Modeling of embedded designs - Part 1: Why model? ARM tips 64-bit 'big-little' processor, partners. Apple's A6 Details and Timeline Emerge. Embedded Newsletter for 07-25-11. Tech Focus: Hardware languages for softies A guide to VHDL for embedded software developers: Part 1 – Essential commands Using SystemC to build a system-on-chip platform The four Rs of efficient system design Compiling software to gates Editor's Note Every once in a while I find myself caught in the crossfire of debates between embedded systems developers about the pros and cons of C versus C++, C/C++ versus Java, or model-driven versus model-based software design frameworks.
One area where such advice should also be heeded is where the dichotomy is the widest. This is ironic because, in an effort to make hardware design easier for both hardware and software designers, the industry has borrowed heavily from software languages. So when you get right down to it even the hardware is software and developers in both worlds face the same sets of challenges: writing the code, compiling, debugging, simulating and verifying it. Design How-Tos Using SystemC to build a system-on-chip platform Excerpts.
Eetimes. 5 tech breakthroughs: Chip-level advances that may change computing. Imagine a world with electronic devices that can power themselves, music players that hold a lifetime of songs, self-healing batteries, and chips that can change abilities on the fly. Based on what's going on in America's research laboratories, these things are not only possible, but likely. "The next five years will be a very exciting time for electronics," says David Seiler, chief of the semiconductor electronics division at the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. "There will be lots of things that today seem like far-out fantasy but will start to be commonplace.
" In this two-part series, we'll take you on a tour of what could be the future of electronics. Some of these ideas may sound fantastic, others simply a long-overdue dose of common sense, but the common thread is that they have all been demonstrated in the lab and have the potential to become commercially available products in the next five years or so. Eetimes.
Eetimes. Paradigm Shift in Understanding of Biology Could Alter Electronics. The discovery that microbial nanowires inside the bacterium Geobacter sufurreducens can conduct electricity not only represents a paradigm shift in our fundamental understanding of biology but also could completely change how we manufacture and use electronics. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, led by microbiologist Derek Lovley with physicists Mark Tuominen and Nikhil Malvankar, have discovered that the Geobacter bacterium uses the nanowire-like protein filaments to transfer electrons into iron oxide (rust) contained within the soil where they live, and that this mechanism serves the same function as oxygen does for humans. While the research, which was published in the August 7th advanced online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, represents the first time that metallic-like conduction of electrical charge has been observed in a protein filament, the researchers had conjectured as far back as 2005 that this was the case.