William Wong
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ED Online ID #13208 |
August 2, 2006
LabView is moving steadily into the embedded field. Initially the core of a test and measurement tool, LabView’s graphical programming environment (see Figure 2) has grown over the past decade into a first class, model-based software development tool. Developers can massage the resulting C code or simply let LabView do all the work.
On the hardware side, NVidia’s GoForce 5500 (see Figure 3) took the hardware Best of Show award. The GoForce 5500 is targeted at mobile devices that are tied to platforms like Freescale’s i.MX processors.
There is a lot more technology didn’t win any awards like products based on Serial Rapid IO (SRIO).
Communications And Multimedia Freescale was showing a number of microcontrollers and DSPs with SRIO support. There was a few vendors with SRIO wares. One of the more interesting ones was Fabric Embedded Tools’ RapidFET that was being displayed with an array of SRIO hardware (see Figure 4). RapidFET (see Figure 5) is an indispensable tool that can configure and monitor an SRIO system.
RapidFET is going to find a lot of use in the new RIOLAB. RIOLAB is a company that will be doing compliance testing of SRIO products. It is currently under the auspices of Tundra, an SRIO hardware vendor, but it is moving towards being an independent entity. The demand for testing is high because of the number of SRIO products continues to grow.
Another hot communications product I learned about was Freescale’s dual core MPC8572 PowerQUICC III. It has a pair of e500 processor cores, PCI Express and SRIO interfaces, and quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Data for the latter can be massaged using application accelerators that include a table-lookup unit (TLU), an encryption engine, a decompression unit and a pattern matching engine. Together, these hardware accelerators can perform in-depth packet analysis at line speeds. The accelerators handle industry standard compression formats such as gzip and encryption standards like DES and AES. The chip uses 90nm silicon-on-insulator so it uses minimal power while running at 1.5GHz.This looks like a really neat platform for routers that can deliver a range of features such as unified threat management, firewall/VPN and load balancing.
Wireless communication was hot in the technical lab and the technical sessions. Zigbee was at the forefront. A related technical session on remote sensors for Zigbee was standing room only and a second session was scheduled to handle the overflow.
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