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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.

By using a simple value process it is possible to speed up the analysis and help identify the best approach to take when developing a constant current regulation scheme for automotive interior LED lighting systems. Various approaches exist to address this particular design challenge that may result in a slowdown of the design process while engineering analysis can be performed to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the different options.

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

DMA is used in almost every complex system or subsystems, but it's observed that teams either build the DMA controller from scratch for each project for specific application or take the existing DMAC available from elsewhere. This article discusses the architecture of DMAC that can be used with any kind of Bus, configuration (parallel, serial transfers), can be connected to any kind of ports, most importantly any kind of software assumptions can be implemented in the DMAC very easily.

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

The marriage of high performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for making lab-on-a-chip technologies more practical. Microfluidics, the ability to manipulate tiny volumes of liquid, is at the heart of many lab-on-a-chip devices. Such platforms can automatically mix and filter chemicals, making them ideal for disease detection and environmental sensing. The performance of these devices, however, is typically inferior to larger scale laboratory equipment. While lab-on-a-chip systems can deliver and manipulate millions of liquid drops, there is not an equally scalable and efficient way to detect the activity, such as biological reactions, within the drops.

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.

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 IEEE has launched a new Web site that consolidates information about smart electric grids from it various societies. The portal is one of many activities from an IEEE smart grid initiative coordinating the organization's work on the transition to digital, networked power systems and services. The smart grid is "so interdisciplinary," said Wanda Reder, chair of the IEEE Smart Grid Task Force and former president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. "We have the gamut covered in technical interests, but we needed a way to facilitate communications between our many entities to link information on all the conferences, papers and standards we have in this area," she added.

The first part of this white paper explores the basic concepts behind HDMI, the markets it serves and its leadership role in multimedia interfaces. This is followed by a tutorial on the new capabilities of HDMI 1.4 and their role in providing a richer, more straightforward user experience. Next, we'll explore a series of user case scenarios that illustrate how the HEAC feature can simplify cabling requirements between digital home multimedia devices. The last portion of this paper discusses the architectural considerations and technical details involved with incorporating the Ethernet and Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format (S/PDIF) standards into the HDMI system-on-chips (SoCs) to support the HEAC feature.

On Monday, National Instruments announced one such platform. It's called LabView Robotics. In addition to LabView, the popular data-acquisition application, the package includes a bunch of tools specific to robotics. It can import codes in various formats (C, C++, Matlab, VHDL), offers a library of drivers for a wide variety of sensors and actuators, and has modules for implementation of real-time and embedded hardware. NI says engineers could use the package to both design and run their robotic systems. 

Ted Marena of Lattice Semiconductor Corp., points out that designers of digital systems are familiar with implementing the 'leftovers' of their digital design by using FPGAs and CPLDs to glue together various processors, memories, and standard function components on their printed circuit board. In addition to these digital functions, FPGAs and CPLDs can also implement common analog functions using an LVDS input, a simple resistor capacitor (RC) circuit and some FPGA or CPLD digital logic elements to create an analog to digital converter (ADC).

French service robotics company Robosoft has introduced a robot called Kompaï designed to assist elderly and disabled people and others who need special care. The mobile robot talks, understands speech, and can navigate autonomously. It reminds people of meetings, keeps track of shopping lists, plays music, and works as a videoconference system for users to talk with their doctors, for example. The video below is pretty awesome. It shows a senior at Broca Hospital, in Paris, interacting with the robot after receiving only a few minutes of training. The man asks the robot about the time, date, and whether he has any appointments that day; Kompaï gives answers in a computerized voice.

The main goal of this article is to focus on the difficulties encountered by SoC integrators when selecting an embedded microcontroller (MCU). Indeed, the selection is based on MCU performances, but the comparison can be difficult and compromised when considering all the parameters influencing these performances.In this article, we will detail how to assess rigorously power consumption, area, speed, code density and processing power for an embedded MCU. For each performance, we will describe how the parameters have to be selected to enable a fair comparison between processor cores.

The race to create tiny wireless sensors that could monitor anything from pressure in the eyes and brain to the stability of bridges appears to be heating up. Earlier this month, IEEE Spectrum reported on two approaches to creating an almost-indefinitely-running sensor using piezoelectric systems to convert tiny vibrations into power. Now, another team from the University of Michigan has created an alternative approach that uses solar power to keep the sensor running autonomously for many years.

When considering the resolution required for an A/D converter (ADC) integrated in a microcontroller (MCU), embedded systems designers must balance cost and performance. Higher ADC resolution implies higher-cost MCUs, but in some cases you can use other features in the MCU to enhance the ADC performance via software. That approach lets you achieve higher resolution using an inexpensive integrated ADC. Here's how to use of oversampling to achieve extra bits of resolution for an ADC integrated in an MCU.

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."

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.

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.

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.