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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.

The ARM Cortex™-M4 processor is the latest embedded processor by ARM specifically developed to address digital signal control markets that demand an efficient, easy-to-use blend of control and signal processing capabilities. The combination of high-efficiency signal processing functionality with the low-power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits of the Cortex-M family of processors is designed to satisfy the emerging category of flexible solutions specifically targeting the motor control, automotive, power management, embedded audio and industrial automation markets. The Cortex-M4 processor features extended single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions, optimized SIMD arithmetic, saturating arithmetic instructions and an optional single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU). These features build upon the innovative technology that characterizes the ARM Cortex-M series processors…

Within the next three years, the U.S. military will test the feasibility of sending a quadruped robot out into the field as a trusty pack mule to carry supplies for its troops, wherever they go. If the testing goes well for Boston Dynamics's Legged Squad Support System (LS3), company founder Marc Raibert will have come a long way from the one-legged hopping robots he pioneered in the 1980s. Actually Raibert has already come a long way, to the point where the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office and the U.S. Marine Corps awarded his company a 30-month, $32-million contract last week to deliver a prototype LS3. This would be the first step in fulfilling the military's call for an autonomous, legged robot that can carry up to 181 kilograms of supplies for at least 32 kilometers without refueling.

The potential for the QTC material to transition from an insulator to a conductor (i.e. change its electrical property) is influenced by how much deformation the material is experiencing as a result of the applied mechanical pressure. QTC can be used to produce low profile, low cost, pressure activated switches or sensors that display variable resistance with applied force and return to a quiescent state when the force is removed. The difference between a QTC switch and a QTC sensor is arguably only the speed and amount of physical input required to achieve the required switching point or resistance range.

In case you haven’t realized it, the new trend in computer chip technology is multi-core. This is where most of the speed improvements moving forward will come from on our computers. To take full advantage of this however it is necessary to design your applications using Parallel Programming practices, also known as "parallelism". In today’s episode, we will meet with Stephen Toub, who will share with us some of the overarching concepts associated with parallelism, and some of the ways we are trying to empower developers to develop applications to take advantage of it.

Supporting the Wind River Systems VxWorks operating system on Intel architecture is valuable for customers who would like to preserve their application software and evaluate other architectures for comparison purposes or for architecture conversion. Products from Wind River Systems, particularly VxWorks, offer a great opportunity to address multiple architectures with the same real-time operating system (RTOS). Furthermore, the continuous development and migration of multicore platforms has increased the focus on migrating software to multicore and performance optimizations given a specified software workload and certain hardware resources.

Experimental microbial fuel cells could turn bacteria into batteries that generate electricity from biomass. The key to this technology is the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to their surroundings—for example, to the anode of a microbial fuel cell. But if the organisms have to be in direct contact with the anode, such devices would have to have extremely large surface areas. Researchers from Aarhus University, in Denmark, report today in the journal Nature that bacteria appear to conduct electricity while separated by several millimeters, at least a thousand times as far apart than previously demonstrated. The naturally occurring electric currents, if confirmed, would allow bacteria spaced at least 12 millimeters apart to communicate electrically. The discovery might lead to new paths to treating infection and a better understanding of microbial ecosystems.

Related to the strong demands for virtualization technology, network I/O virtualization has recently become a hot topic and is one of the key topics being discussed at the upcoming Multicore Expo @ ESC. In fact, analyst firm IDC, in a recent white paper titled "Optimizing I/O Virtualization: Preparing the Data Center for Next-Generation Applications", stated that "If I/O is not sufficient, then it could limit all the gains brought about by the virtualization process."

NXP BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has said it will demonstrate a microcontroller based on the ARM Cortex-M4 at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California. NXP was one of the first companies to license the Cortex-M4 processor core and a chip has been implemented using a low-leakage 90-nm process technology. This enables performance in excess of 150-MHz clock frequency, NXP said. NXP has added proprietary power-down techniques to reduce power consumption. The ESC Silicon Valley demo will show that a 7-channel audio graphic equalizer application processing 32-bit precision audio data requires only 12 MHz of CPU bandwidth using the Cortex-M4 DSP extensions, and 60 MIPs without. The core includes DSP extensions not usually found inside a microcontroller and NXP's implementation are aimed at a broad set of applications including motor control, digital power control and embedded audio.

Avnet Electronics Marketing and Xilinx Inc. said they have concluded their five-month, 37-city global X-fest technical seminar series. According to the companies, the free one-day training sessions offered practical, how-to system level design instruction featuring the Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 FPGA families from Xilinx, as well as key enabling technologies from suppliers including Cypress Semiconductor, Intel, Maxim Integrated Products, National Semiconductor, NXP, Texas Instruments and Tyco Electronics. Replays of the events are available online.

How's this for a wedge issue on a slow news week? When Xilinx announced earlier this year that it was changing one of its foundry suppliers from UMC to TSMC for the 28-nm node, it seemed like a blow to differentiation—at least from a process technology standpoint—between Xilinx and Altera, which has been using TSMC for years. But while Xilinx chose to go with TSMC's high-performance/low power process, Altera said this week it is going with TSMC's high-performance process. Altera maintains that customers in the high end communications equipment market are much more concerned about performance than power. Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera, put it this way: "In communications infrastructure, nothing is battery powered. Everything is plugged into a wall."

March has seen two significant announcements from FPGA start-ups with innovative architectures: Tabula, with their time-domain-multiplexed architecture, and TierLogic, implementing their routing switches in a layer of thin-film transistors. Both approaches promise to significantly reduce the die size and cost of high-end FPGAs. But before these announcements broke, a relatively unnoticed paper at February's International Symposium on FPGAs described what may be the most radical technology of them all: FPGAs using electromechanical relays. No, this is not an early April Fool's joke, nor is it one of those "let's see if anyone will publish this one" academic exercises. The paper presented work by professors and students at the Stanford University departments of electrical engineering and computer science, and researchers at Altera Corp. The work was supported in part by DARPA funding.

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

When the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller appeared in 2005, it featured a set of female pin headers exposing most of the pins of the ATmega168 for easy hacking and for connecting accessory boards known as 'Shields'. The purpose of a shield is to provide new plug-and-play functionality to the host microcontroller, such as circuit prototyping, motion control, sensor integration, network and radio communication, or gaming interfaces, without worrying too much about the hardware implementation details. Seven years after the birth of the original Arduino, new shields keep coming out and are being cataloged on http://shieldlist.org/, a testament to the versatility of the design. It is also simple to build a DIY shield when nothing out there will meet your needs or when you want to understand how the shield concept works from the ground up.

There are severe flaws within the Harmonic-Balance and SPICE programs now widely used. Mentioned as far back as within an abstract of Session WSO at the 2008 IEEE International Microwave Symposium: "Even though nonlinear circuit-analysis software has been in use for many years, users still have difficulty obtaining valid results with existing methods.  Recognized problems include poor accuracy, convergence difficulties, long simulation times, and unstable results (i.e., results that vary greatly with minor changes in parameters).  These problems are encountered in both harmonic-balance and time-domain simulations."