Embedded World 2011 - Cortex-M3 everywhere

This year I renewed my visit to the Embedded World show in Nuremburg, Germany. Walking around the four halls that make up this big show it was simply impossible not to notice the ARM Cortex-M3 based controllers all around. Most chip manufacturers showed off boards with Cortex M3 devices, including ARM itself with their mbed board and other dev boards. There were also some Cortex-M4 demo's around from f.i. NXP (LPC4300) and Freescale (Kinetis).

This show was also rich in free kits; especially ST was very generously handing out STM32 and STM8 kits. I did not accept all of them, because I have no idea what to do with ‘em. Yet I did leave with (amongst others) a BeagleBoard-xM (thank you TI!), an FTDI Vinculo that I will review later on this blog and a ZigBee kit from ST. Fujitsu promised me to send me a Cortex-M3 kit by mail, I wonder if it will ever arrive.

Update 18/3: I received today a Fujitsu SK-FM3-100PMC kit, nicely boxed. More about it, hopefully soon, on this blog.

Due to a rather large amount of business meetings I did not see a whole lot of new or exciting things this year. However, I did get a demo of the very impressive new PIC32 compiler from MikroElektronika. These guys are definitely setting the new comfort standards for embedded software development. Wow! I always liked Microsoft’s Visual Studio, but this is way, way better. And the good news is that they are planning an ARM compiler too! At just under $300 (or $200 if you buy a board too) this is a bargain.

While I’m on compilers, Atmel too presented a new one: AVR Studio 5. This is a great tool too, and toujours completely free. V5 brings together AVR Studio 4 and AVR32 Studio into one IDE. It also integrates the AVR Software Framework (ASF) and over 400 example projects that used to be all over their website. Now you just pick your board and then the example that comes closest to what you want to do and off you go.

From the chip front I would like to mention the new ultra low-power 32-bit micro-controller family from Renesas, the RL78. Besides being low-power, this family is also ultra low-dollar. With an operating current of only 70 µA/MHz this is a direct competitor for the MSP430 from TI. But TI told me that they will announce an ultra-ultra-low-power MSP family later this year that will blow away the competition.
Microchip proudly announced their new PIC18F K80 micro. This is an 8-bit device that costs over one dollar, even at high quantities. This nicely illustrates the 8/32 bit paradox, but both Atmel and Microchip expect that the 8-bit market will continue to grow.

That is was not only Cortex-M3 all around proved Digi who had on display their pretty impressive ConnectCore Wi-i.MX51. As Digi's website says: "This module is a highly integrated and future-proof System-on-Module (SoM) solution based on the Freescale i.MX51 application processor with a high performance 600/800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 core, powerful multimedia capabilities and a complete set of peripherals.".



The kit on the left is running Android, the kit at the right runs Ubuntu.
Digi's latest board, the ConnectCore Wi-i.MX53, was on display at the Freescale stand.
Rabbit 6000 modules are now available too.

Analog Devices showed me their new MEMS gyroscopes that have extremely low drift. So, I guess this is good news for the dead reckoning people.

FTDI presented a rather mysterious device, the FT1248. Although they did make it clear that this device communicates over a 1, 2, 4 or 8 bit wide bus of which the width can be adjusted on the fly, I did not grasp the reason of being of this chip. It is probably very useful or they wouldn’t have spent any time on it, but useful for what exactly? I guess that it is a bus extender of some sort, but I can’t find the data-sheet. Oh well, I am sure someone will figure this out for me.

I really like this show; I can hardly wait for next year.

It's a tactile green embedded world

Last week I visited Embedded World 2010 in Nuremberg in Germany. Nuremberg is a nice city with a mediaeval city center and even though I had a hotel room right on the main market place, I did not see much of the town because of the show. The show was pretty big, more than 700 exhibitors spread out over three halls and allthough I spent two full days there, I did not have enough time to see everything.

The main theme of the show was green electronics. Lots of companies showed off green products, low-power boards and microcontrollers. Although low power electronics is very important, there were not many real green novelties. Microamps per megahertz is the most common term now and several manufacturers claim that their products have the lowest number. Unfortunately these numbers are difficult to compare, because one manufacturer talks about a 32-bit controller whereas another is talking about an 8-bit controller. Actually uA/Mhz is not a good measure, it would be better to use something like uA/MIPS or so. Energy Micro, a company that I didn't know before, won the Embedded World award in the category Hardware. Their EFM32 32-bit MCU (ARM Cortex-M3) consumes 180 uA/MHz (running at 32 MHz and 3V).

Another big thing these days is touch technology. In the coming years everything will be tactile, if we can believe the Embedded World exhibitors. Personally I am a bit weary of touch interfaces. At the end of the seventies touch keys were hot too. Being a poor student I had recovered a third-hand color TV with touch keys for the channel selection. These keys were very sensible to weather conditions and my TV changed station randomly, especially when humidity was high or when I really wanted to see something. One day this TV caught spontaneously fire and I finally got rid of it, but that's another story.

Now I have a monitor with touch keys. I also have a cat. It has happened several times that the cat changed the settings of my monitor in a completely random way just by striking the tactile surface of the monitor. I guess I’ll just have to wait until the touch craze has passed before I buy any new kit.