ARM Community: ESC Boston: ARM’s Cortex-M3 in new designs, robots, analog, FPGA & new cores - ARM Community

I have just been attending the Embedded Systems Conference 2010 here in sunny Boston - wonderful temperatures of 70-83F. For anyone like me who has now forgotten what Fahrenheit means, it's 21-28C. I thought I would put this in for the benefit of my colleague, friend and "anchor man" Andy Frame, who usually gives us a weather report. Not much chance to enjoy the weather though, as I've spent most of the time scuttling around in air-conditioned conference halls reviewing ESC Boston’s ARM’s Cortex-M3 development kits from Actel, Fujitsu, NXP, ST & TI.

NXP’s new core & design contest winner: pilot shows how high you are
As usual ARM's Partners were out in strength on the exhibition show floor. NXP have just launched their fast 150MHz Cortex-M3 MCU (LPC1800) and were showing a development board with real LPC1800 silicon. Also on the booth was the winning entry in their LPC1100 design competition - it had been designed by a glider pilot, and consisted of a variometer attached to a development board, with wireless connection to walkie-talkie; it can apparently tell you your height above ground (through the walkie talkie) to an accuracy of 2". One of the runners-up was a very loud old-style football rattle (did they ever have those in the US?), which when you twirled it round spelt out "NXP" in colored LEDs - I think you had to be there to appreciate it!

TI’s wireless evaluation robot
I liked the Texas Instruments demo showing the Stellaris (Cortex-M3) "EvalBot" development board, which was moving around a maze wirelessly controlled from a "Chronos" Development Watch (controlled from what looked a bit like a 1970's digital watch, but with more style!) - move the watch up-down-left-right to control the robot across a wireless interface.

ST: Unbelievable cost
I picked up an STM32 Value Line Discovery Eval board - a complete Cortex™-M3 evaluation board for less than $10!

Actel: MCU + FPGA wins VDC’s Embeddy Award
Actel have recently launched their SmartFusion™ intelligent mixed signal FPGA reference designs targeting motor control applications, which integrate an FPGA, a hard ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller and programmable analog. This was prominently on display at the show, driving a variety of motorized devices and won VDC Research’s Embeddy Award.

Buzz about Fujitsu’s new line
Dropped by to see the new Fujitsu Cortex-M3 based development kits - lots of interest in these and had to wait to squeeze through to the booth. The Fujitsu employees on the booth were very excited about the upcoming mass production of this product line, due in early 2011, with a wide-range of different peripherals, pincounts and memory sizes.

RTOS vendors out in strength
Got a chance to meet up again with many of my RTOS and tools Partners, including Arium, eCosCentric, Express Logic, Green Hills Software, IAR Systems, Lauterbach, Mentor Graphics, Micrium, SEGGER and Signum Systems. Feels like one big ARM-friendly family!

Show floor was active with working engineers
It looks like the Tech industry really is coming out of recession - there was quite a buzz here and, from what I could see, a good level of attendance. This time, far less people doing a tour of the booths looking for a job!

On the first day there was a real scrum of people waiting to be unleashed onto the show floor - turns out they were wanting to be first in line for the free tote bags, which I later discovered contained such diverse items as a plastic snake, a yoyo and a TI robot development kit - I'm sure there must be an interesting demo somehow to be made out of the contents of the bag!

A full "virtual press office" for the event can be viewed here.

What are your favorite ESC memories?

Ian Johnson, Third Party Relations Manager, Processor Division, ARM, Ian joined ARM in 1995 and currently holds the position of 3rd Party Relations Manager with particular responsibility for RTOS and tools vendors. Ian has also recently become product manager for ARM's spectacularly successful Cortex-M3 product. Previous roles within ARM include Project Manager and Product Manager within the System Design Division. He holds a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Computer Science from Aston University in Birmingham, UK.

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