From the Editor

Grainy cell-phone video not good enough? Embarrassed to send shaky clips to your friends? Well sorry no more because an Irish startup company has just the solution for you. The new Myriad chip packs awesome 20 GFLOPS power into the palm of your, uh, Palm. Or other handheld device. Check out this week's hot new development.

Thanks as always for reading. We encourage you to share your thoughts in the new easier-to-use comments area right below the articles; don't be shy. Or you can get a lively discussion going on our new FORUMS.

You may have noticed a reward for the best, most insightful forum posts.  We're giving another one away for the best posts in March, so get started posting.

Jim Turley - Editor, Embedded Technology Journal


Industry News

March 09, 2010

Energy Micro launches starter kit for energy friendly microcontroller range

Digi-Key Corporation Announces Exclusive Global Distribution Deal with EPC

Active Media Products Releases 1.8-Inch PATA Turbo ZIF SSD

March 08, 2010

Ericsson adds Full PMBus Read And Write Capability to Voltage Regulators

SiTel and Target partnership yields powerful VoIP DSP

Atego’s real-time Ada development system now available to military and aerospace developers

60V Input Dual Output Synchronous Step-Down DC/DC Controller Draws Only 50µA in Battery-Powered Systems

March 05, 2010

CMX Systems Announces SSL/TLS for TCP/IP Stacks

First ETX Platform with new Intel Atom Dual Core CPU

Atmel Connects Single-chip AES-128 Immobilizer and Remote Keyless Entry Microcontroller for Combi-Key Applications

Advantech’s New Series of Intel® Atom™ Processor Based Embedded IPCs Offers Exceptional, Cost-Effective Low Power Solutions

ADLINK Technology Introduces Low Power 3U CompactPCI® Blade Supporting the Dual-Core Intel® Atom™ Processor D510

MIPS Technologies Simplifies Android™ Application Development with Tools for the MIPS® Architecture

March 04, 2010

X-FAB First to Deliver Single-Block Embedded NVRAM as Pure Play Foundry Solution

Atmel Introduces First Solution to Support Active Cell Balancing in High-cell-count Li-Ion Battery Packs

SFF-SIG Adopts CoreExpress® Specification to Strengthen PCIe 2.0-Ready COM Portfolio

Fujitsu selects IAR Systems to provide a development toolchain for the 'Jade-L Starterkit'

Atmel Features Industry's Lowest Power Wake-up Management with New LIN Transceiver Families

Silentium Uses Blackfin Processors To Bring Active Noise Cancellation To A Multitude Of Applications

Atmel First to Introduce Off-the-Shelf Automotive-Qualified Capacitive Touch Controller

Feature Articles

The Moving Picture Show

by Jim Turley

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

Cortex-M4 Stirs the Soup

by Jim Turley


Android… Android… Android…

What’s an RTOS to do?

by Stephen Olsen, Mentor Graphics

Phoenix Rising?

An Old Name Returns in a New Role

by Dick Selwood


The Zii Egg & ZMS 5

I recently came across the Zii Egg and my first reaction was - " I want it! I want it! Now!". All my friends who had a look had the device had the same reaction.

I looked into a bit more about the processor ZMS 5 and the technology that they claim that...
Posted on 03/05/10 at 12:19 AM
by: Lord Loh.

UK Embedded Systems Masterclass - May 6th and 11th

Hi,

this is just to let people know that we are running the Embedded Systems Masterclass again this year. It's a non-sales forum where engineers can come along and learn about new technologies, develop new skills etc. www.embedded-masterclass.com

T...
Posted on 02/24/10 at 5:39 AM
by: Energi

Coverage driven Verification

We do this approach since 5 years, by developing our own test bench vhdl/tcl tools and procedures. This is useful to provide the proof that all the requirements of the FPGA design are covered by simulation, including robustness simulations. Such methodolo...
Posted on 02/17/10 at 5:46 AM
by: Remy

Loh- There's good news and ba

Loh-

There's good news and bad news.

The good news is, there are companies that make the combo CPU-FPGA you're looking for. Check out Actel, Atmel, and Triscend (now part of Xilinx), and Altera.

The bad news is, your professor is right: CPUs and...
Posted on 02/16/10 at 11:28 AM
by: Jim Turley

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Creating Secure Mobile Devices with Open Kernel Labs OKL4 (CHALK TALK)

In this Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton will delve into the world of embedded virtualization and software security in mobile devices with Gernot Heiser and Rob McCammon of Open Kernel Labs. In today's connected mobile devices, the OKL4 open source microkernel can provide security, virtualization, and a host of other benefits with absolute minimal memory and performance overhead

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Multi-gigabit serial I/O standards like PCIe and Gigabit Ethernet are becoming very popular with system designers, but until recently, only very expensive FPGAs supported these standards. In this webcast Amelia Dalton will chat with Bertrand Leigh of Lattice Semiconductor about low-cost FPGAs that bring multi-gigabit serial interface capability to cost-sensitive applications.

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Until recently, the embedded market has been primarily the domain of 8-bit microcontrollers. While embedded applications existed for 32-bit processors, they were limited to a few high-performance areas. The level of processing required for many embedded applications is increasing dramatically due to the convergence of communication and consumer applications and the delivery of higher levels of content, including video and high-end audio.

Using Embedded Hypervisors In Mobile Devices (CHALK TALK)

Join Amelia Dalton as she explores the use of embedded hypervisors to create safe and secure software for mobile devices with Rob McCammon of Open Kernel Labs.

Embedded Networking With MicroBlaze and Spartan-3A FPGAs (CHALK TALK)

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The iridix algorithm was developed by Apical Limited to drastically enhance image quality by employing dynamic range compression. This innovative and patented technology is the result of more than a decade of research by Apical scientists based on how the human eye perceives image contrast under various lighting conditions.

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Join Amelia Dalton as she works her way to "Hello World" on an FPGA-based embedded system with Xilinx Spartan-3A and MicroBlaze.

ZeBu™: A Unified Verification Approach for Hardware Designers and Embedded Software Developers (WHITE PAPER)

Moore’s law continues to drive both chip complexity and performance to new highs every year, and continues to stress and periodically “break” existing design flows. Fortunately for EDA users, the same shrinking geometries that make their design problems tougher are also helping to improve the performance for their EDA tools.