CONTENTS: July 1, 2004

• Best of the Web - Featured Sites
  • News Summary - Top News
    • DAC, IP, FPGA's - The Future of Embedded?
    • Top News of the Month
  • Cool New Web Sites
  • Conference Calendar

If the EDA/SOC market and the traditional 'embedded systems' market are ever going to 'converge,' 'intellectual property' will play a key role in that convergence. IP was big at this year's DAC , but as is always the case with IP, the IP landscape is nothing if not confusing. One vendor in the IP market that is also a true 'embedded vendor' is Cast, Inc. Among the helpful information at their booth, they had a nice slide that categorized the IP market as follows:

• Star IP (e.g., MIPS, ARM, Rambus, etc. ) - leading edge cores and technologies;
• EDA IP (e.g., Mentor, Synopsys ) - EDA vendors selling a broad range of HDL IP cores, primarily 'add-on's' to the cores themselves;
• Foundry hard IP libraries (e.g., Artisan, Virage Logic ); and
• Small IP companies (e.g., Chipidea, Jennic, PLD Applications ) - selling highly focused IP cores.

The first and the last are of highest relevance to the embedded world. CAST provides a practical example of useful IP for embedded systems by specializing in IP cores for 8- and 16-bit microprocessor-based systems (8051 and other IP).

Another practical example of IP is the flurry of releases from major FPGA vendors - new IP support, new FPGA's, and new cores. Quicklogic , for example, released their PCI-484 Reference Development Kit (RDK) that supports the recently announced, low-power QuickPCI family of devices (release here .) Xilinx unveiled their Virtex-4 Family, a multi-platform FPGA (release here ). And Altera followed last month's Nios II announcement, with further broadening by incorporating NIOS II support in their Cyclone FPGA family (release here .)

If you'd like to put in your two cents as to how IP should develop, take the ' IP Implementation and Practices Study. '

June was kind to embedded software, beginning with the announcement of the technical program for the upcoming Embedded Software Conference , scheduled for August 17-19, 2004, in Santa Clara, California. Technical classes on hot topics including embedded security, software testing, Extreme Programming and leading edge tutorials on Windows Embedded, J2ME and Embedded Linux will help prepare attendees for the next generation of embedded design. Be present at the creation, by attending.

Wind River continued its plunge into Linux and Open Source, announcing the general availability of Wind River Workbench 2.0, an integrated development environment (IDE) that supports the end-to-end device software development process. Based on Eclipse, the open and widely supported development framework, Wind River Workbench supports VxWorks, Linux and proprietary, in-house operating systems. Read about it here .

Microsoft celebrated their annual Windows DevCon , a not-to-be-missed event for anyone interested in either WindowsCE or XP embedded. They announced CE 5.0, which offers expanded source licensing, enabling, for the first time, all licensees to ship products commercially built from their modifications of the Windows CE 5.0 shared source code. Licensees will maintain ownership of their derivative code and will not be obligated to share modifications with Microsoft, partners or competitors. Consider it open source, Microsoft style. They also have a cool ' Windows Embedded Introductory Kit , available for free.

> To browse all industry news , for the last thirty days, click here .

eg3.com 's mission is to research, identify, and promote cool new Web resources - white papers, demo's, seminar's, free code. etc. Here are the top new Web sites we have found in the last month. EDN scored another big one with the release of their fourth annual ' Programmable Logic Directory .' The directory builds on previous years to identify, and summarize, the important products in the FPGA/PLD marketplace.

For those interested in Assembly Language, we found a great personal site by author Jeff Duntemann with code examples from his book, as well as summaries and links to other major books on the topic. Browse it here . Another excellent online book for Assembly Language fans is the massive, The Art of Assembly Language , available in PDF at 1426 pages!

National Instruments posted a nice tutorial on 'PCI Express,' useful as an overview to this emerging embedded standard. The paper can be found here . And Applied Data Systems released an in-depth white paper on security in Windows CE, " Embedded System Security - Designing Secure Systems with Windows CE .

> To browse all 'best of the web' sites, for the last thirty days, click here .

( conference, 5 stars ) - 7/21/2004, Phoenix

Microchip Masters Conference
Provides design engineers with an annual forum for sharing and exchanging technical information on the Company's PICmicro╝ 8-bit microcontrollers, high-performance analog and interface solutions, dsPIC╝ 16-bit digital signal controllers, battery management products, KEELOQ╝ security devices, memory products, and MPLAB╝ development systems. MASTERs is an in-depth, bi-directional exchange of technical information . . .

( conference, 5 stars ) - 7/26/2004, Portland

O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention brings together the leaders of 10 critical open source technologies to give you an inside look at how to configure, optimize, code, and manage these powerful tools. Topics include PERL, Linux, Web Services, Python and more.

( conference, 4 stars ) - 8/3/2004, San Jose

VoIP Developers' Conference
TMC is proud to announce the VoIP Developer Conference, an event dedicated to teaching conferees how to take advantage of all types of development in the IP telephony space. This is the one event that every developer in the communications space needs to attend in order to learn the state of the market as well as the future of VoIP and the development opportunities it affords them.

> To browse all 'conferences' , click here .

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