To no one’s great surprise, there’s yet another new ARM chip available in the market. This time the perpetrator is Toshiba, and its lyrically named TMPM330FDFG is a new low-cost microcontroller based on the Cortex-M3 processor design.

The new chip marks Toshiba’s first step into the world of ARM Cortex-M3 processors. The company has certainly produced its share of microprocessors and microcontrollers before – probably numbering in the billions by now – but never one based on ARM’s newish low-end architecture. It’s a move designed to … Read More → "Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex"

“So where are you off to this week?” a neighbour asked. “Paris and Munich,” I replied.  “Oh, very nice,” he said. Well, perhaps.

Actually, apart from the bus from the airport to the hotel, the hotel in Paris could have been a company event anywhere in the world. It was Freescale’s Paris Technical Forum, where they gather together customers and prospective customers (around 600 people in total) from across Europe and present a series of technical papers and tutorials alongside a small scale exhibition (Technology Lab) with booths from … Read More → "European Roundup"

There is a problem with the C programming language. It is too flexible. While it is this flexibility that makes it attractive to many users, it can also introduce serious problems. And the flexibility is a direct result of its history.

As you will remember, C was developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s. (It was called C because it was to be an improvement on the B programming language.) Intended to be a machine-independent replacement for assembly language, it gradually built a reputation as an extremely useful general purpose programming language, in an era when … Read More → "Taming C?"