The processor IP market isn’t just about processors anymore.  A number of companies make outstanding processor core IP, but getting design teams to engineer those into products requires a lot more than a snappy Dhrystone number.  Product developers want to make sure that their designs are backed up by a rich portfolio of development tools, operating system and middleware support, and compatible peripheral IP.  MIPS sells some of the fastest, lowest power, most widely used processor cores on the market.  They have a strong market share in devices like set-top boxes and consumer … Read More → "MIPS Mulls Microcontrollers"

Multiplication is our big problem.  We need to multiply.  We need to multiply integers. We need to multiply fixed-point numbers. We need to multiply floating point numbers. We need to multiply complex numbers.  But, we also need to multiply other things.  In designing embedded systems, we constantly need to multiply our productivity.

Over the past 40 years, Moore’s Law has given us exponential improvement on the three “Ps”: Power, Performance, and Price.  Transistor counts have reached the billions, frequencies have raced into the Gigahertz, and the power consumed for … Read More → "GMACs GAP"

The industrial automation and control field is an ever-changing mish-mash of protocols, standards, and conventions.  Recently, there has been a wave of replacement sweeping the networking standards space as proprietary and legacy standards give way to more cost-effective off-the-shelf solutions such as Ethernet.  The advantages of Ethernet-based networking are probably obvious – high availability of low-cost, high-reliability infrastructure, built-in future-proofing, very high bandwidth by industrial control standards, and the ability to integrate more smoothly with other types of equipment that are not part of the traditional industrial automation ecosystem.

As these standards shift, however, we … Read More → "Industrial Revolution"

The rack of heavy-iron blade servers whirrs away, dishing up data and mashing myriad algorithms for hundreds of users throughout the corporate campus.  Most of them have no awareness whatsoever of the physical location of the computing resources doing their dirty work.  Day by day and week by week the blades and racks are removed, replaced, upgraded, and re-tasked.  One capacity increase is accomplished by stacking in additional blades, the next by replacing an outdated rack with a new, smaller one with fewer blades and vastly more processing power.

Those of us who have … Read More → "From Servers to Smartphones"

Embedded Technology Journal turns a terrific two years old today.  What does this mean?  For us, two years of your loyal patronage means that we’re doing something right.  It means that we were right about you, our readers – that engineers are intelligent, worldly, interesting people who want more than a datasheet, a press release, or a marketing pitch to satisfy their curiosity about the industry in which they work.  Surviving and thriving for two years in the competitive world of publishing shows that our approach to technology journalism – chronicling the technological … Read More → "Happy Birthday"