Embedded Systems

The battle for operating system dominance in the embedded world is heating up as markets formerly driven by other industries such as corporate IT or industrial applications come increasingly under the purview of consumer demand. With almost every device now requiring connection to the Internet and pervasive concerns such as power management, that has pulled Microsoft and Wind River into ...

A battle for dominance in the embedded operating system world is gaining steam, pitting Wind River on one side and Microsoft on the other. Until now, these two companies have existed largely in separate worlds. But as a number of end markets continue to converge and Wind River has repositioned its business away from a heavy telecoms focus, both are ...

The first wave of devices compliant with the HyperTransport Specification 2.0, which defines performance levels of up to 2.8 Gigatransfers/s and mapping to PCI Express, are now available from seven HyperTransport Consortium members. Technology from AMD, Agilent, Dolphin Technology, FuturePlus Systems, GDA Technologies, ULi and VIA, includes HyperTransport-enabled 64-bit processors, I/O chipsets, silicon IP and development tools. HyperTransport chip-to-chip interconnect ...

When MISRA-C was launched in 1998, the UK automotive coding guidelines for C in vehicle systems contained 128 rules for writing good C code. Although a number of development tools support it and many compiler vendors have changed their library source to be MISRA-C compliant, the first version of the coding guidelines was not perfect. After four years in the ...

Designers of safety-critical automotive systems would do well to look to the medical device industry rather than aerospace for inspiration, claims a report from Cambridge Consultants (CCL). “The automotive industry has been trying to learn lessons, and is going to the wrong place,” author Dr Peter Bell told EW. “The aerospace industry designs safety in from the bottom up, but ...

Designers needing a real-time operating system should follow the open source, royalty free model, according to Cambridge-based eCosCentric. The company, which helps maintain the eCos operating system, said third party RTOSs, while offering similar technical features, can lock designers into one set of tools. “The fact that eCos is free and open source, with a flexible licence, is significant,” said ...

The European Commission’s nextTTA project, intended to develop the next level of time-triggered architecture (TTA) for transport electronics, is complete. The two-year project “proved that event-triggered communication such as industry standard CAN can be combined with TTA to provide an easy migration path from current CAN-based applications to time-triggered systems”, said German TTA firm and project member TTTech Computertechnik. As ...

Amino Communications, the Cambridge TV-over-Internet specialist, is about to bring out a set-top box with a hard disk drive to add user-control to its basic home gateway product. “In the fourth quarter we’ll be shipping a set-top box with an 80Gbyte hard disk,” David Cormie, marketing manager at Amino, told Electronics Weekly. “It will give the user more control.” The ...

“The time is right” for network computing if Linux and the growing Chinese market can be harnessed. That is according to PMC-Sierra, which is promoting its collaboration to revive the concept of network computing with MIPS Technologies, ATI Technologies and China’s Tsinghua University. It is called the Open Source Network Computing Intiative. “I believe the time is right in these ...

Developers of operating systems for embedded systems in the automotive market have had to come to terms with that perennial networking problem – the moving target. When adding the optimum comms network to their vehicle designs, the car manufacturers have moved very quickly up through the gears, from the CAN bus to LIN. But as the use of electronic systems ...