ARM Community: Embedded - ARM Community

Microsoft formally announced their Windows Embedded Compact 7 product which marked “15 years of leadership and innovation” in Embedded. The release happened at Embedded World - the European show for Embedded - on the same day ARM started our Embedded Community. In less than a month, events multiplied to show what this often called WinEC7 (WinCE7) is about. And today, Microsoft with Direct Insight, Freescale, ...

This year’s Embedded System Expo conference and Wireless M2M Expo conference were combined and held in Tokyo this week. In this event, companies showcase new ideas and components that can be used for various embedded applications, from deep embedded devices to enterprise equipment. I spotted some interesting new components and devices to share with you in this blog.


4K & 8K DTV

Low voltage differentiated signaling (LVDS) is used for the video image transfer line in most DTVs and Full-HD TVs. One of the issues created by new, higher resolution displays, such as 4K and 8K, is that the high-speed video transfer line must be cheap and fast enough to cope. Actually, when it comes to external video cables, only display-ports and the newly standardized HDMI ver2.3 are capable of transferring 4K2K native video images. But for internal use, such interfaces are simply too expensive. “V-by-One” technology, invented by THine electronics, could solve this problem and has already been adopted by many DTV companies. “V-by-One” enables 3.75Gbps data transfer by two signal lines and Mitsubishi demonstrated it with its ...

The ARM® Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) Community Edition (CE) has been extended to support the community of ARM Embedded Linux users, and it now works on Apple Mac hosts too! DS-5 Community Edition is available as a free download from ARM, and enables you to create, compile, debug and profile Linux applications quickly and easily, whilst retaining its debug and profiling capabilities for Android™ native application developers too.



In this blog, I’ll show how to debug and profile the Open Source “Xaos” fractal rendering application running under Linux on the new BeagleBone Black using DS-5 Debugger, and how to profile the system...

Phew, the second day of Embedded World is at a close. In yesterday’s blog we had the chance to meet up with Chris Styles from ARM, Terrance Bar from Oracle, Paul Zoratti from Xilinx and Dr. Majd Zoorob from PhotonStar, and I only walked 5793 steps – today I just about doubled that with 10502 steps and I haven’t yet ventured out into the brisk weather for some dinner and a well-deserved Weissbier!


Today I chatted with ...

Flights booked...check. Hotel booked...check. German phrase book... check. Comfortable walking shoes, blister cream and plasters... check, check and check. That’s it. I’m all set for Embedded World 2013! The annual pilgrimage to the European alter of all-things-embedded is firmly engraved into my calendar. While my colleagues are basking in the sun at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (current temperature 17ᴼC), I invariably travel to Embedded World in Nuremberg (current temperature 3ᴼC). I’m not in the least bit envious!

This year’s Embedded World looks likely to be one of the best from an ARM point of view. With over 2,000 discrete ARM processor-based devices now readily available to embedded developers I’m looking forward to seeing the ARM logo in every direction on the exhibition hall. It’s that prevalence that is behind the competition we’re running at the ARM booth (4-336) this year – “Where’s ARM” at EW.

All you need to do is snap a photograph of your favourite ARM Powered product and tweet each picture, along with the device and location, with the hashtag #WheresARM...

How do you design a “future-proof” embedded hardware/software platform that will last more than 10 years? Many embedded-system design teams face this problem. The next-generation HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) instrument team at Agilent Life Sciences recently confronted this problem and R&D Manager Peter Stemer has described the team’s decision-making and design processes in an article recently published by Electronics Weekly. (See “Agilent Life Sciences goes multicore with FPGAs.”)

“Agilent Technologies has been supplying HPLC systems since 1984. These are machines that include not only electronics but valves, pumps and heaters,” writes Stemer. “As the technologies developed, the range of applications that could make use of HPLC grew and with that came a demand for greater performance in terms of accuracy and speed of results.”

Agilent’s liquid chromatography instrumentation systems serve customers in diverse markets such as pharmaceutical development and manufacturing, proteomics (identification, isolation and purification of proteins in a cell or body fluid), food safety, environmental analysis, homeland security, and hydrogen processing. Particular areas of growth are in the pharmaceutical and life sciences markets and i...

谷歌公司不久前首次向公众展示了其分布在全球各地的八大数据中心，引起业界的极大关注与媒体的广泛报道。该公司公布的照片所呈现的景象似乎是电影《骇客帝国》中的现实版：鳞次栉比的机箱、盘中错节却又整齐划一的电缆，当然也包括那些在数据中心的运行中承担着重要角色的、由各种大型管道组成的庞大的冷却系统——冰冷的画面感夹杂着某种后现代工业美学的气息。

要运营这些大型的数据中心不仅仅意味着一项巨大的基建投资。相对其高昂的运营成本，前期的投资只是九牛一毛。纽约时报去年9月的一篇报道称，全球范围内的数据中心服务器和散热系统每年大概需要消耗 300 亿瓦的电能，这相当于 30 座核电站的发电量。而更加不为大多数人所知的是，市场调研公司 IDC 去年指出，数据中心冷却系统占据了其总功耗的40%。毫不夸张的说，如今的数据中心简直就是一只吞噬能量的怪物。

暂且撇开既有...

On August 9th BeagleBoard.org announced more than 20 new plug-in boards for the popular ARM® Cortex-A8™ processor-based BeagleBone Linux computer platform thanks to the BeagleBoard.org community who designed the plug-in boards and dubbed them "capes" after the cape worn by Underdog, the beloved cartoon beagle superhero. By creating these plug-in boards, the community hoped to inspire a larger range of innovation using ARM technology – applications like robot motor drivers and sensors that can measure both location and pressure – and we have seen nothing but success!

Simply adding the cape plug-in boards to BeagleBone quickly and easily increases its functionality by incorporating LCD touch screens, cameras, motor control, and battery power, among other things. Think of it this way: you can add a cape to BeagleBone to increase its "cape"...

I woke up to some great news from our partner Freescale on their adoption of our multi-core ARM CortexTM-A7 and CortexTM-A15 for their next-generation networking architecture called Layerscape. This was exhilarating for me both on a professional and personal level, kind of icing on the cake for all the exciting news around ARM in Enterprise so far this year. For the past few years, I have been working with ARM partners to help them drive Enterprise applications, including wireless infrastructure and enterprise networking, with new and exciting ARM technology. But in my past life, I worked at Freescale driving Power-based products into this same arena. Today, with the announcement that my former c...

I don’t think the prospect of rain will affect attendance at the annual tech event now called Design West, which used to be ESC or the Embedded Systems Show - I’m still getting to grips with the name change. But with 250+ companies attending the show, many of whom are part of the ARM® Connected Community® (CC), I’m sure there will be some great technology to see and talk about. Take a look at the show floor map with the ARM Connected Community Partners highlighted to help you plan your route around the show.

At the show this week, Freescale and ARM are demoing CortexTM-M0+ silicon at booth 1607, following up from the launch event that took place a couple of weeks ago.

I first chatted with Thomas Ensergueix, Product manager at A...

This year’s Design West (formerly ESC) from March 26-29th promises something for every designer with seven different Summits. ARM and its Partners have strong representation at ESC, Android and Multicore. Following on the strong showing at this year’s Embedded World (blog), ESC has over 70 ARM® Partners including nine Partners in the annual ARM Connected Community (CC) Pavilion in the expanded ARM booth #1127.

With the excitement following last week’s ARM Cortex™-M0+ processor launch, the most energy efficient ARM processor available (blog) with lead Part...

电力作为国民经济发展的重要基础性产业和公用事业之一，经济的快速发展给电力行业提出了新的要求。Smart Energy (智能电网) 将引发电力能源的革命，它是新的经济增长点、新能源利用的关键以及节约能源的重要举措。在2009年5月召开的“2009 特高压输电技术国际会议”上，中国国家电网公司正式提出“坚强智能电网”的概念，并计划于2020 年基本建成。国家电网公司提出的这个概念包括以特高压电网为骨干网架、各级电网协调发展的坚强网架为基础，以通信信息平台为支撑，具有信息化、自动化、互动化特征，包含电力系统的发电、输电、变电、配电、用电和调度各个环节，覆盖所有电压等级，实现“电力流、信息流、业务流”的高度一体化融合的现代电网。

对于普通家庭关心的用电系统环节，智能电网的发展目标是最终能够实现电网与用户之间的实时交互相应，用户可以实时了解电价状况和计划停电信息，以合理安排电器使用；电力公司通过智能电表可以获取用户的详细用电信息，以提供更多的增值服务供用户选择。新能源汽车等作为储能设备可以在用电低谷时接纳电网富余电能，并可以与其它小型发电装置一起在用电高峰时向电网输送电能，以达到削峰填谷，减少高峰�...

Gone are the days of hard drives, head seek, and enforced single-threaded media access. Modern embedded designs have multiple processors, multiple caches, multiple threads handling graphics and files... and single-threaded file systems that have to handle all that data. Using flash media, using a multi-threaded file system will eliminate this bottleneck and can give a solid performance improvement by allowing parallel access to files.

The first step to a multi-threaded file system is to allow multiple simultaneous reads from the media. A typical design will read from separate files, so allowing those reads to operate simultaneously will give a performance boost larger than the overhead for managing threads. For each write though, the typical single threaded file system has to wait for the other threads to finish reading, then commit the data write, and then finally reads can continue. This prevents partial or corrupted reads from data files. By bundling writes or writing primarily to an application cache, the wait time can be reduced. That data sits in RAM, however, meaning it is vulnerable to unexpected power loss. For temporary data such as a browser cache this doesn't pose too much of a problem, but for email...

Imagine taking a handheld gaming device based on an ARM9™ processor and updating the product to include 3D interactive touch screen interfaces, higher resolution displays, better game logic processing ability and wireless connection for Internet multi-player gaming. This is all possible with an ARM Cortex™-A8. Sounds great, but I bet you’re wondering how you can afford to do this and still keep the bill of materials (BOM) costs and power levels low.

The ARM9 is a great processor, and it’s suitable for a variety of applications; however, there are some limitations for designers seeking to update product designs with more robust functionality. That’s where the ARM Cortex-A8 comes into play. With the introduction of ARM Cortex-A9 devices, you may think the ARM Cortex-A8 processor is becoming obsolete, but this is certainly not the case.

In fact, ...

The ARM Cortex-A7 processor and big.LITTLE processing announcement are game changers for the “always on” home networking and consumer applications. Developers can now choose the right size processor for the right tasks, making many appliances and devices sometimes up to 70% more energy efficient.

At ARM I have been working on the Wireless Infrastructure and Networking market areas for the last couple of years. The energy efficiency value proposition that ARM ALWAYS brings to the table on the consumer side of things is actually relatively new to the traditional networking and wireless infrastructure applications. Power consumption has always been a concern for infrastructure folks, but with the kind of pressure they are under to keep up with ...

As Richard York pointed out in his recent blog, the ARM Cortex-M processor series is now 7 years old during which time it has achieved huge success. Its instruction set makes it extremely suited to microcontrollers (MCUs) and embedded applications, but you can also find it as a companion processor to beefier Cortex-A processor-based applications. An example is the Texas Instruments OMAP™ 5 platform which includes two ARM Cortex-M4 processors for offloading real-time processing from the Cortex-A15 processor to improve low-level control and responsiveness of mobile devices.

In this post, we will concentrate on standalone MCU devices and highlight a few items to consider when choosing the most appropriate processor for your next design. As the ARM Cortex-M series has hundreds of references available, we will not be able to pinpoint the exact part number you need, but rather help your selection.

For this, we will look at:

CPU Choice - On-chip pe...

In last week’s blog I discussed how ARM introduced the ACE protocol to address the need for a hardware based cache coherency scheme. ACE enables smartphones, tablets and other mobile computing applications to continue to increase performance while simultaneously reducing power consumption—two big wins. But (and there is a but) there are clear implications associated with adding new, complex hardware functionality to systems that were complex to begin with. This blog identifies the key functional verification challenges associated with ACE-based designs and review the best practices for tackling them.

The Next Challenge: Ensuring ACE Coherency Schemes are Fully Verified
ARM has now delivered the ACE specification. That’s a great start. However, with so many processing elements and memories in today’s SoC’s, how does an engineering team go about verifying cache coherency in an ACE-based design? It’s not realistic for an engineer to simply read the ACE specification and ...

This is the 1st part of a 3 part series regarding key trends in mobile computing applications and their implications for SoC hardware, software, and verification.
How did your smartphone get so smart?Today’s smartphones, tablets and other mobile applications now all rely on multiple processors or “cores”. Why? Without them performance demanding “apps” couldn’t provide the instantaneous response users have come to expect and demand. Apps such as, video playback, photo editing, facial recognition, turn-by-turn GPS, and real time gaming—all with instantaneous response times—are now simply table stakes to compete in the smartphone/tablet arena. Only by employing multi-core processors are designers able to meet these performance needs and take best advantage of their SoC’s silicon real estate.

Tu...

Microsoft formally announced their Windows Embedded Compact 7 product which marked “15 years of leadership and innovation” in Embedded. The release happened at Embedded World - the European show for Embedded - on the same day ARM started our Embedded Community. In less than a month, events multiplied to show what this often called WinEC7 (WinCE7) is about. And today, Microsoft with Direct Insight, Freescale, ...