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The latest knight to ride for the BT round table, Sir Peter Bonfield, will be looking to bring the competitive skills that he...

Nios-II, the second generation of Altera’s soft processor core, will address the test and verification issues of its predecessor, according to the FPGA firm. Unveiled this week, Nios-II has several times the performance of Nios, but perhaps more importantly the user experience has been simplified. “With Nios a lot of our customers were hardware engineers, plus a few software engineers,” ...

Industry horror stories are being overworked to persuade customers into rash judgements for SoC designs, according to the CEO of Tensilica Chris Rowen. “Everyone is talking up their angle,” Rowen told EW, “the Asic guys are saying if you try and do your own designs you won’t get first time right silicon; the EDA people are trying to get you ...

Mercedes uses it, so do BMW, Ducati and even the budget car makers from Korea. CAN-bus is now in just about every mass-produced car, and CAN-connections are set to grow. Supporting this uptake, and the increasing use of the LIN-bus, are a whole host of microcontrollers, from the simplest 8-pin, 8-bit micro to 32-bit multi-interface devices. In the 32-bit area ...

If your product is driven by performance in terms of communication or interactivity, this will soon drive you to a 32-bit processor. “Communication needs protocol stacks. Protocol stacks need operating systems. Operating systems and protocol stacks both need a lot of processing power, not to mention memory management units (MMU), Ethernet MACs and so on. User interfaces can also determine ...

Embedded code development software does not come cheap if you are developing tens of thousands of lines of code in a multi-engineer project. On the other hand, if the project is smaller, and particularly if it avoids high-level languages, the tools can cost nothing because silicon vendors, eager to sell microcontrollers, give them away. What you won’t get in a ...

They said it, mistakenly, about videophones and world peace, but RFID, the use of radio waves for identification tagging, could be an idea whose time has come. “The technology has been around for 40 years, but now it’s becoming useful because it’s getting cheaper,” says Professor Edgar Fleisch of the University of St Gallen, part of the EPCglobal consortium aimed ...

Sales of new products drove revenues way up at programmable logic company Xilinx. The San Jose-based company reported Q4 revenues of $403.4m, up ten per cent sequentially and 32 per cent year-over-year. Net income rose to $130.9m, up 165 per cent from the same quarter a year ago. The results included the benefit of a tax settlement and a charge ...