Embedded Processing

Oct 16 2007 8:37AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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I would like to encourage you to visit the latest edition of the EDN Microprocessor Directory. The 2007 edition just went live and it has been growing substantially each year. If you were to print the contents of this year's directory, it would number in the hundreds of pages of material. The immediate goal of the directory is to provide designers with an unbiased resource for finding what computing resources are available for use in their embedded projects. The listing continues to add more international options as they make themselves known to us.

The longer-term goal of the directory is to provide an engineering resource and tool set that enables designers to explore more design options so they can make more informed decisions before they lock down 80% of the project's cost. The ability to do quick and meaningful explorations of different design configurations and understand the implications of each approach can help reduce the risk when choosing the ultimate direction of the target implementation. This requires first and foremost, a breadth of material to sift through.

However, breadth of material by itself is not enough, and that is why we have a roadmap that continually moves us forward to providing more extensive filtering, correlating, and aggregating analysis tools to help you explore more options than ever before within shrinking schedule and resource budgets. Today, we offer a very coarse level of filtering, in the form of a application taxonomy, that we perform manually with each release of the new and updated material.

To increase our chances of success in this vision, we have been implementing an approach of evolving and updating that allows us to build on what we have done before and slowly introduce new tools to see what works and what does not work without jeopardizing the immediate usefulness of the material.

This latest edition includes the first stage of implementing a new and complementary resource listing: third-party software-development-tool vendors. The goal is to build up the breadth of the listing, and to start to implement cross-references with the semiconductor products. We are at the build up stage, so we encourage you to let us know which of your favorite embedded software-development-tool vendors are not in the listing.

Also, the goal of this resource is to make your job easier when starting a new embedded project, so we would love to hear your thoughts about what is and is not working for you with the current presentation of the material. You can post in the comments or send an email to mailto:microdirectory@edn.com.