Season for Design Challenges

A second design challenge for embedded developers has opened this week. The Texas Instruments competition is based on their 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 processor while the NXP competition center is based on their 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0. Both competitions offer a free evaluation or developer kit to complete your entry.

Although I doubt this was the intent of any of the competition sponsors, it will be interesting to see how many people are able to port their idea and design between the two processors. This is relevant because the M3 core is the expected migration path for M0 developers if/when they outgrow the M0 core. Even though these are both Cortex-Mx cores, they do not share the same instruction set – the M0 uses a subset of the M3 instruction set. The differences between each target processor and bundled software might be enough to make entries on each processor different enough to avoid eligibility conflicts between each contest. I expect each company will weigh in on their information pages on this unexpected opportunity.

Another difference between the two design challenges is that the M3 contest requires the use of Wittenstein’s safeRTOS. The rules for the M3 contest indicate additional credit will be awarded to those designs that use the StellarisWare IEC60730 library and for applications which improve safety or reliability.

Let the games begin.