Embedded system engineering magazine 2006.07,08

One of the stranger things that editors on technical publications find themselves doing is to answer questions from PR firms seeking their views on different aspects of their industry. (The PR compa-

nies use them as the basis for guidance to their customers on forming communications strategy). A few days ago, one of those phone calls was surveying thoughts on both the EDA and the semiconductor industries. As usual, the call came un-announced and the answers were shot from the hip, but afterwards there was time to reflect on the final question, which was roughly, “What is the future for these industries?”

NASDAQ nadir

Three years ago the US technical stock market, as measured by NASDAQ, was at its lowest point after the rupture of the dot.com bubble, with a knock-on effect on all aspects of technology. Greedy investors had swallowed in one gulp business plans that would have been laughed out of existence if they hadn’t had the precious dot.com tag. When the inevitable happened, they reacted to their failures by punishing all technology investments – with the same lack of discernment.

Particularly hard hit were the telcos, who having geared up for internet saw both underused networks and a corresponding drop in their share price, and telecom equipment suppliers, who suddenly had empty order books for as long as networks were running under capacity.

Today that unused capacity – and more – is filling. Broadband is penetrating more and more homes worldwide (50% of UK households is one estimate). It only takes a visit to your local electrical shop to see that the boundary between computers and consumer devices is blurring: convergence is here with combined PCs and TVs, with VOIP boxes and even internet radio devices equipped with WiFi for home distribution as well as sharing the router. Channel 4 is streaming many of its programmes over the web and even Aunty BBC is making programmes available on demand and providing pod casts. And just look at the functionality in today’s 3G slim-line phone/video camera/MP3 player.

will continue to have a role, but the increasing cost and complexity of their development, particularly in a world where standards and protocols are continuing to evolve, means that this role is going to be even more limited. Programmable devices, with the flexibility to match the changing world, are going to be increasingly the product of choice, particularly as more powerful processors become part of the fabric and third party IP continues to improve. But this provides a challenge to the EDA industry. How are they going to persuade the developer to pay the many thousands of dollars that EDA tools have to cost, when they are used to “free” or, at worst, low cost software? And how are the developers going to manage the increasingly complex projects that the new products are going to demand.

One route is in the technical focus of this issue – through modelling and code generation.

SysML

When we planned this issue, it was in the knowledge that the SysML standard was due for discussion by the Object Management Group. In fact, after most of the issue was ready for the printer, OMG announced that it had adopted SysML. Now it is a formal standard you can expect to see more announcements of SysML tools or tools that interface with it, to generate code, for example.

For many smaller projects, modelling has always seemed to be an unnecessary and expensive route, but as the problems to be solved become more complex, so the importance of early accurate definition and also early bug finding and resolution, become more relevant. Code generation may not produce the quality of code that can be written by the very best programmer, but the best tools produce competent code that does the job, and they produce it quickly.

And this brings us back to the starting point. The future for the embedded industry is at least as exciting as it ever has been, and the tools for developing systems, the chips and the design tools, mean that the designer can concentrate on being a designer, creating new and exciting products and letting the tools do the grunt work.

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Good news

All of this is great news for the embedded industry, as innovative engineers come up with even more ways to exploit the Internet, WiFi and consumer electronics. Automotive systems, particularly infotainment, are still growing in power and flexibility and even the industrial sector is seeing growth.

And that brings us back to the semiconductor market. How is it going to serve these new markets? SoCs and ASICs

Red faces

We must apologise to Nallatech for incorrectly giving their URL in the last issue. The one we gave, due to a small production problem, was that of another site. Nallatech’s site is www.nallatech.com

Introduction to microcontrollers

The Hitex Insider’s Guides to microcontrollers now cover more architectures. As well as the Philips LPC2000, Insider Guides are available for STMicroelectronics STR71x, STR73x, STR91x as well as the Infineon XC166.

These books include a systematic introduction to the fundamental features of special microcontrollers and beside basic processor knowledge, the reader is given step-by-step instructions and program examples, with the aim of providing a rapid development.

They can be used as tutorials as well as reference manuals.

Copies of the manuals can be downloaded for free in a screen-optimised PDF version at www.hitex.com/download.html. A low-cost printable PDF in high resolution is also available.

www.hitex.co.uk

nect to increase gate utilization up to 90%. Die sizes that are about half those of previous 180 nm generation sea-of-gates ASICs and are equal to or better than today’s cell-based technology in a 130 nm process.

Existing designs based on a microcontroller and an FPGA may be directly migrated to an MPCF ASIC in as little as 12 weeks. An example BOM for a one-million gate FPGA with an ARM7-based microcontroller is approximately $15.00: an MPCF single chip with equivalent functionality would be less than $9.00.

www.atmel.com/products/ASIC

/mpcf.asp

$2,000 benchmark contest

EEMBC hopes to attract novel benchmarks for its next version of GrinderBench, a benchmark suite that measures the performance of Java ME implementations on mobile phones, with a contest with prizes of $2,000.

Java ME benchmarks that are selected by the Consortium for GrinderBench 2.0 will meet a rigorous set of criteria, including relevance, originality,

www.grinderbench.com.

FRAM-enhanced 8051

Ramtron has launched the VRS51L3074, the first 8051-based microcontroller with nonvolatile FRAM memory.

FRAM simplifies the design cycle by eliminating the code overhead accompanying Flash data storage. FRAM bytes can be modified without first erasing an entire sector FRAM provides virtually unlimited read/write cycles and fast data

writes.

The VRS51L3074 includes 8KB of FRAM memory, an advanced 40-MIPS, single-cycle 8051-core, 64KB Flash with In-System/In- Application Programming, 4KB SRAM, a JTAG program/debug interface, digital signal processing (DSP) extensions and a robust digital peripheral set. Suggested applications range from sensors and metering to industrial control, instrumentation and medical devices.

www.ramtron.com.

NPT-Trench IGBT

The FGA15N120ANTD is available in a lead (Pb)-free TO-3P package.

www.fairchildsemi.com

LMU drives up to 20 LEDs

National has introduced two new, highly integrated lighting management units (LMUs) that include a high-voltage boost converter and programmable constant-cur- rent driver to control up to 20 series-con- nected LEDs in display backlights, and keypad, RGB and camera flash LEDs. The LP3958 and LP5526 LMUs have micro SMD

Fairchild’s new 1200V/15A NPT-Trench IGBT can withstand as much as 300mJ of avalanche energy in induction heating (IH) applications. This helps ensure “rugged” fail-safe operation of the system during abnormal avalanche-mode conditions that commonly affect IH appliances such as microwave ovens, IH rice cookers and other IH cookers.

PC Card to USB and UART

packages and are for cell phones and other handheld devices.

They drive from two to five strings of four series-connected LEDs and each features three GPIOs to trigger lighting functions such as flash or to control additional device-enable signals.

www.national.com.

COMBINING A 16-bit PC Card host interface, a USB 2.0 full speed host controller and a high performance UART, the OXCFU950 from Oxford Semiconductor is for next generation, high speed PC and Compact Flash Cards for 3G cellular, mobile TV and wireless networking applications.

It complies with both PCMCIA revision 8.0

and Compact Flash revision 3.0 standards and integrates a USB 2.0 full speed host controller with an 8kbyte data buffer and Windows or Linux software stacks. The UART offers baud rates up to 12Mbps and is software compatible with the industry standard 16C550 type.

www.oxsemi.com.

Fixed configuration logic analysers

Agilent has released new fixed-configu- ration logic analysers. The new Agilent 16800 family of analysers has eight logic, all with a 15-inch display and optional touch-screen interface.

Memory depth is up to 32M samples and three models offer an integrated digital stimulus that allows design teams to quickly emulate missing components, inject faults and assist in performing design characterisation.

www.agilent.com.

IP vendors to create a single version of the encrypted data that can be used by tools from multiple EDA vendors and allows IP providers and EDA vendors to deliver solutions to their customers that provide the flexibility and security necessary for an industry standard to emerge. .

www.synplicity.com.

PCI Express analyser

LeCroy has a new low cost PCI Express analyzer. The PETracer Edge is based on a card platform that supports x1/x2/x4 lane widths at 2.5 GB/s speeds and will be offered in two versions: PRO and EXPERT.

EXPERT has deep analysis for error trou-

Open IP encryption

Synplicity has developed a free, non-propri- etary IP encryption methodology, applicable to both FPGA and ASIC design flows, which permits industry-wide interoperability.

Synplicity is offering this methodology to the EDA, IP and end-user communities as a means to address the challenges designers face when using protected IP in their design flows, which are often made up of tools from several different EDA providers. The proposed methodology will allow

bleshooting of bus management and protocol operation issues. For example, users can monitor in real-time various statistics like bus throughput and link utilization for all transactions and packets that occur on a given link.

www.lecroy.co.uk

Cortex A8 Support

THE TRACE32 ICD and TRACE32 PowerTools debuggers from Lauterbach now support the ARM Cortex A8. The Lauterbach TRACE32ICD and PowerDebug modules take advantage of CoreSight, a new ARM standard, for enhanced debugging and trace functionality. With TRACE32 PowerTrace, it is possible to use the ETM CoreSight components to record the program flow of Cortex A8 in real time. In addition, extended NEON instructions and access to the NEON registers are also supported as well as access to the cache and the

MMUs. An unlimited number of software breakpoints in the RAM and flash memories, debugging at HLL and assembler levels, and support of the most widely used C and C++ compilers are standard features.

www.lauterbach.co.uk