The recent release of Intel’s Cedar Trail platform has caused quite a stir in the embedded community as designers scramble to take advantage of the improved graphics performance, lower power requirements, reduced component count, and overall lower costs. As I covered in part 1 of this series, Cedar Trail is based on the next generation Intel® Atom™ processor plus the Intel NM10 Express chipset for embedded computing. This new architecture offers seven year lifecycle support a...Read More

As competition heats up among embedded system manufacturers, designers are adopting off-the-shelf Computer On Module(COM) technology to reduce risk, lower development cost, and shorten the time to market. These pre-engineered plug-in computer modules allow development teams to focus their design efforts on a carrier board to deliver the unique functions of the embedded product. Although these modules offer substantial advantages, there is a significant hardware and software learning curve requi...Read More

It wasn’t long ago when system designers needed a dedicated processor to handle robust HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces) with features such as touch control, but escalating processor power and integration has changed that. Today in fact, even low-power Intel® Atom™ processors can simultaneously host  very-complex HMIs along with application software for segments such as medical, industrial control, and military & aerospace. For example, Atom-based touch-panel systems con...Read More

The ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture) and smaller-form-factor µTCA (MicroTCA)  standards (collectively referred to as xTCA) for blade-based systems are increasingly popular in applications including telecommunications, military, and industrial automation. Embedded teams have a number of options for connecting multiple processors across xTCA backplanes and that choice can have a significant impact on realized system performance. PCI Express (PCIe) is often the b...Read More

When a newcomer takes a first look at using an Intel® Architecture (IA) microprocessor for an embedded application, the allure may be the raw performance that IA is known for in the general computing space. But embedded design teams quickly learn that the sum is greater than the parts in terms of the hardware and software technologies that comprise the IA portfolio and that truly maximizes system-level performance and affords mission-critical reliability. Intel technologies such as Intel&#...Read More

We’re less than a month away from the annual Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and the expected arrival of Intel® Architecture (IA) processors based on the new Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. The better news for embedded systems designers is that they will also get access to the Sandy Bridge architecture in short order. And the second generation of the Intel® Core™ processor family will include numerous enhancements such as ECC memory support, improved Intel® ...Read More

One significant advantage of the Intel® Architecture family of microprocessors is the many ways that embedded design teams can deploy modular systems based on those processors. The breadth of IA offerings in terms of performance, power consumption, and integrated functions such as graphics mean that manufacturers of board-level products typically support IA processors first on any new modular standard. I've written several times recently on modular standards for small form factors such as ...Read More