TMCnet News
ESC embarks on 20th voyage(Electronic Engineering Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) When the Embedded Systems Conference was proposed about 20 years ago, someone purportedly quipped that a more apt name would be the "Everything you ever wanted to know about embedded systems but were afraid to ask" Conference. The story may be apocryphal, but the implied bounty of information and resources captures the essence of the upcoming ESC (www.cmpegevents.com/web/esv), to be held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., April 14-18. And you need not be afraid to ask. Indeed, there are likely to be events, classes and demos that you haven't even thought to ask about. The show lineup includes more than 180 papers and classes, and 12 two-day tutorials, on key areas of interest to embedded developers: architectures and low power; analog design and data conversion; digital signal processing and multimedia; hardware design, including programmable logic; Linux and open-source software; multicore; operating systems; project management; real-time design; security; software design; tools; verification and debugging; and wired and wireless networking. Events will include live teardowns, a new "Build Your Own Embedded System" (BYOES) track, a career fair, the Disruption Zone and MSP430 Day. The BYOES track deserves special mention. All paid full-conference attendees will receive an embedded development kit along with their registration materials. They will take the kit from class to class and learn how to configure it for their specific application. At the end of the conference, the newly configured kit-with the bugs already worked out in class-will be theirs to keep. One constellation of classes will focus on wired and wireless control-network design. In "Working with USB/Ethernet Software for Distributed Sensor Networks," Eric Gregori will detail how to combine USB and Ethernet into an effective home-networking scheme. Matt Maupin will survey ZigBee, WirelessHART, the SP100 network stack and Freescale's Synkro Networking Protocol in "IEEE 802.15.4: Providing the Foundation for Wireless Sensing and Control." Because sensor nodes are minimalist by nature, debugging and updating are problematic, given the lack of MCU pins to perform such tasks in the background. David Johnson, in "Zero Wire Debugging Using Inductive Technology," will describe how to use inductive coupling to create a debug interface that requires no extra debug pins and no extra circuitry on the application hardware side. In "Architectural Design of Software for Multicore Systems"-part of the multicore cluster-David Kalinsky will suggest that many of the design assumptions that have served as the underpinning of multitasking software design for the past 20 to 30 years are not valid when designing software for multicore SoCs. Kalinsky will explain which of the old assumptions still apply and which need modification or replacement. The interconnect scheme the developer chooses is important in a multicore design. In "Interconnections for Multicore Systems," Sanjay R. Deshpande will analyze the various approaches, describe how to choose the right one for your design, and outline the tools and building blocks you will need to achieve your goals. Three classes stand out in the selection on Linux development. In "Introduction to Posix Threads," Doug Abbott will provide an intensive course in asynchronous programming in the Unix/Linux environment. He will discuss using Pthreads as an alternative to the "process model" historically used by Unix systems to split a large system into smaller, more tractable pieces. For insight on what's needed to implement a Linux app on a mobile device, try Robert Mueller-Albrecht's class on "Linux Kernel Debugging on Embedded Low Power IA Systems." He will detail methods for isolating problems on an embedded system, using mobile as an example. In "Asynchronous DMA: Taking Linux out of the Data Path," Haluk Aytac will describe a Linux ADMA interface recently created for an SoC to exploit its DMA engines to boost RAID performance. Bernard Cole ([email protected]) is Web editor for Embedded.com. Richard Nass ([email protected]) is editor in chief and editorial director for Embedded Systems Design and the Embedded Systems Conferences. http://www.eetimes.com/ Copyright 2008 United Business Media US, LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright ? 2008 CMP Media LLC |