As competition grows, embedded designers must pack increased performance, real-time connectivity, and interactive graphics features into each new design while reducing power requirements to eliminate fans or extend battery life. Some of the latest specifications in critical applications such as healthcare also call for always-on, always-connected embedded devices to eliminate delays due to startup and data updates. The current generation of consumers that grew up with computers and smart phones...Read More

How important is power consumption in embedded systems? On an individual piece of equipment every watt can be important. Reducing power consumption reduces heat, which may eliminate heat sinks, but more importantly improves component life expectancy. When you consider the effect of large quantities of small numbers the effect can be staggering. For example, there are about 10 million medical instruments using embedded processors shipped every year. A power savings of just one watt per new medic...Read More

Hardware emulation facilities are an essential part of developing, debugging, and validating software for customized Intel® Atom™ processor E6xx chipsets.  The standard E6xx chipset includes an Intel Input/Output Hub (IOH) that provides the essential mechanism to provide boot load capability for the processor. But the standard configuration is not the only way to make an E6xx-based system operate.   ADI Engineering (1) offers a standard two-chip compact board based on the E...Read More

Performance assessment is always in the eye of the beholder, and measuring processor core performance is no different. While the best way to assess performance is to compile the actual application or at least critical portions of it, sometimes the costs to do that simply for comparison are prohibitive. The embedded industry has been striving for a fair way to compare processor performance for decades now, and we'll briefly look at EEMBC's new CoreMark benchmark as a new way to do that.   I...Read More