Embedded Processing

There is a new Pranav Mistry presentation on TED talking about his Sixth Sense project. For those of you that have not heard about this project yet, it is based around a wearable device that combines real-world object and gesture recognition and mobile display of relevant information from the data network about those objects. It is an intriguing and exciting idea, but it currently exists only in the lab – and I suspect it is many years and a tremendous amount of engineering innovation and work away from manifesting in real world products.

The net number of microprocessor offerings available to embedded developers continues to grow every year. Each update of the microprocessor directory is our attempt to help you improve your chances of being aware of and considering the best processor options for your design in this constantly changing landscape. Consider the sheer size of this year’s microprocessor directory. The device table alone is 172 pages – in a 6 point font – and the table mostly lists product families under a single entry rather than every possible device available as a separate entry. The company overview and product family detail pages approach 100,000 words in content.

One thing to note is that the number of ISAs (instruction set architec...Read More

When I wrote about gesture interfaces two years ago, the Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii, and the Microsoft Surface were brand new version 1.0 products. It was not a certainty that any of these products would be commercially successful a few years after their roll out. Two years later, all of these products are still available commercially, and in fact, they have moved well beyond version 1.0 into version 2.0 or even 3.0 versions. The iPhone operating system is version 3.1 and the product has incorporated many lessons learned into the system and software. The Wii Motio...Read More

Olivier Bloch, Windows Embedded Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, was kind enough to share his experience and observations after participating in the Imagine Cup 2009 finals in Egypt. He makes some encouraging observations about embedded designs and the visibility it is gaining among students around the world.

Based on my personal experience, I am a strong supporter of competitions for students. In fact, I can attribute an unexpected success in a computer programming competition (sponsored by Rockwell International), which I participated in high school, which “opened my eyes” and cemented my continuing relationship with computers and the engineering world. These compet...Read More

I delayed posting about feedback-based multiprocessing until the remaining guest posts related to multiprocessing were posted. Check out what Grant Martin from Tensilica had to say about dataplane processing and what Kent Fisher from Freescale had to say about the current issues regarding industry consensus.

When I was putting together the multiprocessing taxonomy, I went back and forth between including or leaving out FBM (feedback-bas...Read More

There are two sets of posts going out in this series in conjunction with my article on multiprocessing options – the series here and the series in our guest blog. Today’s guest post is from Mark Hermeling, Senior Product Manager, Wind River Systems. I encourage you to read both series of posts as they are intended to be complementary. I am alternating posts between the two series. My next post will expand on feedback-based multiprocessing.

If you missed the previous post in this series, ch...Read More

MDBM (Multidomain-based multiprocessing) is a taxonomy category that encompasses applications that span multiple software domains, such as cell phones, automobiles, and many consumer products. This type of multiprocessing has been the bread and butter of embedded-multicore designs for decades. The multiprocessing implementation in many MDBM applications is less about meeting high-end processing performance – rather it is more about: partitioning design, build, and test complexity into semi-independent and manageable chunks; providing more independence in the time domain for resources that would otherwise be in complex contention in a shared capacity such as in a single processor implementation; and providing an optimized processing platform for each type of task that needs to be performed, such as using a microcontroller, DSP, and general-purpos...Read More

There are two sets of posts going out in this series in conjunction with my article on multiprocessing options – the series here and the series in our guest blog. Today’s guest post is from Alan Gatherer, CTO and TI Fellow, High-Performance and Multicore Processing Business, Texas Instruments. I encourage you to read both series of posts as they are intended to be complementary. I am alternating posts between the two series. My next post will expand on multi-domain-based multiprocessing.

If you m...Read More

[Housekeeping]: There are two sets of posts going out in this series – the series here and the series in our guest blog. Today’s guest post is from David Stewart at CriticalBlue about multicore programming. I encourage you to read both series of posts as they are intended to be complementary. David was kind enough to avoid all marketing in his post, but I did expect him to at least mention his company’s multicore programming Prism tool – so I will mention it here. [End Housekeeping]

Last year at the Multicore Expo, I was asked why there were not more embedded developers at the conference. After some thought, I pointed out that the discussion at the conference was dominated by how to parallelize software running on GHz class machines, even though the majority of embedded processor offerings are MHz class machines. The point being, maybe there were other motivations for using multicore in embedded designs rather than clock rates are not continuing their dizzying climb into ever faster rates. Issues such as reducing overall system-level design, build, and test complexity through resource partitioning. This question got me thinking over the last year, so much so that I have proposed an update to my earlier proposed processor taxonomy from several years ago to more explicitly add...Read More

The Dhrystone benchmark is a single number benchmark score that was originally developed by Reinhold Weicker in 1984. After 25 years, it is still reported as a measure of a processor’s integer (no floating-point) performance. The types of functions in the benchmark code are simple integer arithmetic, string operations, logic decisions, and memory accesses. The processor hardware, memory architecture, wait states, integer data types, as well as the software design, compiler and linker optimizing options affect the benchmark score.

The Dhrystone benchmark is small, free, and easily ported to new processor designs; however, it is not without shortcomings. It is a synthetic benchmark in that the functions included in the code are based on exercising what the core is capable of performing rather than based on the rep...Read More

There is a lot of energy being expended in the electronics industry to identify, create, and market the next killer application. The term killer application has been used to refer to a capability that draws in large numbers of new consumers for a particular system or platform. The iPhone from Apple and the Wii from Nintendo are two platforms that benefit from killer applications that rely on the system recognizing the user’s gestures instead of having to use conventional button-based and keyboard interfaces. My article about ...Read More

The available choices for digital signal processors are constantly evolving especially as many of the signal processing architectures targets the different tradeoffs for each specific application space. We regularly update the DSP Directory to help you dig through all of the available options and help you find the best processors to meet your project’s needs.

I would like to encourage you to visit the latest edition of the DSP Directory; the 2009 edition is now live. You can always find the latest version of the directory at www.edn.com/dspdirectory. In fact, we have gone the extra step to retain a copy each year of the directory so that you can find older compani...Read More

The last few months have been challenging ones for my family. Over the past few years, we have known two coworker families that lost a family member during this time of year to asthma. This year, it hit close to home as my wife dealt with a life-threatening asthma condition. The good news is that after a three-month disability absence, my wife should be returning to work in January.

I share this with you because while working on what to write about here, the incident reminded me of an experience. As a junior member of the technical staff I attended a company training course with a group of senior managers. Normally I would not have been placed with this group, but I had missed the training at an earlier time, and this was the only meeting available that I could attend. Everyone else in the training course was older enough to have been my parent.

During the class,...Read More

I was thinking about a video I recently saw about candles. Before seeing the video, I had never given candles much thought. They did what they did, and they seemed trivially simple in their structure. I always took for granted that the candlewick was consumed during the process of burning the candle. Until the invention of self-snuffing wicks, a scissor-like tool called a candle snuffer, was needed to trim the wick precisely because the wick did not burn and to avoid excess smoke.

As I thought more about this topic, I realized the wick could be considered an example of the passive or structural processing I introduced in an earlier post. In this case, the structural characteristics created d...Read More