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Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has launched a programmable product for data communication over existing power lines. The Powerline Communication product leverages the programmable analog and digital resources of Cypress's PSoC programmable system-on-a-chip architecture. It integrates multiple functions beyond communication, such as power measurement, system management and LCD drive. In addition to its flexibility and integration, the product offers greater than 97% packet success rates without retries and 100% success rates with retries built into the solution's coding, according to Cypress. It also offers the flexibility to communicate over high-voltage and low-voltage power lines for lighting and industrial control, home automation, automatic meter reading and smart energy management applications.

National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) present an efficient and inexpensive alternative when it comes to implementing complete embedded systems along with important peripheral functions. The reconfigurable logic circuitry of an FPGA offers tremendous flexibility. A lesser known feature is that the outputs of a digital FPGA also permit various analogue applications.