Ultra Mobile Devices – Embedded or not?

Written by Henry Davis September 17, 2009 Hits: 1238 Favorites

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The Embedded technology space is exciting and fast-paced. But exactly what is “embedded” and what is not? It’s pretty clear that non-programmable systems employing some sort of processor qualify as an embedded product. On the other side of the equation, most engineers would agree that a general purpose Personal Computer doesn’t qualify.

There has always been a continuum from general purpose to embedded systems. Well, not always. The continuum has formed as microcontrollers have increased capacity. Memory capacity. I/O capacity. Expanded interrupts. Greater MIPs. And expanded instruction sets. For certain when the first MCUs were developed in the late 60s and early 70s they all went into what we would call embedded systems. But in 1974 Jonathan Titus published an article in Radio Electronic magazine detailing the design of the Mark-8 personal computer. And that established the other end of the computing spectrum based on integrated single chip (or a very small number of chips) semiconductor-based CPUs.

Today I received an email from my friend Will Strauss, President of Forward Concepts. He’s promoting a new market study on the topic of Ultra Mobile Devices that serve a gap between high-end smartphones and notebook PCs. The report also extensively covers the chips that go in them, both high-end ARM-based application processors and competing Atom-based and other X86 processors. The study, "Ultra Mobile Device Chip Market Opportunities" lays out the prospects of this emerging market and forecasts both devices and chips that enable them through 2014.

UMDs occupy a spot in the middle of the Embedded-General Purpose continuum. But if we had to classify it as either embedded or GP where would we put it? Where would you put it?

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Written by :

Henry Davis