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 sessions will remain a big part of the conference,
which are a major draw for most engineers. Mainstays like
“DSP Demystified” and “C (and C++) Gotchas” will return.
You’ll also find a larger concentration in areas such as power
management with “Let Sleeping Chips Lie: Programming
for Low Power” and security in “Seven Steps for Developing
Secure Mobile Devices.”
The “Build Linux Applications with the MicroBlaze Soft
Processor” session will highlight the uptick in general FPGA
usage. Likewise, strong interest continues in areas such as
operating systems and development frameworks. For instance,
there’s a session on “Eclipse—Up Close and Personal.”
A few of you may sit in on these sessions simply to polish
your resume. On that note, you can expect a good bit of traffic
at the ESC Career Fair, given the current economic forecast.
Of course, the fair is a panoply of the latest technology, and
that includes plenty of new software packages.
SAN JOSE SOFTWARE
LynuxWorks will showcase its LynxSecure separation kernel.
Separation kernels provides a robust environment where mixing
secure and non-secure operating systems (OSs) is
common. It allows legacy systems
to run side by side with new
application platforms.
Hypervisor
technology offers isolation while taking advantage of the virtualization
and multicore capabilities of the latest processor chips.
LynxSecure supplies a base for LynuxWorks’ LynxOS
real-time operating system (RTOS), which now can provide
time-space partitioning and OS virtualization. These features
resemble those of other RTOSs that will be on display, such as
Green Hills Software’s Integrity and its Padded Cell Secure
technology—same idea, different name.
Security will take up a larger chunk of the announcements
at ESC, partly due to customer demand and partly due to the
need to build up the infrastructure to support networked devices.
Also, developers are starting to understand and demand this
type of support.
At the lower end of the spectrum, attendees can take a gander
at Microsoft’s .NET Micro Framework 2.5. This platform
targets midrange 32-bit platforms with a new low footprint of
128 kbytes of RAM and 256 kbytes of flash. This includes a new,
native TCP/IP and room for at least one application. Plenty of
single-chip solutions now can address this platform. The number
goes even higher for those that utilize external memory.
This latest incarnation of the .NET Micro Framework adds
support for the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS),
which is found on .NET’s larger siblings, including Windows
CE and Windows XP Embedded. DPWS allows network
devices to
locate each other and collaborate, as well as subscribe
to events.
Of course, an even broader range of processors supports
the .
NET Micro Framework, including chips from Atmel
and NXP.
These ARM-based solutions are an ideal fit.
Also in
the ARM space, Hitex Development Tools offers its support for STMicroelectronics’ Cortex-M3-based STM32
microcontroller (Fig. 1). The development kit includes the
HiTOP development environment. Integration with the Tasking
VX-compiler is available as well.
The development environment features the DashBoard graphical
user interface, which lets users configure the device and view
the effects of an application while it’s running. The evaluation
board has interfaces for USB, CAN, USART, and IrDA, plus an
optional extension I/O board.
You may also do well to stop by the Eclipse PluginFest 2008
and see the latest Eclipse-based development tools. This event,
which overlaps ESC, will be held at Wind River’s offices in nearby
Sunnyvale, Calif., April 16-17.
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