Feature Articles
The Moving Picture Show
These guys should meet. The other day we talked about Ceva’s MM3000 cell-phone processor (Feb 16, “Viddy This, O My Brothers”). This week we’ve got an equally interesting device from startup company Movidius that makes handheld video even cooler. Brace yourselves for Myriad, the video-editing deck in your hand.
In some ways, the two companies are related, so it’s not surprising they would approach the same market. Ireland-based Movidius is staffed, in part, with exiles from Parthus, the company that eventually became the Irish/Israeli firm Ceva. Apart from their shared accents, though, the two companies and their chips are very different.
For starters, Ceva licenses IP cores while Movidius makes real chips. They call it Myriad, probably because it can do countless different things. To an engineer, Myriad is a massively parallel, superscalar, 8-way VLIW machine. To a cell phone user, it’s a way-cool method to capture, edit, and massage high-definition video taken with your cell-phone camera. Read More
Actel’s Three-Legged Stool
They say good things come in threes: the Three Stooges, triple plays, the first Star Wars movies, two halves of a six-pack. Now FPGA maker Actel adds another happy trio: SmartFusion.
Actel’s triple play is a new chip that combines the three things most embedded designers need: a microprocessor, an FPGA, and analog circuitry. The company calls the conglomeration SmartFusion on the theory that it fuses three disparate features into one device.
Processors in FPGAs aren’t new, but they’re not always successful. The big FPGA companies have done it before, and every engineering undergrad has probably tried stuffing a microcontroller into an FPGA at some point. The result is usually awkward, power-hungry, slow, and expensive. Programmable logic just isn’t a good match for the resources that a processor requires.
Microchip Maxes Out Mighty Mites
For a silicon company, Microchip has the best brand name ever. Even your grandmother knows what a “microchip” is, even if she isn’t clear on what they do. Like Scotch tape, Xerox copiers, and Kleenex snot rags, Microchip has built-in name recognition. (Insider trivia: here in the publishing business we get letters from trademark lawyers gently reminding us not to use words like Coke, Xerox, and Kleenex as generic nouns. A weird one came from a certain agricultural firm to remind me not to call tractors “caterpillars;” does anyone really do that?)
Microchip’s biggest challenge isn’t protecting its brand name but keeping its complex product line straight. At last count, I think the company made 3.72 zillion different kinds of microcontrollers. They’ve abandoned any semblance of meaningful names or part numbers for them all; I think they just assign a serial number at birth and call it good.
Cortex-M4 Stirs the Soup
It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping! It’s the Cortex-M4!
As if ARM’s pantry of microprocessors weren’t already well stocked, now there’s another tasty treat to squeeze on the shelf. The Cortex-M4, revealed just yesterday, combines ingredients from the popular M3 microcontroller with a helping of goodies from the ARM9 and ARM11. The resulting confection is a microcontroller/DSP combination that should suit the tastes of embedded designers the world over.
As its name suggests, the new M4 is part of ARM’s low-end microcontroller range of 32-bit CPU cores that run the new(-ish) Thumb2 instruction set. Like other M-series processors, the M4 is intended for fairly low-cost chips in the $2–$15 range. Indeed, the first M4-based chip from NXP is due out late this year and will likely be priced right around $5 in volume.
Android… Android… Android…
What’s an RTOS to do?
Just one short year ago, developers were scratching their heads over this curiosity called Android. Today it appears developers can’t wait to get their mitts on it. Programmers and major device manufacturers alike are showing a great appetite for Android. This feeding frenzy has spilled over to the smart phone user as well. When market-research firm ComScore polled smart phone users in late summer of 2009, seven percent of current users said they would be switching over to an Android phone. A few months later, the same polling found 17 percent of the respondents were considering an Android phone.
No question the Android development platform has turned into a juggernaut. But a common concern now is that this open-source platform will become the de facto operating system for that market. And while it does show a lot of promise, let’s not forget the true and valued performance of a real-time operating system (RTOS).
Viddy This, O My Brothers
iPhone not powerful enough? BlackBerry looking a bit sluggish? Palm Pré just doesn’t have that kick you need? Then hang onto your tights because a new killer cell-phone processor is on its way.
These days, the phone is the least interesting part of a cell “phone.” It’s the camera, the applications, the GPS location-based services, the battery life, the user interface, the wireless networking, and (in all too many cases) the color of the plastic that make or break the product. Making calls on your cell phone? What a quaint idea.
That being the case, it’s important for cell-phone designers and manufacturers to keep up with the latest in processor and multimedia technology. Multi-megapixel still cameras in a phone are no longer remarkable; they’re expected. Video playback is mandatory. Live video recording is no big deal. And the ability to squirt all this video over one or more wireless networks (not necessarily the telephony network) is also de rigueur.
Could You Make Your Own Processor?
Could you design your own microprocessor or microcontroller? Would you want to?
Designing a microprocessor is one of those EE-student daydreams, like mechanical engineers doodling cars in their notebooks or art students who sketch, well, sketches. It’s a cool idea, and any EE undergrad worth his salt knows, just knows, he could do it better than anyone else.
What would you put in yours? And what would you leave out?
You’d probably make it fast, and power-efficient, and easy to program. You might add a couple of interesting and clever instructions that are curiously absent from all the mainstream chips. What would yours do? Would it include floating-point math, graphics functions, cryptographic primitives, ASCII string handling, BCD arithmetic, or something else?
Phoenix Rising?
An Old Name Returns in a New Role
Trying to trace UK electronics companies through the maze of takeovers, sales, mergers and disposals of the last fifty years is complex and frequently depressing. Then sometimes something happens and, irrationally, the mood lightens. The news that the Plessey Semiconductors name is once again to be on the outside of a wafer fab provokes one of those irrational moments.
Thirty years ago Britain still had a significant home-grown electrical and electronics industry.
ICL was building mainframe computers, with its own operating system and using its own designs of LSI ICs.
Flashing, Hetero Unions, and Changing Your Name
A real-time operating system (RTOS) used to be just a tiny microkernel of code. Nowadays they’re growing into fully featured operating systems with their own development tools and third-party support. Just a few months ago, Intel paid $884 million in cash to acquire RTOS vendor Wind River Systems. Clearly, we’ve moved beyond a few kilobytes of microkernel code.
Another case in point is QNX, makers of the popular Neutrino RTOS. With help from desktop-software heavyweight Adobe, QNX ported Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash software to Neutrino. Now you can have Flash animation on your embedded systems, at least so long as you’re using Neutrino. It’s an interesting match.
Analog Devices and Your Digital BFF
Circling silently beneath the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a solitary fin breaks the surface; then two, then three. Panicked swimmers paddle for the shore, anxious to distance themselves from the threat. Watch out! It’s a Blackfin!
Yankee chipmaker Analog Devices has released a school of Blackfin chips, causing mayhem in parts of Texas. These once-placid waters were TI’s territory. Now that dominance is under threat as a newer and hungrier challenger threatens to take a bite out of the market leader.
Meanwhile, back on dry land, we have three new processor chips to consider. They’re called the Blackfin BF500 family, and they’re brand new today. They’re cheap ($5 to $13 in quantity), they’re fast (300-400 MHz), and they come in three flavors.