ETJ

Does the name Intel ring a bell? Heard of them? If you’re an embedded designer, you can be forgiven for not knowing much about Intel. After all, aren’t they the company that makes the… what’dya call it… PC processors? What’s that got to do with embedded systems?

Well, it’s time to wake up and smell the espresso, because Intel is jumping into the embedded-processor pool with both feet. Last week, the world’s most profitable chipmaker unleashed ten new x86 processors specifically for embedded applications. And these ain’t no moldy old cast-off ’486 chips collecting dust behind the file cabinet, either. All ten of ’em are fast, fire-breathing multicore processors with high-end features. Everybody out of the pool. The whale just jumped in.

I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. That’s a great plan, unless you’re in the embedded processor business. Down here, you need to shave a little off the frontal lobe from time to time. Even shrink the cortex, you might say.

NXP Semiconductors has a new chip out that lowers the bar for 32-bit microcontrollers. It’s a cute little device that just barely fits into the 32-bit category. In fact, it’s more like a 16-bitter with an 8-bit price tag.

A few years ago, a company called Luminary Micro made headlines with its “32 Bits for a Buck” offer. The company (now part of Texas Instruments) was the first to offer an ARM Cortex-M3 processor for dirt cheap. Now NXP has gone that deal one better. The new LPC1100 chip costs just $0.66 in reasonable quantities. So that makes NXP one-third better than TI, right?

“All I want for Christmas is my two front speakers, my two front speakers, my two front speakers!” You can just hear the little third-graders singing it now, can’t you? Ah, the innocence of youth. What all the nerdy kids really want is wireless speakers, and lucky for them, Santa is here to bring it to them.

“Santa” in this case comes in the form of Kleer, an Ottawa, Canada–based chip company that makes the KLR3012 chip, a neat little device that snips the wires off your stereo speakers, headphones, iPod, and other audio gear. It’s what marketing people call enabling technology – not a product by itself but a vital ingredient in some desirable products, indeed.

Kleer’s KLR3012 chip works by converting normal stereo audio into radio waves in the 2.4-GHz part of the spectrum, and then converting it back. Typically, you’d put one of these chips in your audio playback unit (think stereo receiver, TV cable box, MP3 player, etc.) and another chip in the speakers, headphones, or ear buds. Voila! Wireless audio playback from a distance.

Go big or go home. That could be the company motto for Tilera, a Boston-based startup that makes the most gonzo processor you’ve probably ever seen.

Tilera’s new GX-100 chip contains one hundred – count ’em – identical microprocessors, each connected to the others though a massive terabit network. And these processors aren’t just wimpy little cores, either. They’re big 64-bit RISC machines, each with its own L1 and L2 caches, TLB, and 64-bit instruction set. Roughly speaking, each Tilera processor is about equivalent to a good PowerPC, MIPS, or Intel Xeon. In other words, a serious processor. In a big crowd of serious processors.

What would you do with this much horsepower in a single package? If you have to ask, this chip probably isn’t for you. Step aside, sonny, and let the real engineers do their work. But if your business card says Cisco, AT&T, Google, or Nokia, you probably have some good ideas about where this chip might fit. It’s aimed at high-end networking and telecommunications gear, products that have to massage a lot of data in record time.

Actually, that’s for real. Also the Internet-enabled lawn sprinkler, automobile, espresso maker, big-screen TV, and refrigerator. We think nothing of Internet-connected cell phones – in fact, we generally expect that feature – and Internet connections are de rigueur for video games, navigation systems, and retail point-of-sale terminals. Hell, what isn’t Internet-connected these days?

So how do you as an engineer actually connect all these seemingly unrelated embedded systems to the big wide Interweb? Slapping an Ethernet connection on the side of the box isn’t enough. You’ve also got to add TCP/IP software stacks, and drivers, and maybe some server-side code. Probably some security and intrusion-detection software, too.

The company has launched a new 32-bit chip that tops its range of ubiquitous microcontrollers. It’s got grown-up features that could entice the company’s legions of 8-bit and 16-bit users to move up into the 32-bit world and experience life in the semi-big leagues.

“Thirty-two bits for 5 bucks” could be the headline here, as the new chips combine a 32-bit MIPS M4K core – a processor for real men—with an average price of $5. As usual for Microchip, the device is crammed to overflowing with peripherals and interfaces for most conceivable applications. In this case, the key gee-whiz features are CAN (controller-area network), 10/100 Ethernet, and USB.