Bridging the Gap
The Real World Meets Innovation At The Avnet Tech Games
In this week’s Fish Fry, I interview Joe Tillison (Technical Director for Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas) about the upcoming Avnet Tech Games. From racing robots to a new game called “Kevin’s High-Tech Home Makeover”, Joe and I sort through the details of the Avnet Tech Games and chat about why the these games aren’t like your average high tech scholarship contests. Also this week, I dig into my mailbag and come up with a sponsorship opportunity for industrious engineers.
I have another (yes really!!) MAX V CPLD development kit courtesy of Altera to give away this week, but you’ll have to find out how to win.
The PC In Your Ear
Intel’s Medfield to Debut in Smartphones; Microsoft Plays Both Sides
So it’s finally happened: an Intel PC that fits in the palm of your hand and costs less than $300.
Nobody’s calling it a PC, of course. It’s a smartphone, and it’s not due to appear for a couple of months, but it’s basically a PC. It’s got an Intel x86 processor, a bunch of RAM, a real live operating system, a network interface, a keyboard and a screen, and it runs third-party applications. If only the operating system were Windows instead of Android, it really would be a PC.
Tools for the Gifted
Packet Plus Brings Debugging to Networking Engineers
Networking engineers are some of the best and brightest among us. There are good reasons for this. Designing networking equipment is a demanding discipline, spanning a wide gamut of areas from analog and signal integrity to digital design to software - and integrating all of these elements at something near their maximum performance potential. In order to get a competitive piece of network hardware out the door, you are literally designing at the bleeding edge of everything.
Why Use an 8-bit Core When 32 Bits Are Better?
You are designing a new product as an SoC and need some processing power - not a huge amount - and you have tight power and real estate budgets. So you drop in an 8051 core. Job done? Well, not according to the folks at Cortus. These guys, a multinational mix of people based in the Southern French town of Montpellier, whose backgrounds include working on processors for Intel, Bosch, Infineon, Siemens, and Synopsys, are likely to say that you may have made a poor move. Your real estate and power budgets can be achieved with a processor that will also give you a great deal more processing horsepower and a lower overall cost of ownership - their APS3 32-bit core.
Connecting the Dots
One Embedded Design at a Time
In this week’s Fish Fry (sponsored by Altera), I look into how Texas Instruments is ushering in a new wave of WiFi-enabled devices with their SimpleLink family of products. I chat with Matt Kurtz (Texas Instruments) and dig into the details about this new family of products -- from what design challenges SimpleLink addresses, to the unexpected designs that could come from this technology. Also this week, I check out a new way to lose money: by betting on high tech announcements.
I have another MAX V CPLD Development Kit courtesy of Altera to give out this week, but you’ll have to listen to find out how to win.
Looking Back on Five Years
During the Christmas break, I took time out from roasting an ox on the open fire, distributing presents to the assembled multitude of staff, chasing foxes across the rolling acres of Selwood Towers and feasting, wassailing and carousing to think about the past year and embedded technology stuff. I managed to overcome the urge and went back to roasting an ox etc, but, now the break is over, it seems worth having another think.
