ARM has introduced the Cortex™-A15 MPCore processor that they say delivers a 5x performance improvement over today’s advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. In advanced infrastructure applications the Cortex-A15 processor running at up to 2.5GHz will enable highly scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets. The Cortex-A15 processor is available for licensing today and, they say, is targeted at manufacture in 32nm, 28nm and future geometries. The Cortex-A15 extends the capabilities of the ARM Cortex-A Series by adding hardware support for OS virtualization, soft-error recovery, larger memory addressability and system coherency.

Today I attended a webinar put together by XtremeEDA and Cadence Design Systems titled “The Importance of a Complete Methodology for ESL”.  It is meant to be available later for on-demand viewing and the details will be put out by Cadence. A rather disappointing 29 people were in attendance once the presenters were removed from the list, and some of those in attendance were Cadence people, so not sure what the real number was. Steve Brown from Cadence started the ball rolling with an introduction and the reason why they are working with XtremeEDA.  At the end he also pointed...

I have just read an interesting article related to the BP oil spill. It is not about the spill itself, but of one of the ramifications of it that is just starting and is associated with the litigation. It talks about the amount of data related to the case now that we have the Internet, facebook, twitter and many other technologies – none of which existed at the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The article estimates that there will be 1 petabyte of daya. They describe that much data this way:

National Semiconductor Corp. has unveiled an eight-channel ultrasound transmit/receive chipset specifically designed for portable ultrasound systems used in hospitals, clinics, ambulances and remote point-of-care facilities. The PowerWise® chipset's innovative circuit architecture enables the design of both hand-carried and handheld units that deliver longer battery life and imaging performance comparable to larger console systems.

These days it seems as if everyone is making the transition from single to multicore solutions but it is not an easy transition to make when there is a large amount of legacy software to be taken care of. That is where companies like CriticalBlue come in and their product called Prism has now been extended to support the Renesas Electronics V850E2v3 instruction set enabling users to target and optimize software for Renesas electronics' dual V850E2M core platform.

On September 15th, Freescale and GE are getting together with Open Systems Media to present a webcast titled “Optimized mission-critical solutions with Freescale multi-core”. This promises to be an interesting webcast that will talk about the use of Freescale's P4080 8-core processor to build flexible, scalable and secure applications. It will also touch on the ability to map classic single core multi-board multi-function systems into a single P4080 based SBC solution.

So – you like to hack eh? Well this may be your chance and do some good at the same time. HealthTap is hosting the first health-data specific Developer Challenge Hackathon, “Hacking 4 Health,” on September 11, 2010.  Hackathons are events where talented developers come together to examine, problem solve, and build tools to make sense of large data sets.  At the HealthTap Hacking 4 Health event, developers of all skill sets will gather to learn more about new health data recently released by the U.S. Government, non-governmental sources, and to build tools and innovative health applications with this data....

For those interested in EDA360 and the whole area of ESL in general, you may want to tune into this webinar that is being put together by Cadence and XtremeEDA. It is to be held on September 8th at 10:0 Pacific time, and you can bet I will be on the list of attendees if I can. XtremeEDA is one of the most experienced ESL companies out there who have helped many companies come up to speed with high-level modeling techniques and thus I am sure this webinar will be packed with good information that people can take home with...

I saw an article this morning that came from VDC, a research company that has been compiling statistics about the embedded systems space. The article, titled Virtual Platforms – White Knight or Red Herring, was an interesting read. One paragraph in particular stood out to me. Our research shows that projects using VSPS tools were reported to be late at approximately the same rate as within the embedded market as a whole (a dismal 43.4% versus 42.7%, respectively).  While it is certainly possible that projects using VSPS could have been more late without their use due to the level of...

Recently Accellera kicked off the start of the next phase of the IP-XACT standard which includes a rapid requirements gathering timeframe. I thought it would be a good idea to get a snapshot (the good, the bad and the ugly) of where IP-XACT is at the moment and where you believe it should go next.