The advent of embedded virtualization has enabled a new “soft ASMP” approach that combines many of the benefits of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetric multiprocessing (ASMP).  To see how it works, check out National Instruments’ article in the latest Embedded Innovator newsletter.   You can access more articles like this by subscribing to the  Embedded Innovator .  Subscribers receive a quarterly newsletter as well as the annual Embedded In...Read More

We live in a “seeing is believing” world. And embedded systems users likely physically see only the hardware they use as they: keep an F-22 flying high (Figure 1); capture telemetry information; gather Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) data; pilot an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from a ground control station; or even send a deployed soldier classified information on a handheld device. But the fact remains that this very-visible hardware is 100\% dormant without...Read More

Today the Internet and its associated communications standards provide the ability to deliver nearly every type of media to any location that has enough bandwidth to service the request. What was once an advanced research project sponsored by the US Military has become over-run by the civilian uses of the medium. Developing both media servers and media clients for the wide range of media types is no small task. Looking at defined, commonly used media types for ordinary consumption, we can divid...Read More

Since the VirtuaLab provides remote access to Intel hardware, we decided to continue developing the control system using the Intel Development kit. Of course, the Intel development kit will eventually be replaced with an ATOM hardware design that contains only the necessary functions for the system.   Choosing an embedded software development tool chain may be trivially simple if your company has already standardized on a specific tool chain that supports the ATOM processor. But if the I...Read More

The development of the off-grid electric system is based on the Intel® Atom™ Processor Z5xx Series and Intel® System Controller Hub US15W Development Kit. Although the Development Kit offers a large number of peripherals, the kit does not include wireless radio links for experimentation.       To add WiFi capabilities to the Development Kit requires the addition of both hardware (the WiFi transceiver) and software (a TCP/IP protocol stack). Green Hills Software, I...Read More

  There's a critical difference between servers and embedded systems. Usually, embedded systems include realtime operation requirements - most servers do not. Where servers work correctly so long as the software completes and performs a logically-oriented algorithm, hard realtime embedded systems fail if the algorithm doesn't complete in time. Developers of soft realtime embedded systems gain a technique to make the system function even if the algorithm fails to complete in time on occasio...Read More

The practice of virtualization has been around for more than a decade, but who's to say which of the three frontrunner methods - binary translation (or runtime handling of system behavior/control-sensitive instructions); OS-assisted (also called para-virtualization); or hardware-assisted (also known as full virtualization) - is best? Or is there a best? While some continue to rely on binary translation as the de facto method, others might think that either para-virtualization or hardware-assist...Read More