Electronic Everything!

During the Google IO event, two new great features of the popular Android OS were announced. The most important from a robotics point of view is the Android Open Accessory standard that is Arduino based and enables Android devices to integrate with hardware via usb (or bluetooth in the near future). You can read more in the posts on engadget.com and robots-dreams.com (where the video is from). Also engadget reports on the Android @ Home framework that aspires to interconnect every home appliance, device or gadget to an integrated network. More information and details will be announced soon from Google but already the potential for various robotic applications that could take advantage of these projects looks promising.

With the consumer demand for richer content and its resultant , increasing high data bandwidth continuing to drive communications systems, coding for error control has become extraordinarily important. One way to improve the bit error rate (BER), while maintaining high data reliability, is to use an error correction technique like the Viterbi algorithm. Originally conceived by Andrew Viterbi as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication, the Viterbi algorithm provides an efficient method for forward error correction (FEC) that improves channel reliability. Today, it is used in many digital communications systems in applications as diverse as CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting and computational linguistics.

Power and energy are key design considerations across a spectrum of computing solutions, from supercomputers and data centers to handheld phones and other mobile computers. A large body of work focuses on managing power and improving energy efficiency. While prior work is easily summarized in two words—"Avoid waste!"—the challenge is figuring out where and why waste happens and determining how to avoid it. In this article, I discuss how, at a general level, many inefficiencies, or waste, stem from the inherent way system architects address the complex trade-offs in the system-design process. I discuss common design practices that lead to power inefficiencies in typical systems and provide an intuitive categorization of high-level approaches to addressing them. The goal is to provide practitioners—whether in systems, packaging, algorithms, user interfaces, or databases—a set of tools, or "recipes," to systematically reason about and optimize power in their respective domains.

Understand an accelerator's particle-beam measurement and control challenge, and how engineers met it with leading-edge digitizing systems and associated techniques

Rosie, the robot who kept house for the title family in "The Jetsons," a 1960s animated television show, has at last come alive—sort of. Before you'll see a robot slicing cucumbers in your kitchen, researchers will need to make these mechanical servants smarter. Here's how three teams are tackling this challenge.

The embedded world is constantly changing. You might not have noticed, but if you take a minute to recall what a microcontroller system was like 10 years ago and compare it to today's latest microcontroller systems, you will find that PCB design, component packages, level of integration, clock speed, and memory size have all going through several generations of change. One of the hottest topics in this area is when will the last of remaining 8-bit microcontroller users start to move away from legacy architectures and move to modern 32-bit processor architectures like the ARM Cortex-M based microcontroller family. Over the last few years there has been a strong momentum of embedded developers starting the migration to 32-bit microcontrollers and, in this multi-part article, we will take a look at some of the factors accelerating this migration.

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.

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.

In 2008 a team of physicists from Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and other institutions stumbled upon an odd phenomenon. They called it superinsulation, because in many ways it was the opposite of superconductivity. Now they’ve worked out the theory behind it, potentially opening the doors to better batteries, supersensitive sensors, and strange new circuits. Superconductors lose all resistance once they fall below a certain temperature. In superinsulators, on the other hand, the resistance to the flow of electricity becomes infinite at very low temperatures, preventing any flow of electric current.

Having the lowest system power allows customers to achieve their design objectives, whether it be for longer battery life, higher product performance or lower system cost. The Si100x/1x wireless MCU family features the industry’s lowest active mode current consumption, which saves power when the application is running. It also has the industry’s lowest current consumption sleep modes that save power when the device is sleeping, which is typically the majority of time in most battery powered applications.

Based on recent technological developments, high-performance floating-point signal processing can, for the very first time, be easily achieved using FPGAs. To date, virtually all FPGA-based signal processing has been implemented using fixed-point operations. This article describes how floating-point technology in FPGAs is not only practical today, but that the processing rates of one trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS) are feasible and can be implemented on a single FPGA die.

We've collected the most recent how-to and technical articles from Embedded.com on multithreading, multicores, multiprocessor-on-chip (MPoc), and multiprocessor system designs. We're constantly updating our lists of articles and industry links. Keep checking back to see what's new.

In separate keynote addresses in Silicon Valley, two Internet pioneers gave different takes on the future of the network of networks Monday (May 24). Vint Cerf, co-developer of the Net's TCP/IP protocol, shared his thoughts with developers of the smart electric grid, seen as a massive embedded extension to the Internet. Larry Roberts, who helped launch the forerunner of the Internet, explained his ideas for remedying the growing congestion that plagues the Web today. Smart grid developers can learn from the lessons of the Internet, Cerf told attendees at Connectivity Week here. They should follow the model of the Net in creating a layered architecture with plenty of room for flexibility in areas that cannot be anticipated today, he said in a keynote at Connectivity Week.

A Product How-To on building a unified control environment using architectures such as TI’s Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3-based MCUs or Cortex-A8-based Sitara AM35x MPUs.

Sony Corp. has developed a highly flexible OLED display that can be rolled around a pencil and continue to operate. The 4.1-inch diagonal isplay is 80-microns thick and offers 432 by 240 by RGB pixels resolution at 121 pixels per inch. It is an organic LED full color display driven by an organic thin-film transistor matrix.

STMicroelectronics has the STM8S Discovery kit for around US$7. For that little bit of money you get an 8 bit CPU with a detachable USB programming/debugging board and 32k of flash, 2k of RAM, and 1K of EEPROM. Downloadable tools include demo C compilers from a variety of third party vendors (limited to 16k, if I'm reading the literature correctly).

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.

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.

In high-end audio equipment, careful selection of resistors is one of the best ways to avoid or minimize noise and distortion in the signal path. This paper describes the noise generation in resistors manufactured using the various available resistor technologies and quantifies the noise insertion typical for each type.

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.