ARM Community: ARM at EW2012: Computer-on-Modules, Smart Grid, Wireless & Massage Chairs - ARM Community

Another great day in Nuremburg, the second day of the Embedded World 2012 show which this year is celebrating its 10^th birthday. Last year over 18,000 visitors attended the show and with an estimated 800 exhibitors this year - and lots of foot traffic visible today - I’m sure the number of attendees this year is much greater.

I met up with a few new faces and some you may recognise from before today as part of my task to bring you the latest news and updates from the ever increasing percentage of the 800 exhibitors who were demonstrating ARM technology or supporting the ARM architecture.

My first meeting of the day was with Norbert Hauser, Executive Vice President at Kontron who explained to me a little more about the new Kontron Ultra Low Power ARM based computer on module standard – or ULP-COM for short. Kontron has announced the support of the newly introduced NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 quad core mobile processor and Texas Instruments' recently launched Sitara AM3874 microprocessor on board level (Computer-on-Modules, Single Board Computers and Motherboards) and system-level solutions.



I managed to take a few pictures at the show today and get them posted on the ARMEmbedded twitter feed, including what might be the first ARM Cortex-M3 powered massage chair called the Zero-G which was on show on the Fujitsu stand. I found out that it has three Cortex-M3 MCUs enabling a very satisfying massage – I plan to try it out tomorrow so I’ll get back to you on just how comfortable it is.



Further, a few new announcements were made today at the show. I spoke with Laurent Rakotondrainibe, Product Marketing Manager at Atmel, about the announcement of 40 new Cortex-M3 based parts from Atmel, along with finding out more about the adding of support for Cortex-M products into the Atmel Studio 6 software development tool chain. These 40 new devices will deliver more scalability, cost-efficiency and connectivity for a broad array of applications including industrial automation, smart grid, and building and home control.



In the afternoon I caught up with Geir Førre, CEO of Energy Micro to find out more from the ‘Gecko world’ now that Energy Micro has reached the four year milestone.




At the Texas Instruments stand I met with Adrian Valenvuela, Marketing Director, and Product Marketing Engineer Mione Sadeghzadeh, who brought me up to date on the latest news regarding the Sitara and Stellaris product lines. I learned that pretty soon my umbrella will be able to signal to me as I leave the door whether it is going to rain or not – pretty cool wireless stuff.





I spent a few minutes with Reinhard Keil over at the ARM stand, which this year was very well advertised by way of an airship in the lobby area of the show!



Reinhard described to me some of the significant updates that have gone into the Keil MDK 4.50 product release. He also told me more about how the CMSIS Version 3.0 has been received by the market.




Next week I’ll do a final wrap up blog bringing you further highlights of some of the videos that we weren’t able to get into the daily show blogs.

Andy Frame, CPU Product Manager, ARM, is based in Cambridge and is fanatical about the success of the Cortex-M3 and how it is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for 32-bit MCU’s. Since joining ARM in 1995, Andy has had a variety of roles from Software Tools Technical Training though to Business Development, joining the CPU product management team about two years ago to look after Cortex-M3.