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The Analog Devices Sharc gets a workout inside Sixense Entertainmentâ??s 3D sensor system, which will be at the heart of a new class of game controllers. Nintendoâ??s Wii popularized 3D wireless controllers, but its accelerometers only provide relative motion information. Sixenseâ??s patented TrueMotion game controller delivers absolute 3D position and orientation information (see the...

The eagerly awaited revision 3.0 of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) specification offers 10 times the speed of USB 2.0 even as it maintains backward compatibility with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices. Early adopters ramping up their USB 3.0 (known as SuperSpeed USB) developments are testing this nextgeneration peripheral interconnect, which offers 5-Gbit/s data rates over copper. Developers are grappling with sophisticated physical-layer (PHY) features, ...

With Altera and Xilinx FPGAs moving to 40 nm, that means more lookup tables (LUTs), higher performance, and lower power requirements/LUT. They target the highperformance FPGA market with high-speed serializer-deserializer (SERDES) support. Multiple soft-core processors will easily fit in these high-density chips. Achronix’s 1.5-GHz Speedster is another contender at the high end (see “1.5-GHz FPGA Takes Clock Gating To The Max” at ...

FPGAs aren’t that difficult to incorporate into embedded designs. But unlike some microcontrollers, they often lack features like built-in clocks and brownout detection. Also, some designs require offchip memory. One alternative is to employ an FPGA module that includes this additional circuitry. Opal Kelly’s XEM3050 FPGA module contains a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA (see the figure). It also...

FPGAs are expensive... and hard to use... and too slow... and difficult to program... and hard to debug... and they draw too much power... and require register-transfer-level (RTL) wizards. That’s the conventional developer widsom, at least. But before you run for the exits, sit and relax, because the conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, FPGA design will likely take you out of your comfort zone if you’ve never handled an FPGA or ASIC design. But even novices can...

As the decade closes, the major battleground in memory technology lies squarely with nonvolatile (NV) devices. Even as flash—the king of NV memory—continues adapting to increase its utility, challengers based on magnetic and anti-fuse technologies are rising to wrest away a growing number of applications. At the same time, market forces are eroding the profitability needed to fund further flash technology developments. Despite its limitations, flash is the dominant ...

High-speed serial interfaces such as PCI Express and USB are becoming more familiar to developers and users, even as the standards push into their third and fourth generations. New releases usually highlight higher throughput, but the more subtle features often have the real impact in new designs. These newer standards address issues such as security, quality of service (QoS), and distance. Backward-compatibility tends to be the norm as well, and this trickles through related...

Storage providers are whetting designers’ appetites with terabytes at the top end and silicon for a range of embedded applications. Newer interfaces like Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) are now the norm as Inetgrated Drive Electronics (IDE) quickly fade, at least on the hard-drive side. And, a move to smaller form factors is without question. The 3.5-in. drives still dominate capacity equation, but 2.5-in. is the new target. Server redundant arrays of disks (RAIDs)...

Getting to market quickly is a major determinant in the build-versus-buy choice. Thanks to a host of new processor options, the choice is clear: system creation through the use of boards and modules. Most existing modules and board standards such as EPIC, PC/104, VME, and CompactPCI continue to shine. The installed base is the main reason, but they also meet the needs of designers for a range of applications. Their lower cost will remain an advantage for a number of...

When it comes to embedded system design, the choices keep multiplying. Form factors never go away—they just continue to morph. Take Acces I/O Product’s USB-based modules (Fig. 1). These boards have a PC/104 form factor but no ISA or PCI bus. They work with any USB host, from a PC to a single-chip micro. You can wire up a stack or spread them around like a hydra as multiple boards with a...

Anyone waiting for a consolidation to occur in the micro or DSP arenas should settle in for the long haul. The choices just keep growing, even as vendors attempt to use software and peripheral consistency to simplify what developers have to deal with. Yet the array of options isn’t the sole purveyor of multiplicity. Multicore also falls into this category, and now it’s moving into embedded. Low-count, high-performance multicore chips will continue to dominate the...

One thing is for sure. Advances in the digital realm continue at a breakneck pace, even if various limits force the move to multicore and lower-power devices. ASICs and high-performance processors are pushing 45 nm, but not without challenges. Adoption of the latest and greatest is slowing due to technical challenges and the economy. Likewise, existing technologies are meeting the needs of most designers who are not pushing the proverbial envelope. Look...

Parallel processing is everywhere, with almost as many software choices as hardware. Symmetrical-multiprocessing (SMP) designs and clustering dominate large-core, multicore solutions on PCs and servers. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have their own architecture optimized for data flow, while specialized multicore solutions abound. In many cases, the hardware vendor may supply a de facto standard, but even this can change over time. ...

FPGA hardware technology will continue to improve across the spectrum this year. Actel’s Igloo Nano FPGAs are available for under $0.50 (Fig. 1), while Achronix will be shipping 1.5-GHz Speedster (Fig. 2) parts. Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and Xilinx will be pushing the limits of their product lines as well, but it is the year of...

According to iSuppli Corp., revenue from global shipments of core ICs—applicationspecific standard products (ASSPs), applicationspecific ICs (ASICs), and programmable logic devices (PLDs)—will see a weak finish to 2008 and decline in 2009. While global core silicon saw $101.3 billion in revenue in 2008, which is a modest 1.8% rise from 2007’s $99.5 billion total, it will decline by 9.9% in 2009 to drop to $91.2 billion. ASIC shipments...

The steady progress of ASIC design in embracing each new semiconductor process node has stalled at 45 nm, and it may take some time to jump through that hoop. Growing design challenges, rising costs, and shrinking benefits face users of the latest processes, with relief far from sight. So instead of designs moving in a wave toward new generations, the adoption curve is flattening out. Therefore, many process nodes remain viable even though they’re many generations...

The economy may not be growing, but processing power and storage continue to climb. For example, the lab got a little crowded with the arrival of Intel’s software development platform (see the figure). Inside this massive rack-mount system are four of Intel’s latest hex-core Xeon “Dunnington” processors. That’s 24 high-performance cores in one box. Its care and feeding includes a RAID array of eight...

The key reason for using an RTOS is determinism, which typically means precise management or time and space resources. Unfortunately, many problems require more complex solutions, including virtual memory and virtual-machine support. Virtual-memory systems drive RTOS programmers nuts, because a single page fault can mess up timing. In most instances, the trick is to lock down applications that require real-time support. This sometimes means not using the...

Real-time operating systems (RTOSs) tend to be a checkbox item for many embedded projects. But is an RTOS always necessary? The answer is application-specific, so understanding what one will deliver is key to determining whether it becomes a requirement or an extravagance. In general, an RTOS can be used anywhere a non-RTOS is employed. However, it’s rare to find an operating system with a matching RTOS that has exactly the same application programming ...

The multicore Opteron processors in AMD’s “Shanghai” line are designed for performance, but their new Smart Fetch technology can also save power. A core can detect when a thread becomes idle. After a programmable delay, the core flushes its L1 and L2 cache to the chip’s L3 cache before shutting down. In addition to a faster startup, this gives other cores access to the core’s working set. Power savings up to 21% are possible when cores aren’t running...