Embedded Systems

Toumaz Technology, the power wireless system specialist, is to take part in an EU-funded collaborative research project to develop a personalised blood glucose prediction tool aimed at improving the lives of diabetes patients. The EU is backing the four year project with €7.1m under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project is being coordinated by Novo Nordisk A/S, a specialist in ...

Design engineers are used to deciding which peripherals they need when devising the architecture of a microcontroller-based system; they are not used to thinking about when they need them. There is a category of applications, however, in which this extra dimension is relevant, and accounting for it in the design process can lead to valuable cost and space savings. In ...

Broadcom eyes potential for single chip Blu-ray design platform with acquisition of Sunext Design, a US subsidiary of Sunext Technology, which specialises in front-end optical technology. Broadcom has also licensed optical disk reader and writer technology from Sunext Technology. Sunext’s single-chip front-end technology will be integrated into Broadcom’s system-on-a-chip (SoC) back-end Blu-ray Disc platform. The emergence of full high-definition 1080p ...

Multi-core devices are driving into embedded applications with new quad core chips from Intel and Renesas and the coming launch of benchmarking for multi-core systems. Intel has launched three new multi-core processors for the embedded market with two support chipsets, and extended its minimum lifetime support to seven years for all its chips in the face of customer pressure from ...

Two embedded operating system vendors, Lynuxworks and Green Hills Software, have launched hypervisor software to allow different operating systems to run on a single system securely. At the same time the Multicore Association is working on a standard to make them easier to use to run multiple operating systems on the same hardware completely securely and independently. Lynuxworks built a fully ...

Texas Instruments has introduced its first processors based on the ARM Cortex-A8 core, and they are notable because they offer the performance to widen the market for its OMAP mobile phone platform to other types of handheld product, including medical monitors. The superscalar 600MHz Cortex-A8 core has been integrated into four OMAP35x applications processors which have been tuned to meet the needs ...

Microchip Technology’s latest family of 8-bit flash PIC microcontrollers (MCUs) will operate down to 1.8V. The aim seems to be to add more functionality to what is essentially a very low cost general purpose MCU. Prices start at $1.34 (70p) each in 10,000 unit quantities. One interesting feature is the addition of a touch sensing peripheral, which can be used ...

Altera has teamed up with design-in distributor Trs-Star to create an all-in-one multimedia platform for the in-car entertainment system market. A Stratix II FPGA lies at the heart of the in-car multimedia system platform which has been created by the German distributor. Called Paris, the development platform supports CAN, MOST, USB, Ethernet and SDHC interfaces. By virtue of the FPGA ...

Xilinx’s latest design kit, based on Spartan-3A DSP FPGA, is intended to provide a development platform for cost-effective video applications including in-car diver systems, multimedia and portable ultrasound systems. According to Dean Westman, v-p of marketing in the processor group at Xilinx, video systems that target FPGA-based designs will tend to include a combination of both DSP and embedded processing. “We ...

3DLABS Semiconductor will be demonstrating its Windows CE board support package (BSP) for its programmable media processor at Embedded World in Nuremberg next week. The DMS-02 programmable media processing array is based on a dual ARM architecture and is used in embedded consumer electronics devices such as connected media players, portable navigation units, service terminals, smartphones and gaming devices. The Windows CE 5.0 ...