I am bouncing up and down with excitement performing my "happy dance" (it's not a pretty sight) because I just booked my flight to attend ESC India 2010, which is to be held July 21 – 23 in the historic city of Bangalore!

This is starting to become a very interesting year for yours truly. For example, as I reported a couple of days ago, next month at ESC Silicon Valley I'm going to be in a No-Holds-Barred Debate with the despicable Jim Turley (I use the word "despicable" in a loving way [grin]). And even more exciting, in July I'm going to be presenting two sessions at ESC India (visit www.ESC-India.com and/or follow the conference on Twitter at twitter.com/ESCIndia)

Mysterious, exotic, fragrant, spicy... but enough about me, let's talk about India! ESC India is to be held in Bangalore (also known as Bengaluru). A quick visit to Wikipedia informs me that Bangalore, which is known as the "Silicon Valley of India", is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Also, is is the third largest city in India, which means it's got to be humongous.

I really cannot begin to tell you how excited I am. This is going to be my first trip to India. Based on the tales told to me by Indian friends who were born there and other friends who have visited, I know enough to expect a multi-faceted experience – from extreme poverty to magnificence and opulence – but at the moment my "knee-jerk" reaction is to visualize India's rich history and incredible architectures, as embodied by the photo of a temple I just ran across as shown below:

Are there buildings like this in Bangalore, I wonder? I'll return to this point in a little while, but first...

In addition to all of the local expert speakers, I'm going to be in the company of four American heroes in embedded space ("where no one can hear you scream"): Mike Barr (Netrino), Robert Oshana (Freescale Semiconductor), Gary Stringham (Gary Stringham and Associates), and Bob Zeidman (SAFE Corporation).

Truth to tell, these guys are so good that I'm wondering why I was invited; maybe I'm the warm up act and the comic relief for everyone to laugh at (grin).

Be that as it may, on Wednesday July 21 I'll be giving an all-day presentation introducing the hardware domain to firmware/software developers. Intended for Computer Scientists and Embedded Software Developers, this session will provide an intuitive understanding of the underlying hardware these folks interact with via their device driver code.

Amongst many other topics, I'm going to waffle on about stuff like analog versus digital (including A/D and D/A conversion); real-world sensors (optical encoders, accelerometers, pressure sensors, etc.); different types of numerical representations (sign-magnitude versus signed binary, fixed-versus floating point, and the use of Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) for certain applications); microprocessors versus microcontrollers; what do we mean by ASIC, ASSP, SoC, FPGA (can you have an ASIC that is also an SoC, for example)?; programmable logic (PLDs, CPLDs, FPGAs, etc.); memory ICs (Flash vs. EEPROM; SRAM vs DRAM; the underlying concepts of DDR, DDR2, DDR3; potential future memory technologies like phase-change devices). Printed circuit board technologies (multi-layer boards; lead-through-hole vs. surface mount technology; high-density interconnect and micro-via technologies) ... and so forth.

DON'T PANIC! The idea of this presentation is not to delve so deep into the fiddly details of hardware and hardware design that it makes one's brain ache and one's eyes water; instead, it's to familiarize software folks with the concepts and terms used by the hardware guys so as to facilitate communication between the two domains...

...speaking of which, my session will provide a perfect lead into Gary Stringham's all-day presentation, which is to be held the following day on Thursday July 22. In his seminar, Gary will be considering all aspects of hardware/firmware interface design.

And then on Friday July 23, I'll be giving a 75 minute lecture titled "How Choose the Right FPGA for Your Embedded Application". In this session we will discuss a wide range of considerations that may affect the FPGA selection process. We'll start with a high-level view of the various underlying FPGA fabrics (Antifuse-based, FLASH-based, and SRAM based....) Also the availability/use of hard IP blocks versus their soft IP counterparts implemented in programmable fabric (including hard and soft uP/uC cores). Of course we will also consider the various FPGA offerings from different vendors, including the availability of different uP/uC cores, ultra-low-power FPGA fabrics, asynchronous FPGA fabrics, mixed-signal FPGA fabrics, programmable analog fabrics, radiation-tolerant FPGA fabrics, and ... the list goes on. This really is going to be quite exciting, because I happen to know all sorts of secrets (from well-known companies and from companies that are still in deep stealth mode) that have not yet been announced...

The thing that is particularly exciting to me is that I will have a little free time to explore Bangalore... but where should I go and what should I see? You know what it's like when you visit a strange city... you can be surrounded by the most amazing buildings and museums and art galleries and suchlike ... and not see any of them because you simply don’t know where to look...

...which brings me to the fact that I just went to the "Members" page on TechBites and performed an "Advanced Search" to discover that a bunch of TechBites' members hail from Bangalore... so I'm looking for advice – if you know the city, where should I go and what should I see? Please feel free to send me photos, which I will post here on TechBites in a future blog (or you can post your own blog(s) including photos and YouTube videos and suchlike).

Meanwhile, I think tonight is going to be a Bollywood evening ... I feel an urge to revisit two of my all-time favorites: Bride and Prejudice and Monsoon Wedding. Actually, now I come to think about it, I had better start practicing my dance moves, just in case I'm caught up in one of the spontaneous street dances and songs that – I am led to believe by these films – happen all of the time in India (note to self: "don't forget to pack my dancing shoes").

I'll doubtless be blogging more on this later ... watch this space!

PS Don't forget to keep on checking my Cool Beans (and related) blogs.