88 results found for Lab Bench, displaying items 1 - 20
November 16, 2009 Will Android Open The Set-Top Box?
Comcast’s final move to all-digital transmission in my area means I need a set-top box (STB) for all of my devices. This puts Comcast on par with other HDTV service providers such as Verizon and Dish Networks. Viewers can still get local channels via Comcast cable with a TV or HDTV tuner, but they’re just a fraction of all of the available channels. This doesn’t make much of a difference for viewers with one or two televisions. But I have a few more, ...
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William Wong
November 5, 2009 Rambus And SPMT Offer A Memory Of Things To Come
Memory is more than double data rate (DDR), as any embedded designer will attest. Memory technology is also one of the arenas where there is an ongoing conflict between standards and innovation. Volume keeps memory costs down, but it also means standards need to exist so parts are interchangeable. Plenty of memory technologies are out now, with more on the drawing board. Two new possibilities, multithreaded DDR RAM from Rambus and serial port memory from the...
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William Wong
October 22, 2009 Developers Can Expect To See Everyware Everywhere
Building a system from the ground up including all the software can be rewarding, but it’s a timeconsuming process that’s prone to errors. That’s why developers utilize off-the-shelf processor boards, operating systems, and run-time systems. Systems that aren’t built with a significant amount of off-theshelf hardware and software are rare. On the software side, C remains the dominant programming language of choice, with C++ bringing up the rear. C++ has...
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William Wong
October 8, 2009 Robot Athletes Have A Kick At Robocup 2009
Held this summer in Graz, Austria, Robocup 2009 hosted an array of robots, from Aldebaran’s Standard Platform Nao to the custom-built Middle Size Robot League, where Team T’n’T took first place with its BlackFin-based robot. Multiple robots hit the field in a variety of soccer team competitions. For example, the Middle Size Robot League uses a 70-cm ball and a field that’s 18 by 12 m. The teams have five autonomous robots. One is usually the...
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William Wong
October 1, 2009 Take Advantage Of Multicore Platforms
Multicore is everything these days, from laptops to servers. Getting started programming a multicore PC is as easy as downloading Intel’s Thread Building Blocks (see “Threads Make The Move To Open Source”). It’s just one of the many frameworks designed to take advantage of the multicore hardware that is readily available. Even C++ is making it easier ...
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William Wong
September 24, 2009 Unmanned Systems North America 2009: Where The Robots Are
It was hot and muggy at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station’s Webster Field, where Curtis Ellezy of Engineering TV and I went to keep an eye out for robots that may have their eyes on you. The demonstrations were part of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s Unmanned Systems North America 2009 show in Washington, D.C. ROLLING ROBOTS There were lots of robots on wheels and tracks, and most were custom...
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William Wong
August 25, 2009
New Power-Management Policies Emerge At DAC
Power management was high on the feature lists of the products shown at July’s Design Automation Conference in San Francisco. For example, Mentor Graphics highlighted new features in its Vista platform that allow users to model, analyze, and optimize power at the transaction level of abstraction. Synopsys showed off its DesignWare minPower Components, which are designed to provide major reductions in power for datapath logic compared to traditional power optimization methods.
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William Wong
August 12, 2009
Counting Down The Top 10 New Features In LabVIEW 2009
The latest version of National Instruments' LabVIEW includes a number of improvements. Key enhancements include its 3D Math Plots, Verification and Validation support, Partial Block Cleanup, Icon Editor, MathScriptRT Module, FPGA Compile Window, StatechartAutoDocs, VI Snippets, Real-Time Hypervisor, and LabVIEW versioning.
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William Wong
August 13, 2009 Do You Remember When Today’s MCUs Were Yesterday’s High Tech?
You never know what’s going to show up in your inbox. A recent note from Matt Miller, tooling engineering manager for Commercial Forged Products, spurred a look back. “I have been marveling at the proliferation of incredibly powerful and precise modules of incredible varieties that are available these days. The price is comparatively cheap and, whoa, the bang for the buck is big,” he wrote. “I’d be very interested to see someone do an objective ...
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William Wong
July 23, 2009 Interconnects Matter
XMOS recently released its singlecore version of its quad-core XS-G4, the XS1-L1. The XS1-L1 core is the same XS-G4 (see “Match Multicore With Multiprogramming”). It handles eight hardware-based threads that can be activated by the 64 peripheral I/O pins that have a 10-ns timing resolution. This allows highlevel peripheral interfaces, such as serial ports, to be...
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William Wong
June 25, 2009
Prevarication, Damn Lies, And Benchmarks
Bill Wong discusses the reliability of the new CoreMark benchmark with Markus Levy, president of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).
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William Wong
June 25, 2009 My E-mail Ate My Homework
I’m becoming more forgetful these days— or rather my e-mail is (Fig. 1). Like many of you, I work for a company that limits the lifetime of e-mail. At first, this seems reasonable. It saves space, even though hard-disk prices per terabyte are falling faster than a fully populated NAS box. It’s also a great way to eliminate evidence. This policy has some unintended consequences, though, for...
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William Wong
June 11, 2009 Accelerometers Shake Up The Old Ways To Play
Is it time to think outside the box or just give it a shake? Movement- or gesture-oriented input isn’t new. Try shaking a cell phone like Apple’s iPhone. Matched with the right application, like a game, juggling the phone may produce the effect you want. Then again, it may not. These little tricks are brought to you by accelerometers. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology has made these devices small and inexpensive. They’re used to shut down...
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William Wong
May 21, 2009 Embedded USB Tower Of Babel
Do you speak USB? If so, then you’re using one or more of the USB classes shown in the table. The most popular classes tend to be the human interface device (HID) and the mass storage device, since these kinds of products are ubiquitous around PCs and mobile devices like digital cameras. Details can be found at the USB Implementers Forum. The class approach works well by allowing device driver and...
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William Wong
May 7, 2009 Looking Over Your Shoulder At The Indy 500
The Indianapolis 500 has come a long way since its start on Memorial Day, May 30, 1911. The inaugural event marked the first time a rear-view mirror was used in a motor race, courtesy of Ray Harroun on the “Marmon Wasp” for Indianapolis automaker Marmon. Harroun also was the only driver in the race who didn’t bring along a mechanic in the passenger seat. Mechanics in those early races checked the oil pressure and also served as the rear-view mirror. Harroun...
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William Wong
April 23, 2009 Volunteers Wanted For A Fair Affair And Robots Everywhere
Student science and engineering competitions come to a boil in the spring. School programs often feed into regional events like the Mercer Science and Engineering Fair in Lawrenceville, N.J., which I help run (see the figure). In turn, our winners will compete in the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Reno, Nev., run by the Society for Science and the...
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William Wong
April 9, 2009 What Can You Build With Ethernet, USB, And An Arm?
Tucked away in a couple of smaller booths at January’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of companies with an interesting approach to network attached storage (NAS). One was PogoPlug. The other was Ctera. They have slightly different business models, but the hardware looked similar. In fact, it looked a lot like Marvell Semiconductor’s SheevaPlug (Fig. 1). The...
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William Wong
March 26, 2009 Stripping Down Java
As expected, my article on “Embedded C Bashing” generated some discussion. So, I thought I better call in some experts to provide advice when it comes to safety and performance. The performance of compilers for languages like Java and C# has improved to where code generated for adding a pair of integers winds up being a single instruction. Features such as...
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William Wong
March 12, 2009 Going Green, Or Just Using Old-Fashioned Design Practices?
Going green is all about cost, value, and tradeoffs. The big difference in designs from a decade ago is that more of the real costs are starting to surface. This ranges from the cost of recycling devices to how much power a system consumes. Power consumption has become the focus for hardware designers for a range of reasons, from portability where batteries are required to cooling limitations. Designing a green system is really a matter of checking out...
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William Wong
February 26, 2009 Embedded C Bashing
I love C. I started using it on DEC PDPs and Intel 8080s ages ago. It has long since replaced assembler and, along with C++, remains the programming language of choice in the embedded tool space according to most surveys. My recent article, “Parallel Processing Zooms While Debugging Zags” (www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online ...
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William Wong
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