Embedded Systems

NEC’s latest 16-bit flash microcontrollers come with integrated LCD drivers and are designed for use in battery-operated handheld medical diagnostic instruments, building utility meters for gas, water and electricity as well as applications in factory automation. The microcontroller series, which is available from distributor Gleichmann Sunrise, includes 80-pin 78K0R/LF3, 100-pin 78K0R/LG3 and 128-pin 78K0R/LH3 and features an extremely low standby current consumption of just 1.2µA when the LCD ...

The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform is nothing new. In the IT sector, systems such as VMware have been on the market for some years and new virtualisation solutions are being introduced at a constant rate. There are three obvious reasons for this popularity: Administrators prefer to distribute applications or data via separate protected ...

The most striking development in video game technology in recent years has been the emergence of motion control, a trend that is expanding the industry beyond its traditional demographics by appealing to young and old alike. The Nintendo Wii with its Wii­Mote controller drove this change by allowing players to direct the action of game characters with natural gestures instead ...

Ilya Bukshteyn, senior director of Windows Embedded Marketing at Microsoft, talks to Electronics Weekly about the main challenges facing embedded developers in 2009, what impact open-source software is having on the embedded market, and just how important the market is to Microsoft… What are the main challenges facing embedded developers in 2009? The current economic situation presents major challenges for ...

Embedded operating system firm LynuxWorks has joined the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium’s (EEMBC‘s) hypervisor sub-committee. “A number of key factors are contributing to the increasing adoption of embedded hypervisor technology, such as running legacy code and operating systems, migration to multi-core chips and the need for security separation of applications” said Arun Subbarao, v-p engineering at LynuxWorks. “However, real-time performance ...

LynuxWorks will upgrade its LynxSecure separation kernel and embedded hypervisor to versions 3.0 and 4.0 during 2009, adding full virtualisation for both Windows and Solaris amongst other features. Released at v2.0 earlier this month, LynxSecure operates with Intel’s virtualisation hardware (Intel VT) to provide a standards-based secure software platform for applications with low-, medium- and high-assurance requirements running concurrently on a ...

Once a year at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, the IEEE pulls together the best of recent chip-based circuit designs both analogue and digital. Steve Bush picks a few of the most interesting ideas from hundreds of papers. Digital circuits From Harvard University comes an all-digital CMOS temperature sensor for on-die thermal monitoring of microprocessors. The ...

We are delighted to announce a new addition to our stable of blogs on ElectronicsWeekly.com – one that addresses an increasingly important area. The new Open Source Engineering blog features the use of Linux and GNU software in industrial, embedded and mobile applications. We hope it provides useful, informative and entertaining content, and please feel free to contribute with your own ...

Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) has acquired an Infineon Technologies-owned software development centre in Linz, Austria. Operating under the name of Comneon, the centre’s team of 48 engineers develops and supplies embedded software for markets including automotive. FME said it will use the centre in European automotive and industrial projects supporting its own hardware and software design teams in its Automotive ...

Renesas has introduced a 90nm 120MHz 32-bit automotive microcontroller. “It achieves a processing performance of 240 million instructions per second when operating at 120MHz,” said Renesas. “This enables fine-grained and sophisticated real-time control of engine or transmission systems. It supports 120MHz operation at temperatures up to 125 deg C, something that is difficult to achieve in a flash MCU while ...