News

“As our rivets rub together, flashing sparks into the night.” Anything for a Tubes reference. Actually, the headline is relevant to today’s embedded designers because touch-sensitive interfaces are becoming hugely popular, just as they have been for millions of years. But now they’re popular in electronic gadgets, too. (Just as they have been for…. oh, never mind.)

Cypress Semiconductor and Atmel are among the microcontroller companies making noise about their touch-enabled chips. These devices include interface logic for capacitive touch screens (sold separately), making it much easier for the average engineer to include this must-have feature. But there’s a lot more to touch than just having the right digital I/O.

After shipping 15 billion chips you’d think the cocky computer cowboys from Cambridge would be finished, right? Not on your life, pardner. They’ve got more tricks up their collective sleeve than a saloon gambler with a seat against the wall. They just keep dealin’ and we keep ante’ing up.

The newest ace in the hole is the Cortex-A5, announced today. The –A5 fills the enormous (not really) gap between the Cortex-A8 and ARM’s older designs in the ARM9 and ARM11 family. (For some background on ARM’s processor nomenclature, see Embedded Technology Journal, August 25, 2009.)

The A5, codenamed Sparrow, is mostly just a watered-down A8. It’s slower, and therefore cheaper, than its sibling, but still faster than anything in the Cortex R-series or the older numerically designated processors. As such, the A5 is now the entry point into the top-range A-series of ARM processors.

Engineering is all about design. Creating elegant solutions. Finding the best compromise between price, performance, power, reliability, time-to-market, and so on. It’s a high-wire act that requires balance, technical skill, and more than a little creativity.

Sales, on the other hand, is all about… well, selling. And marketing? The less said about marketing the better, right?

So why does the world reward bad products and ignore good ones? Why do so many idiot customers seem oblivious to the benefits of your design while shelling out good money for that other company’s inferior product?

Why don’t the best products win?

Following on from last week’s article about security and cryptography, this week we have a new product from CPU Tech. As the name might suggest, CPU Tech designs CPU chips. The twist is, this company’s chips have a high level of security built into them. As you also might guess, one of their big customers is your government.

CPU Tech starts with the familiar PowerPC processor architecture, so if you’re in the market for PowerPC chips, CPU Tech is worth a look for that reason alone. But the real excitement comes when you enable the on-chip security features. The processor is tamper- and virus- and hacker-resistant, and it includes all sorts of other features I’m not allowed to talk about.

Q: When is a disk drive not a disk drive? A: When it becomes your next memory chip.

We’ve seen how flash memory chips are steadily replacing hard disk drives in MP3 players, laptop computers, and all sorts of embedded systems. Now, in a weird reversal of technology fortunes, disk-drive technology is moving into nonvolatile memory chips.

In military parlance, an Osprey is a propeller-driven airplane that takes off and lands vertically, like a helicopter. The Osprey tilts its wings 90 degrees, the props pull it straight up, and the wings flip back again for conventional flight. Clever engineering, but a bit ungainly to look at.

Over in the less dangerous but equally contentious microprocessor world, ARM has also hatched its own Osprey, this one officially named the ARM Cortex-A9. The new A9 will be capable of 2-GHz clock rates, an unheard-of speed for an ARM core. The previous-generation A8 was barely able to make 1 GHz (see Embedded Technology Journal, July 28, 2009, “Better, Stronger, Faster), and even that required some silicon sleight of hand from Intrinsity. At 2 GHz, the new A9 becomes the most potent weapon from the ARM’s dealer.