Happy Monday! Although the NFL playoffs didn't go as well as I hoped, at least the bright side is I have my Sundays free again.
I did want to share some news from TI in case you did not see this last year. TI has a tool called WEBENCH that allows to create power topology solutions for your designs. This tool can be used for selecting one power part or going through a complex power topology that might be necessary when powering an FPGA. I have used WEBENCH a lot, and find that it helps me get to the best architecture quicker. It goes through all the power calculations for you and helps you see the tradeoffs of cost, size, and efficiency. At the end of last year, they added a new feature to WEBENCH, schematic export! Now you can go write from design into schematic. They support Altium Designer, OrCad Capture CIS, and the free tool DesignSpark. They are working on support for Mentor DxDesigner and Altium's P-Cad.
Check out the link from TI to learn more!
Great Lakes
Monday, January 14, 2013
Friday, January 4, 2013
Top Ten Products from EE Times User Reviews
I love the New Year because we get to look at what was hot in 2012. Here is another list from 2012 from EE Times.
Avnet made the list with our ZedBoard design.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
It's a New Year - How about a USB Topic
Welcome to 2013! I hope you had a great 2012 and enjoyed your holidays. I took some time off and I am now feeling refreshed and energized to start 2013. I was made aware by a friend today of a bit-banged USB implementation on an MSP430. This is very exciting because the only options of doing this in low cost designs is to add an additional translation chip, usually a USB to uart bridge. For those of you interested in going right to the content, check out this link.
I did want to give a little background on why someone would want a bit-banged USB implementation on a microcontroller. Today USB is the most ubiquitous interface available in the market. The connector was largely driven by the consumer space but has started to adapt quite well to markets I am more familiar with, medical and industrial. Although USB is widely used, it is not the easiest thing to understand. There are numerous profiles that have to be coded in software and different configurations that have to be accounted for in hardware.
Traditionally if a user wants to a add a USB connection they either have to get a processor with a USB controller or they have to insert a USB to UART bridge chip in between their microcontroller and the USB port. There are numerous suppliers with USB to UART bridge chips and the most popular is probably FTDI.
There are numerous open source projects that I am aware of that are starting to implement the bit-banged USB implementation without a bridge chip in between. A very popular implementation is the one for the AVR micros called V-USB - link.
Here is the schematic required to add a USB connection for the V-USB implementation, pretty simple:
I did want to give a little background on why someone would want a bit-banged USB implementation on a microcontroller. Today USB is the most ubiquitous interface available in the market. The connector was largely driven by the consumer space but has started to adapt quite well to markets I am more familiar with, medical and industrial. Although USB is widely used, it is not the easiest thing to understand. There are numerous profiles that have to be coded in software and different configurations that have to be accounted for in hardware.
Traditionally if a user wants to a add a USB connection they either have to get a processor with a USB controller or they have to insert a USB to UART bridge chip in between their microcontroller and the USB port. There are numerous suppliers with USB to UART bridge chips and the most popular is probably FTDI.
There are numerous open source projects that I am aware of that are starting to implement the bit-banged USB implementation without a bridge chip in between. A very popular implementation is the one for the AVR micros called V-USB - link.
Here is the schematic required to add a USB connection for the V-USB implementation, pretty simple:
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Ten Developments in 2012 - RePost
I saw this on Embedded.com and wanted to share. Here is the link to the full article: link.
Embedded.com editors asked me to put together a list of what I feel are the ten best things that have happened in the embedded space in 2012. Rather than do that, I've compiled what I see as the ten most important things this year for embedded systems.
Number 10: Sub-$0.50 32-bit processors.
NXP and others have introduced ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers for tens of cents. Put a high-end CPU in your product for a tenth of the cost of a cup of Starbucks. Does this spell the end of 8 and 16 bits? I don't think so, but it does shift the landscape considerably.
Click on image to enlarge.
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "The low-pin count LPC800"
Ada 2012
Number 9: Ada 2012
Ada 2012, a new version of Ada, includes design-by-contract to automatically detect large classes of runtime errors. Though Ada's use is still very small, it does offer incredibly low bug rates. In the past design-by-contract was only available natively in Eiffel, which has a 0% market share in the embedded space.
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "Ada gets a makeover"
Ada 2012 Language Reference Manual
Ada2012.org lists the updated features
Zynq FPGA
Number 8: Xilinx acquires Petalogix, meanwhile coming out with the Zynq FPGA
The Zynq has twin Cortex-A9 cores. Zynq is interesting in that it's less about a massive FPGA and more about cores with some configurable logic. And Petalogix has a great demo showing interrupt latency on each core, one running FreeRTOS and the other Linux. Although Linux is a wonderful OS, it isn't an RTOS replacement:
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "The rise of FPGAs?"
Coremark
Number 7: The Coremark benchmark goes mainstream
While Coremark has been around for some time, in 2012 a number of microprocessor manufacturers have started using it strategically to differentiate their offerings. Now Coremark is even found in datasheets. ARM leveled the playing field... will Coremark upend it?
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from article CoreMark: A realistic way to benchmark CPU performance.
Related content:
Coremark
CoreMark: A realistic way to benchmark CPU performance
Ivy Bridge
Number 6: Ivy Bridge released
Although Intel's part is not targeted at the embedded space, their successful use of 22nm geometry, enabled by FinFET transistors, is causing the other foundries to scramble. You can be sure we'll see FPGAs at this process node before long, which will mean higher density and lower power consumption (at least on a per-transistor basis). Today both Altera and Xilinx are shipping 28nm parts.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from TechInsights' Ivy Bridge teardown as shown in EE Times.
Related content:
"Analysts start Intel Ivy Bridge CPU teardown" by Rick Merritt, EE Times.
TechInsights' "Inside Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge processor"
Foxconn robots
Number 5: Foxconn plans to add 1 million robots.
Nope, this isn't happening in 2012, but that oft-reviled company is starting to ramp up their robotics. What will this mean? A ton of layoffs in China, that's for sure. It will also be a shot in the arm for those vendors who make the embedded systems that go into robots. I suspect the economy of scale will drive prices down substantially, creating more opportunities for robots there and here in the West. The impact on employment will be scary.
Foxconn workers build products at a facility in Shenzen, China.
BIG.little heterogeneous cores
Number 4: ARM's BIG.little heterogeneous cores
If there is a theme about embedded in the last year or two, it's that of power management. It's all about the Joules when running from a battery. A smart phone demands a ton of computational capability when active, but does spend most of its time loafing. ARM mixed a Cortex-A15 with an -A7 on one die. The A15 runs when demands are high; otherwise it sleeps and the A7 runs exactly the same code while consuming less power. Other vendors have taken somewhat similar approaches, like NXP in their LPC4350 which mixes a Cortex-M4 and -M0 on a single chip.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from ARM Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE hardware from ARM.
Measuring power consumption
Number 3: Improved tools to measure power consumption of devices
To continue with the theme of power management, a number of vendors have introduced or improved tools to measure power consumption of devices. ARM's DS-5 toolchain now operates with National Instruments' data acquisition devices; Segger has a brand-new debugger that measures power, and IAR's has been improved. All three of these correlate power consumption to the running code (with some caveats). Then there are the low-cost devices like Dave Jones' uCurrent and a new-new and very innovative product I'm not allowed to talk about yet. The bottom line is that designers of low-power systems now have tools that operate in the power/code domains.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from alternatezone.comoriginally from April 2009 Silicon Chip Magazine..
Gestures
Number 2: Innovations in gesture UIs, such as Microchip's GestIC parts
Also huge in the last few years are new ways to interact with devices. Apple refined the UI with touchscreen swiping. Kinect uses a camera to sense a player's inputs. This year Microchip introduced their GestIC parts that sense hand gestures made within 15 cm of a device. It can detect the hand position in 3D space, flicks, an index finger making clockwise or counterclockwise circles, and various symbols. And, no, as yet it cannot detect that gesture you were just thinking about.
Click on image to enlarge.
Still waiting
Number 1: Searching..., searching....
Finally, the biggest development in 2012 is the one that didn't happen. Despite sales of hundreds of millions of multicore chips this year, no one really knows how to program them. The problem of converting intrinsically-serial code to parallel remains unsolved. Here's my six-core PC's current state as half a dozen busy apps are running:
Click on image to enlarge.
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
Top ten milestones in embedded 2012
- December 19, 2012Embedded.com editors asked me to put together a list of what I feel are the ten best things that have happened in the embedded space in 2012. Rather than do that, I've compiled what I see as the ten most important things this year for embedded systems.
Number 10: Sub-$0.50 32-bit processors.
NXP and others have introduced ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers for tens of cents. Put a high-end CPU in your product for a tenth of the cost of a cup of Starbucks. Does this spell the end of 8 and 16 bits? I don't think so, but it does shift the landscape considerably.
Click on image to enlarge.
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "The low-pin count LPC800"
Ada 2012
Number 9: Ada 2012
Ada 2012, a new version of Ada, includes design-by-contract to automatically detect large classes of runtime errors. Though Ada's use is still very small, it does offer incredibly low bug rates. In the past design-by-contract was only available natively in Eiffel, which has a 0% market share in the embedded space.
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "Ada gets a makeover"
Ada 2012 Language Reference Manual
Ada2012.org lists the updated features
Zynq FPGA
Number 8: Xilinx acquires Petalogix, meanwhile coming out with the Zynq FPGA
The Zynq has twin Cortex-A9 cores. Zynq is interesting in that it's less about a massive FPGA and more about cores with some configurable logic. And Petalogix has a great demo showing interrupt latency on each core, one running FreeRTOS and the other Linux. Although Linux is a wonderful OS, it isn't an RTOS replacement:
Related content:
Jack Ganssle's "The rise of FPGAs?"
Coremark
Number 7: The Coremark benchmark goes mainstream
While Coremark has been around for some time, in 2012 a number of microprocessor manufacturers have started using it strategically to differentiate their offerings. Now Coremark is even found in datasheets. ARM leveled the playing field... will Coremark upend it?
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from article CoreMark: A realistic way to benchmark CPU performance.
Related content:
Coremark
CoreMark: A realistic way to benchmark CPU performance
Ivy Bridge
Number 6: Ivy Bridge released
Although Intel's part is not targeted at the embedded space, their successful use of 22nm geometry, enabled by FinFET transistors, is causing the other foundries to scramble. You can be sure we'll see FPGAs at this process node before long, which will mean higher density and lower power consumption (at least on a per-transistor basis). Today both Altera and Xilinx are shipping 28nm parts.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from TechInsights' Ivy Bridge teardown as shown in EE Times.
Related content:
"Analysts start Intel Ivy Bridge CPU teardown" by Rick Merritt, EE Times.
TechInsights' "Inside Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge processor"
Foxconn robots
Number 5: Foxconn plans to add 1 million robots.
Nope, this isn't happening in 2012, but that oft-reviled company is starting to ramp up their robotics. What will this mean? A ton of layoffs in China, that's for sure. It will also be a shot in the arm for those vendors who make the embedded systems that go into robots. I suspect the economy of scale will drive prices down substantially, creating more opportunities for robots there and here in the West. The impact on employment will be scary.
Foxconn workers build products at a facility in Shenzen, China.
Credit: ©Steve Jurvetson/Flickr link
BIG.little heterogeneous cores
Number 4: ARM's BIG.little heterogeneous cores
If there is a theme about embedded in the last year or two, it's that of power management. It's all about the Joules when running from a battery. A smart phone demands a ton of computational capability when active, but does spend most of its time loafing. ARM mixed a Cortex-A15 with an -A7 on one die. The A15 runs when demands are high; otherwise it sleeps and the A7 runs exactly the same code while consuming less power. Other vendors have taken somewhat similar approaches, like NXP in their LPC4350 which mixes a Cortex-M4 and -M0 on a single chip.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from ARM Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE hardware from ARM.
Measuring power consumption
Number 3: Improved tools to measure power consumption of devices
To continue with the theme of power management, a number of vendors have introduced or improved tools to measure power consumption of devices. ARM's DS-5 toolchain now operates with National Instruments' data acquisition devices; Segger has a brand-new debugger that measures power, and IAR's has been improved. All three of these correlate power consumption to the running code (with some caveats). Then there are the low-cost devices like Dave Jones' uCurrent and a new-new and very innovative product I'm not allowed to talk about yet. The bottom line is that designers of low-power systems now have tools that operate in the power/code domains.
Click on image to enlarge.
Image from alternatezone.comoriginally from April 2009 Silicon Chip Magazine..
Gestures
Number 2: Innovations in gesture UIs, such as Microchip's GestIC parts
Also huge in the last few years are new ways to interact with devices. Apple refined the UI with touchscreen swiping. Kinect uses a camera to sense a player's inputs. This year Microchip introduced their GestIC parts that sense hand gestures made within 15 cm of a device. It can detect the hand position in 3D space, flicks, an index finger making clockwise or counterclockwise circles, and various symbols. And, no, as yet it cannot detect that gesture you were just thinking about.
Click on image to enlarge.
Still waiting
Number 1: Searching..., searching....
Finally, the biggest development in 2012 is the one that didn't happen. Despite sales of hundreds of millions of multicore chips this year, no one really knows how to program them. The problem of converting intrinsically-serial code to parallel remains unsolved. Here's my six-core PC's current state as half a dozen busy apps are running:
Click on image to enlarge.
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Game Changing Technologies for 2012
It is the end of the year! Time to gather with friends and family and celebrate all the accomplishments of 2012. But what technology was developed in 2012? I saw an article on Quartz regarding some new technologies and product instantiations of these technologies that hit us in 2012. Check out the article on this link.
Avnet adds Digi
This article was taken from our website, but I thought it was a good repost on my blog:
Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas Adds Digi International to Line Card
Print Friendly
PHOENIX – December 11, 2012 – Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet, Inc.
(NYSE: AVT), today announced it has signed a distribution agreement
with Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII), a leading provider of
machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions. The agreement provides Avnet's
customers with access to Digi’s broad range of ARM-based embedded wired
and wireless modules, wireless routers and gateways and other M2M
technologies.
Click to Tweet: Avnet Inks Deal with Digi International: http://bit.ly/UVWTp0
“Avnet offers a large, experienced sales team with outstanding engineering and integration services,” said John Guargena, vice president of Americas and India sales, Digi International. “This agreement allows us to leverage Avnet’s sales and technical support groups as an extension of our own and serve a wider customer base. It also provides Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas’ customers easy access to industry-leading embedded modules based on Freescale technology and other best-in-class M2M solutions.”
M2M technology, machines communicating with other machines, allows devices to monitor and adjust to one another with human intervention only when necessary. Digi’s products and services are used to enable thousands of M2M applications throughout the world, including many within medical, security, energy, building automation and other industries.
"Market research firm IDC projects that M2M services will account for over 30 percent of all embedded wireless systems worldwide by 2015[1], and Digi is a pioneer in the advancement of M2M solutions,” said Alex Iuorio, senior vice president, supplier development, Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas. “In addition, many of Digi’s modules are based on Freescale Semiconductors’ popular i.MX processor family. Having Digi’s technology on our line card enables us to offer customers more integrated processor module options, which is exactly the kind of technological synergy that Avnet can help bring to a customer’s development effort.”
Digi’s network-enabled ConnectCore® for i.MX53 module family is a highly integrated system-on-module (SoM) solution based on the Freescale® i.MX53 application processor. It offers a high-performance 1 GHz ARM® CortexTM-A8 core, wired and wireless connectivity options, powerful 1080p/720p video encoding/decoding capabilities and a complete peripheral set. Energy efficient and scalable, this module family is particularly well suited for medical devices, security/surveillance equipment, industrial applications and digital signage. To view the entire Digi International product line available from Avnet, visitwww.AvnetExpress.com.
Click to Tweet: Avnet Inks Deal with Digi International: http://bit.ly/UVWTp0
“Avnet offers a large, experienced sales team with outstanding engineering and integration services,” said John Guargena, vice president of Americas and India sales, Digi International. “This agreement allows us to leverage Avnet’s sales and technical support groups as an extension of our own and serve a wider customer base. It also provides Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas’ customers easy access to industry-leading embedded modules based on Freescale technology and other best-in-class M2M solutions.”
M2M technology, machines communicating with other machines, allows devices to monitor and adjust to one another with human intervention only when necessary. Digi’s products and services are used to enable thousands of M2M applications throughout the world, including many within medical, security, energy, building automation and other industries.
"Market research firm IDC projects that M2M services will account for over 30 percent of all embedded wireless systems worldwide by 2015[1], and Digi is a pioneer in the advancement of M2M solutions,” said Alex Iuorio, senior vice president, supplier development, Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas. “In addition, many of Digi’s modules are based on Freescale Semiconductors’ popular i.MX processor family. Having Digi’s technology on our line card enables us to offer customers more integrated processor module options, which is exactly the kind of technological synergy that Avnet can help bring to a customer’s development effort.”
Digi’s network-enabled ConnectCore® for i.MX53 module family is a highly integrated system-on-module (SoM) solution based on the Freescale® i.MX53 application processor. It offers a high-performance 1 GHz ARM® CortexTM-A8 core, wired and wireless connectivity options, powerful 1080p/720p video encoding/decoding capabilities and a complete peripheral set. Energy efficient and scalable, this module family is particularly well suited for medical devices, security/surveillance equipment, industrial applications and digital signage. To view the entire Digi International product line available from Avnet, visitwww.AvnetExpress.com.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Teach Yourself Mobile Apps
Have you wanted to write some specific application for your phone? There are numerous books and training websites out there, but I happened on one that impressed me. It is called the MIT App Inventor and is aimed at helping people build simple apps quickly. Check out this video:
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