Heading Out To Design West 2013

April 12, 2013

Technology Editor Bill Wong looks forward to the upcoming Design West 2013 show in San Jose to check out the latest micros, modules, boards, software and more.

William Wong Blog

Design West 2013

Related Articles

Getting ready for this year's Design West show has been a challenge because of everything that is coming down the pike. It looks like it will be an extremely busy show with a surprising amount of new technology on display. We have set up the Electronic Design Design West 2013 microsite for you to check out the latest. I am working on a couple of articles that will be up before the show including Small Form Factor Modules Deliver Flexible Deployment Options. This includes the following modules and platforms:

You will be able to follow us on Twitter at @electronicdesgn and my own @altembedded. We are on Facebook and Linked In as well but I need to get my smartphone hooked up with those before I leave. We will also have links to Engineering TV> where we hide all our videos. We will have a Design West 2013 playlist as soon as we have the videos completed. They tend to take a little longer than blog entries like this but they are worth watching.

Another announcement that just rolled in was from Element 14 known for the Raspberry Pi. The latest offering is based on Cypress Semiconductor's PSoC 4 with a Cortex-M0 (see Custom Peripherals Surround Cortex-M0 Platform). The $25 Pioneer Development Kit uses an Arduino-form factor board (Fig. 1). This allows it to be used with the plethora of Arduino shields. It targets a range of applications including field-oriented control (FOC) motor control.

Figure 1. Pioneer Development Kit board built around the Cypress Semiconductor 32-bit PSoC 4 is compatible with Arduino shields.

There will be plenty of new software at the show as well. For example, Vector Software's new VectorCast 6.1 looks to improve software testing. It now provides better aggregation of code coverage data across all test runs. This addresses all phases of testing including system, integration and unit testing. It provides trend analysis of coverage metrics over time.

VectorCast received a new user interface with multimonitor support and undockable windows. Filtering test cases is just a click away and there is a new unit test dashboard. Functionality has been enhanced to support testing of abstract classes, MC/DC masking, plus stubbing of inline and library functions. There is also block code coverage analysis for resource-constrained targets.

A lot more of what I have been briefed on is embargoed at this point but I have it scheduled to show up on our site as soon as we are allowed to release it. I'll see you if you make it to San Jose. If not, check out Electronic Design for the latest news.

About the Author

William Wong Blog | Senior Content Director

Bill Wong covers Digital, Embedded, Systems and Software topics at Electronic Design. He writes a number of columns, including Lab Bench and alt.embedded, plus Bill's Workbench hands-on column. Bill is a Georgia Tech alumni with a B.S in Electrical Engineering and a master's degree in computer science for Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

He has written a dozen books and was the first Director of PC Labs at PC Magazine. He has worked in the computer and publication industry for almost 40 years and has been with Electronic Design since 2000. He helps run the Mercer Science and Engineering Fair in Mercer County, NJ.