Mercedes uses it, so do BMW, Ducati and even the budget car makers from Korea. CAN-bus is now in just about every mass-produced car, and CAN-connections are set to grow. Supporting this uptake, and the increasing use of the LIN-bus, are a whole host of microcontrollers, from the simplest 8-pin, 8-bit micro to 32-bit multi-interface devices. In the 32-bit area ...

If your product is driven by performance in terms of communication or interactivity, this will soon drive you to a 32-bit processor. “Communication needs protocol stacks. Protocol stacks need operating systems. Operating systems and protocol stacks both need a lot of processing power, not to mention memory management units (MMU), Ethernet MACs and so on. User interfaces can also determine ...

Embedded code development software does not come cheap if you are developing tens of thousands of lines of code in a multi-engineer project. On the other hand, if the project is smaller, and particularly if it avoids high-level languages, the tools can cost nothing because silicon vendors, eager to sell microcontrollers, give them away. What you won’t get in a ...

They said it, mistakenly, about videophones and world peace, but RFID, the use of radio waves for identification tagging, could be an idea whose time has come. “The technology has been around for 40 years, but now it’s becoming useful because it’s getting cheaper,” says Professor Edgar Fleisch of the University of St Gallen, part of the EPCglobal consortium aimed ...

Sales of new products drove revenues way up at programmable logic company Xilinx. The San Jose-based company reported Q4 revenues of $403.4m, up ten per cent sequentially and 32 per cent year-over-year. Net income rose to $130.9m, up 165 per cent from the same quarter a year ago. The results included the benefit of a tax settlement and a charge ...