New challenge for gaming industry

Ecosystems for tremendous gaming platforms factors exist at various levels, making some more popular than others. Companies still continue to develop proprietary mezzanines to meet specific requirements, and this is expected to continue as long as gaming platforms components exist.

Gaming platform are an important design element to many board form factors. They grew out of a necessity to gain more board real estate or to incorporate modular flexibility to the original form factor. In the early days, few, if any, standards for mezzanines existed. However, over time, standards emerged to make it easier to incorporate mezzanines into designs

refer to: http://vita-technologies.com/articles/stacked-standardizing-mezzanine-modules/

Top 10 Chopper with embedded technology

The embedded medical department of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany, is cooperating with the Health Foundation Hospital in Noerdlingen in testing the exchange of real-time medical images and other medical data during an operation or other emergency tasks. LMU not only educates medical students, but also operates one of the most embedded  hospitals in Germany. The hospital in Noerdlingen is small and old, founded in the 13th century, but very modern. It serves several small communities around it.

Noerdlingen is fairly remote by German standards, which is one reason why it was chosen for this embedded application. So if an operation is or becomes critical, experts in Munich can literally see what is going on in the operation room in Noerdlingen and give recommendations on what to do or analyze the available data, including Computed Tomography (CT) scans. A number of embedded electronic devices (blood pressure, heart frequency, ultrasound, laser imaging, nerve reaction speed, and so on), high-performance computer systems, and high-speed communications links are involved in this application.

refer to: http://embedded-computing.com/articles/embedded-medical-biological-applications/#at_pco=cfd-1.0

Deploying techniques on industrial-computer-boards

Requirements to deploy
Most of the requirements to deploy a critical system are based on the real-time response of the system to the processes they monitor and control. The top requirements are related to:

• Memory protection - A misbehaved thread can corrupt the kernel's own code or internal data structures causing all types of bad behaviors to the system.
• Fault tolerance and high availability - Even the best software has latent bugs. As applications become more complex and perform more functions, the number of bugs in fielded systems continues to rise. System designers must, therefore, plan for failures and employ fault recovery techniques.
• Mandatory vs. discretionary access control - Mandatory access control provides guarantees to the access of a device or file. Discretionary access controls are only as effective as the applications using them, and these applications must be assumed to have bugs in them.
• Guaranteed resource availability: space domain and time domain - A critical process cannot, as a result of malicious or careless execution of another process, run out of memory resources or deadlock due to priority conflicts that block resources.
• Schedulability - Meeting hard deadlines is especially important, and missing a deadline can be a critical fault; the access to system services must be deterministic.
• Interrupt latency - Some interrupts are higher priority and require a faster response time than others; how long it takes to respond is critical.
• Bounded execution times - Just as response time is critical, how long a task takes to execute is also important.
• Priority inversion - A lower task can block a higher priority task; predictably resolving the block is a must.
• Security - Everything is becoming connected, so trusted computing is more important than ever to prevent malicious attacks.

refer: http://vita-technologies.com/articles/operating-impact-critical-systems/

http://www.acrosser.com 

Growing pressure to boost the performance

In response to growing pressure to boost the performance and trim down the size of embedded applications, standards organizations meet regularly to optimize their portfolios in light of the latest available technology. These updated standards take advantage of new silicon architecture combining multiple processors, graphics elements, and complex I/O to deliver the next generation of preengineered, off-the-shelf modules to support many of the high-performance requirements of embedded product development.

These standardized computer platforms allow designers to trade in substantial savings in Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) and scheduling for slightly higher recurring costs. Standards-based designs also shortcut the software development effort by providing access to compatible operating systems, vendor-supplied drivers, and sample firmware.

In the Strategies section of this issue, we asked experts from several standards organizations to bring us up to date on the latest changes affecting embedded designs. Starting things off, Jim Blazer, CTO at RTD Embedded Technologies and active member of the PC/104 Consortium, presents the history and updates in work – such as the latest generation of PCI Express – that support the PC/104 stackable architecture. Citing the need for smaller and more rugged building blocks, Alexander Lockinger, President of the Small Form Factor Special Interest Group (SFF-SIG) and CTO at Ascend Electronics, covers the trends and new products to expect in 2013. In addition, Jerry Gipper, Director of Marketing at VITA and Editorial Director ofVITA Technologies magazine, reports on the recent Embedded Tech Trends 2013 meeting aboard the Queen Mary and standards work in progress, plus some new technologies such as optical interconnects.

refer: http://embedded-computing.com/articles/evolving-simplify-embedded-development/

Under increasing pressure ....

 IT managers are under increasing pressure to boost network capacity and performance to cope with the data deluge. Networking systems are under a similar form of stress with their performance degrading as new capabilities are added in software. The solution to both needs is next-generation System-on-Chip (SoC) communications processors that combine multiple cores with multiple hardware acceleration engines.

 

The data deluge, with its massive growth in both mobile and enterprise network traffic, is driving substantial changes in the architectures of base stations, routers, gateways, and other networking systems. To maintain high performance as traffic volume and velocity continue to grow, next-generation communications processors combine multicore processors with specialized hardware acceleration engines in SoC ICs.

The following discussion examines the role of the SoC in today’s network infrastructures, as well as how the SoC will evolve in coming years. Before doing so, it is instructive to consider some of the trends driving this need.

refer:http://embedded-computing.com/articles/next-generation-architectures-tomorrows-communications-networks/

About performance management issue

 

Given the increased complexity of processors and applications, the current generation of Operating Systems (OSs) focuses mostly on software integrity while partially neglecting the need to extract maximum performance out of the existing hardware.

Processors perform as well as OSs allow them to. A computing platform, embedded or otherwise, consists of not only physical resources – memory, CPU cores, peripherals, and buses – managed with some success by resource partitioning (virtualization), but also performance resources such as CPU cycles, clock speed, memory and I/O bandwidth, and main/cache memory space. These resources are managed by ancient methods like priority or time slices or not managed at all. As a result, processors are underutilized and consume too much energy, robbing them of their true performance potential.
Most existing management schemes are fragmented. CPU cycles are managed by priorities and temporal isolation, meaning applications that need to finish in a preset amount of time are reserved that time, whether they actually need it or not. Because execution time is not safely predictable due to cache misses, miss speculation, and I/O blocking, the reserved time is typically longer than it needs to be. To ensure that the modem stack in a smartphone receives enough CPU cycles to carry on a call, other applications might be restricted to not run concurrently. This explains why some users of an unnamed brand handset complain that when the phone rings, GPS drops.
refer:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/performance-management-new-dimension-operating-systems/

Development of M2M devices

With advances in wireless technologies, defining a strategy for building wireless M2M-enabled devices is not the dauntingly complex task it was once thought to be. Instead of devoting precious R&D resources to the integration of fragmented, ad hoc technologies, today’s developers can take advantage of increasingly sophisticated Embedded Application Frameworks (Linux, Android, and others), some of which are highly optimized for M2M application development.

 

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, or the ability to connect and manage remote devices over the air, offers enormous potential. With the ability to centrally control remote industrial equipment, trackvehicle fleets, manage electric vehicle charging stations, expand the capabilities of consumer devices, and much more, M2M has profound implications for virtually every industry.
Given the novelty of M2M technology, however, developing connected devices has traditionally been an expensive and time-consuming process, largely due to the fact that system designers had to build the entire M2M architecture from scratch. Today, designers have a powerful new option in their M2M toolkit: Embedded Application Frameworks (EAFs). By deploying connected services on mature, prepackaged Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSs) and libraries embedded directly into the communications module, M2M designers can substantially reduce the time and costs involved in developing new M2M hardware and focus their efforts on creating innovative connected applications.

refer:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/embedded-frameworks-simplifying-development-m2m-devices/#utm_source=Cloud%2Bmenu&utm_medium=text%2Blink&utm_campaign=articles