ESC San Jose: Wrapup

Another noticeable trend was the increasing number of FPGAs found on boards not destined for communications or military use. It is changing the way digital IO is being delivered. Of course there were plenty of new FPGAs and FPGA development software. Altium was showing off its new modular NanoBoard 2 and a matching portable unit that can be used to demo or deliver FPGA-based solutions built using the NanoBoard 2. I did see some novel demos like QuickLogic’s FPGA demo board. The board had sockets of half a dozen FPGAs that each drive an LCD display. The driver chips for the latter were powered independently while the FPGAs ran off capacitors. The demo charged the capacitors and then let the counters programmed into the FPGA run free. A higher output number indicated a larger number of calculations possible with the associated FPGA. Of course, you know whose FPGA result was the highest, at least for this demo. One of the most popular spectacles, of course, was the teardown. Everything from a Prius to a Lego Mindstorm robot was torn to pieces for the entertainment and education of attendees. I was wondering whether they were going to start disassembling the booths to see what made the demos run. ESC Visuals More robots darted around the floor than ever before, but the applications tended to be similar to those on display in the past. The difference this year was how long it took to create the demos and the growing levels of sophistication. National Instrument’s (NI) robotic arm took longer to build than to program. Of course, NI’s LabView made this possible, which is what the demo was designed to show. Optical recognition was combined with ultrasonic range finding. We’ll see next year if the robot can take the cylinders it put into a box and put them back onto the table. Robots were handy for showing off real-time capabilities of hardware. STmicroelectronics’ ARM7 was powering this autonomous vehicle. The big difference with most of these new demos is that they are based on off-the-shelf boards. Robots, teardowns—were there any surprises? None that I found. Notes from some behind-closed-doors demos will be released in a couple of months, but the show mainly revealed the expected incremental improvements. It seems to be time to take a collective breath and work with the hardware and software that’s been delivered. MIPS will go up, power requirements will go down, and long-term hardware commitments will again be the norm. Surprises will have to wait until next year. Related links Embedded Systems Conference Altium Ampro Connect One National Instruments QuickLogic Rabbit Semiconductor STmicroelectronics