News

Chalk one up for sensationalist journalism.

A new Associated Press article article describes, in somewhat breathless terms, how security consultant Chris Tarnovsky "cracked" the security chip found in most PCs. According to the article, this will lead to widespread identity theft, lost passwords, stolen military secrets, and more.

Although the details of Tarnovsky's exploits are accurate, the fallout is not. In reality, this is no big deal. Here's the background.

Read more: "Black Hat" PC Security Hack Is No Big Deal

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.

Does the name Intel ring a bell? Heard of them? If you’re an embedded designer, you can be forgiven for not knowing much about Intel. After all, aren’t they the company that makes the… what’dya call it… PC processors? What’s that got to do with embedded systems?

Well, it’s time to wake up and smell the espresso, because Intel is jumping into the embedded-processor pool with both feet. Last week, the world’s most profitable chipmaker unleashed ten new x86 processors specifically for embedded applications. And these ain’t no moldy old cast-off ’486 chips collecting dust behind the file cabinet, either. All ten of ’em are fast, fire-breathing multicore processors with high-end features. Everybody out of the pool. The whale just jumped in.

I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. That’s a great plan, unless you’re in the embedded processor business. Down here, you need to shave a little off the frontal lobe from time to time. Even shrink the cortex, you might say.

NXP Semiconductors has a new chip out that lowers the bar for 32-bit microcontrollers. It’s a cute little device that just barely fits into the 32-bit category. In fact, it’s more like a 16-bitter with an 8-bit price tag.

A few years ago, a company called Luminary Micro made headlines with its “32 Bits for a Buck” offer. The company (now part of Texas Instruments) was the first to offer an ARM Cortex-M3 processor for dirt cheap. Now NXP has gone that deal one better. The new LPC1100 chip costs just $0.66 in reasonable quantities. So that makes NXP one-third better than TI, right?

“All I want for Christmas is my two front speakers, my two front speakers, my two front speakers!” You can just hear the little third-graders singing it now, can’t you? Ah, the innocence of youth. What all the nerdy kids really want is wireless speakers, and lucky for them, Santa is here to bring it to them.

“Santa” in this case comes in the form of Kleer, an Ottawa, Canada–based chip company that makes the KLR3012 chip, a neat little device that snips the wires off your stereo speakers, headphones, iPod, and other audio gear. It’s what marketing people call enabling technology – not a product by itself but a vital ingredient in some desirable products, indeed.

Kleer’s KLR3012 chip works by converting normal stereo audio into radio waves in the 2.4-GHz part of the spectrum, and then converting it back. Typically, you’d put one of these chips in your audio playback unit (think stereo receiver, TV cable box, MP3 player, etc.) and another chip in the speakers, headphones, or ear buds. Voila! Wireless audio playback from a distance.