ETJ

You could buy a large yacht – and a Caribbean island to moor it on. You could keep a lifetime supply of Ferraris for you and all of your newly found friends. You could acquire several small companies. You could settle into a dozen houses along the fairways at Pebble Beach, hitting balls through the windows all day. Or if you’re Intel, you write a big check to AMD. And if you’re AMD, you fritter it away in about 12 months.

By now you’ve heard about Intel’s big legal settlement with AMD, ending a longstanding lawsuit that’s been both bitter and strangely entertaining. The two companies have been fighting each other for years, both in the market and in the courtrooms. For now, at least, it looks as if they’ve buried the hatchet.

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.” Thus spake Albert Einstein, a man who knew a thing or two about big spaces and long stretches of time. Given a few more years, he might have made the same observation about Intel’s x86 processor family and its infinite attraction to programmers.

If I may indulge in another quotation, it’s been said that there are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they hate the x86, and liars. Nobody really likes programming x86-family processors, at least nobody I’ve ever met who’d worked with any other chip family.

If there were a god of microprocessor design, She would have smitten Intel long ago for creating such an abomination. The entire family tree comes from a bad seed, bearing the taint of the original 8086 and its spawn. Strong men weep, children faint, and wolves chew their own legs off rather than program x86 chips in assembly language. The sight of too much x86 code has been known to drive men mad. Its importation is limited in some countries. Humanitarian efforts bring aid to countless victims. International talks proceed quietly behind the scenes to ban its use and manufacture. Yet stockpiles exist to this day. Stop the madness!

“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.