Embedded Systems

Cambridge-based Camcon Technology has gained a European patent for its Intelligent Valve Actuation (IVA) technology which allows electrical operation of internal combustion engine valves without resorting to cams. “If all goes to plan, in two years we should have a running pre-production engine,” company founder Wladyslaw Wygnanski told Electronics Weekly. The firm’s basic technology is a high-speed bi-stable electromagnetic actuator. ...

Research organisation Qinetiq has demonstrated a system for updating target information in a flying weapon. In a trial by the RAF’s Fast Jet and Weapons Operational Evaluation Unit, two separate Enhanced Paveway 2 (EPW2) self-steering bombs dropped from a Tornado GR4 aircraft were both twice updated in-flight with new target co-ordinates. “Weapon terminal guidance was within that expected of GPS ...

Texas Instruments has released the first of its DaVinci chips aimed at allowing firms with little experience of video to incorporate it in their products. The TMS320DM6443/6 chips include a C64x 600MHz DSP, an ARM926, video accelerators, networking peripherals and external memory interfaces “specifically tuned for video”, said the company. The 6443 is for video decode applications and includes analogue ...

Creating a robot which can navigate autonomously in confusing environments is the focus of a research project at the University of Wales. A researcher is teaching a robot to learn its way around an environment using its own memory. “The aim is for it to navigate in an environment using a reduced set of sensors and history,” said Dr Torbjorn ...

Micron Technology has produced a camera chip for cars, which includes a mixer to add computer-generated overlays to images. “The MT9V125 is designed to generate NTSC or PAL with the minimum number of additional components,” August Will, Micron’s European image sensor manager, told Electronics Weekly. The device is designed for side-view mirror replacement and reversing, for either ‘scene viewing’ or ...

After a year of growth following the addition of Linux to its device operating system portfolio, Wind River is focusing on freeing up developers for more important work. The company’s upgrade to its Workbench 2.4 product can take over manual testing and failure diagnosis tasks. “Most developers would prefer to develop and not test code,” said John Fanelli, v-p of product ...

Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS) claims its Matrix location technology will be able to improve the location capabilities which will be offered by the European Galileo satellite system. “Here we have another satellite system and yet because of specific technical issues there’s still a need for a backup system – a helping hand from a cellular-based network – just to make ...

Nallatech has extended the performance of its FPGA-based computing range with a motherboard and expansion modules incorporating all the variants of Xilinx’s Virtex-4 family. According to Dr Malachy Devlin, chief technical officer at Nallatech, given the performance and I/O capabilities of the Virtex-4 FPGAs the company has created a range of peripheral subsystems to match their bandwidth and memory requirements. ...

Wireless sensor networks, with their ability to capture location-sensitive information where wired systems are impractical or costly, seem poised to take off in applications such as industrial control and building monitoring. However, their performance in these electrically noisy environments has been less than robust. Now Dust Networks claims it has solved that problem with a new mesh platform that provides ...

Software security is an increasingly critical issue in embedded system designs that are web-enabled, according to supplier of real-time operating systems Green Hills Software. Peter Hoogenboom of Green Hills told the Micro Developer Forum at the Embedded Systems Show in Birmingham this week that the problems of software security in embedded computing designs is compounded when systems are connected to ...