ETJ

Embedded systems are getting all touchy-feely. The iPhone ushered in the era of touch-sensitive user interfaces, and now everybody wants one. Nintendo’s Wii introduced most of us to MEMS accelerometers that can tell whether you’re holding it sideways or upside-down or swinging it around. Jogging shoes come with sensors that measure the length of your stride and count the number of steps you’ve taken, even calculating calories burned on the way to the next Starbuck’s.

Well, get ready to make it more interesting. Freescale is rolling out a new line of “smart” sensor chips that do more than just measure and report raw data. They take care of that “processing” part, too. The company has taken run-of-the-mill sensors and combined them with a ColdFire processor, an I²C interface, and some memory. The result is a one-chip sensor subsystem that detects stuff, filters and massages the data, acts on it, and delivers the predigested result to a host processor elsewhere in your system.

They say good things come in threes: the Three Stooges, triple plays, the first Star Wars movies, two halves of a six-pack. Now FPGA maker Actel adds another happy trio: SmartFusion.

Actel’s triple play is a new chip that combines the three things most embedded designers need: a microprocessor, an FPGA, and analog circuitry. The company calls the conglomeration SmartFusion on the theory that it fuses three disparate features into one device.

Processors in FPGAs aren’t new, but they’re not always successful. The big FPGA companies have done it before, and every engineering undergrad has probably tried stuffing a microcontroller into an FPGA at some point. The result is usually awkward, power-hungry, slow, and expensive. Programmable logic just isn’t a good match for the resources that a processor requires.

For a silicon company, Microchip has the best brand name ever. Even your grandmother knows what a “microchip” is, even if she isn’t clear on what they do. Like Scotch tape, Xerox copiers, and Kleenex snot rags, Microchip has built-in name recognition. (Insider trivia: here in the publishing business we get letters from trademark lawyers gently reminding us not to use words like Coke, Xerox, and Kleenex as generic nouns. A weird one came from a certain agricultural firm to remind me not to call tractors “caterpillars;” does anyone really do that?)

Microchip’s biggest challenge isn’t protecting its brand name but keeping its complex product line straight. At last count, I think the company made 3.72 zillion different kinds of microcontrollers. They’ve abandoned any semblance of meaningful names or part numbers for them all; I think they just assign a serial number at birth and call it good.

It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping! It’s the Cortex-M4!

As if ARM’s pantry of microprocessors weren’t already well stocked, now there’s another tasty treat to squeeze on the shelf. The Cortex-M4, revealed just yesterday, combines ingredients from the popular M3 microcontroller with a helping of goodies from the ARM9 and ARM11. The resulting confection is a microcontroller/DSP combination that should suit the tastes of embedded designers the world over.

As its name suggests, the new M4 is part of ARM’s low-end microcontroller range of 32-bit CPU cores that run the new(-ish) Thumb2 instruction set. Like other M-series processors, the M4 is intended for fairly low-cost chips in the $2–$15 range. Indeed, the first M4-based chip from NXP is due out late this year and will likely be priced right around $5 in volume.

A real-time operating system (RTOS) used to be just a tiny microkernel of code. Nowadays they’re growing into fully featured operating systems with their own development tools and third-party support. Just a few months ago, Intel paid $884 million in cash to acquire RTOS vendor Wind River Systems. Clearly, we've moved beyond a few kilobytes of microkernel code.

Circling silently beneath the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a solitary fin breaks the surface; then two, then three. Panicked swimmers paddle for the shore, anxious to distance themselves from the threat. Watch out! It’s a Blackfin!

Yankee chipmaker Analog Devices has released a school of Blackfin chips, causing mayhem in parts of Texas. These once-placid waters were TI’s territory. Now that dominance is under threat as a newer and hungrier challenger threatens to take a bite out of the market leader.

Meanwhile, back on dry land, we have three new processor chips to consider. They’re called the Blackfin BF500 family, and they’re brand new today. They’re cheap ($5 to $13 in quantity), they’re fast (300-400 MHz), and they come in three flavors.