So, what are embedded engineers up to in all of this? At the recent ESS (Embedded System Show), Britain’s leading exhibition and conference, I talked to a number of the exhibitors to try and get a qualitative overview for what is happening today.

While ESS is a small brother of the ESCs of the US and the even bigger embedded world in February in Germany, it still attracts around 2500 attendees, mainly from within Britain. It provides a good barometer for the general feeling in the industry, and for the second year running the barometer … Read More → "Embedded Britain?"

A moment later, it was gone. The mark – their goal for their next leg of the race – had unceremoniously sunk into the sea, leaving no trace of its previous location. Spinning on his heels, the tactician saw that the previous mark had also disappeared into the deep green water. The entire race course had effectively suddenly vanished. He looked at his skipper and the other members of their yacht’s “brain trust” in confusion.

The entire racing fleet was now adrift at top speed. In a matter of seconds, what had been a tightly fought battle for … Read More → "Adrift…"

One thing is clear, though. Our new [insert catchy techno-trademark here] will speed your time to market, reduce the number of costly debug iterations, improve your system reliability, and slash your BOM costs. Your software will run faster, your batteries will run longer, and your system will be immune to a host of evils, the likes of which you haven’t yet even begun to comprehend. Don’t believe us? Why not ask our well-compensated and supported beta customers? They’ve had it for awhile, they get it, and just listen to them rave about how … Read More → "Fall Fury"

What so many have been seeking is an architecture that combines efficient parallelizing of the performance core of demanding algorithms with the ease of programming and predictability of traditional von Neumann-based machines. A number of approaches to the problem have emerged over the past couple of years, each working to overcome the key problem of ease of programming while delivering on the promise of parallelism.

This week, Ambric announced their entry into the parallelism party. Their new devices are massive parallel processor arrays based on the globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) architecture. GALS attacks the global synchronization … Read More → "Power Parallelism"

Our first year saw explosive growth in the “ecosystem” of embedded system development, including rapid expansion of open-source offerings for embedded design, increased competition in the commercial software, tools, and IP space, and a reckoning of the co-existence of open-source and commercial components within the same systems. We watched ARM and MIPS roll out new processor offerings, Wind River, Microsoft, and Mentor Graphics turn up the competitive heat on embedded device operating systems, and we tracked a wide variety of announcements from companies whose offerings accelerate the development cycle for device software and hardware platform development.