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Don’t look now, but you may have a supercomputer on your desk. It’s hiding in your video card. While it won’t make your word processor faster, it may improve the transcoding speed when you’re moving movies to your mobile Internet device. Intel and AMD have been pushing multicore in the 64-bit x86 realm with only four-core chips at this point. Intel’s 80-core Polaris is designed to push the envelope, but AMD and NVidia have other ideas, at least when it ...

Make it low-power. Buying off-the-shelf parts to meet these criteria is still a challenge, but the latest crop of modules makes the job easier. Modules let designers develop custom configurations with minimum moving the design of the critical aspects of the system to the module vendors. This includes the processor and memory subsystem and usually most, if not all, of the peripheral interface. A carrier board typically contains connectors and...

Men Micro’s ESMexpress-based XM50 targets the pending VITA 59, RSE Rugged System-On-Module Express standard. The 1.5-GHz PowerQUICC III MPC8548 processor has access to 2 Gbytes of ECC DDR2 SDRAM memory in addition to nonvolatile SRAM and FRAM. The 12-W board has three Gigabit Ethernet ports, five USB ports, three SATA ports, and an 8x PCI Express port. The XM50 also plugs into a carrier board and is enclosed in a metal case...

Take one SpaceSaver-II. Attach one GMS P70x. Start developing on one slick platform with Mini-PCI Express and a 2.16-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The 4- by 4-in. SpaceSaver-II provides these connectors: three video (NTSC, RGB, DVI), audio with 2.5-W amp, two SATA, IDE, two serial, eight GPIO, five USB, LVDS LCD, Mini-PCI Express, Express- Card, Compact Flash, two Gigabit Ethernet, plus support for a 1.8-in. solidstate hard drive. The...

Marvell took its ARM license and cranked out the 32-bit Shiva core, which hits 2 GHz and delivers PCI Express connectivity. It’s compatible with ARM’s 16- and 32-bit instruction sets even though it isn’t part of ARM’s Cortex push. This lets designers tailor the core to its requirements. The initial crop of Shiva chips targets multimedia applications, including portable units such as mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The 2-GHz 88F6281 ...

Freescale’s QorIQ series builds on the venerable PowerQUICC lines. PowerQUICC will remain, but the QorIQ is where the power is. The P4 series starts with the eight-core P4080, which uses Freescale’s CoreNET on-chip interconnect to deliver high performance while keeping power requirements low (see the figure). The one- and two-core P1 series offers even lower requirements. ...

The COM Express-based COM680 from Ampro combines a 1.66-MHz dualcore Core2 Duo 7500 processor with high-resolution video, including on-board video encoding for HDTV, component, and S-video outputs. The board handles resolutions up to 2048 by 1536. It also holds up to 4 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM. Interfaces include Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB 2.0, AC’97/HD audio, two SATA II, IDE, x16 PCI Express, five PCI Express, PCI, and LPC. ...

The LAN9500 USB-to-Ethernet bridge is one of a number of new Ethernet offerings from SMSC. It incorporates a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 controller and physical layer (PHY) with a 10/100 Ethernet interface that includes an auto-MDIX PHY. The LAN9420 PCI Ethernet controller is optimized for 32-bit microcontrollers. It also has the auto-MDIX PHY. The integrated scattergather DMA and IRQ support can significantly reduce CPU overhead while delivering ...

Microchip’s latest microcontrollers, from its 8-bit PICs to 32-bit MIPS-based chips, now sport USB. At the low end is the small-footprint PIC18F1XK50 family. The 16-bit PIC24F family now adds USB OTG (On the Go) support, as does the low-cost, 40-MHz, 32-bit PIC32MX420. Other PIC32 systems run at speeds up to 80 MHz. Pricing starts at $1.32, $3.47, and $3.25, respectively. MICROCHIP ...

High-speed Aurora or Serial FPDP links feed dual Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs via a pair of FPGA mezzanine card (FMC/VITA 57) slots on VMetro’s latest VPX single-board computer (SBC). The HPE640 also includes two Freescale MPC8641D dual e600 PowerPC cores. The PowerPC chips have access to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM. Each FPGA has access to six banks of memory (36 Mbytes of SRAM via four banks, 256 Mbytes of DDR2 SDRAM via two banks). A Gigabit Ethernet...

The Element/Accelerator Platform delivers full software support of AdvancedTCA systems that typically include DSP farms to handle multimedia chores. Enea’s highavailability platform addresses fault tolerance from the ground up, including protocol stacks through application and chassis management tools. Software management tools address the complete system, including in-service upgrades. Developers can build on a fully functional system instead...

The Parallel Computing Toolbox and matching Distributed Computing Server augment the MathWorks’ Matlab 2008a with parallel computing support that will be a boon to number-crunching developers. New features include parallel for (parfor) definitions as well as distributed arrays (darray) that allow data to be distributed across many servers. Users also can transition from serial Matlab programs to parallel Matlab programs without significant...

Even in this age of tiny earbud music players, audiophiles want high-end stereo systems that provide perfect acoustics and fidelity— and technology is making these systems less expensive than ever. In fact, I recently received a letter from a reader asking about some of these developments: “I heard that Emerald Physics has a set of $3500 speakers that outperforms more expensive, $20k to $50k systems using a DSP. Is this possible?” asked S....

NVidia’s T10 architecture brings double-precision floating point to the company’s massively parallel computing platform. This graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture also is used in NVidia’s consumer graphics boards. Both are supported by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The Tesla S1070 1U rack-mount system incorporates four of the Tesla T10 boards, each with a single chip containing 240 cores ...

Demand for devices that can sense motion, orientation, and location is surging, and it runs the gamut from the hottest video games to critical medical technology. With accelerometers and gyroscopes based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) rapidly maturing, that demand is being met. Many of the latest consumer products include one or more MEMS IC functions that measure and control factors like movement, position, force, and even temperature. As a...

Held last month in Atlanta, the Intel ISEF 2008 brought together more than 1500 students from around the world as they presented their award-winning projects from state and regional science fairs. Individuals and teams competed in more than 17 categories, including a healthy showing in the Engineering: Electrical and Mechanical (EE) division. A number of students used development kits in their work. Chris King’s Electromagnetic Levitation: A Digital Control ...

Utilizing modularity in an embedded design opens up a number of new possibilities when compared to standard embedded applications. It enables the design of compact form-factor devices, without sacrificing functionality. Modularized embedded designs can be designed economically, because they can be tailored to the application—avoiding unnecessary functionality and cost. They’re also production-friendly, since they open up new diagnostic possibilities without...

Falling FPGA prices and ever-improving tools make FPGA development more palatable to designers who aren’t well versed in this arena. Likewise, the increased number of choices and improved sophistication of soft processor cores for FPGAs create new options for developers who would otherwise look only at stock, offthe- shelf microcontrollers. There are many reasons why designers should consider FPGAs as a development and deployment platform. Processors ...

Aerospace and military applications that are more sophisticated and complex are spawning a new breed of single-board computers (SBCs). Thatâ??s because the users in these areas have rather formidable demands, such as greater ruggedness, higher reliability, more power performance, less power dissipation, and a smaller form factor. As a result, board and systems integrators are scrambling to find ways to pack as much technology as possible on the...

Extending from the factory floor and into your living room, the personal robot’s time has arrived. These devices have pushed past uses as expensive and cute toys like Sony’s Aibo and into sophisticated and affordable products that perform a number of functions in and around the home. Allied Business Intelligence Research says that the personal robotics market, which includes robotic toys, educational robots, and task-based robots, will reach $15...