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.

Before FPGAs became viable system-on-chip platforms, there were two simple basic food groups in the embedded processor world: stand-alone processors for board- and module-level integration and processor IP cores for system-on-chip integration. Some of the most successful offerings today are processor architectures that managed to span both of those domains, such as ARM’s wildly successful architectures that have attained widespread adoption both as flexible IP cores in ASIC SoC implementations and in high-value, stand-alone chipsets for board-level integration.

Recently (as we’ve thoroughly documented in these pages), FPGAs have shrunk and grown to the … Read More → "Soft Core War"

The MathWorks is bucking that trend, however, because they’ve approached the problem from a different direction. First, they won the hearts and minds of the electronic design community with their general purpose (non-EDA-specific) tools like MATLAB and Simulink. Then, when they apparently noticed that they had thousands of seats of software in places where only EDA companies typically played, they set about developing domain-specific technology to try and capitalize on that market presence.

This week, The MathWorks made another bold step across that line from supplier of general-purpose software tools to head-on competitor for some of … Read More → "Connecting the Camps"