Samsung Heavy Industries has been using a family of advanced RTLinux powered robots in its industry leading facilities on Koje Island Korea.
Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) has made FSMLabs RTLinuxPro its standard platform for shipbuilding robotics and has been using a family of advanced RTLinux powered robots in its industry leading facilities on Koje Island Korea. SHI designs and constructs high value-added vessels such as LNG carriers and large passenger ships, as well as drill ships and shuttle tankers as part of a nearly $4 billion yearly business. FSM Labs RTLinuxPro is distributed and supported in Europe by SDC Systems.

SHI selected RTLinuxPro as the standard platform for ship-building robots and has now has been using several systems in production.

The Spider welding robot moves autonomously on the ‘membrane wall’ structure within the ship.

A pipe alignment robot automatically produces the precise alignment required for efficient construction.

A third, Stewart-Gough type six-axis parallel unit is under development.

SHI engineers, working with FSMLabs Korean partner, real-timeWave, have developed 3D path tracking systems and real-time attitude control systems that are incorporated in their sophisticated robot control logic.

The SHI Project Leader and Managing Director Jae-Hun Kim says: ‘RTLinuxPro and the excellent support from RealTimeWave helped us bring this complex equipment from design to production in record time and with low development cost’.

Young-Jun Park, the Principal Research engineer for SHI adds: ‘RTLinuxPro has a unique capability of combining very precise real-time with the standard Linux platform so that we could make the time sensitive control algorithms operate together with background processing without worrying about interference’.

Jae-Hun Kim also notes: ‘SHI has interests in the ship automation and building automation system markets where we think there will be much future growth and RTLinux is a key technology for us in this area’.

Virage Logic and Discretix will present a free online technical webinar titled: ‘Security made solid with nonvolatile Novea’.
Virage Logic and Discretix will present a free online technical webinar titled: ‘Security made solid with nonvolatile Novea’. The live webinar will be broadcast via TechOnLine on Wednesday 29th March 2006 at 1800 BST. Due to surging demand for DRM and identity protection, ensuring the security of digital information has become increasingly critical for logic designers.

Virage Logic and Discretix are collaborating on this informative webinar to explain how the integration of their respective products addresses the security concerns of SoC designers while minimising sise, power, cost, and design time, and enables the implementation of a cost-effective, highly secure system on a standard CMOS process.

Discretix, the leading provider of embedded security and DRM solutions for mobile devices and flash storage, has integrated Novea as a secure nonvolatile memory component with their embedded security solutions, CryptoFlash and CryptoCell.

The integration of Novea ensures that the unique device key created and encrypted using the CryptoCell or CryptoFlash solutions can be stored in hardware on chips in a cost-effective and secure manner.

‘Novea complements CryptoCell and CryptoFlash to provide comprehensive security solutions for mobile devices and flash memory’, said Edo Ganot, Executive Vice President of Sales and Business Development for Discretix.

‘Our security solutions utilise a secure nonvolatile memory module as their ‘root-of-trust’, forming a secure foundation for applications such as DRM’.

‘We are pleased to partner with Discretix to bring SoC designers the solutions they need to provide an efficient, reliable and low-cost security subsystem for mobile and storage devices’, said Jim Ensell, vice president of marketing and business development for Virage Logic.

‘With Discretix’s expertise in helping customers meet their security requirements in a broad variety of applications, we’re confident webinar delegates will gain valuable insights into how to protect and secure their digital information’.

This webinar is the second in a series of eight Virage Logic-sponsored educational webinars addressing timely and critical design challenges facing SoC designers.

Each webinar in the series features a different industry-leading company from Virage Logic’s VIP Partner Programme and will provide an integrated approach to helping SoC designers successfully leverage the most advanced technologies available for accelerating their silicon success.

The ThreadX RTOS is now available for the MIPS32 34K multithreaded processor core family.
Express Logic has released a version of its popular ThreadX RTOS for the MIPS32 34K multithreaded (MT) processor core family. Through a co-operative development effort with MIPS Technologies, Express Logic has developed ThreadX/MT, an enhanced version of ThreadX for the MIPS 34K. ThreadX/MT is designed to provide applications with a significant performance boost through its use of the multithreading capabilities of the MIPS MT application-specific extension (ASE), as implemented in the 34K processor cores.

Licensees of the 34K core now will have access to this powerful solution for their performance-intensive designs.

The MIPS32 34K family of cores is a revolutionary multithreading solution for high- performance, cost-sensitive embedded applications.

Single-threaded microprocessors today waste many cycles while accessing memory, which considerably limits system performance.

The 34K cores are designed to minimise the effect of memory latency by increasing processor use of otherwise wasted CPU cycles.

As one thread stalls, waiting for access to memory, other threads can feed instructions into the pipeline, resulting in a significant gain in application throughput.

Additionally, the 34K core family provides hardware support for real-time responsiveness in embedded applications.

Users can allocate dedicated processing bandwidth to real-time tasks resulting in a guaranteed quality of service (QoS).

MIPS Technologies’ benchmarks indicate that the 34Kc core running just two threads achieved a 60% speed increase over a single-threaded processor with only a 14% increase in area.

It is this low-cost performance capability that ThreadX/MT delivers to applications, while managing the 34K’s MT resources transparently.

Mobileye, a global leader in driver assistance and safety systems for the automotive industry, has licensed the MIPS32 34Kf core for its next-generation SoC, EyeQ-2.

Featuring lane-departure warning, forward-collision warning and vision/radar fusion for active safety, EyeQ-1 combines high performance and low cost in a technology aimed at revolutionising the mass implementation of driver assistance systems.

EyeQ-2 will add pedestrian detection capabilities to its extensive feature list and will debut in late 2008 models.

‘Our new EyeQ-2 SoC demands high-performance and rapid real-time response’, said Elchanan Rushinek, Vice President of Engineering at Mobileye.

‘The combination of the 34K core and Express Logic’s ThreadX/MT RTOS planned features are designed to provide that kind of performance and speed time to market’.

Mobileye intends to use the ThreadX RTOS in its firmware to support efficient application use of the 34K’s multithreading resources.

Mobileye’s current SoC, EyeQ-1, will debut in the AWSTM after-market driver assistance products in March 2006.

ThreadX/MT is based on Express Logic’s popular ThreadX RTOS, a small, highly efficient embedded OS that minimises system overhead and provides lightning-fast real-time response.

With as small as a 6KB footprint and submicrosecond interrupt response and context switch, ThreadX/MT perfectly complements the QoS mechanism in the 34K processor.

ThreadX/MT introduces technology that automatically, or optionally, manually under program control, calculates 34K QoS weights for application threads to assure that the intended threads get the desired percentages of CPU cycles.

It is the ideal RTOS for demanding real-time applications where high-efficiency is needed.

Together, ThreadX/MT and the MIPS32 34K cores provide the system developer with a combination of high-performance and ease-of-use that speeds time to market.

‘We’re delighted that ThreadX/MT will support licensees of our new 34K multithreaded processor cores’, noted Jack Browne, Vice President, Marketing at MIPS Technologies.

‘The 34K cores are ideal for applications that demand high efficiency and real-time response, and the addition of ThreadX/MT enhances these capabilities’.

‘We believe that this combined solution will greatly benefit our customers by accelerating their development of consumer, multimedia and other performance-hungry products’.

ThreadX/MT achieves such a high degree of ease-of-use by enabling 34K applications to be developed without concern for all of the details of the 34K architecture.

The RTOS takes care of efficiently allocating and managing powerful hardware resources to provide maximum efficiency for application threads.

The MIPS32 34K processor implements the MIPS MT ASE with multiple thread contexts (TC).

These TCs of hardware registers and program counters channel concurrent multithreading into a common execution pipeline.

ThreadX/MT transparently maps application threads to individual TCs within the 34K core.

Each TC provides a ‘virtual machine context’ for a thread, enabling it to run concurrently with other threads on other TCs.

Up to five TCs can be configured in the 34K core, and ThreadX/MT manages the assignment of application threads to these TCs.

The low overhead of ThreadX enables an efficient thread-to-TC allocation and assignment that may be difficult for a larger RTOS to achieve, especially in the common case where there are more threads than TCs.

In such cases, the small size and extremely low overhead of ThreadX/MT make thread-to-TC assignment very efficient, delivering the 34K’s execution cycles to all available threads.

‘We’re excited to introduce ThreadX/MT for the MIPS32 34K core family’, commented William E Lamie, President of Express Logic.

‘ThreadX/MT enables developers to use existing applications on the 34K core, and to develop new ones without concern for the 34K’s architectural features’.

‘ThreadX/MT enables applications to run more efficiently without a redesign’.

ThreadX/MT for the MIPS 34K is available now from Express Logic, with royalty-free licences starting at $12,500.

The latest release of the Edge tool suite supports Eclipse 3.1, the latest version of the open framework.
Accelerated Technology has developed a new version of its Edge tool suite that supports Eclipse 3.1, the latest version of the open framework. The Edge version 1.2 suite provides embedded systems developers with a complete, integrated tool solution that includes an integrated development environment (IDE), debugger, profiler, compiler, unified modelling language (UML) tools, Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) connection device and prototyping tools. The tool suite supports the ARM, MicroBlaze, MIPS, Nios II and PowerPC families of processors.

Eclipse 3.1 introduces various enhancements to its framework, most notably improved operation performance, that Edge Tool Suite users can now take advantage.

Because the Edge tool suite is based on a standard, unmodified version of Eclipse, Edge developers benefit from the ability to use all of the plug-ins provided by the Eclipse community, which add value to the Eclipse framework.

New features of the Edge software include dynamic variant support (DVS), which allows embedded developers to easily target variants of currently supported processor families.

For instance, a user may add a variant of the PowerPC family by simply dropping in additional XML files that describe the new processor.

Also, new target support packages make it easier for users to apply the Edge tools to new embedded development boards.

Additionally, developers can now benefit from a new fully automated function that allows the debugger to connect to an embedded target.

These new features enable users to be up and running quickly out of the box for faster product development.

The Edge Profiler software, part of the Edge tool suite, has previously used a serial interface to move collected data from the target to the host for analysis.

Now, in addition to the serial interface option, the updated Edge Profiler software uses an Ethernet channel to communicate with the target board.

Because throughput is faster using Ethernet versus serial, collecting profiling data on the embedded application is greatly improved.

The Ethernet channel uses the IP stack so that the Edge Profiler can gather data from remote locations without requiring a direct connection between the host and the target.

The Edge Profiler now also contains downloadable filters, which give users complete control over collected data.

This allows developers to collect only the specific data required for diagnosing a problem, thereby minimising the impact that the profiler might have on the embedded system’s behaviour.

An added benefit of using the filters is that data collection can be changed dynamically.

The target agent doesn’t have to recompile to change captured events.

‘This release of the Edge Tool Suite gives our users what they have been asking for: more performance and ease of use’.

‘Because our tools are built on the Eclipse framework, customers are getting all the value we have added, plus the benefit of the work done by the Eclipse community’, said Glen Johnson, Product Marketing Manager, Accelerated Technology Division, Mentor Graphics.

‘Accelerated Technology’s Edge tool chain is a great example of how Eclipse can be used in a commercial environment’.

‘Basing their tool chain around Eclipse allows Accelerated Technology to focus on adding incremental value, rather than implementing common IDE features’, said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation.

The Edge software suite comprises years of technology development.

It gives embedded developers tighter tool integration, total control over the quality and stability of their applications, full control of release cycles, shorter learning curves and a common platform with desktop tools.

Licences for the complete Edge tools software package begin at US $3000 per seat.

This article compares data transmission rates on an Ethernet network for embedded systems based on 8051 and ARM7 microcontrollers.
This article looks at data transmission rates, over an Ethernet network, of one 8bit and one 32bit general purpose embedded system that are as similar as possible in all components other than the microcontroller itself. The test performed is not an attempt to measure the maximum possible transmission rate. It instead attempts to give a general idea as to the figures that could be achieved in real systems.

The transmission results are to be used to draw conclusions as to the practical uses for each system.

It does not cover the technicalities of Ethernet communication itself.

Over the past few years, there has been a market need to provide Ethernet network connectivity on embedded systems.

Used here: ‘embedded systems’ is a term to cover a whole range of devices used in industrial and commercial environments, for example: instruments to measure quantities such as temperature and flow rate; information display systems; and ticketing systems.

To operate as a node on an Ethernet network, a system needs a physical connection, an Ethernet controller chip, and, software wise, a driver for the Ethernet controller and a TCP/IP protocol stack.

With 8bit microcontrollers nowadays containing tens of kilobytes of program memory, 8051 type microcontrollers are still commonly used in embedded systems.

This memory capacity also enables a TCP/IP stack to be implemented in software.

However, the processing power needed to run TCP is not inconsiderable.

It could be interesting to know what kind of actual data transmission rates can be achieved over an Ethernet network, from an embedded system based on an 8051 microcontroller.

This article presents figures for an 8051 based system, and for comparison, an ARM7 based system.

The 8051 system used for this test has an Atmel AT89C51ED2 microcontroller running at 22.1184MHz.

It has 64Kbyte of program memory, and 1792byte of RAM.

The ARM7 system has a Philips LPC2129 microcontroller running at 58.982400MHz via the on-chip phase-locked loop.

It has 256Kbyte of program memory, and 16Kbyte of RAM.

Both systems have the same 10Base-T, Cirrus Logic CS8900A Ethernet controller chip, with an identical device driver, running an identical TCP/IP stack.

A small application, again, identical on both systems, sits on top of the stack, and composes and sends application data, as described below.

The stack, device driver and application were all written entirely in C, with minimal porting required to compile the entire software for each system.

Each embedded system was, in turn, connected to a small 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet network via a D-Link router.

A simple application was written using Visual C++ for a Windows based PC.

The PC application used the sockets API to send and receive data on the network.

Operating as a client, the PC application had a button on its GUI to open a TCP connection with the embedded system.

Once a connection was established, text could be typed into an edit window, and sent to the remote, embedded system.

The text string ” was used as a trigger on the embedded system to initiate a series of data transfers to the client.

The embedded system, operating as a server, would listen for a TCP connection from a client.

Once a connection was established, it would evaluate any application data received, looking for the trigger ”.

On receipt of the trigger, it would perform the test, which consisted of 100 iterations of the following sequence: write 1460byte of data into a buffer; send n bytes of data from the buffer to the TCP; and wait for a TCP acknowledgement from the receiving TCP.

Three tests were performed, where the number of bytes sent (n) was 1460, 750 and 100.

(1460byte is the maximum application data length of an Ethernet frame).

The scope calls for figures that could be achieved in real systems.

Real systems tend to do some work between sending or receiving data.

The work done by these systems was to write 1460byte (note - 1460, never 750 or 100) into a buffer.

The PC application performed a rudimentary check on the application data that it received, and printed the count of each one-hundredth data packet received onto its edit window.

The TCP connection could be closed manually by pressing a button on the GUI of the PC application.

Using Ethereal (a network monitoring tool), the time taken from the trigger string being transmitted from the application, to the 100th frame being acknowledged, was recorded for the results.

It should be noted here that the TCP on the PC application was not using delayed acknowledgements.

The bytes-per-second figure is for application data bytes only.

It does not include the extra 58byte per frame of header and CRC data.

The elapsed time for the acknowledgement for each frame was, on average, 155us.

For the 8051 system, with an application data length of 1460byte the test time for 100 frames was 30.51s, giving an application data transmission rate of 4785byte/s and 3.28 frames per second.

With an application data length of 750byte, the test time for 100 frames was 20.61s, giving an application data transmission rate of 3639byte/s and 4.85 frames per second.

With an application data length of 100byte, the test time for 100 frames was 11.56s, giving an application data transmission rate of 865byte/s and 8.65 frames per second.

For the ARM7 system, with an application data length of 1460byte the test time for 100 frames was 2.30s, giving an application data transmission rate of 63478byte/s and 43.48 frames per second.

With an application data length of 750byte, the test time for 100 frames was 1.32s, giving an application data transmission rate of 56818byte/s and 75.76 frames per second.

With an application data length of 100byte, the test time for 100 frames was 0.45s, giving an application data transmission rate of 22222byte/s and 222.22 frames per second.

Aside from the microcontroller itself, the hardware and software constituent parts of the two embedded systems were remarkably similar.

The output quality of the respective compiler for each system needs to be considered.

The author has no way to quantify that, but has no reason to suspect that one compiler is good, whereas the other is poor.

It can be concluded then, that the vastly superior data transmission rate of the ARM7 system can be put down solely to its extra processing power.

So, can an 8051 microcontroller be used in practice to host Ethernet-enabled embedded systems?.

Referring back to the example embedded systems, a device to measure temperature would probably need to transfer only a hundred or so bytes of data per minute.

A display system would be receiving rather than transmitting data, and a ticketing system may need to transmit and receive in equal measure, but both of them could also have low data throughput requirements.

So, working on the basis that data can be received at a similar rate as it can be transmitted, an 8051 microcontroller could be considered for implementing these three example systems with Ethernet connectivity.

If the requirements for an embedded system without an Ethernet connection can be easily met by implementing the system on an 8051 microcontroller, the data throughput requirements are low, and there is sufficient spare memory to host a TCP/IP stack, the move to an ARM based system is probably not needed.

It should be noted here that the author has no vested interest in promoting 8051 over ARM based systems.

The scope of this article does not call for a technical description of any of the constituent parts of the embedded systems, nor is it meant to compare one TCP/IP implementation over another.

But, it is worth suggesting how the result for the 8051 system could be improved.

The TCP/IP stack used for the test generates checksums for all transmitted frames (which is compulsory), and checks checksums for all received frames (which is optional).

The checksum calculations involve extensive summing of 32bit numbers, which is done in C.

By rewriting the checksum routines in assembly for the 8bit, 8051 microcontroller, the data throughput rates on the 8051 system would improve significantly.

The author would not expect such assembly routines to produce any significant improvements on the ARM system.

The transport protocol used for this test was TCP.

TCP provides a reliable transmission of data between two nodes on a network.

UDP, on the other hand, simply sends data to a destination node, without any guarantee that it arrives.

Thus, higher throughput rates can be achieved using UDP.

For systems where the data throughput requirements are high, and no one is going to die if the odd frame is lost, UDP is used instead of TCP.

An example is voice over IP (VoIP).

One standard codec used for VoIP is G.711.

Each frame has an application data size of 120byte, and, for duplex operation, a requirement of 132 frames per second.

Thus, the raw data throughput rate, for both transmitting and receiving, is 15840byte/s.

From the results, it can be interpolated that the data throughput requirements for VoIP, for this codec, could be implemented on the ARM7 system.

However, even with the higher throughput rate of UDP, and with checksum routines written in assembly, it is unlikely that this requirement could be met on the 8051 system.

Sigma Designs has adopted the ANT Galio Browser and IPTV Client software for integration with its EM8620L and SMP8630 series media processors.
Sigma Designs has adopted the ANT Galio Browser and IPTV Client software for integration with its EM8620L and SMP8630 series media processors. The pre-integrated solution unleashes the maximum potential of the silicon-based processors while ensuring a quicker time to market and considerable cost savings. The solution is already planned for deployment with a tier one European telco and is also actively in review by a number of other global tier one telcos for delivering enhanced IPTV services.

Sigma’s EM8620 and SMP8630 semiconductors provide integrated, cost-effective solutions for consumer products such as digital media adapters, IPTV set-top boxes, networked DVD players, portable media players and HDTVs.

Integrated with the ANT Galio Client, the highly dynamic HTML browser-based solution delivers sophisticated packages of digital, interactive TV programming to today’s demanding customers using a consistent client approach.

With ANT’s software managing everything from local device setup menus and controls to electronic programming guides (EPGs), video on demand (VoD) interfaces and interactive advertising, the joint solution gives service providers unsurpassed delivery, presentation and control.

ANT and Sigma Designs are also now working towards enabling other elements of the ANT Galio Client, including personal video recording (PVR) and connected device framework.

‘For operators deploying IPTV and other advanced digital media services, it’s important to streamline integration as much as possible and hasten the design cycle of devices and services’, said Stephen Reeder, Executive Director of Product Strategy, ANT.

‘Working closely with Sigma Designs, we can bring a tailored, pre-integrated end-to-end solution to the table, offering valuable cost savings to players across the value chain and ensuring fast time to market for new applications on a range of consumer devices’.

‘Our partnership with ANT provides a critical component to answering today’s demand for the enhanced and compelling digital media services of tomorrow’, said Ken Lowe, VP of Strategic Marketing, Sigma Designs.

‘Combining the processing power and flexibility of our digital media processors with the power and flexibility of ANT Galio, we are able to ensure high levels of quality, functionality and performance, along with a fast and cost-effective route to market for OEMs and service providers’.

The Sigma EM8620L and SMP8630 series of media processors are ideal for digital media adapters, IPTV set-top boxes, networked DVD players and digital televisions.

The EM8620L Series represents the first high-definition (HD) Windows Media 9 decoder silicon solution and also supports DVD and HD MPEG-4/-2 decoding.

The SMP8630 Series represents the first single-chip solution to support high-definition MPEG-4.10 (H.264), VC-1 and MPEG-4/-2 decoding, handling the advanced requirements of IPTV set-top boxes and HD-DVD/Blu-ray players/recorders.

The new Secure Media processor architecture is designed to protect premium content and support a wide variety of DRM and conditional access solutions.

The ANT Galio and Sigma Designs platform will make a public debut at the iHollywood Forum IPTV World conference at NAB 2006, 26th April 2006 in Las Vegas.

A Bluetooth manager for Windows CE is billed as the most cost effective solution for OEMs wanting to add Bluetooth support to their Windows CE devices.
Adeneo has released a new version of its Bluetooth manager for Windows CE, billed as the most cost effective solution for OEMs wanting to add Bluetooth support to their Windows CE devices. With this new version, the product brings key innovations such as favourite devices handling, new profiles like DUN and FTP server and enhanced error management. Furthermore, its migration to Visual Studio 2005 gives OEMs a powerful and ergonomic development environment for adapting the source code.

Yannick Chamming’s, Adeneo’s Windows Embedded Team Leader and first ‘Embedded MVP’ in France commented: ‘For OEMs willing to implement Bluetooth feature in their device, a key point of concern is the high level application that will handle Bluetooth connections and profiles’.

‘This development requires a deep understanding of Windows CE Bluetooth stack and a real amount of work to implement a complete solution’.

‘With Adeneo’s Bluetooth manager, OEM can now benefit of a robust standard implementation, which provides most of the features available in Windows CE Bluetooth stack’.

Adeneo’s Windows CE Bluetooth manager implements all standard Bluetooth features such as devices and services enumeration, authentication, encryption, pairing, favourites, remote services connexion and local services implementation.

Furthermore it supports most of the profiles available in Windows CE (SPP, OPP, FTP, DUN etc).

Adeneo’s Windows CE Bluetooth Manager is completely implemented on the standard Windows CE Bluetooth stack.

Consequently, any Windows CE device which includes the Bluetooth stack can integrate the product.

Developed in native C, there is no need to have the Compact Framework on the device.

The Bluetooth manager is available for CE.NET 4.2 and CE 5.0.

The Windows CE Bluetooth manager comprises two distinct modules: an ‘engine’ layer, which implements all the features of the manager with an intuitive and an easy to use API; and a ‘graphical’ layer, which implements a typical ‘PDA like’ IDE for Bluetooth communications management.

With this two-layer model, it can be integrated easily on any type of devices: headless devices, custom GUI devices etc.

The use of Visual Studio 2005 as the development tool for the product provides a powerful development environment for OEMs wanting to adapt the product to their own specific needs.

Available both as a catalogue component of Platform Builder and as an ActiveSync installation package, Adeneo’s Windows CE Bluetooth can be integrated and used immediately without any integration costs, on both OEM custom devices or ‘of the shelf’ pre-installed products.

The licensing model allows users to purchase either the binary version of the product, or the source version.

The binary version is intended for customers willing to use the product without any modifications.

The source version is for OEMs who need to implement specific customisations.

Furthermore, the licensing model is royalty free, with only one-time licensing fees.

A free evaluation version can be obtained from Adeneo.

Esmertec will present its cutting edge client-server M2M solution, OSVM Universe, at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas and at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
Esmertec will present its cutting edge client-server M2M solution, OSVM Universe, at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas and at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose. OSVM Universe brings innovative end-to-end features to the M2M market and is ideally suited for use in automation, fleet management, and vending machines. It can also be seamlessly integrated to existing enterprise solutions such as ERP or a CRM system with a server-side plug-in.

OSVM Universe, an all-in-one solution, features a user-friendly integrated development environment (IDE), a virtual machine-based embedded platform and a secure remote device administrator (RDA).

The RDA enables remote, scalable and automated on-the-fly software upgrade for large numbers of M2M devices.

‘OSVM Universe is an M2M software solution for devices with limited resources’.

‘It can easily be deployed on existing platforms and enables cost savings in device management’, said Lars Bak, Chief Architect of Esmertec.

‘Its two-way connectivity and data exchange features opens up opportunities for new robust and secure M2M services’.

Esmertec will be on Booth 5221 in the CTIA Wireless M2M Pavilion (5th to 7th April 2006, Las Vegas Convention Centre) and on Booth 5063 at the Embedded Systems Conference (3rd to 7th April, McEnery Convention Centre, San Jose).

Datalight has upgraded its FlashFX Pro software used on the world’s most popular embedded devices.
Datalight has upgraded its FlashFX Pro software used on the world’s most popular embedded devices. FlashFX Pro version 3.0 - a Flash manager and Flash driver - ensures the integrity of data stored on resident Flash, both NAND and NOR, and makes it simple for software applications to access the Flash chip just as they would a hard disk drive. The product will be available at the end of this month from Logic Technology.

NAND controllers are a technology advance that is being used more extensively in devices to improve overall performance.

Most currently available Flash drivers and managers lack the software architecture to support these hardware innovations.

By adding support for common NAND controllers, FlashFX Pro 3.0 allows device manufacturers to take advantage of advanced performance capabilities, such as hardware error correction, data caching, and power management available through NAND controller hardware.

FlashFX Pro offers unparalleled design flexibility with prewritten drivers for over 100 state-of-the-art Flash parts.

Engineers can efficiently use both NAND and NOR in the same device; changing the Flash memory at any stage in the device design process - even during production - is as easy as swapping out the chip and identifying the new part number in the software.

Different data types have different handling needs.

Secure system data (such as a proprietary operating system) in a device should never be tampered with by the user.

And encrypted user data (such as ringtones or paid music) must be separated from active user data (like a contact list).

Support for multiple partitions makes it simple to satisfy these varying data needs.

‘FlashFX Pro is the Flash memory management software of choice used by many of the best-known OEMs’, stated Kerri McConnell, Director of Marketing for Datalight.

‘With version 3.0 we’ve listened to our customers’ needs and responded with features that give their devices better performance, greater reliability, and simplify the process of getting those devices to market quickly’.

Coding Technologies has won the Stora Teknikpriset, the annual technology award from Sweden’s technical news magazine Ny Teknik.
Coding Technologies has won the Stora Teknikpriset, the annual technology award from Sweden’s technical news magazine Ny Teknik. The prize honours the founding team at Coding Technologies - Lars Liljeryd, Fredrik Henn, Kristofer Kjorling and Per Ekstrand - for contributing the core idea to the company’s audio compression technology aacPlus since its formation. The award is arranged by Ny Teknik together with Sweden’s Governmental Agency for Innovation, Vinnova.

It aims to reward the development of Swedish technology which is already being used in the market, with this year’s nominations including ABB Power Technologies and Aracam, alongside Coding Technologies.

The internationally standardised aacPlus from Coding Technologies is the world’s most efficient audio compression technology, and is deployed in digital broadcasting, mobile music, and Internet streaming services across the world.

‘I am very proud to receive this award, especially considering the other two very excellent nominees’.

‘This award confirms that our technology gives our customers a competitive edge on the market’.

‘It is fantastic that my invention has led to a world wide standard that improves the listening experience for millions of people’, says Lars Liljeryd, inventor and founder of Coding Technologies.

The jury included Margareta Norell Bergendahl, Principal of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Staffan Helgesson, from the private equity firm Creandum, Claes Wilhelmsson, former Head of research at Astra and Lars Nilsson, Editor in Chief at Ny Teknik, among others.