Take an MCU and add Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection to the internet and you have an Internet of Things (IoT) device, and smart devices that are connected to the internet are everywhere. Smartphones, home automation, fitness bands, and products like the Amazon Echo are all examples of IoT. The problem with millions of internet-connected MCUs […]
Industry Experts
What is differential signaling?
Differential signaling is used in many communication schemes including HDMI, USB, DVI, CAN, LVDS, and more. Differential signaling uses two wires and therefore two signals accomplish transmitting a series of bits from one point to another. In the figure below, the first image demonstrates single-ended signaling, which uses a single wire and pulses 0s and […]
Containerization and how it differs from Virtual Machines
A Virtual Machine (VM) is a machine that runs on another machine. Virtual machines can be used to run several different operating systems on the same computer hardware. For example, a computer (“machine”) running Linux can have a VM installed on it that is running Windows and for all intents and purposes, the Windows machine […]
The Internal Processor Bus: data, address, and control bus
A bus is a pathway for digital signals to rapidly move data. There are three internal buses associated with processors: the data bus, address bus, and control bus. Together, these three make up the “system bus.” The system bus is an internal bus, intended to connect the processor with internal hardware devices, and is also […]
What is an In-Circuit Emulator?
Embedded systems tend to lack a display, keyboard, and mouse with which to manipulate the microcontroller that you’re trying to program. So a host computer is used for this function, and typically communicates over a serial cable or more recently, Wi-Fi. Once you create, edit, and compile code for your embedded system on a host […]
SoC based on free and open-source RISC-V allows rapid prototyping for MCU, embedded, IoT, wearable apps
SiFive, the first fabless provider of customized, open-source-enabled semiconductors, today announced the availability of its Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) system on a chip (SoC), the industry’s first commercially available SoC based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, along with the corresponding low-cost HiFive1 software development board. As part of this availability, SiFive […]
Cards help prototype SoCs with pre-engineered interfaces
S2C Inc., a worldwide leader of FPGA-based prototyping solutions for today’s innovative designs, announced today the addition of 8 new Prototype Ready interface cards and accessories to its extensive library of over 90 pre-engineered hardware and software components aimed at accelerating the development of SoC prototypes. These new modules enable users to prototype SoC designs […]
Chips add remote voice control to Bluetooth LE, ZigBee, multistandard apps
Expanding its leadership in voice remote controls, Texas Instruments today announced new voice remote control solutions as part of its SimpleLink ultra-low power platform. These were created to help developers easily add ultra-low power Bluetooth low energy, ZigBee RF4CE or multi-standard connectivity to their designs for voice remote controls, TVs, set-top boxes and more. Developers […]
Next-gen BLE chips sport ASCII-style command interface to eliminate complicated coding
Microchip Technology, a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced two next-generation Bluetooth Low Energy solutions with an easy-to-use ASCII-style command interface that makes the devices easy to configure and eliminates any complicated code compiling. The RN4870 and RN4871 support the latest Bluetooth 4.2 specification and have a Bluetooth stack on […]
Debugging Serial Interfaces
I often work with embedded, mixed signal systems and while in the past that might have included parallel data with numerous data and address lines, nowadays you are more likely to be working with serial interfaces. To keep chip sizes small, with a reduced numbers of pins and less wiring/tracking involved, there are now quite […]
