How We See Embedded Processing

Do some inflection points make as much sound as one hand clapping? It seems that way. Why else would so many device manufacturers still use 8- or 16-bit processors, when modern 32- and 64-bit processors blow those parts out of the water?

The answer, of course, is cost. 8-bitters are cheap. Unfortunately, this cost-saving measure comes at a, well, cost — lost productivity.

Engineering time is expensive, and an accurate cost assessment needs to amortize engineering effort over the life of the product. Say you are building a consumer electronics device with a short product life. For every cent you save using an 8-bit processor, you might add a dollar's worth of engineering time to the bill of materials. Your engineers will end up packing and repacking functions, rewriting code ...Read More

Do some inflection points make as much sound as one hand clapping? It seems that way. Why else would so many device manufacturers still use 8- or 16-bit processors, when modern 32- and 64-bit processors blow those parts out of the water?

The answer, of course, is cost. 8-bitters are cheap. Unfortunately, this cost-saving measure comes at a, well, cost — lost productivity.

Engineering time is expensive, and an accurate cost assessment needs to amortize engineering effort over the life of the product. Say you are building a consumer electronics device with a short product life. For every cent you save using an 8-bit processor, you might add a dollar's worth of engineering time to the bill of materials. Your engineers will end up packing and repacking functions, rewriting code ...Read More

… or is the 16-bit microcontroller family dead?

Over the years, the lines have blurred between the 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontroller families with designers confused to when they should select which line. In Robert Cravotta’s recent article entitled “Recognizing Technology’s Inflections” he says that

“… Freescale’s Flexis and Atmel’s AVR lines blur the line between 8- and 32-bits by sharing common IP (intellectual property) between the processor groups.”

Although this is very true, and I agree completely with Robert’s statement, I wanted to make clear that there are several clear...Read More

Robert Cravotta’s article on technology inflection points highlights the idea that electronics industry progress is often driven more by added simplification, not added complexity, in underlying technologies. When the internal sophistication of a technology can be encapsulated in robust, general-purpose abstractions, it becomes more usable.

We have seen this in the many key transitions in our industry: from analog to digital design; from hardwired to programmable systems; from custom interfaces to industry-standard I/O ports; from company-specific semiconductor fabrication design rules to foundry-based open design rules; and from processor-specific instructions sets and assembly code to C and Java programming on widely-used ins...Read More

After reading Robert Cravotta’s article on Recognizing technology’s inflections it brought to mind just how many changes our industry is going through. It appears that Moore’s Law can be applied to many different fields in the embedded processor market, and perhaps that the original two year timeline for each generation has become even shorter.

One specific market my company participates in that is going through very dramatic changes these days is wireless baseband. We see an ever growing demand for bandwidth intensive content on mobile devices. Smartphones are definitely a key driver of this growth and according to th...Read More

[Editor’s note: George Zimmerman’s post is copied here as a guest post to allow the guest posts on this topic to be gathered in one place. Check out George’s other posts at Up and Down the Network Stack.]

A recent article in EDN by Robert Cravotta pointed out how changes in the adoption of new technologies (so-called “inflection points”) are often related to integration of multiple technologies together. These are “easier to spot in hindsight”, and often comprise the right mix of integration while hiding the complexity to the end user. Cravotta cites TI&rs...Read More

[Editor’s note: Gene Frantz’s post is copied here as a guest post to allow the guest posts on this topic to be gathered in one place. Check out Gene’s other posts at On the Fringe with Gene Frantz.]

I just read the EDN article by Robert Cravotta on “Recognizing technology’s inflections.” We have talked about this at length over the last several months which leads me to add to his thoughts in this blog.

I have been in the middle of technology inflections for the last 30 years. In that period...Read More

As processing devices continue to get faster, smaller, and lower power, the ability to integrate more functionality into a single device is more easily realized. Advances in core architecture and process technologies are allowing system-on-chip (SoC) methodologies to proliferate. Stand-alone DSPs (digital signal processors) are an example of devices becoming a thing of the past in many applications. As Robert Cravotta’s article “The evolving landscape of Digital Signal Processing” highlights, there have been many new ways of integrating pieces of a DSP into MPUs (microprocessors), MCUs (microcontrollers), and software packages to include the required functionality, yet eliminating the extra chip onboard.

I recently participated in the IP-ESC 2009 conference in Grenoble, France. This event, which brings together many of the leading IP vendors and their customers - SoC designers - focused on some of the key trends in SoC design, including growing complexity, increased programmability, and the need for robust development environments.

A clear trend that has been emerging over the last few years is the growing complexity of SoCs. The two aspects driving this are 1) the continued industry move towards total system integration; and 2) the dramatically increased performance requirements of these chips. From an integration aspect, modern SoCs need to support a large number of technologies on a single chip including, for example, communications, multimedia, GPS, connectivity, and sto...Read More

DSP is all about multiplying, accumulating, and manipulating data for all kinds of interesting applications such as software defined radios, controlling motors and encoding and decoding music. It has become something that touches all of our lives. We can’t even watch TV without it. Everything is digital. These days when you talk about inductors designers give you a funny look. Power supply designers are the only ones that can describe what saturating a core means. DSP is in most designers’ thoughts because of the world we live in.

As an example, a designer is using an 8051 for a home alarm system and then marketing comes along and says they want it to play an MP3 file for the alarm sound. “I guess that means I need to get a DSP to do that job and have my 8...Read More

[Editor’s note: Gene Frantz’s post is copied here as a guest post to allow the guest posts on this topic to be gathered in one place. Check out Gene’s other posts at On the Fringe with Gene Frantz.]

I am currently running a series looking at where technology will be in 2020. I hope you are enjoying it! I wanted to break into that series for a minute to comment on a paper I just finished reading from Robert Cravotta (EDN Magazine) entitled: “The evolving landscape of digital signal processing.”

This summer I participated as a judge at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2009 finals in Egypt, and I am finally taking time to reflect on my experiences. 

You can think of the Imagine Cup as the Olympic Games for Software. It is an amazing event for student developers to compete in categories such as Software Design, Embedded Development, Game Development, Robotics and Algorithm, IT Challenge, Mash Up, Photography, Short Film and Design. After several local rounds of selection, Microsoft invited the top teams from around the world to compete in Egypt for the finals.

Cairo was amazing. Everyone visited historic places such as the ...Read More

Let me make it clear right away that I don’t want to start another debate about the merits of various benchmarks (or deal with the infinite thread of flaming comments that follows). Fact is, we often need a metric; a way to measure and compare the performance of the “apples” and “oranges” available to us. My focus is always on microcontrollers in embedded-control applications, so it happens that the apples and oranges I usually end up talking about are microcontrollers of different architectures, which are implemented in a seeming infinite variety of CMOS processes.

We all have the right to our opinions on the relative value of counting the cycles, MIPS or DMIPS of choice. I just wanted to bring to your attention the fact there is a new kid on the block. It is called ...Read More

Robert’s insightful article on multicore taxonomy makes a good case for the need for standard ways to describe and discuss multicore technology. But it might be simply too soon in the game to settle on a firm taxonomy.

Industry consensus on even the most basic definition of what constitutes a multicore processor remains elusive. Participants in the “Trends in Multicore Processor Design and Application Optimization Panel” at the recent Multicore Expo event were barely able to agree on the most basic definition of a multicore processor. After much back-and-forth, the panelists ultimately compromised and agreed that multicore is more than one CPU...Read More

In this article I would like to pick up on the processor and multiprocessor taxonomy themes that Robert Cravotta introduced in his article, and his two blog posts (first and second). Robert divided the multiprocessing world into four categories: “channel-based, aggregate-based, multi-domain, and feedback architectures”. Interestingly, he also talks about pipeline or streaming approaches as being useful in several of these multiprocessor architectures, which is true, but often not thou...Read More