30°C Power On 12 to 36 watts - for fanless sealed system design ...

ESE Magazine Jan/Feb 06
06
Industry
Wireless design contest
LANTRONIX is offering £7,000 in prizes for the
best wirelessly network-enabled machines or
devices, using a Lantronix WiPort 802.11b wireless
embedded device server. Winners will be
announced at the 2006 Embedded Systems
Conference.
www.lantronix.com/info/wirelesscontest
Cell to 32 nanometres
IBM, Sony Corporation and Toshiba, the team
behind the “Cell” microprocessor design, and its
underlying SOI (silicon-on-insulator) process technologies
in 90 and 65 nanometre have begun a
new, five-year phase of their joint technology development
alliance. They plan to work together on fundamental
research related to advanced process
technologies at 32 nanometres and beyond.
www.ibm.com/chips
www.sony.net
www.toshiba.co.jp/index.htm
Multicore with T-Engine
IGNIOS has demonstrated SystemWeaver integrated
with a T-Engine. The SystemWeaver API
allows application software to be written, via a T-
Kernel adaptation layer, and compiled independently
of the number of underlying processing
resources. The SystemWeaver IP core then manages
the dynamic run-time distribution of software
across all available processing resources in a multicore
Fujitsu MB87Q1100 device, delivering the
full potential of the hardware to the application.
www.ignios.com
Multicore processor family
P.A. Semi, a secretive start-up, has unveiled the
PWRficient processor family. Based on the IBM
Power Architecture the family is 64-bit, multicore
and scalable. The first PWRficient processor, a
dual-core chip running at 2GHz, dissipates 5-13
watts (typical) depending upon the application.
A modular architecture integrates cores, memory,
south bridge, and high-speed I/O onto a single
device. Target applications include high-performance
computing, embedded datacom and telecom,
storage, and embedded consumer applications.
www.pasemi.com
For a more detailed look at these stories please visit
www.esemagazine.com
Aardcase and the
Were-Rabbit
Part of the technology for creating
“Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-
Rabbit”, was Aardcase, a custom-developed
computer. Capturing the images from
up to 30 cameras directly to hard disc, it
allows the animators to check the minute
changes made from one frame the next in
real time.
Aardcase is a single board based PC with a passive
backplane in a ruggedised 6U 19” rack mount
case. The system includes a video capture PCI card,
an optical drive for storing captured film, and two
hard drives: video is stored on a high-performance
SCSI drive while the operating system and software
are held on a cost-effective ATA drive.
www.sightsystems.co.uk
Flash memory
Spansion, which floated on NASDAQ in
December, is going for the NAND portion of
the cell phone market with its 90nm
MirrorBit ORNAND family.
The first product is 1Gb with a NAND interface.
ORNAND combines the pricing of traditional
NAND solutions with the reliability and highread
performance of NOR Flash memory.
Spansion plans to deliver complete memory
subsystems of up to 3 gigabits to its customers
GNU GPL revision
THE FREE SOFTWARE Foundation and the
Software Freedom Law Center are working
on a revision of the GNU General Public
License (GNU GPL). The first discussion draft
was released for comment at the
International Public Conference for GPLv3 at
MIT on January 16 and 17, 2006.
The last revision was more than 15 years
ago and Gartner has predicted that by 2010
more than 75 percent of IT organizations will
have formal acquisition and management
this year that include MirrorBit NOR, MirrorBit
ORNAND and random-access memory (RAM)
from leading RAM providers in Multi-chip
Packages and Package-on-Package. (POP), solutions
with the reliability and high-read performance
of NOR Flash memory.
Meanwhile Renesas has announced that it
will be dropping development of AG-AND flash
memory chips with capacities of 8G bit and
beyond. It will continue to supply customers with
existing flash memory products, mainly 1G bit
and 4G bit products for applications, including
flash cards for mobile and digital still cameras,
and portable music players.
Renesas also entered into supply and strategic
collaboration agreements with M-Systems, where
Renesas will supply advanced multi-level cell
(MLC), high- performance AG-AND flash memory,
while M-Systems will contribute flash controllers
and the TrueFFS flash management technology.
www.spansion.com
www.renesas.com
www.m-systems.com
2006 technology
trends
Technology Futures, Inc. (TFI) list of significant
technology trends for 2006 includes
the democratisation of the Internet and the
increased penetration of global broadband
coverage to expand the Internet even more.
This will lead to a greater threat to security and
privacy extending to mobile devices and device-todevice
networks. The digital home is entering the
next level of acceptance, with the expansion of the
electronic gaming and MP3 marketplace being a
major driver. Public relations and marketing expenditures
and projects will continue their shift to the
public networks and the timeframe of the product
life-cycle continues to decrease.
www.tfi.com
strategies
dealing with
Free Software.
Publication of
the second discussion
draft is expected
by summer 2006 and
the final GPLv3 license is
expected no later than spring 2007.
http://gplv3.fsf.org