An interesting seminar looking at how to improve product and packaging security to combat IP theft in the supply chain is taking place at BIS Conference Centre, 1 Victoria Street, London SW1 on Wednesday 14th September.
RS Components has teamed up with design tool firm Accelerated Designs for the introduction of a series of component libraries providing schematic symbols and PCB design footprints for chips from STMicroelectronics and Microchip Technology.
There is an interesting perspective on Google's takeover of Motorola Mobility by Andrew Burke CEO of Amino Technology on his blog.
"Imagine the scene, you are in the Garden of Eden-net, being tempted by an enormous Search Serpent to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in exchange for great wisdom," writes Burke.
"Do you side with the serpent, become all knowing but be condemned to a lifetime of servitude or stay pure and battle through using only your own knowledge and capabilities?
"Such is the biblical dilemma facing Motorola's customers...."
Andrew Burke's Hardcore IPTV Blog
RS Components has added an Arduino design resource to its DesignSpark community website.
Since it emerged from the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, Arduino has been used by developers for the design of control interfaces.
Farnell intends to collaborate with Tinker, a London based design studio, to run an introductory EAGLE CadSoft workshop for Arduino users.
Web-based design tools are now providing ready access to embedded system development and NXP's design initiative with ARM has launched a web-enabled development tool for the firm's LPC ARM processor family of microcontrollers.
Social networking is finding its place in the electronics design community. But is it a fun exercise, or something with commercial value?
Do designers consider multi-core architecture support as a critical factor in the choice of embedded operating systems? Not generally, says market research firm Venture Development Corporation (VDC).
Multi-core architectures are increasingly being used by designers but the availability of software support for multi-processing systems seems to be of relatively low importance even to those developers who indicated that they were using a multi-core or multi-core and multiprocessor design.
Embedded computing firm Vmetro is proposing to simplify the development of multi-processor systems by changing the way data is transferred to the shared memory.
The company's FusionIPC processor-to-processor comms software handles both bulk data movement and message passing in a small footprint without requiring application involvement.
“Similar to other existing approaches, FusionIPC is built upon a shared memory buffer model but differs in that it combines coordination of bulk data movement with messaging and signals without application involvement,” commented Mike Jadon, CTO of embedded systems at Vmetro.
AMD is the latest big name in the PC industry to jump into tthe open source software community. The processor company is to participate in the Eclipse Foundation.
Does this endotrsement make Eclipse the only show in town for embedded system designers looking to go open source?
There is no real surprise to see Linux being adopted like the bargin of the century by the mobile phone industry.
The possibility to standardise on an essentially royalty-free, open source operating system for the next generation of PC-like mobile phones is too good to ignore.
But once again the naturally commercially aggressive chip companies have taken a simple concept and made it too complicated for its own good.
Intel has made its C++ programming tool for multi-core processors available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2) with the runtime exception.
The Threading Building Blocks (TBBs) are designed to aid parallel programming for C++ programmers. It uses generic programming, and allows express tasks instead of threads. This effectively simplifies multi-threaded programming.
Enea has upped the parallel processing support of its Polyhedra relational database management system (RDBMS) for network infrastructure systems.
Polyhedra v7.0 is tuned for multi-processor systems by supporting parallel execution of queries and transactions.
The in-memory, transactional RDBMS is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it will execute out of local RAM so should run smooth.
Polyhedra 7.0 is available immediately for a broad range of operating systems, including OSE, VxWorks, Integrity, Linux, Windows and Unix.
