Back to Embedded
3540 results found, displaying items 281 - 300
DisplayPort Receiver Simplifies Interface
IDT’s PanelPort receivers simplify DisplayPort interfacing while lowering system costs. DisplayPort uses up to four high-speed serial pairs with a capacity up to 10.8 Gbits/s, including audio and a 1-Mbit/s auxiliary channel. The VPP1600EMG DisplayPort V1.1-compliant receiver has an adaptive equalizer for a direct-drive monitor. It also supports digital brightness and contrast control. Furthermore, it incorporates a mini-LVDS (low-voltage differential ...
ARMing OMAP
ARM’s RealView Development Suite 3.1 now supports Texas Instruments' DaVinci technology and the OMAP platforms, including the DaVinci TMS- 320DM355 digital media processor and OMAP35x processors. The Eclipsebased RealView support automatically configures the RealView development tools for specific TI processors. The RealView CoreSight debugger provides full visibility of on-chip peripherals. This release also adds processor-specific project templates for...
DSP Shrinks Bluetooth Phones
Untitled Document Cambridge Silicon Radio’s MusiCore chip combines its Kalimba DSP with a Bluetooth interface. It replaces a Bluetooth transceiver while offloading the host processor’s audio chores,...
Offloading CPU Boosts Microcontroller Performance And Cuts Power
Sponsored by: ATMEL
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Atmel Why should designers offload a microcontroller’s CPU? Performance and power consumption are the typical reasons for adding offload capability to a microcontroller. Traditionally, any hardware peripheral offloads the CPU. This includes devices like universal synchronous/asynchronous ...
Developers Refine Their Embedded Wares For ESC
Keep two watchwords in mind when you head to next month’s Embedded Systems Conference—more and better. Scheduled for April 14-18 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., this year’s show will reveal a number of incremental improvements as companies deliver systems based on established standards and product lines. For example, Intel will offer its latest Xeon processor chip sets with an eye on power management. The tech...
Hollywood And Silicon Valley Both Love Remakes, Sequels, And Series
Do it once. Do it again. Even better, turn a remake into a series. They make lots of money. It works in Hollywood, and it works for the electronics industry too—sometimes. Just like movies, there are flops in electronics. But while the whims of the viewing public tend to have more of an effect on the success of movies, changes in technology can have a profound effect on whether a particular remake or series of products even makes sense. Some changes are...
Guide To The Emerging Telecom Standards: Who Does What And Why
As service providers build out their broadband packet networks to offer enhanced triple-play services, telecom OEMs (TEMs) are working overtime to provide the equipment needed to deploy those services. Historically, TEMs have built this equipment from the ground up by using proprietary platforms. A growing number, however, is finding it increasingly difficult to deliver homegrown equipment in a timely, cost-effective fashion. To enhance their competitive position, many TEMs are...
Traversing The Telecom Standards Maze
Proprietary designs once dominated telecom equipment. Individual companies provided total solutions encompassing the customer premises equipment, central-office gear, and a link with the wide-area network. To remain competitive, cut costs, and keep pace with technological innovation, vendors are now moving from proprietary to standards-based designs. Several organizations are involved in the definition of open platform standards (see “Guide To The...
Modules And Motherboards
Modules and small motherboards like VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX or Kontron’s nanoCOMExpress offering are designed to pack commercial off-theshelf (COTS) performance into a small package (see the table). The ever-expanding set of options is necessary to address new interconnects such as PCI...
Peripheral Controller Chip Makes Nice With PCI Express
MosChip Semiconductor Technology's MCS9901CV PCI Express (PCIe) to peripheral I/O controller targets peripheral expansion. The 1x PCI Express (PCIe) interface can access any of the devices, including an I2C port, a 1.5-Mbit/s parallel port, a limited ISA bus interface, a USB 2.0 host, and up to four RS-232, RS-485, and RS-422 mode serial ports. Four mode select pins specify 14 combinations of peripherals support, since a full complement cannot be active at one time. For...
3U VPX Hits The Sweet Spot
In recent years, two seemingly conflicting technology trends have affected many rugged embedded aerospace and defense applications. First, system designers have witnessed rapidly increasing requirements for processing speed, bandwidth, and distributed processing through the adoption of serial fabrics. Meanwhile, size, weight, and power (SWaP) are critical design considerations for emerging applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and...
Why Can't I Do What I Want?
Challenges abound when you’re dealing with computers and trying to get something done—and computers are everywhere these days, from cell phones to light switches. Occasionally, these flaws may be a design oversight. In other cases, the barriers may be by design. Recently, I was trying to get some MP3 ringtones onto my new LG VX9900 EnV by using a free tool called BitPIM (see the ...
Kit Houses PICO-ITX
For prototype or production, the VIA ARTiGO Builder Kit provides a compact, 15- by 11- by 4-cm, x86 platform. The system uses between 15 and 20 W from the PWB-N550 power board, and the case still has space for a 2.5-in. hard disk or flash drive. The $300 kit is based on VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX board running a 1-GHz VIA C7 processor that can handle up to 1 Gbyte of DDR2 533 small-outline dual-inline memory-module (SO-DIMM) system memory....
Dual-Head Graphics Target XMC Slot
XMC slots looking for high-performance graphics can try Thales Computers’ XMC-G72. This dual-head XMC mezzanine card has an x8 PCI Express interface that delivers an AMD/ATI M72-CSP128 graphics controller with 128-Mbyte on-chip GDDR3 memory and dual outputs. DVI/CRT or dual-CRT versions are available. The rugged conduction-cooled version routes the digital DVI video output to the Pn4 rear I/O connector. Drivers support 2D and 3D acceleration...
Universal Graphics Module: The New Standard For Graphics Control Modules
The demand from embedded applications for high-performance graphics has increased dramatically as larger flat-panel displays have become readily available and very desirable components are integrated in systems ranging from medical imaging to point-of-sale. Yet interface reliability, interchangeability, and long-term availability have been sticking points for designers in choosing which controller to use. Embedded designers needed a...
Parallel Programming Language Brings Software Closer To Hardware
Programming languages are evolving to bring the software closer to hardware. As hardware architectures become more parallel (with the advent of multicore processors and FPGAs, for example), sequential programming languages are forced to deal with representing parallelism, which isn’t always an elegant or intuitive solution. A research paper on the landscape of parallel computing published at the University of California, Berkeley, validated this concept and noted that...
Programming To Survive Multicore
While many of us are just beginning to write parallel programs to use multicore, we can already see a crisis looming for those who use raw threads (p-threads or Windows threads) to implement parallelism. More abstract parallel-programming methods have tremendous advantages in allowing parallel programs to survive future processor designs. And there’s a lot of future to survive. We soon will face a transition from multicore processors (eight cores or less) to tera-scale ...
Programming To Survive Multicore: Race Conditions
Non-deterministic programs generally have the worst reputation for parallel programming, which often leads to the frustration of having programs that don’t run the same way, given the same data inputs. Assuming the non-determinism occurs when it’s run on the same hardware, this sort of program most often results from data race conditions. If you’re varying the hardware—say, the number of cores—you should still suspect a data race condition. But it’s also possible that the ...
The Multicore Era Seeks A Parallel Paradigm
Parallel programming is hard. But debugging it is even harder. Unfortunately, taking advantage of multicore solutions like Intel’s 80-core TeraScale prototype will require some type of parallel-programming technique (Fig. 1). The first challenge is to find parallelism that can be exploited. The next is using a tool to exploit the parallelism. Another goal is bug-free code. Parallel...
Old Ideas In New Design = Lower Power, Higher Performance
Elegant designs have always blended old and new while meeting certain criteria. In the case of VIA Technology’s Isaiah architecture, these criteria included higher performance, lower power consumption, and pin-compatibility with the company’s C7 line of x86-compatible microprocessors. The result was a chip design with twice to four times the performance within the same package and power envelope. The architecture’s execution pipeline is key to...
 prev. page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
[15]
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
next page 
|
