The Embedded World 2005 conference and exhibition is being held
this week in Nüremberg, with a variety of small, low power
microcontrollers being launched.
Among the firms showing devices, Cambridge's Cyan Technology
introduced a smaller version of its 128-pin eCOG1k processor.
The 8x8mm 81-ball æCOG1m flash microcontroller includes dual
UARTs, dual USARTs, SPI and IrDA, as well as 16-bit clock generator
timers, general-purpose event counter timers, an A-to-D converter
and 60 digital I/O lines.
It has the "highest density of peripherals, memory and digital
I/O per square millimetre", claimed Cyan sales director Paul
Barwick. The Harvard Risc core consumes 400nA in standby mode and
10.1µA clocked at 16kHz. Maximum clock is 25MHz.
The firm's free CyanIDE development environment includes an ANSI
C-compiler as well as an editor, project file manager, simulator,
debugger and in-system programmer. Peripheral configuration is done
through a drag and drop menu.
Also on the theme of space saving, Zilog has joined the 8-pin
brigade, releasing a cut-down member of its XP range. "Zilog is
already seeing interest in application areas such as fan control;
home appliances including electric toothbrushes, electric razors;
and security systems," said a spokeswoman for the company.
Sharp unveiled a processor and a reference design for a mobile
media player, including a 90mm QVGA TFT display. At the design's
core is a system chip, part of Sharp's BlueStreak programme, with a
clock frequency of 200MHz and 80kbyte of on-chip memory which
decodes compressed video and audio formats.
The firm is also showing a 200MHz ARM922T based 32-bit
microcontroller with an OSE real-time operating system, and other
processors for controlling LCDs based around the 77.4MHz 16/32bit
ARM720T for controlling LCDs.
RadiSys announced Procelerant CE, the first in a family of
products based on COM Express, the PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer
Manufacturers Group) standard for PCI Express in
computer-on-modules (COMs).
Procelerant CE consists of a carrier board and four 90x125m COM
modules, aimed at medical, test and measurement, and industrial
control applications.
COMs, based on Pentium-M (1.4 and 2.0GHz) or Celeron-M (1.0 and
1.5GHz) processors and the Intel 915GM chipset, can be selected
depending on processing needs and budget.
Current and legacy interfaces are available, allowing migration
from PCI to PCI Express, IDE to SATA, or 10/100 Mbit to 1 Gigabit
Ethernet all using the same module. "This gives customers the
flexibility to upgrade and refresh different product lines with new
interface technologies at different rates all while using a common
COM," said Radisys. "Additionally, software becomes portable and
can be used from module-to-module and
application-to-application."
The modules feature up to 1Gbyte DDR2 DRAM and include dual
display (analogue VGA, LVDS and SDVO) interface and AC97/Azalia
audio support.
The carrier board is a FlexATX form factor featuring x16 PCI
Express, or dual DVI and SVGA capability. It will be available in
July 2005.
With the aim of adding flash memory to embedded PC motherboards
simply, M-Systems introduced µDiskOnChip, a bootable USB 2.0
compatible flash module which plugs directly into a standard
motherboard USB header.
The idea is "to deliver the storage for a vast array of markets
such as thin clients, POS workstations, gaming, single board
computers and telecoms infrastructure equipment", said the
firm.
Capacities of up to 2Gbyte are available and an acceleration
algorithm "enables read rates as high as 20Mbyte/s, allowing fast
operating system boot and application loading rates", said
M-Systems. Write is up to 10Mbyte/s.
Built-in hardware security and cryptography are included.
For safe live card changeover, Freescale has a couple of
hot-swap controllers. The MC34652 and MC34653 include the Mosfet
required in most applications.
The 34652 will carry 2A and operate between -15 and -80V, the
other is a 1A device working from -39 to -75V. Over-current
limiting with auto retry is available.