a heavy telecoms focus, both are ...

The first wave of devices compliant with the HyperTransport Specification 2.0, which defines performance levels of up to 2.8 Gigatransfers/s and mapping to PCI Express, are now available from seven HyperTransport Consortium members. Technology from AMD, Agilent, Dolphin Technology, FuturePlus Systems, GDA Technologies, ULi and VIA, includes HyperTransport-enabled 64-bit processors, I/O chipsets, silicon IP and development tools. HyperTransport chip-to-chip interconnect ...

When MISRA-C was launched in 1998, the UK automotive coding guidelines for C in vehicle systems contained 128 rules for writing good C code. Although a number of development tools support it and many compiler vendors have changed their library source to be MISRA-C compliant, the first version of the coding guidelines was not perfect. After four years in the ...

Designers of safety-critical automotive systems would do well to look to the medical device industry rather than aerospace for inspiration, claims a report from Cambridge Consultants (CCL). “The automotive industry has been trying to learn lessons, and is going to the wrong place,” author Dr Peter Bell told EW. “The aerospace industry designs safety in from the bottom up, but ...

Designers needing a real-time operating system should follow the open source, royalty free model, according to Cambridge-based eCosCentric. The company, which helps maintain the eCos operating system, said third party RTOSs, while offering similar technical features, can lock designers into one set of tools. “The fact that eCos is free and open source, with a flexible licence, is significant,” said ...

The European Commission’s nextTTA project, intended to develop the next level of time-triggered architecture (TTA) for transport electronics, is complete. The two-year project “proved that event-triggered communication such as industry standard CAN can be combined with TTA to provide an easy migration path from current CAN-based applications to time-triggered systems”, said German TTA firm and project member TTTech Computertechnik. As ...