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Events such as natural disasters, military actions, and public safety threats have led to an increased need for robust robots — especially ones that can travel across complex terrain in any dimension. The ability to scale vertical building surfaces or other structures offers unique capabilities in military applications such as urban reconnaissance, sensor deployment, and setting up urban network nodes. SRI's novel clamping technology, called compliant electroadhesion, has enabled the first application of this technology to wall-climbing robots that can help with these situations.  As the name implies, electroadhesion is an electrically controllable adhesion technology. It involves inducing electrostatic charges on a wall substrate using a power supply connected to compliant pads situated on the moving robot. SRI has demonstrated robust clamping to common building materials including glass, wood, metal, concrete, etc. with clamping pressures in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 N per square cm of clamp (0.8 to 2.3 pounds per square inch). The technology works on conductive and non-conductive substrates, smooth or rough materials, and through dust and debris. Unlike conventional adhesives or dry adhesives, the electroadhesion can be modulated or turned off for mobility or cleaning. The technology uses a very small amount of power (on the order of 20 microwatts/Newton weight held) and shows the ability to repeatably clamp to wall substrates that are heavily covered in dust or other debris.

In many instances, the way embedded software is structured and how it interacts with the hardware in a system can have a profound effect on the transient immunity performance of a system. It can be impractical and costly to completely eliminate transients at the hardware level, so the system and software designers should plan for the occasional erroneous signal or power glitch that could cause the software to perform erratically. Erratic actions on the part of the software can be classified into two different categories:

25 March 2010—Nowadays, a phone that doesn’t know where it is or where it’s going can’t really call itself ”smart.” To orient themselves properly, smartphones require not just GPS capability but also an electronic compass, an accelerometer, and increasingly, digital gyroscopes. The point of a gyroscope is to sense any change in an object’s axis of rotation. Up until now, gyroscopes measured movement around the three axes with three sensors—one for pitch, one for yaw, and another for roll. At most, two of these sensors would be combined on a single die. The best you could do was, say, match up a 3- by 5- by 1-millimeter yaw sensor with a 4- by 5- by 1-mm sensor that would detect pitch and roll. But on 15 February, STMicroelectronics unveiled  a 4- by 4- by 1-mm gyroscope whose single sensing structure tracks all three angular motions. It’s a triumph of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering.

Using a programmable device to expand the capabilities of an embedded system, designers can reduce power consumption at the same time By Rahul V. Shah and Vishesh Agrawal

RoweBots Research, Inc., a supplier of tiny embedded POSIX RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of UnisonTM Version 5 and the open-source version of Unison Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux and POSIX compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s SH-2A Microcontroller (MCU) family to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time.

In then the past few years we have seen multiprocessing systems become more mainstream, in fact most modern personal computer CPUs now feature symmetric multiprocessing systems (SMP), where multiple instantiations of the same processor share the processing burden of the applications running on the PC. While SMPs are quite common today, we typically have not seen a shift towards multiprocessing in embedded computing. However, a new type of embedded design technique gives engineers the freedom to intelligently distribute processing functions across a digital subsystem. This article will look at an example of the distributed processing technique using Cypress Semiconductor's PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 architectures, which consist of a main CPU (in this case an 8051 or ARM Cortex M3), a DMA engine, and array of Universal Digital Blocks (UDB).

In what comes as a bit of a surprise, Fuji Soft Inc.’s new humanoid robot platform for hobbyists and researchers has been given the name PALRO (pal + robot).  Naturally we feel this name is a superb choice!  Sales to research institutions will begin on March 15th, 2010 with a general release following later in the year.  The robot combines Fuji Soft’s software prowess with an open architecture which will give developers plenty of room to experiment. PALRO stands 39.8cm (15″) tall and weighs 1.9kg (3.5 lbs), and here’s the good news: it costs 298,000 JPY ($3300 USD).  Considering PALRO has 20 DOF, a camera, 4 directional microphones, a speaker, LED arrays in its head and chest, 4 pressure sensors in each foot, 3-axis gyro sensor, an accelerometer, and an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU, it is priced very competitively.  A comparative robot kit like Vstone’s Robovie-PC for example, costs $1100 USD more and doesn’t have such a fancy exoskeleton.

Today's FPGAs are doubling in capacity every 2 years and have already surpassed the 5 million equivalent ASIC gate mark. With designs of this magnitude, the need for fast flows has never been greater. At the same time, designers are seeking rapid feedback on their ASIC or FPGA designs by implementing quick prototypes or initial designs on FPGA-based boards. These prototypes or designs allow designers to start development, verification and debug of the design—in the context of system software and hardware—and also to fine tune algorithms in the design architecture. Quick and intuitive debug iterations to incorporate fixes are of great value. The ability to perform design updates that don't completely uproot all parts of the design that have already been verified is also a bonus! Whether the goal is aggressive performance or to get a working initial design or prototype on the board as quickly as possible, this paper provides information on traditional and new techniques that accelerate design and debug iterations.

Analog Devices, Inc., has introduced a pair of Class-D audio amplifiers for smart phones, GPS units and other handheld electronics where premium sound quality offers a major competitive advantage. The SSM2375 and SSM2380 amplifiers provide audio system designers with the option of fixed or programmable gain settings combined with low noise and superior audio performance. The SSM2380 low-power, stereo Class-D amplifier is the first in its class to incorporate an I²C interface, which allows gain stages to be set from 1 dB to 24 dB (plus mute) in 47 distinct steps with no other external components required. The programmable interface also enables independent L/R channel shutdown, a variable low-EMI (electro-magnetic interference) emission control mode, and programmable ALC (automatic level control) functions for speaker protection. The SSM2380 achieves a 100-dB SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and extends battery life by achieving 93 percent power efficiency at 5 V while running at 1.4 W into an 8-ohm speaker.

ON Semiconductor has expanded its multiplexer product line with devices that are designed to function at high input rates/clock frequencies. The NB6VQ572M, NB6LQ572, NB7L572, NB6L572M, NB7LQ572, NB6LQ572M, NB7VQ58M and NB7V58M mux/fanout devices are targeted at SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel, backplane and other clock/data distribution applications. The NB6VQ572M and NB6LQ572M differential 4:1 clock/data input multiplexers with 1:2 current mode logic (CML) clock/data fanout buffers operate at up to 6 GHz/8 Gbps from a 1.8 V, 2.5 V or 3.3 V power supply. The new devices have a data dependent jitter of <10 ps and random clock jitter of less than 0.8 ps RMS.

A transistor that emits light and is made from organic materials could lead to cheaper digital displays and fast-switching light sources on computer chips, according to the researchers who built it. Small displays made from diodes of the same type of materials (organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs) are already in commercial production, but the transistor design could improve on those and lead to applications where OLEDs can’t go. The new organic light-emitting transistor (OLET) is much more efficient than previous designs. It has an external quantum efficiency—a key measure of how much light comes out per charge carrier pumped in—of 5 percent. An OLED based on the same material has a quantum efficiency of only 2 percent. Previous OLET designs had an efficiency of only 0.6 percent.