April 11, 2012, FlexTech Workshop, San Jose, CA—Jeffery Ashe from GE talked about the nature of health care and the issue that the healthcare system is increasingly complex. Changes in the systems will require the application of many new technologies and a different way to look at all of the healthcare issues. The domain experts [...]
We talked with Renesas about their latest products at Design West, formerly the Embedded Systems Conference. Among the new releases were a low power microcontroller, a motor control kit, a capacitive touch evaluation kit, and new software support for the various products. The 32-bit RX62G group are optimized for digital power control applications, including motor [...]
We talked with the Rapid I/O group at Design West, formerly Embedded System Conference. The increase in infrastructure, especially in 3G and 4G wireless base stations, demands higher performance in the I/O sections of the system. RapidIO is deployed in virtually 100 percent of all 4G/LTE systems and 60 percent of new 3G systems worldwide. [...]
We talked with Imagination Technologies about their suite of processors and development tools at Design West, formerly Embedded Systems Conference. The newest releases include a 4k capable video encoder/decoder, new microprocessors, and many new tools to support developments on the new platforms. The PowerVR VXD395MP video decoder with support for resolutions up to 4Kx2K has [...]
March 27, 2012, Design West Conference, San Jose, CA—Scott Emily from Ramtron posited that their F-RAM (ferro-electric RAM) is better suited for many applications than flash. The technology uses a different storage mechanism than most memories The storage element is a thin ferroelectric film of lead zirconate titanate [Pb(Zr,Ti)O3], commonly referred to as PZT. The [...]
While at the OTT conference, we talked with Cavium about their latest wireless interfaces and media processors. The company focuses on high-performance processors and interfaces. They now have a reference design featuring their media processor that should cost less than $20 for the total BoM. The reference design allows mobile devices with WiFi to connect [...]
As an extension to their existing touch solutions products, Atmel announced a flexible touch sensor. The Xsense is a flexible film-based touch sensor that can be integrated into a flat panel display. The impetus for this product is the growth in touch-based interfaces on many products. The primary drivers are smart phones and tablets, but [...]
We talked with Cameron Swen of AMD about trends in embedded systems. The compute environment now enables the separation of functions and capabilities from the computational CPU/GPU platform. An example is some apps moving computation and storage to the cloud to reduce the workload at the endpoint. This thin client architecture provides benefits of lower [...]
