Embedded Processing

This week's cover story touches on how designers are adding more sensors to their designs and how this is enabling them to build systems that would cost more to implement or use more power to operate if they did not use those extra sensors. In other words, the cost of taking on the additional design-time complexity of working with more sensors is being increasingly being offset by the savings in design complexity or operational costs. I like the phrase "emerging embedded systems" that I heard from Gene Frantz, Principal Technical Fellow at Texas Instruments  in a recent conversation to describe a larger trend that includes sensor-rich designs.

When I started working on this article, I thought it would be easy to line up examples to include in the article mostly because I worked on projects that were doing these kinds of things nearly 20 years ago. In one case, we purposely made the camera system move around to make it easier to distinguish undesirable sensor characteristics from potential data. It involved correlating a measured motion vector with the vision data to simplify movement prediction and verification of what we were trying to identify in the field of view. Unfortunately, I cannot share much more than that.

What I discovered while working on this article was that while more design teams are implementing increasingly richer sensor designs, they are not necessarily able to share the details of those designs because they represent important proprietary information – it's their secret sauce so to speak. As a compromise, I tried to illustrate the concept with high-level examples of where sensor-rich designs are permeating across many applications including cost-sensitive consumer electronics.

Rishi Vasuki, DSC product marketing manager at Microchip, realized after some sourcing conversations for this article that we did not have a framework that laid out the various contexts that sensor-rich designs have to address. Rishi has written an article that proposes an embedded-sensor processing framework, and that article has gone live in conjunction with this week's cover story as a complementary online story. While there has been some internal discussion on the framework, this is its first public presentation and you are encouraged to weigh in and contribute your thoughts about it by posting a response in this blog posting.