RTC Magazine

Increasing Reliability through Automated Enforcement of Design Rules

In the ongoing effort to improve software reliability, advanced static-analysis tools have proven to be effective at finding serious programming errors. These tools use sophisticatedRead More...

CPU Architectures Bring C Programmability into Formerly Specialized Devices

Given all the hardware assists that are continually appearing to speed specialized parts of applications such as I/O, signal conditioning, graphics processing, signal processing, etc.,Read More...

Hardware Trumps Software in Medical Devices

Let’s start by looking at the facts. Medical device recalls reached an all-time high in 2008—up 43 percent from 2007. The experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) haveRead More...

Tools for Motor Control Improve Efficiency and Performance and Reduce Development Time

Tools for Motor Control Improve Efficiency and Performance and Reduce Development Time Two new low-cost development systems enable the rapid development for motor controlRead More...

Graphics Processors Running General-Purpose Code Set to Revolutionize Embedded Computing

The quest for ever higher performance in embedded computing has seen successive generations of microprocessor come and go, with quad core the latest to rise to the challenge. DSP andRead More...

New Intel Processor Family Extends the Embedded Span of x86

With the announcement of a new family of processors and chipsets, Intel is enhancing its CPU offerings for the desktop and mobile space while also tailoring some of them to theRead More...

Intel’s Core i7: What It Means to the Embedded Market

On Thursday, January 7 of this year, according to one editor in the embedded computing space, it “rained” Intel Core i7 press releases. According to another editor, theRead More...

Embedded Virtualization Manager Pairs Windows with RTOSs

Embedded Virtualization Manager Pairs Windows with RTOSs A new embedded virtualization manager software product enables different real-time operating systems (RTOSs) to runRead More...

A Tale of Two Embeddeds

Attending an embedded-focused trade show is always an interesting experience. For those of us who cover the broad embedded market, you’ll have to excuse us if we are unable to checkRead More...

The Application Services Platform: A New Class of Device for Embedded Development and Systems

There have been many attempts over the years to achieve a highly integrated system-level device on a single piece of silicon. There have been ASICs, ASSPs, SoCs and more. There haveRead More...

Gap Remains Between Multi-core Potential and Software Realization

VDC’s embedded hardware and systems research practice recently surveyed over 200 embedded developers who were using multicore processors. The results showed that there is still a majorRead More...

Optimizing Multicore Software for Embedded Processors

The use of multicore processors in embedded systems is increasing. These processors, which are two or more processor cores on one package, enable increased computation performance andRead More...

nanoETXexpress Starterkit for Wind River VxWorks

A new Atom Processor-based COM Express-compatible  nanoETXexpress Starterkit for the latest VxWorks platform is designed to enable easy and efficient development and validation ofRead More...

Power Analysis Debug, Java and Specs

Are you worried that perhaps your sub-watt processor core is drawing too much power? With an increasing number of CPUs offering more sophisticated power management options, such as aRead More...

Multicore Trace Tool Enables Event Analysis

A new multicore-enabled development tool enables embedded developers to visualize and better understand the behavior of their real-time systems by showing thread and core activityRead More...

Tightly Integrated Devices Yield More Efficient Motor Control

Motor controls are comprised of the power electronics that control the application of voltage and current to the motor. Digital motor controllers manage the power electronics toRead More...

Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices

Whether they realize it yet or not, test teams and their software development colleagues at embedded product companies are headed for trouble—or are knee-deep in it already. There isRead More...

Java Tackles Multi-Core Complexity

As VLSI transistor densities continue to rise, microprocessor vendors are increasingly turning toward multicore architectures as the most effective utilization of availableRead More...

Medical Device Software: Why Has It Gone Code Red?

An FDA analysis of 3,140 medical device recalls conducted between 1992 and 1998 reveals that 79% of software-related recalls were caused by software defects introduced when changesRead More...

Ensuring Software Quality in Embedded Medical Devices

The term “medical device” is used to refer to any item that treats, diagnoses, prevents or monitors patients. This ranges from simple stethoscopes, to teleoperated surgical devices, toRead More...

Advanced Static Analysis: Evaluating Tools to Optimize ROI

Advanced static-analysis tools have become popular in recent years because they are capable of finding serious programming errors that might otherwise go undetected. UnlikeRead More...

Embedded Development Kit for Wind River Software and Intel Core i7

A new Embedded Development Kit  enables design engineers to quickly begin developing their application. Part of the Wind River On-Board Program, the Embedded Development Kit fromRead More...

Multi-Operating System Support for Intel’s New Embedded Quad-Core Core I7 Processors

The Intel Core i7 family has been widely used in the desktop and laptop market, and now the quad-core versions of the processor are available for embedded designs. Now LynxSecure 4.0Read More...

Getting to Low Power Consumption Depends on the Right Data—and Using it.

With the proliferation of handheld and mobile devices, often used in conjunction with larger, server-based applications, and the spread of small, distributed devices that may beRead More...

Mandates for Power Efficiency Push Telcom Providers Toward Software Optimization

Power efficiency has emerged as one of the key areas for long-term improvement in telecom applications. Reduced energy usage means lower costs and diminished environmental impact. InRead More...

Windows 7 Goes Embedded

Windows Embedded Standard 7 (WES 7) takes the latest Windows desktop operating system, Windows 7, into the embedded space just as its predecessors, Windows XP Embedded and Windows NTRead More...

CE Goes Multicore: Microsoft Windows Embedded Compact 7

Microsoft sells two operating systems tailored to the embedded community, confusingly named Windows Embedded Standard 7 and Windows Embedded Compact 7. Windows Embedded Standard 7Read More...

Industry Insider

LynuxWorks and Themis Team to Demonstrate Rugged and Secure Server Solutions  LynuxWorks and Themis Computer have announced that they have teamed up to demonstrate a new rugged,Read More...

SDK Targeted for Designs Using PCI Express 3.0 Switches

An upgraded and free software development kit (SDK) supports the PLX ExpressLane PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 switches. This suite of software tools works in conjunction with PLX’s on-chipRead More...

Tracing Requirements through to Verification: Improve current practices for standards compliance

Recent quality concerns are driving many industries to start looking seriously at ways to improve the quality of software development. Not surprisingly, there are marked differences inRead More...

Power Debugging the Software: Optimizing the Power Consumption of an Embedded System

Power debugging is a methodology that provides software developers with information about how the software implementation in an embedded system affects system-level power consumption.Read More...

Monitor Provides Real-Time Visibility into System Performance and Health

A graphical software tool provides real-time visibility into systems that use Real-Time Innovations’ Data Distribution Service. RTI Monitor collects information and analyzes dataRead More...

Managing Energy Savings in Real Time

Picking the right microcontroller and development environment for applications that need to support many years or even decades of operation off a battery is not easy. A real-timeRead More...

Security Considerations in Embedded I/O Virtualization

In any embedded system, there is inevitably a need for sharing a limited set of physical I/O peripherals across workloads. The embedded operating system provides abstractions, such asRead More...

Securing Your Embedded Designs: Encryption and Authentication ‘Keys’ To Success

While the world has focused on providing better security for servers and desktop computers, embedded systems have often been overlooked. As embedded devices are used to handleRead More...

Configurable and Programmable: The Sweet Spot for the SoC

The February issue of RTC included the article titled, “MPUs Team with FPGAs to Solve Real-Time System Requirements,” a brief history of how FPGAs have evolved and how the programmableRead More...

Compile-Time Analysis Spots Quality and Security Problems

An enhanced compile-time analysis tool identifies quality and security problems, helping companies to avoid failures in the field. CodeSonar 3.6 from GrammaTech provides a radicallyRead More...

Standard Configurations for Electromechanical Development Tasks

Plug-and-Play Integration of Avionics Software

A combination of DDS-compliant middleware with an ARINC 653-compliant RTOS dramatically reduces the time and cost required to develop and integrate distributed avionics software. TheRead More...

Safe Software: Things to Consider when Building Products that Can Cause Injury

A fair number of developers in the embedded software industry are now building products that are considered to be moderate or high level of concern devices. This terminology means thatRead More...

Programming ASP-Type Devices: New Approaches for a New Paradigm

An application services platform or ASP, a name coined by RTC editor-in-chief Tom Williams, is a new class of IC that combines a CPU, a standard set of configurable peripherals and aRead More...

Software Verification Tool Boosts Automation and Transparency of Test Process

A test management and traceability component for the LDRA tool suite increases automation of verification tasks and result retrieval to complete workflow integration. TBmanager is aRead More...

Embedded Virtualization Meets Real-time Needs in Multi-OS Systems

Embedded systems often employ multiple computing platforms with each running different operating systems. Typically, there is a real-time operating system (RTOS) on one platform toRead More...

Embedded Virtualization on x86: A Technical Look at, Approaches and Solutions

With virtualization becoming an increasingly widely used technology in embedded systems, it is helpful to take a look at some of the “virtualization-specific” terminology and theRead More...

Open-Source IDE Covers Entire Microchip Line with Support for Linux, Mac OS and Windows Users

A comprehensive open-source integrated development environment has been created for the entire portfolio of 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers from Microchip Technology. The MPLAB XRead More...

Tool Suite Provides Requirements to Object-Code Traceability

In the safety-critical domain, devices required to meet the most critical levels of certification must verify software traceability from requirements through design to code at bothRead More...

Express Logic Introduces Memory-Protected Application Modules for ThreadX RTOS

Express Logic has announced the introduction of ThreadX RTOS Memory Protection for downloadable application modules. Downloadable application modules, introduced earlier this year,Read More...

Gang Tester Improves Efficiency During Boundary Scan in Mass Production

A new gang tester enables users to test or program up to 16 boards in parallel, applying only one central controller. With the SFX-TAP16/G from Goepel Electronic, users are now able toRead More...

Static Analysis for Multi-core and Multi-threaded Applications

Development teams are embracing multicore processors such as the new quad-core Intel Core i7 processor because they are the most promising avenue to better computing performance. ThisRead More...

Supercomputer Performance on a Chip Powers Next-Generation Embedded Image Processing

Current-generation imaging applications have exhausted every method for squeezing out additional performance. First, microprocessor vendors deepened on-die caches, created SIMD (singleRead More...

Real-Time Java Virtual Machine Undergoes Overhaul

Since 1997, the PERC Ultra virtual machine has enabled developers of Java applications to deploy in contexts that require compliance with real-time constraints. Unlike traditionalRead More...

Challenges and Opportunities For The Medical Device Industry: Meeting The New IEC 62304 Standard

The recent IEC 62304 standard for medical device software is causing companies worldwide to step back and examine their software development processes with considerable scrutiny.Read More...

Android—Google’s Mobile Platform and its Capabilities for Embedded

Google Android deployment has been rising steadily since the introduction of the mobile/embedded OS in 2008. While most adoption has centered on building smartphones and moreRead More...

An Integrated Real-Time Platform Can Deliver Improved DSP Performance at Lower Costs

Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) have specialized architectures that are optimized for heavy math computations and they have dominated the real-time digital signal processing marketRead More...

A Static Analysis Approach to Identifying Defects in Multithreaded, Multicore Designs

Multithreading adds entirely new classes of potential bugs to those that must be considered by developers. At the same time, the nondeterminism and sheer number of possibilitiesRead More...

Advanced Development Kit for High-Quality Digital Audio

A 32-bit microcontroller (MCU)-based development kit for the creation of high-quality, 24-bit audio applications features an 80 MIPS PIC32 MCU, a 24-bit Wolfson audio codec, aRead More...

Next Generation Wireless Server Supports New Software Development Kit

A next-generation wireless server allows design engineers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to easily add Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking to virtually any device. TheRead More...

OpenComRTOS for Freescale PowerPC Processors Integrated into Designer Suite

For applications where performance is paramount, using less memory means higher performance and less energy consumption. The small code size of OpenComRTOS from Altreonic frees aRead More...

Evaluation Board for the New LPC1800 Family

For NXP’s new Cortex-M3-based LPC1800 microcontrollers, Hitex has introduced the Evaluation Board LPC1850 ensuring an easy evaluation of the LPC1800 family’s main features. TheRead More...

Simplifying Robot Software Design Layer by Layer

Robot software architectures are typically a hierarchi¬cal set of control loops, representing high-level mission planning on high-end computing platforms, all the way down toRead More...

Wind River Unveils Graphics-Rich Linux Platform

The latest Linux 4, Update Pack 2, is the latest release of Wind River’s commercial embedded Linux runtime and development platform. The company says it is the first commercialRead More...

New Levels of Hardware Integration with LabVIEW 2011

National Instruments has unveiled NI LabView 2011, the 25th-anniversary version of its award-winning system design software. LabView accelerates the productivity of engineers andRead More...

Reducing the Cost of Developing Safe, Secure and Resilient Industrial Control Systems

The cost of developing and certifying control systems that are safe, secure and resilient continues to escalate due to increasing complexity, demands for increased assurance andRead More...

Software Platform for Medical Devices Comes with Compliance Documentation

A new software suite for medical devices is part of a comprehensive software portfolio designed for medical device development, including those devices requiring premarketRead More...

User Interface for Graphical JTAG/Boundary Scan Project Development

Intuitive system controls guide first-time users safely through the project development flow and improve their productivity with a new JTAG/Boundary scan graphical user interface fromRead More...

JTAG/Boundary-Scan Tool for Debug & Repair

A new “no-netlist-required” JTAG/boundary-scan test and debug tool uses a “seek and discover” feature to scan completely a compliant design and then perform comparative tests usingRead More...

Four Key Steps to Address Security Threats in Embedded Systems

A piece of pop trivia: In the Rebooted series, what was so special about the Battlestar Galactica spaceship that it survived the initial Cylon attack and went on to lead the survivorRead More...

Software Radio Module with FPGA Preconfigured for Turnkey Operation

New JTAG Demo Kit to Promote Engagement in Open Source Initiative

Within the framework of the goJTAG initiative, Goepel Electronic has developed a new demonstration kit. In addition to the USB 2.0 controlled Boundary Scan controller PicoTAP andRead More...

Simplify Development with Cost-Effective Bootloading Using I2C/SMBus Interfaces

Adding bootloading capabilities to embedded applications provides the framework to update firmware running on a microcontroller (MCU) at any time. This capability is beneficial ifRead More...

RTOS Adds Real-Time SMP Support for ARM MPCore

The ThreadX RTOS from Express Logic has been adapted for ARM’s MPCore multicore processor architecture. ThreadX/SMP, an enhanced version of ThreadX, provides synchronous multicoreRead More...

Virtual Platforms from Xilinx and Altera Support Development on ASPs

Everybody has a different name for them: Programmable SoC (PSoC) from Cypress, SmartFusion from Microsemi, Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) from Xilinx and, most recently, SoCRead More...

App Servers and Lua Scripting Speed Rich Web Applications for Small Devices

Running a business used to be straightforward. You had development and production and marketing and sales, little of which had fundamentally changed for decades or more. And thenRead More...

ARM Development Kit for Rich Media Applications

Premier Farnell’s global online eCommunity for electronic design engineers, has announced availability of the DM3730 ARM-based development kit, a complete embedded developmentRead More...

Three Considerations for a Successful Vision-Guided Motion System

Vision-guided motion systems can automate tasks at accuracies and speeds that provide next-generation machines with faster throughput, higher quality and lower cost. Today, theRead More...

Changing Demands Are Changing the Role and Applicability of SoCs and ASICs

Companies building embedded systems that depend on SoCs and ASICs have reached a tipping point. They cannot continue to meet their customers’ increasingly aggressive product-featureRead More...

ARM Debugger Adds New Support and Features

An updated version of an ARM debugger includes many new features. SourcePoint from Arium includes support for a lineup of JTAG-based debuggers and trace port analyzers (TPA). ThisRead More...

Free LabView Link for Data Translation USB and PCI

A library of Virtual Instruments (VIs) enables National Instruments LabVIEW programmers to access the data acquisition features of DT-Open Layers-compliant USB and PCI devices fromRead More...

Ethernet AVB Development Kit Enables Automotive Driver Assistance and Infotainment Development

Android Poised to Move from Phones and Tablets to Wider Embedded Applications

Future Proofing Through Portable Software

Designing ASP-Type Devices: What Does it Take?

Tool Suite Extension Offers Certification Validation for Altera Nios II Soft Core Processors

Windows Embedded POSReady 7: The right choice for Digital Signage