ARM Community: ARM at ESC2011: Energy Micro, GainSpan, Future Designs, Nuvoton, Xilinx - ARM Community

The Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) is only a week away and excitement among ARM Partners attending is at fever pitch. In fact the buzz surrounding the compelling new demos and product announcements from ARM Partners promises to be deafening.

At the ARM Partner Pavilion on booth # 1308 Energy Micro, GainSpan, Future Designs, Nuvoton, Crank Software, Cadence, and Microsemi will be highlighting their latest and greatest ARM product-based innovations, while elsewhere other ARM Partners, such as Xilinx, will be showing and demonstrating ARM technology on their booths, as detailed on the map of ARM Partners’ booths. Learn some of the highlights below.

Energy Micro will demonstrate the brand new innovations that will help designers reduce their embedded systems energy consumption.

The 23 new EFM32 Tiny Gecko microcontrollers include the same ultra low energy features as the Gecko family plus a new feature called LESENSE - Low Energy Sensor interface. The LESENSE function block enables autonomous monitoring of up to 16 external sensors in the microcontroller’s sub-microamp Deep Sleep mode. Able to run independently of the EFM32’s ARM Cortex-M3 processor, LESENSE is particularly suitable for battery operated systems, and the sensor interface is designed to operate with virtually any type of analog sensor control scheme, including capacitive, inductive and resistive types. The new EFM32 Tiny Gecko is part of the big EFM32 portfolio which consists of 116 devices ranging from 4 KB to 1024 KB of Flash memory and features like Low Energy UART, Low Energy Timer, LCD and TFT drivers, USB interface and AES crypto engine.



Another new breakthrough in reducing development time and energy consumption is the release of Simplicity Studio^TM. Simplicity Studio brings together Energy Micro’s expanding portfolio of free energy saving tools and auto-configures in response to the user selection of a target microcontroller from a drop-down menu. A key time-saving role of Simplicity Studio is to ensure users stay automatically up-to-date with all of the changes affecting their own development environment. Users therefore receive alerts for example concerning new software releases, documentation and firmware updates and can access a change-log identifying exactly what has been updated. Simplicity Studio is free to download and is available at www.energymicro.com/simplicity



The latest news is the announcement of 30 new radio transceiver and SoC solutions called EFR - the world's most energy friendly radios. Complementing the EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers, EFR4D Draco is a high performance radio solution that will consume only 25% of the energy of competing products. Based on an ARM Cortex-M0, Draco system-on-chip (SoC) radios will achieve receive and transmit current consumption as low as 4mA and 5mA respectively.


GainSpan Corporation is launching its next-generation embedded Wi-Fi module and will showcase an array of ultra low power Wi-Fi connectivity solutions enabling the “Internet of Things”. GainSpan’s new GS1500M is a high-performance 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi module with Wi-Fi Direct capability. It brings leading edge Wi-Fi connectivity to standard 8-32 bit MCUs and is aimed at plug-and-play integration of Wi-Fi into such platforms through an SPI or UART interface. The new GS1500M leverages the performance and efficiency of GainSpan's innovative GS1011 SoC, which is powered by dual ARM7 processors -- one to manage WLAN and system control and the other one to manage networking stack services. In addition, attendees will be able to experience Wi-Fi connectivity at work firsthand with several exciting demos using low-power Wi-Fi modules that are powered by ARM processors:

• A Wi-Fi Smart Plug connected to a device lets users remotely monitor power consumption and turn the device on and off – with their smartphone.
• A Wi-Fi enabled Microscope will zoom, capture and send video and images to a smartphone for display.
• A Wi-Fi based remote control car will be “driven” from a smartphone.

Future Designs will be highlighting their family of Touch Screen LCD GUI solutions based on various ARM^® processors at ESC. The uEZ^® GUI Family provides an “Off The Shelf” solution that allows customers to quickly and cost effectively upgrade their User Interfaces to meet today’s market requirements. FDI offers NXP LPC2478 (ARM7TDMI-S based), NXP LPC3250 (ARM926EJ-S based) and NXP LPC1788 (Cortex-M3 based) microcontrollers in various speeds and memory configurations. The uEZ^® GUI Family is currently available with LCD’s ranging in size from 3.5” to 7.0” and resolutions up to WVGA.

The uEZGUI-2478-43WQS and uEZGUI-1788-70WVE are miniature, self-contained designs which are well suited to embed directly into your product or FDI offers pre-packaged versions for stand-alone use. FDI offers low cost customization services for customer specific hardware, software or packaging applications at volumes of 500 units or more. Products are in stock at any of their five franchised distributors including Avnet Electronics Marketing. Users can visit http://www.uezgui.com for more details.




Nuvoton’s Projective Capacitive Multi-Touch MCU, NuMicro will be shown at the ARM Connected Community booth. This MCU simplifies the implementation of sophisticated and responsive touch interfaces as well as enables designers to accommodate last minute changes through built-in ISP/ICP capabilities. Features include:

• 32-bit Cortex-M0 with speed up to 60MHz
  • Reduced MHz, therefore reduced noise for analog signals
  • True multi-touch capabilities
• Flexible Memory
  • Up to 64KB Flash, 8KB SRAM for diagnostics and full screen image data
  • 4KB Data Flash for full screen calibration
  • 4KB ISP Flash for boot code and firmware update in the field
• Innovative Peripherals
  • SPI to control up to 4 sensor controllers with dual speed
  • USB 2.0 FS Device, I2C preferred interface for Android
• Software Package
  • WLK 1.5 Pass USB Device driver
  • Driver for USB HID, I2C, and UART
  • Source codes for ISP, USB, I2C, and SPI

Crank Software is providing a live demonstration of how to quickly build a rich animated user interface (UI) that can be accelerated immediately on users’ ARM target. Crank’s Storyboard™ Suite is a UI development environment and runtime engine that provides embedded device manufacturers with a single UI solution. Graphic designers and embedded engineers can easily prototype, develop and deploy rich UI’s across multiple operating systems and graphical rendering technologies.

The experts at Crank will show you how to create a user interface starting with a Photoshop file. They will then simulate that user interface and deploy it to an embedded target.

Storyboard Suite shortens time to market by allowing designers and developers to collaborate on product delivery and harness the power and performance of embedded OpenVG and OpenGL ES technologies.

Additionally there will be four demos from Xilinx Inc at their own booth #1332 featuring the Zynq^TM-7000 Extensible Processing Platform -- a new class of product, combining an industry-standard ARM^® dual-core Cortex^TM-A9 MPCore^TM processing system with Xilinx 28nm programmable logic unified architecture. ESC demos in Xilinx booth #1332 include a Linux web server running on the Zynq-7000 emulation platform, accelerated image rendering on the Zynq-7000 emulation platform, National Instruments’ LabVIEW programming environment interfaced with Zynq-7000 emulation platform running Real-Time Linux, and Android-based multi-channel video processing on Zynq-7000 EPP.

For a preview of what is being shown at ESC, watch the Xilinx video

Not seeing enough? See the map of ARM Partners’ booth and explore more ARM based demos!

Jenny Su, Digital Media Manager (APAC), is based in Cambridge. She joined ARM in 2007 with years of experience in the Consumer Electronic Industry. Her primary goal is to work with the local team to drive the reach and engagement across different social media channels.

Jenny Su, 是 ARM 的亚太数字媒体经理，工作地点在英国剑桥。之前曾在消费电子领域有过多年工作经验。她2007年加入 ARM ，曾担任 ARM 的合作伙伴项目经理，熟悉 ARM 的生态系统。目前致力于扩大 ARM 在新兴数字媒体渠道的受众规模和影响力。