It’s been a wild and frantic year for
designers of embedded devices. A wide
range of products has boosted performance,
cut costs, and reduced power
requirements by impressive amounts.
On top of that, many new releases deliver
matching reference designs or low-cost
development kits, enabling developers to
quickly check out the latest offerings.
KITS IN HAND
Take DLP Design’s
DLP-FPGA platform, which doubles as
a deployable module based on a Xilinx
Spartan 3E as well as an evaluation and
training platform (Fig. 1). FPGA adoption
is up as prices drop, development
tools improve, and designers exploit
FPGA performance.
New combinations were delivered to the
lab in 2007, too, like Texas Instruments’
eZ430-RF2500. It combines an MSP430
microcontroller with a low-cost RF transceiver.
A pair of modules is included in a
development package under $50—great
for portable wireless applications.
SHRINKING FORM FACTORS
Parts based on the MicroTCA standard
may finally see the light of day next year.
But developers looking for a small form
factor might check out 3U VPX (VITA
46) boards like P.A. Semi’s PA6T-1628M
or Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded
Computing’s VPX3-125, based on lowpower
PowerPC chips. The processors
incorporate PCI Express and 10-Gbit
Ethernet fabric interfaces.
EPIC Express didn’t see the light of day
this year, but new form factors such as VIA
Technologies’ Pico-ITX look to move the
latest processors into the small form-factor
space (Fig. 2). Compact form factors like
Kontron’s nanoETXexpress build on
existing standards like COM Express.
MIXING MEMS
Even smaller form
factors are possible
with MEMS technology.
Freescale’s
MPXY8300 uses the
company’s system-inpackage
(SiP) technology
to combine an 8-bit
microcontroller, a Smart-
MOS RF transmitter, and a
MEMS pressure sensor into a
single package (Fig. 3). This approach
reduces a system’s footprint and power
requirements. Wireless integration
simplifies deployment.
EMBEDDED MULTICORE
Today, the 64-bit multicore
solutions on servers and
desktops grab the limelight. Yet solutions
for standard embedded platforms
from MIPS and ARM push performance
to 1 GHz. Fine and
coarse clock gating are key to
reducing generated heat and power
requirements. SMP remains the
primary architecture, but distributing
functionality via virtual
machines or dedicated cores is common.
Multicore solutions have led to more novel designs, such
as Raytheon’s MONARCH (Morphable Networked
Micro-Architecture) architecture. This approach is useful
in applications that change dynamically, say, from stream
processing to data processing.
High-performance computing takes advantage of 64-bit multicore
platforms. Specialized compute platforms often can augment
these systems, though. AMD’s R580 turns multicore
graphics processing toward more general stream-processing
applications. This approach heralds asymmetric processing
architectures that are moving toward the chip level.
VIRTUAL SOFTWARE, MACHINES
Multicore solutions
often need to support a range of operating environments. Virtualmachine
managers (VMMs) like Xen make this possible.
Enhancements in Intel’s and AMD’s latest 64-bit multicores use
new hardware acceleration to reduce VMM overhead.
Products like Trango Virtual Processors’ Trango Hypervisor
target ARM and MIPS processors. There’s also VMware’s Lab
Manager, which brings VMM support into the development,
test, and deployment realm. It spreads VMM control across
processor networks, not just a single system.
The other side of the virtual realm addresses the lack of hardware.
Virtutech’s Simics was chosen to simulate Freescale’s
MPC8641D dual-core embedded processor even before the chip
made it out of the foundry. Virtutech isn’t alone in this area.
VaST Systems’ CoMET and its METeor embedded softwaredevelopment
environment let developers create and test applications
without target hardware.