Embedded system engineering magazine 2005.11,12

Editorial

Editor:

Dick Selwood

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Consulting Editor:

Martin Whitbread

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Managing Editor:

Andrew Porter

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Martyn Day

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Stuart Wilkes

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Dave Oswald

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Steve Banks

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Terry Wright

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Origination

ESE is published by:

Electronic Design Automation Ltd, 63/66 Hatton Garden,

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E D A

P U B L I C A T I O N S

Embedded System Engineering

November-December 2005

Next Issue: In-depth on real time and embedded OS, consumer and multimedia applications and a buyers guide to Eclipse products.

</Contents>

ESE Magazine October 05

03

</Editorial>

ESE Magazine Nov/Dec 05

Editorial comment:

Meeting the challenges of the web?

<Written by> Dick Selwood </W>

	E NEEDED to carry out a make-over of our web
	W
	site and this brought on a burst of introspection.
	What is the function of a magazine in the age of
	the web? How do we get the web and the printed
	magazine to complement each other, rather than compete?
	How do these fit with other means of communication? Most
	importantly, how do these different channels of communica-
	tion meet the need of our readers, the embedded engineers?
	Some of our answers can be seen in this issue and on the new
	web site, some will become apparent over the time, but we
	wanted to tell you why things have gone the way they have.
	We have assumed that you are busy people, and the role of
	the magazine, as well as providing you with product news, is
		spend googling, and it provides links to suppliers.
	to provide introductions to technical topics. You may already
	have noticed that we are running more short feature articles	That brings us to the web site. The thoroughly revised web
	rather than fewer longer pieces in the magazine. Each month	site, www.esemagazine.com provides an archive of arti-
	we have two main technical foci: one an in-depth look at an	cles and will be adding extended pieces and other more
	important topic, the second normally more application orient-	detailed documents, such as supplier white papers, to provide
	ed. For each focus we commission articles from leaders in that	a strong resource for embedded engineering.
	field or from expert analysts. These are deliberately kept short	The web and the printed magazine are supported by ESS,
	– their role is to provide an introduction or viewpoint on the	the annual trade show and conference, as we believe that
	specific topic, not to be a tutorial. In some cases the author will	there are things that can only be addressed by face to face
	provide a longer version, which we will post on the web along-	meetings, hands on demos and hearing the leaders in the
	side the archived features. If you want to follow up on the top-	field. A short report on some of the interesting news from the
	ics there will be a web-link at the bottom of the printed article	show is on page 14, but in summary there were more confer-
	or a click though on the web. Some of the technology focus	ence papers, more exhibitors and considerably more visitors
	themes planned for the first half of 2006 include real-time and	this year. We are already planning for ESS 2006 (mark your
	embedded OS, boards and modules, real-time programming	diaries for October 11th and 12th)
	languages and embedded and configurable processors. The	The final string to our bow is the specialist seminar. This is
	application areas include consumer and multi-media, control	provides a sharp focus on a specific topic during a day of high-
	and automation, networks and security and encryption.	level technical papers, normally supported by a small exhibi-
	There will also be in each issue a buyers guide; this	tion featuring products from relevant companies. We have
	month’s is for FPGAs and planned future guides include	held them on subjects such as mission critical systems, auto-
	Eclipse and open source software products, PC/104Plus mod-	motive electronics and are currently looking at a day on
	ules, connectivity protocols and middleware and high perform-	Eclipse, the open source software framework.
	ance embedded processors. The buyers guide again is	With all these different routes we are trying to meet your
	designed as a starting point, to cut down the time you need to	information needs as closely as possible.	</Ends>

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datacom telecom wireless devices automotive medical avionics

IT GOT TO THE PATIENT IN TIME.

Because it got to the market in time.

In a field where every second matters and reliability is everything, medical product developers look to one company for help: Enea. Why? Enea offers the industry’s leading high availability, high reliability RTOS—it’s already inside 50% of all 3G phones and base stations in the rigorous, always-on world of telecom. Our portfolio of tools can help speed your ideas to reality and save months of precious development time. And our world class Engineering Services team can support you from design, through implementation and certification. Enea is the one company that does it all. So when time matters and reliability is everything, you can count on Enea to be there. For more information about our products and services for safety-critical and medical products, call 44(0)1844 276980 e-mail:[e-mail] or visit www. enea.co.uk <http://www.enea.com.uk>

Embedded for Leaders

</News - Industry>

ESE Magazine Nov/Dec 05

Industry

Processor benchmark software

THE EMBEDDED Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) will license its benchmark software to commercial users. Certified EEMBC scores for many processors have always been available for free on the EEMBC Web site, but only members of the consortium had access to the benchmark source code and the ability to run the benchmarks.

Apart from helping select a processor, the benchmark software can be used as a tool to analyze, tune, and validate new processor and system architectures; to prove product capabilities; and to compare processors according to more important criteria than clock rate. The specific application areas targeted by the benchmark suites include automotive, digital entertainment, digital imaging, mobile Java, networking, office automation and telecom.

www.eembc.org

$100 laptop

THE FIRST working prototype of the $100 laptop has been unveiled. The $100 laptop is an ultra- low-cost, full-featured computer designed to

dramatically enhance children’s primary and secondary education worldwide. It is a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and the nonprofit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association, which aims to equip the world’s schoolchildren and their teachers with a personal, portable, connected computer.

These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy-efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection.

The pricing goal is to start at approximately $100 and then steadily decrease. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu

For a more detailed look at these stories please visit

www.esemagazine.co.uk

Autonomous devices in the desert

Five vehicles completed the DARPA Grand Challenge Race, a US government-spon- sored contest that aims to create fully autonomous, independently-acting vehicles.

The 132-mile race took place in the Mojave Desert: Stanford Racing Team took the $2-million dollar prize and the two vehicles of the Red Team (a group of Carnegie Mellon University faculty, staff and students) came second and third.

The Red Team vehicles use "drive-by-wire" technology, in which on-board computers control all relevant vehicle movements and products from TTTech provided the basis for the control systems.

www.tttech.com.

www.redteamracing.org

Autonomous devices in a can

The ZiLOG sponsored ARLISS (A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites) Project ‘Comeback’ event for student engineers again didn’t have a winner this year – but came very close.

The challenge was to develop a gadget that could be carried by amateur high-power rockets launched by members of Aeropac - the Northern California high power rocket club - up to around

two miles high, ejected and returned to earth on a small parachute. The gadget had to be less than 6 inches in diameter by 10 inches long and had to autonomously return in a 30-meter diameter circle near the launch site. The prize money was $6,000, with ZiLOG is donating half and the remainder coming equally from Stanford University and the University of Tokyo. Twelve teams comprising more than 50 students took part. One vehicle, from the University of Tokyo, made its way right up to the flag after landing about three miles away, but it was disqualified after being moved by hand out of a hole.

www.zilog.com

www.geakfreaks.com

Patent commons

OSDL has launched of its online Patent Commons reference library, part of a project to provide greater confidence for developers and customers of all open source software.

More than 500 patents, pledged to date, and more than a dozen technical standards are in a searchable library is freely available to developers, users and vendors. The OSDL Patent Commons Project has already rallied the support of many industry leaders, including CA, IBM, Intel Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. The Lab welcomes other IT vendors, corporations, organizations, government agencies and individuals to participate.

www.patentcommons.org

Record performance per watt

CLEARSPEED has accelerated a mainstream dual processor workstation from a LINPACK score of 8 Gigaflops (GFLOPS) and over 300 watts power consumption to 30.2 GFLOPS with only an extra 25 watts in power. The ClearSpeed Advance accelerator board weighs 9 oz. and achieved the Linpack score without program changes.

The almost 4x improvement in performance increased the performance per watt ratio for the system considerably. In trials, the Advance board has been shown to lower overall system power consumption at the

same time as significantly increasing performance. As the dense linear algebra workload is undertaken on the power efficient accelerator board, the host CPU uses much less power, resulting in a reduction in the total system power consumption

ClearSpeed achieved the 30.2 GFLOP score without changing a single line of the standard benchmark code.

www.clearspeed.com

http://top500.org/lists/

linpack.php

06

The proof is empirical

More than 20,000 engineers use Agilent EEsof EDA

	There’s truth in numbers. Agilent EEsof Electronic Design
	Automation (EDA) is the top choice among engineers for RF
	design software for nearly all of the world’s wireless devices.
	The fact is derived from the product’s undisputed breadth of
	functionality. Agilent EEsof EDA was created for RF engineers
	by RF engineers. It includes the capabilities you need the
	most—and offers a depth of features other products can’t
	touch. Agilent’s team of EDA experts release multiple improve-
	ment updates each year. And Agilent has the largest number
	of technology partners, application examples, and technical
	articles in the industry.
Agilent EEsof EDA now includes Eagleware-Elanix solutions.
UK 07004-666666	Work the proof yourself. Agilent EEsof EDA can be customised
Ireland 1890-924-204	to fit the precise needs of your projects and budget. Visit
www.agilent.com/find/eesof-innovations	www.agilent.com/find/eesof-innovations to find out more.

© Agilent Technologies, Inc. 2005

<News - Chips & FPGAs>

ESE Magazine Nov/Dec 05

Chips &

FPGAs

3-axis MEMS accelerometer

ANALOG DEVICES has introduced a 3-axis accelerometer. It has a power consumption of 200 microamps at 2.0 V. Designed for use in mobile phone handsets and other handheld consumer electronics products, combines a rugged, 3-axis sensor structure with signal conditioning on a single die.

www.analog.com

In service re-configuration

The TRansFR technology from Lattice, allows the LatticeXP FPGAs and MachXO PLDs to be reconfigured in less than 1 millisecond while the

host system is still operating.

Using the company’s free ispVM software, changes are downloaded into Flash memory on the target device while it continues to operate out of SRAM. At an appropriate moment, the IO is locked, device operation suspended and the new configuration transferred from Flash to SRAM, typically in under a millisecond. Once the device logic is operating it is placed into a known state and the IO is released.

www.latticesemi.com

In keeping with our FPGA theme in this issue, the majority of stories are about new FPGA products. These are backed by feature articles and an “In depth” look art trends in FPGAs, starting on page 24.

For a more detailed look at these stories please visit

www.esemagazine.com

ADCs below 100 mW

Xignal Technologies new 14-bit and 12-bit, 40 MHz analog-to-digital converters, based on the company’s recently announced Continuous Time Delta Sigma (CΔ∑) technology, consume only 70 mW while operating at 20-40 MSPS data rate.

They do not need anti-alias filters, have an on-chip, precision (low jitter) sample clock and need no differential input buffer. They can handle 4 V peak-peak input signals while operating from a 1.2 V DC supply.

www.xignal.com/xt11

Graph-based physical synthesis

Synplicity's Synplify Premier software uses a new technology, graph-based physical synthesis. It merges optimisation, placement and routing to give critical paths of a design the fastest routing resources.

A detailed routing resource graph of preexisting wires, switches and placement sites is used for routing an FPGA. Optimisation and placement are driven by wire delay and actual availability of resources, rather than by measuring distance alone.

The graph-based approach aims to deliver highly accurate timing correlation between the estimated and final post place and route (P&R) results, for faster timing closure and reducing the number of iterations between synthesis and P&R. Synplicity suggests that 90% of the timing predictions produced are within 10% of final post P&R timing, and 70% are within 5% of final timing.

The software also provides simulator-like visibility into operating FPGA hardware. Designers can annotate directly in their RTL code the signals and conditions they want to monitor. Nodes that may be used as breakpoints and watch points are displayed for menu-driven instrumentation. The RTL debugger displays actual signal values from a running FPGA directly in RTL code. Users can debug it, in-system, and at the target operating speed.

www.synplicity.com

FPGA or DSP?

Xilinx has announced that it is to develop application-optimised DSP packages for digital communications; multimedia, video and imaging (MVI); and defence systems.

Each package integrates specialized hardware platforms, system-level application knowledge, software algorithms and intellectual property (IP) libraries, and are supported by software tools for implementing DSP algorithms in an FPGA.

The company will also work with TI and The MathWorks for FPGA-DSP co-processing and tightly integrated tool flows for algorithmic development and design implementation.

The first package released is for MVI systems. It includes the Video Starter Kit Virtex-4 SX35 (VSK-4VSX35) with the new 8.1i System Generator

Soft ARM7 for FPGAS

THE COREMP7, a soft ARM7 family processor optimised for use in FPGAs, is now available for use in ARM-ready versions of Actel’s ProASIC3 family of FPGAs.

Actel is offering the 32-bit ARM7 family microprocessor for use in its products free of license fees, with no additional charge for CoreMP7 when an ARM-ready ProASIC3 device is purchased. It will later be extended for use with other families, including devices based on the recently announced Actel Fusion technology, which incorporates both analog and nonvolatile memory on a single device.

Operating at up to 25MHz, CoreMP7 is for

applications, such as digital cameras, kitchen appliances, automotive traction control systems, car infotainment systems, robotics and medical equipment.

www.actel.com

08

for DSP tool suite; Video co-processing XEVM642 development kit; and new MPEG4 encoder and decoder intellectual property (IP) cores.

www.xilinx.com

FPGAs with embedded transceivers

The Stratix II GX family is designed for high-speed designs by incorporating up to 20 low-power transceivers that operate between 622 Mbps to 6.375 Gbps.

Protocols, including PCI Express, serial digital interface (SDI), XAUI, SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, SerialLite II, Serial RapidIO, and Common Electrical Interface 6 Gbps Long Reach and Short Reach (CEI-6G-LR/SR), are supported with IP, system models, reference designs, signal integrity tools, and supporting collateral.

The new version 5.1 of the Quartus II design software includes design support for the Stratix

IIGX family. www.altera.com/stratix2gx

HD video buffer

Nippon Precision Circuits (NPC) is now shipping the SM5302A, a 3 channel High Definition video buffer with built in 5th order low pass filters.

The device is for input blocks where it functions as a next stage ADC system anti-aliasing filter. It can be used in video output systems where the filter removes video DAC aliasing, external noise and can drive a two 75ø terminated loads. Eight functions can be controlled via an onboard I2c controller. The lowpass filter cut off frequency can be adjusted from 4.8 MHz to 43 MHz, and the output gain, input multiplexers can be controlled via I2c bus.

www.npc.co.jp

Multiple smart cards

Atmel’s new AT83C26, a multiple smart card reader interface device can handle up to 5 smart cards.

It powers the smart cards with the appropriate supply voltage and enables data transfer between the host controller and the smart cards. It is for Point of Sales Terminals that typically involve one user card and up to 4 SAM cards, and Health Card Readers that require 2 user cards and 1 SAM card.

www.npc.co.jp

Low power FPGA

The new PolarPro FPGAs from QuickLogic has an 'instant' deep-sleep standby mode that reduces power consumption to less than 10 microamps a 25-times improvement on QuickLogic's current generation devices.

Circuitry that isolates the I/O pads from the logic core when on standby maintains this power conservation level in all situations, even when connected to an active bus. Some quiescent modes can effectively leave I/Os in input mode and bus traffic causes them to draw current. Media players, PDAs and cellphones typically have such situations which can lift a headline static power consumption of 100 microamps to tens of milliamps.

The architecture includes circuitry to optimise performance when implementing interfaces from deeply embedded processors to high-bandwidth peripherals such as hard disks and wireless chipsets. QuickLogic claims that that such interfacing functions can be implemented at a significantly lower cost, making the solutions highly applicable for mass consumer products.

www.quicklogic.com

</News - Tools>

ESE Magazine Nov/Dec 05

Tools

Evaluation on a Stick

SILICON LABORATORIES

ToolStick is a fully contained 8-bit MCU development tools evaluation system in a USB stick, including the on-chip

debugging hardware for full, non-intrusive access to the C8051F mixed-signal MCUs’ CPU, peripherals and memory. Software includes IDE, editor, debugger, Flash programmer and an evaluation copy of the Keil compiler.

www.silabs.com/ToolStick

Configuration-Based

FPGA and CAN I/O

THE LATEST VERSION of the NI LabVIEW Simulation Interface Toolkit 3.0, includes new configuration-based deployment to CAN and FPGA I/O; run-time parameter selection; and thread scheduling for multirate models.

www.ni.com/uk

ObjectAda 8.2

THE LATEST VERSION of ObjectAda for the Windows development environment, in addition to supporting an Eclipse-based development environment targeting mission-critical software solutions, integrates current Microsoft platform improvements, ensuring full compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. It also includes a Java-call interface, for Java applications to be called from an Ada program.

www.aonix.com/objectada.html

More tools news in the ESS round-up, page 14

For a more detailed look at these stories please visit

www.esemagazine.com

Commercial-grade

Linux

Wind River’s Linux device software platform for consumer devices has been released. It is designed to scale from the smallest handhelds to the most robust network equipment. It provides a “pristinesource”, Linux 2.6 implementation and an Eclipse-based development suite.

Additionally Linux device software platforms and the Wind River Workbench development suite are to support ARM TrustZone technology. This is an open specification enables application interoperability and lowers porting costs within a security framework.

www.windriver.com

Design for meters

The Microchip Utility Meter Design Centre is a web site with technical tools and resources to simplify the design process and speed the design cycle for low-cost utility metering applications, including energy, water, gas, and heat meters.

It covers the migration from mechanical meter designs to electronic-based solutions and provides charts that take the user through all of the building blocks and considerations in creating a utility metering design, whether it is gas, water, heat or power. The site includes all Microchip’s metering application notes, reference designs, and other technical documentation addressing critical design features, such as accu-

racy, low cost displays, low power consumption, remote communication and billing.

www.microchip.com/meter

400W Lab PSU

The EX2020R, new from TTi is a high-current single-output bench power supply capable of currents up to 20A at voltages up to 20V. The unit is only 140 x 160 x 195mm and weighs just 3.6 kg.

The EX2020R uses mixed-mode regulation technology which combines switch-mode preregulation with linear post-regulation. It incorporates remote sense terminals which can eliminate the effects of connection lead resistance. Sensing can be selected as remote or local by a front-panel switch.

www.tti-test.com

Multi with Eclipse

GREEN HILLS has announced that its MULTI development environment and C/C++ compiler have been integrated with the standard versions of the latest Eclipse 3.1 and CDT 3.0 distributions from eclipse.org.

Developers can use their existing Eclipse and CDT implementations; all extensions required for device software development are handled by the MULTI environment.

Green Hills is making the source code to its Eclipse plug-ins available to its MULTI and compiler customers to allow them to customize it for their environments.

MULTI tools can be launched from within the Eclipse interface, including the MULTI source-level debugger and instruction set simulators. The standard Eclipse console can be used to view the output from applications

running on a simulator.

Green Hills has also announced that its MULTI development environment now supports Wind River Systems’ VxWorks RTOS version 6, making it the first development environment to support both VxWorks versions 5 and 6.

www.ghs.com

10