The latest embedded news from the 2008 Embedded Systems Conference, Silicon Valley. Hosted at the McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, the conference runs from 14 - 18 April.

Tuesday 15 April

Controller chip boosts E Ink displays
Epson and E Ink have announced a controller chip for E Ink's electrophorescent e-paper at the Electronic Systems Conference in Silicon Valley.

Synplicity intros system-level design tool for FPGAs
Synplicity has introduced a device-independent intellectual property (IP) configuration and system-level assembly environment for FPGA design.

Luminary Micro gets royalty-free RTOS support
Express Logic has announced at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Jose that its royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS) and USBX USB Host/Device stack now support Luminary Micro's Stellaris LM3S3000 series and LM3S5000 series ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers.

MIPS tool finds code hot spots
MIPS Technologies introduces what it claims is the first hot spot analyser (HSA) for Linux Kernel profiling at the Embedded System Conference in Silicon Valley.

16-bit microcontroller has 100nA standby, says Microchip
Microchip Technology claims to offer the lowest power 16-bit microcontroller which has a standby current of just 100nA.

Monday 14 April

ARM cuts power of Cortex-M3 processor
Building on the success of its Cortex-M3 processor core, the Cambridge-based developer adds a new Wake-Up Interrupt (WIC) controller that allows what the company called an "almost instantaneous return to fully active mode from an ultra-low leakage retention state".

Freescale and Xilinx amongst early movers in San Jose
The Embedded Systems Conference kicks off in San Jose, California today (Monday) and some of the early movers are Freescale with an LCD Coldfire microprocessor, Atmel with Linux OS support and Xilinx with an embedded development platform for 65nm Virtex-5 FPGAs.

(Picture "San Jose McEnery Convention Center" - cathleenemily, under Creative Commons Attribution Licence)