RTC Magazine

The magazine of record for the embedded computing industry

www.rtcmagazine.comJUNE 2014

An RTC Group Publication

The Internet of Things and the Cloud

Virtualization Opens the Power of Multicore

Small Modules Tackle Rugged Environments

The Yocto Project Speeds Platform Support

TABLEOFCONTENTS

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RTC MAGAZINE JUNE 2014 3

VOLUME 23, ISSUE 6

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6TECHNOLOGY CONNECTEDThe Internet of Things and the Cloud

Devices in the Cloud: Driving Intelligence Where You Need It

Ido Sarig, Wind River

TECHNOLOGY IN SYSTEMSThe Yocto Project Speeds Platform Support

The Yocto Project: Challenges and OpportunitiesChristopher Hallinan, Mentor Graphics

The Yocto Project – Portability, Compatibility, SupportJon Aldama, Enea

TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTHypervisors and Virtualization

Understanding Hypervisors and System ConsolidationGerd Lammers, Real-Time Systems

Choose Your Embedded Virtualization Solution WiselyKim Hartman, TenAsys

INDUSTRY WATCHIndustrial Automation

Integrated HMI, Control and Communication Platform for Industrial AutomationClaudio Ambra, Exor International

DEPARTMENTSEditorialWhat Is Robust? What Is Secure? Can We Have Both?

Industry InsiderLatest Developments in the Embedded Marketplace

Small Form Factor ForumMillion Module Milestone

Products & TechnologyNewest Embedded Technology Used by Industry Leaders

40G AdvancedTCA Switch Blade for Bandwidth-Demanding Applications

JTAG Controller Speeds Measurement TasksCompact COM Express Type 6 with High Performance and Ultra Low Power

12

TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEXTSmall Modules in Rugged Environments

Rugged Electronics Rapidly Adapt to New ApplicationsMichael Plannerer, MEN Mikro Elektronik

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The Yocto Project Speeds Platform Support

4 JUNE 2014 RTC MAGAZINE

JUNE 2014

Publisher PRESIDENT John Reardon, [email protected]

Editorial

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Tom Williams, [email protected]

SENIOR EDITOR Clarence Peckham, [email protected]

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Colin McCracken and Paul Rosenfeld

MANAGING EDITOR/ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Sandra Sillion, [email protected]

COPY EDITOR Rochelle Cohn

Art/Production

ART DIRECTOR Jim Bell, [email protected]

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Compatible Modules fromSingle-Core to Quad-Core

The MSC Q7-IMX6 with ARM Cortex™-A9 CPU is a compatible module with economic single-core CPU, strong dual-core processor or a powerful quad-core CPU with up to 1.2 GHz, and provides a very high-performance graphics.

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as 2x LVDS up to 1280x720 OpenGL® ES 1.1/2.0, OpenVG™

1.1, OpenCL™ 1.1 EP UART, Audio, CAN, SPI, I2C Industrial temperature range

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Untitled-3 1 8/14/13 2:16 PM

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To Contact RTC magazine:

HOME OFFICE The RTC Group, 905 Calle Amanecer, Suite 250, San Clemente, CA 92673 Phone: (949) 226-2000 Fax: (949) 226-2050, www.rtcgroup.com

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Published by The RTC GroupCopyright 2014, The RTC Group. Printed in the United States. All rights reserved. All related graphics are trademarks of The RTC Group. All other brand and product names are the property of their holders.

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EDITORIAL


JUNE 2014

Tom Williams Editor-in-Chief

We are constantly concerned with security. It has become an entire sub-industry throughout the enterprise, the personal Internet and the embedded spheres. We see security strate-

gies being implemented at the device/hardware level, among plat-forms with intrusion and detection strategies, with encryption/de-cryption approaches, and all manner of different efforts. And at the same time hackers ranging from nerdy teenagers in their bedrooms to buildings full of PhD computer scientists in government-funded cyber warfare centers of nations around the world, are working on breaching those efforts. The battle over security is a never-ending struggle, which means you can never really be sure of security.

And we also occasionally—and I believe this is the excep-tion rather than the rule—hear about spectacular breaches such as the recent theft of vast amounts of credit card data from Target. More recently we were alerted to the Heartbleed security bug in OpenSSL, which was apparently introduced in March of 2012 and only discovered some two years later. The fix is proceeding, but as of this writing, thousands of public Web servers remain vulnerable. Those are just some of the things we’ve heard about that directly affected the public. There are large numbers of other incidents that we will never learn of due to corporate security, national security or public safety concerns—and not the least, due to fear of embarrass-ment and/or liability on the part of many operators.

Can this rather discouraging situation be improved by also making robustness as big a concern as what we normally under-stand as security? What is robustness? Normally we think of it as akin to ruggedness—the ability to maintain operation in the face of harsh conditions, and the ability to sustain a certain amount of damage or compromise yet still maintain operation. Robust secu-rity would mean the ability to sustain some successful breaches while maintaining critical security and continuing operation. Ro-bustness linked with security would mean not only different levels but also implementing strategic architectures that can detect and isolate breaches and restructure systems to protect vital functions and data. Admittedly, that is a tall order.

We enthusiastically tout the growth of the Internet of Things as heading for some 50 billion connected devices. Can anyone as-sure us that there are not paths from some seemingly innocuous network, such as a building management system, which might lead

to a very vital system, such as the power grid, by means of some neglected links? Since everything is ultimately connected to the power grid, this means that there are millions of possible paths and that implementing security of the grid itself at all possible access points is utterly imperative. And then levels of security within the grid are needed to implement its own internal robustness.

In fact, the emerging Smart Grid is perhaps the most security-critical element in the modern world. Literally everything depends on it, and as we add intelligence, we also add vulnerability. The Catch-22 here is that we need the intelligence to make a 100-year-old technology more efficient and able to handle new sources of renewable energy. So we must therefore accept and deal with the new forms of vulnerability. And as that vulnerability grows, there is no absolute assurance of security. Robustness has to include not only the ability to continue some level of operation, but also the ability to quickly recover both cyber function as well as physical functionality.

Ah, and therein lies yet another consideration that has actually always been with us, but which is now even more acute. The grid has, of course, always been vulnerable to physical attack. However, now some studies have shown, as reported by the Wall Street Jour-nal, that a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) analy-sis revealed that an attack on nine key East Coast substations and on one transformer manufacturer could lead to an 18-month blackout. Physical considerations go parallel with cyber concerns. One of the issues may be centralization of our power system, which has been essential due to the need for large power generation plants.

That might start to be relieved by the growth of rooftop solar, which would also be a boon to the embedded industry due to all the microcontrollers needed to track the to/from the grid flow of power. It is theoretically quite possible to cover all our future elec-tricity needs with distributed rooftop solar power generation—over the long term, of course. Such a system would fill our needs and its inherent decentralization would make it virtually immune to an effective cyber attack due not so much to cyber security as to its inherent homogenous distribution. About the only thing that could bring such a pervasive solution down would be an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nuclear weapon. But, as noted, that is a very long-term solution.

What Is Robust? What Is Secure? Can We Have Both?

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8 SEPTEMBER 2014 RTC MAGAZINE

Adlink and VadaTech Partner to Offer Enhanced AdvancedTCA Solutions

VadaTech and Adlink Tech-nology have announced a part-nership to offer AdvancedTCA-based embedded computing solutions. VadaTech will utilize Adlink’s line of processor boards to complement VadaTech’s switch, chassis, RTM and special-ty products in the AdvancedTCA architecture. The boards will in-clude Adlink’s line of 10G and 40G processor and packet pro-cessing blades based on the Intel Xeon E-series chipset. Adlink in-tends to capitalize on VadaTech’s integration capability and diverse ecosystem of chassis and switches to complement its core processor offering. Together the companies provide an unmatched array of AdvancedTCA solutions, from boards up to integrated comput-ing systems.

“We see a great synergy be-tween our embedded platforms and the integrated solutions pro-vided by VadaTech,” said Dan-iel Yang, GM of Adlink North America. “This affiliation helps both of our companies expand our reach in the AdvancedTCA market.”

“VadaTech is excited to work with Adlink and provide their versatile array of processor boards based on the AdvancedT-CA architecture,” said Saeed Karamooz, CEO of VadaTech. “This partnership will expand the VadaTech offering and bet-ter serve the integrated solution needs of our customers.”

AMD and Mentor Graphics Join Yocto Project as New Advisory Board Members

The Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation Collaboration Proj-ect, has announced that AMD and

Mentor Graphics are increasing their investments in the embedded Linux project. Both companies are becoming Gold-level members and will sit on the Yocto Project Advi-sory Board.

The Yocto Project reduces fragmentation in the embedded market by providing developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. It is a collaborative, open source project that provides templates, tools and methods to help developers create custom, embedded, Linux-based systems, regardless of hardware ar-chitecture.

AMD and Mentor Graphics will maximize their investments in the Yocto Project and deepen their commitment to the embed-ded Linux development community with this latest move. The two com-panies recently announced a multi-

year partnership to deliver open source embedded Linux software tools for AMD Embedded proces-sors that comprise multicore and heterogeneous systems targeting data storage and networking, indus-trial automation, Internet of Things (IoT) and visual applications. The Yocto Project technical leadership and governance is merit-based; maintainers and technical leaders are selected based on the quality and quantity of their code contribu-tions to the project.

Other Advisory Board mem-bers of the Yocto Project include Gold members Freescale, Intel, Juniper Networks, LSI, OpenEm-bedded, Sakoman, Inc., Texas In-struments and Wind River Systems. Silver members of the Advisory Board include Dell, Enea AB, Hua-wei, LG, MontaVista Software, OS Systems and Renesas.

INDUSTRYINSIDERThe Search Is on for the Successor to Flash Storage

The search for a memory solution to replace flash storage is on, with U.S. memory provider Data Memory Systems tracking the updates and developments in the hope that they will be the first to deliver the new flash storage solution to their customers. With semiconductor manufacturers developing myriad solid-state technologies, the fight to see which solution will succeed conventional flash memory is on.

NAND manufacturing process sizes are reaching their limits, which is why there has been a steep downward trend in the prices of flash memory. Recently, however, famed supplier Samsung announced that they would

start producing NAND flash chips with a 3D internal architecture. This sparked a new trend in flash memory, and other manufacturers set out to follow Samsung’s lead. But when 3D NAND flash reaches its limits, which will happen in around three or four years, what next?

The first potential candidate to take the place of flash memory is Resistive RAM—also known as ReRAM or RRAM. This method of storage saves data by flipping resistors between two stable states. It has a number of advantages over conventional NAND flash such as a longer life span, lower power consumption and significantly higher performance levels. However, this method may not hit the market until NAND flash has fully come to the end of the road, and it may not be fast enough to compete with the other

alternatives—SRAM and DRAM.MRAM is also among the

contenders, and it’s already being used as an SRAM alternative. It has high performance levels and a far longer life, but it’s set to be more expensive than all other memory options on the market so far. One type of MRAM has recently entered volume production, and this may actually see prices come down eventually, making it a real contender.

Lastly, there’s phase-change memory, also known as PRAM or PCM. Although it’s not currently in production, a number of big names in the memory industry, including Micron, IBM, Intel and Samsung, have been monitoring and investigating the memory solution for a number of years. It can be produced at small process sizes, making it great for

regular consumers, and it heavily outperforms NAND flash memory in every sense. It could provide everything from standard consumer memory to “storage class” memory that, if produced cost-effectively, could eventually replace SRAM, DRAM and NAND altogether.

The fight is on to see which method will win out. Many experts are making no predictions just yet. There have been many rumors and false starts around the development of these solutions, and none of them are willing to put their neck on the line and make the call on the future of flash memory. Data Memory Systems will continue to monitor the situation with the goal of being the first to provide the most up-to-date computer memory solutions when they hit the market.

JUNE 2014


Cadence Gobbles Up Jasper2012 was the year that every-

one remembers Synopsys going on an acquisition binge, but 2014 will go down as the year that Cadence Design Systems decided that EDA was worth investing in. Rather than placing investment bets outside of its core competence, Cadence bought Forte in February and now adds Jasper Design Automation to its fold.

Jasper has been the premier player in the formal verification market, making all other players look like second-class citizens. Many had said that so much money had been invested in Jasper over the years that a buyout was unlikely, but Kranen and the investors always had faith that they would get the returns they expected. Today that belief turned into a reality when Cadence offered approximately $170 million in cash. Jasper had approximately $24 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term in-vestments as of December 31, 2013. That makes Jasper one of the high-est valued companies in the EDA industry. Over the years, Jasper has received approximately $27M in funding, with the latest round being $2.13M in 2012.

In addition, the latest new app is JasperGold Sequential Equiva-lence Checking App. This new app enables designers to exhaustively verify the sequential functional equivalence of RTL implementa-tions, ensuring that they function identically at sequential design points—and 10x faster than com-peting tools. This ties in nicely with Cadence’s Forte acquisition, be-cause one of the technologies nec-essary to make high-level synthesis successful is sequential equivalence checking. Calypto is the only other company that has these two pieces in the same company, and because Calypto is majority owned by Men-tor Graphics, this would potentially be a hole in the Cadence portfolio.

Earthquake Simulation Tops One Quadrillion FLOPS

A team of computer scientists, mathematicians and geophysicists at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Ludwig-Maximillians Universitaet Muenchen (LMU) have—with the support of the Leib-niz Supercomputing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (LRZ)—optimized the SeisSol earthquake simulation software on the SuperMUC high-performance computer at the LRZ to push its performance beyond the “magical” one petaflop/s mark one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Geophysicists use the SeisSol earthquake simulation software to investigate rupture processes and seismic waves beneath the Earth’s surface. Their goal is to simulate earthquakes as accurately as pos-sible to be better prepared for future events and to better understand the fundamental underlying mecha-nisms. However, the calculations in-volved in this kind of simulation are so complex that they push even super computers to their limits.

In a collaborative effort, the workgroups led by Dr. Christian Pel-ties at the Department of Geo and Environmental Sciences at LMU and Professor Michael Bader at the Department of Informatics at TUM, have optimized the SeisSol program for the parallel architecture of the Garching supercomputer “Super-MUC,” thereby speeding up calcula-tions by a factor of five.

Using a virtual experiment they achieved a new record on the Super-MUC: To simulate the vibrations inside the geometrically complex Merapi volcano on the island of Java, the supercomputer executed 1.09 quadrillion floating point operations per second. SeisSol maintained this unusually high performance level throughout the entire three hour sim-ulation run using all of SuperMUC’s 147,456 processor cores.

Stephen Hawking Warns of Danger of Artificial Intelligence

In a commentary in the Brit-ish daily, The Independent, famed Physicist Stephen Hawking has is-sued a warning about the potential danger involved in perfecting artifi-cial intelligence. Citing such efforts as self-driving cars, the personal as-sistant Siri and Google Now, Hawk-ing says that these early successes will pale against what the ambitious pursuit of AI is likely to achieve in coming decades. Mostly, we tend to think of the potential benefits of the pervasive spread of AI, and Hawk-ing notes that there seem to be no theoretical limits to what could be achieved with intelligent machines continually working on improving their own design. This could even-tually take them out of the realm of science fiction as portrayed in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, since, as Hawking states, “there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved.”

The “dark side” of this vision is potentially that with the world’s militaries looking at autonomous weapons systems that choose and attack their own targets, the pos-sible actions of such systems could get out of control. Could they, for instance, outsmart financial mar-kets, develop weapons that humans cannot even understand, or outstrat-egize the leaders trying to combat them? “The short-term impact,” says Hawking, “depends on who controls it; the long-term impact depends on whether it can be con-trolled at all.”

We are currently and quite op-timistically building out the Inter-net of Things. This interconnected universe is bound to be host to an increasing amount of artificial in-telligence distributed throughout the world. The idea that this could harbor potential danger is some-thing that could easily be disre-

garded in our efforts to advance the technology. The fact that a person with the stature of Stephen Hawking is raising a flag of caution should at least be worthy of some serious attention.

Google’s ATAP Group Selects Lattice FPGAs for its Project Ara Modular Smartphone Prototype

Lattice Semiconductor Corp. has announced that Google’s Ad-vanced Technology and Projects group has selected Lattice FPGAs for its ambitious Project Ara initia-tive that aims to deliver the world’s first modular smartphones for con-sumers to configure from a variety of modules. Made available to de-velopers last week, and the subject of the recent Project Ara Modular Developers Conference, the Mod-ule Developers Kit (MDK) incor-porates Lattice FPGAs for critical connectivity between reference implementations of removable modules and the Project Ara endo-skeleton.

In addition to enabling com-panies to rapidly develop proto-types of Project Ara modules, the low power and small size of Lattice FPGAs meet the system require-ments of a thermally constrained environment, as well as provide the flexibility to support the MIPI UniPro network protocol that will be used for connectivity between modules. Finally, Lattice FPGAs are a proven solution for mobile consumer products, making them ideal for production modules as well. Developers can go from pro-totype to production, reducing the product development effort and ac-celerating the time-to-market. The advantages of Lattice FPGAs have already been proven in millions of smartphones currently used by consumers worldwide.

RTC MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2014 9RTC MAGAZINE JUNE 2014 9

FORUMColin McCracken

SMALL FORM FACTOR


Embedded computing will never be the same again. Small form factor boards now deliver more performance in a frac-tion of the size, weight and power of what was considered

small ten years ago. Moore’s Law gains can be applied to old sys-tems either as a cost and power reduction, or as a major speed-up, along with fast memory and I/O interfaces.

Even quad core 2 GHz processors with RAM and LAN con-troller fit on a 10 square centimeter module and dissipate only 10-20 watts. Some modules are even one third that size. Some of these Intel and AMD-based modules are rated for the industrial tem-perature range of -40° ~ +85°C from the chip manufacturer and don’t need the extra step of the board vendor’s screening process.

As computer-on-module (COM) plus carrier board solu-tions make their way into more and more market segments, leg-acy small form factor SBCs are retrenching into foxholes—safe proven market segments—but even there they aren’t safe from the module invasion.

What is the secret to rapid COM penetration? Exact I/O match in a small space? Easy CPU upgrades over time? Obsolescence management? Multiple price / performance system configura-tions using a single carrier board? Quick retrofitting into mechani-cal housings without expensive re-tooling? Open standards with multiple sources? Aggressive competition among suppliers? Asian manufacturing? It’s hard to pick just one answer, and the benefits vary widely across system OEM users anyway.

There are still a few areas where COMs aren’t common. If the technical and supply requirements are straightforward enough to point to a vanilla motherboard solution, it’s hard for a two-board COM architecture to match the price. But all it takes is one sig-nificant COM benefit to tip the scales. Again, this can be purely a business or technology or subsystem management consideration that outweighs the cost disadvantage.

Occasionally time-to-market is touted as a disadvantage to the COM (modular) approach. It’s easy to see why. Designing a carrier board isn’t trivial for those OEMs who are staffed only to spec and buy components rather than design their own boards. Third-party design service companies exist to alleviate the design burden. Module manufacturers provide reference carrier board schemat-ics, usually without fees or NDAs. But a type of newcomer to the

COM ecosystem is really starting to accelerate COM adoption by OEMs who couldn’t stomach the lead time or NRE cost of devel-oping with COMs before.

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) carrier boards are the new missing link for enabling the wide replacement of legacy SBCs and I/O cards. These carrier boards are ready to use, meaning they are suitable for a device manufacturer to put on the system level bill of materials and buy in volume, whereas reference design carriers are intentionally too bulky and expensive for that purpose. COTS carriers don’t need to have a kitchen sink of I/O expansion op-tions. Each has a simple set of I/O that is meaningful for a certain class of applications. Although this approach has been around for nearly ten years, only recently has the breadth and depth of carrier choices achieved critical mass.

The recent breakthrough came about when a number of long-time I/O card and CPU card vendors realized that COMs have moved from specialty niches into the mainstream. In other words, if you can’t lick e̓m, join e̓m. A computer-on-module de-sign includes a processor, a companion chip / chipset (if the pro-cessor isn’t already a system-on-chip), RAM, a LAN controller, and power supplies and control. This subset of system circuits has proven to be common across so many applications that it’s very useful to carve out and standardize as a building block. Doing this solves the headache of subdividing SBC production into so many small builds due to many connector styles, chip stuff options and BIOS builds. The industry runs more efficiently with a small num-ber of high volume processor core vendors and a large number of low-volume high-mix I/O card producers.

Off-the-shelf COM processor boards are now shipping by the millions per year. A great deal of commoditization has occurred, spurred by aggressive module vendors who sell mainly on price. The supplier base is being pared down a bit by the exit of promi-nent board vendors from this category of boards who don’t want to weigh down the profit margins of their high-margin large form fac-tor and systems businesses. Nonetheless, each year the customer base continues to benefit through competitive multiple sourcing and much broader x86 and RISC offerings.

Million Module Milestone

Untitled-5 1 9/26/13 9:29 AM

12 OCTOBER 2013 RTC MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY INCONTEXT


by Michael Plannerer, MEN Mikro Elektronik

VITA 59: RCE, the result of cooperative efforts between VITA and PICMG, is bringing the modular, small form factor advantages of COM Express to the world of systems that require ruggedization, opening a wide range of new and exciting applications for small embedded systems.

Rugged Electronics Rapidly Adapt to New Applications

Small Modules in Rugged Environments

specific industry. Real estate in electron-ics systems is shrinking in two significant ways. On the outside, in terms of physical space, there is less room for the actual sys-tem or board to fit into, especially in the

The broadened availability of rugged electronics has led to the use of em-bedded systems in applications pre-

viously not able to take advantage of the latest developments in embedded comput-ing. Not only are existing markets ben-efitting, but completely new markets are opening up, since electronics can now re-liably be used in places where previously they just wouldn’t survive.

Specifically, embedded technology has found its way into a wider variety of mobile and small form factor applica-tions enabling a new set of technological innovations in fields as diverse as mobile medical equipment, industrial agricul-tural machinery and mass transit vehicles. Ruggedization of the systems and compo-nents has laid much of the groundwork for this growth.

Today’s embedded systems are found in portable applications as varied as rolling X-ray and MRI machines to buses, railcars and even airplanes. This seemingly diverse set of equipment has a few key points in common. Namely, each is based on being mobile, which brings shock and vibration into play, as well as being subjected to rig-

orous environmental effects such as dust, humidity and heat or even cosmic radiation in airborne applications.

Available space is also a concern in each piece of equipment, regardless of the

FIGURE 1

Taking it to extremes, compact, rugged electronics handle today’s most severe application environments.

RTC MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2013 13

TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEXT


case of space-constrained applications. On the inside, more components are fight-ing for this reduced system space, and yet the systems are expected to incorporate more functionality, which often translates into more components, or integrated com-ponents, which brings the concern of heat dissipation into play. So, how does a de-signer overcome this battle of developing a rugged, reliable system within very tight quarters, and do it cost-effectively?

Why Ruggedized?The degree and intensity that each

element in an embedded system endures varies depending on the intended applica-tion, which drives component choice in overall system design. Ongoing develop-ments in components, technologies and the standards that govern embedded sys-tems have led to a growth in the choices designers have to match a system to their application requirements.

Ruggedization needs to be an inher-ent concept in the initial development of the component design, not just added as a consideration after product develop-ment or after certain parameters are al-ready defined that will influence how the product operates. True ruggedization is best achieved at the first steps of a compo-nent’s design. (Figure 1).

Why Standardize?The embedded industry has seen its

share of ideas that work and those that maybe could have been done a bit differ-

ently. But one thing is clear: a healthy eco-system that involves several industry man-ufacturers and that offers customers flex-ibility, options and enhancements gives a technology platform a much better chance of not only surviving, but of thriving.

Standardization promotes growth in an ecosystem in several critical ways. The availability of a universal platform enables users to develop systems that talk effectively with one another. It also en-sures that components work side by side in a system, not against one another; and it fosters a community of developers and manufacturers that work together for the growth of the industry as a whole.

In addition to providing a network of manufacturers that gives the end user supplier choices and various development options, a standardized platform facili-tates rapid system design time and greater flexibility. Currently in preparation, VITA 59: RCE (Rugged COM Express) provides embedded designers with a compact for-mat, an industry standard platform and rugged performance. (Figure 2).

Based upon the PICMG COM.0 (COM Express) standard, VITA 59 not only capitalizes on the small form factor and interchangeable concepts behind this

original standard, but also adds ruggediza-tion and modern serial interfaces while de-fining pin-out for compatibility among dif-ferent modules, regardless of manufacturer (see sidebar “A Chapter on COMs,” p. 15). It is also the first collaboration between PICMG and VITA to set forth an industry standard that will facilitate the embedded computing community as a whole.

The VITA 59 RCE standard uses three of the four widely accepted form factors of PICMG’s COM Express, along with all the associated mechanics and pin-out requirements. Within those form factors, a VITA 59 module has provisions for a 5 mm wing extension for cooling and mounting (Table 1).

Standardization Aids Optimization

A number of factors working within the standard can aid in optimizing designs. The inherent modularity enables a building block approach to system design for rapid development of customized systems com-ponents. Since key technology parts are standardized, and therefore require mini-mal or even no development time, resources can be focused on the application specifics. Standardized modules can easily be re-placed or upgraded, extending overall sys-tem longevity. Because the components are based on the same standardized platform, integration is simplified, reducing costs as well as time-to-market. Ruggedized COMs modules can be tailored for a range of plat-forms from low power up to high perfor-mance environments, and the established pin-out and PCB size guarantee intercom-patibility.

The use of flexible I/O configurations gives designers a wide range of choices in system design and functionality. A module can be cost-effectively and easily adapted to its application in terms of functionality and environmental concerns, including shock, temperature, vibration, dust and humidity.

VITA 59 provides enhanced EMC pro-tection to reduce risk and qualification costs as well as additional mechanical protection against shock and vibration, enabling the modules to be used in harsh applications, such as railway and military systems. The sealed design keeps the electronics free of humidity and dust, which could compro-mise the electronics.

FIGURE 2

A standardized platform ensures a healthy, growing ecosystem.

FIGURE 3

Life-critical medical systems are relying on rugged electronics for reliable operations and advanced patient monitoring.




Thermal Management is also a vital aspect of ruggedization. By their nature, smaller systems are frequently more af-fected by heat build-up and the need to protect electronics from associated dam-age. The VITA 59 design accommodates functional operating temperatures ranging from -55° to +125°C through heat trans-fer properties built into the CPU as well as the choice of connector and the solid connections between the chip, the module frame and cover, and the carrier board. Heat from the CPU is transferred to the metallic top cover and then to six cooling tabs that mate with the module frame for conductive cooling. Supplemental cooling is also possible by applying a heat sink to the top of the module cover.

New Vistas of ApplicationsMedical: Ten years ago, moving a pa-

tient on a ventilator in intensive care in-volved some critical risk factors, since the unit would need to withstand the wobbles in an elevator, numerous bumps over door jams and jostling around corners, through hallways and positioning within the room.

However, now through the use of rugge-dized, compact electronics, developments are being made that are facilitating patient care and increasing quality of life.

Rugged electronics are being used to control ventilation in mobile medical equipment, while monitoring patient vi-tals. In one example, a carrier board was developed by the equipment manufacturer that included system functionality with application-specific I/O that met the pa-tient monitoring and ventilation control requirements (Figure 3).

These devices need to work in close proximity to several other pieces of medi-cal equipment, all of which are crucial to patient safety. EMC, in terms of how the ventilator was affected as well as how it would affect other devices, was therefore of the utmost concern. Extremely low EMC values and high ESD requirements were met through the VITA 59 specifica-tion, since the rugged module is sealed in a 100% EC-protected housing.

Since it is regulating a patient’s breathing, interruptions in performance, even for a split second, would be detri-

mental. The system is designed to with-stand severe shock of up to 25G in addi-tion to vibration up to 2.5G, ensuring that no matter where the patient needs to be transported, the system electronics will continue to function, ensuring patient safety.

Transportation: Ruggedized elec-tronics are not only helping to transport individual patients safely, but are also being used in mass transportation appli-cations to move much larger numbers of people on a daily basis. Today’s modern rail system is finding many benefits in small form factor ruggedized electronics.

From the rail system itself down to the specific train cars, electronics are be-ing used to automate, facilitate and ac-commodate the vast amount of data that keeps the trains running on time, passen-gers informed, and the system operating efficiently and safely.

Starting with the engineer of a train, Rugged COM Express is being used to update the display within the train cab to allow the engineer access to the growing amount of data available on a railway net-work. The added computing power of the system’s AMD processor, combined with the ruggedized electronics, brings more data to the engineer quicker without the threat of the system going offline.

For example, an IP65 front plate on a display, complete with touch keys, gives the engineer easy access to system infor-mation while ensuring the display will be unharmed by environmental elements including dust and humidity. Conformal coating on the electronics will protect the internal workings of the system to ensure reliable operation over an extended period of time.

On the rail network itself, system de-signers are implementing more advanced and rugged electronics for the central con-trol as well as remote control and diagno-sis. One freight train manufacturer is us-ing a completely customized system that is still fully compliant with the European railway standard EN 50155.

The use of VITA 59 components al-lows the cars to be equipped with highly advanced electronics that fit in very small spaces, yet ensures that the system meets the standards set forth by the governing

FIGURE 4

New applications, such as construction and mining equipment, are finding rugged electronics attractive for their space-constrained and harsh environments.



industry-required specifications. Shock, vibration and protection from the ele-ments are also considerations of this rug-ged operating system, along with passive cooling from -40°C up to +125°C.

Construction: One of the newer ap-plication areas using small form factor, rugged electronics is the construction industry. Previously, the extremely high shock and vibration found in this industry had precluded most embedded electronics from truly being utilized in construction equipment (Figure 5).

However, because it caters to both the rugged and compact requirements of con-struction equipment, VITA 59 is forging new ground in terms of where embedded computing systems can be used. This trend is set to continue as electronics are expected to perform reliably in a growing number of compact and mobile environments.

Not only does VITA 59 provide a standardized method for implementing rugged electronics in compact environ-ments, it also aligns the principles of two important industry organizations. In essence, it highlights the advantages of both PICMG and VITA to establish to-morrow’s platform for reliable and rugged embedded computing.

An ecosystem can only survive if there is growth and support from within. As evidenced by the use of rugged elec-tronics to modernize older systems as well as to provide inroads into new ap-plications, small form factor electronics will continue to proliferate into different embedded environments, providing long-term reliability, advancing electronics and solid performance well into the future.

MEN Mikro Elektronik Blue Bell, PA (215) 542-9575 www.menmicro.com

A Chapter on COMsA Computer-On-Module (COM) is

a complete computer on a plug-on mod-ule that offers many benefits. Because the I/O is configured on an individual carrier board, the system designer can tailor the functionality to the application, save de-velopment costs, and shorten time-to-mar-ket, all goals for an embedded designer.

Since the pure CPU functions can easily be standardized for many fields of use, COM-based systems can use a more or less standard plug-on CPU module. Even complex CPUs, including those with multicore technology, can be realized on a very compact, highly integrated COM. Special I/O interfaces, memory devices, connectors or form factors may be added to the carrier board. Also, FPGA-based functions can be added to a carrier board or to the CPU module, if desired.

All this makes the electronics 100% tailored to the application, and future-safe. The implementation is far less complex and less expensive than reengineering a system from scratch, especially in appli-cations where a special I/O platform is needed. The CPU module, which provides a standard interface to the carrier, remains scalable and can be used in a design ap-plication much like an integrated circuit component.

But, two major downsides that have hindered the widespread use of COMs are the lack of ruggedization and the disparity among the structure of the modules.

VITA 59: RCE takes the basic tenets of the COM model that provide design benefits, since upgrades and functional-ity can simply be replaced by switching the base module, as well as cost benefits by keeping design, redesign and upgrade costs to a minimum, and adds rugged characteristics. Now, these cost and de-sign advantages can be brought into an even wider range of harsh applications, rugged equipment and mission-critical environments.

A TQMa6x module witha Freescale i.MX6 cansave you design timeand money

ConvergencePromotions.com/TQ-USATQ-USA is the brand for a module product line represented in N. America by Convergence Promotions, LLC

Technology in Quality

TQ embedded modules:

■ Are the smallest in the industry, without compromising quality and reliability

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The TQMa6x module comes with aFreescale i.MX6 (ARM® Cortex™-A9),and supports Linux operatingsystems.

The full-function STKa6Q-AAStarter Kit is an easy and inexpen-sive way to evaluate and test theTQMa6x module.

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TECHNOLOGYCONNECTED


The Internet of Things and the Cloud

TECHNOLOGY

Analysts predict that 15 billion intelli-gent devices will be connected in the Internet of Things by 2015. Ultimate-

ly, connected devices will control every-thing from indoor temperatures to in-dash navigation, from the flow of energy through our cities to the flow of intravenous flu-ids. The prospects are at once exciting and daunting: exciting because of the potential to rejuvenate industries and create entirely new streams of revenue; daunting because of the complexities involved in making sure all those devices perform as promised.

Let’s look at the exciting part first the opportunity to adopt new business models and revenue streams. One Wind River cus-tomer is a manufacturer of forklifts (Figure 1). They traditionally made money selling or leasing equipment a product. Now, with the confluence of embedded technology, wire-less connectivity and the Cloud, they are seeing the opportunity to evolve from sell-ing products to selling subscription services to get paid for the usage of the product based on tonnage per month and not just for the product itself. Smart sensors on the fork-lifts can record and report how many tons

by Ido Sarig, Wind River

The expansion of the Internet of Things is opening exciting new business opportunities with distributed connectivity and huge amounts of data. Knowing how and where to manage such intelligence is key to being able to realize its potential.

Devices in the Cloud: Driving Intelligence Where You Need It

Using an expensive piece of equipment as a service available for subscription offers opportunities like opex and capex savings due to increased asset uptime, but it requires the ability to update firmware remotely as well as acquire use and maintenance data.

FIGURE 1


TECHNOLOGY CONNECTED


they are picking up, how far they are travel-ing and other variables relevant for the new business model.

That is not much different from the telecom carriers who will gladly sell you a smartphone at a deep discount in order to sell you monthly, renewable voice and data plans. It’s a model that more and more hard-goods industries are interested in adopting. And it is only possible because of the abil-ity to connect smart onboard devices with Cloud-based applications and analytics.

In our enthusiasm for the new possibili-ties, however, we cannot overlook the real challenges to achieve this vision. While the challenges are many, they tend to fall into three broad categories: connectivity, secu-rity and manageability.

Connectivity: With new products cur-rently being developed, we can start build-ing intelligence and connectivity into them from scratch. Today, though, much of the industry’s effort is focused on connecting legacy or “brownfield” devices that until now have stood alone. Most of these devices were not designed with connectivity in

mind. On the contrary, many were designed to make connectivity difficult in order to protect them from network-borne threats. Now, builders and operators of large-scale systems want to take advantage of the effi-ciencies and economies that the IoT prom-ises. To reap those benefits, they must figure out not only how to connect them but also how to protect them.

Another complication is that there is no single standard for connecting to networks. Many brownfield devices use proprietary protocols and will require gateways to con-nect with IP-based networks. And if they are already IP-based, they may be using a wide variety of protocols. Developers will need to be able to build gateways that support virtu-ally any communication protocol.

The availability, accessibility and cost of bandwidth are another constraint. For equipment operating in remote locations, the transmission of data from onboard de-vices to Cloud-based applications via sat-ellite can be an expensive proposition. We need to figure out ways to move data effi-ciently to where it needs to be. That starts

with figuring out more precisely which data is needed at which level.

Security: As we become increasingly reliant on intelligent, interconnected devices in every aspect of our lives, how do we pro-tect them from intrusions that could com-promise personal privacy or threaten public safety? The number of network-based at-tacks on embedded devices that control crit-ical infrastructure is increasing at an alarm-ing rate, as is their sophistication. Security is arguably the overriding issue in the Internet of Things, inseparable from performance and reliability.

Security needs to be factored in at ev-ery level, from the devices to the gateways to the Cloud-based systems that control them (Figure 2). Virtually every known type of hardware and software security measure comes into play in the IoT. Secure booting at the device level, access control and au-thentication, application whitelisting, fire-walls and intrusion prevention systems are just some of the tools at hand to respond to security threats.

Security for connected devices and services must be applied at various levels in a system of connected devices, and targeted for the specific characteristics and needs associated with those levels.

FIGURE 2




Manageability: Once you have ad-dressed the connectivity and security issues, the next challenge is how to manage the de-vice remotely over time. You need to be able to provision it securely with software up-dates as they become available. You need to send security patches as vulnerabilities are uncovered. You need to be alerted when the device is not performing properly, and you need the capability to diagnose problems re-motely when they happen. And you need to be able to perform tasks like these without the risk of disruption or downtime.

It Starts with an End-to-End ViewPlayers in the IoT market need to take

an end-to-end view that encompasses the endpoint device, the connectivity layer, the gateway and the application running in the Cloud. We need to understand what the en-tire system is meant to do and the role each component plays, or could potentially play, in its overall operation. By looking along the whole continuum, we can identify op-

portunities to deliver intelligence where it’s needed to optimize performance.

Consider, for example, the issues of processing capacity and bandwidth. One of the big challenges in the IoT is how to deal with the enormous volumes of machine-generated data flowing through it, from devices through gateways to applications in the Cloud and back. It puts a huge strain on bandwidth, which can drag down per-formance and drive up costs. Conventional thinking is that all that data is necessary for Cloud-based applications to do what they’re supposed to do analyze the data from the de-vices, monitor performance, make decisions and send instructions back to the devices.

What if, instead, you could push a lot of the computing the intelligence down to the gateway, or even to the device itself? Imagine if the device could perform various services, such as smart data aggregation and filtering, and figure out which data needs to be sent to the Cloud. The Cloud applica-tions would continue to perform the heavy-

duty analytics and create statistical models for crunching the data. Ultimately, though, once the model has been fine-tuned and is running properly, a scaled-down version of it can be sent to the device, which can then take over much of the processing.

This vision is quickly becoming a re-ality. With a “write once, run everywhere” development platform and a scripted pro-gramming language optimized for resource constraints, developers will be able to cre-ate small-footprint applications that bring intelligence to the device level. Bandwidth constraints will be less of an issue as smart devices become more selective in the data they send to the Cloud, and systems distrib-ute their processing more efficiently.

Translating Technology Advancement to Business Advantage

Of course, the end benefit of optimal IoT performance is the business advantage it delivers, whether that means saving money

For more information: www.ces.ch

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CES - Creative Electronic Systems SA has been designing and manufacturing complex high-performance avionic, defense and communica-tion boards, subsystems and complete systems for thirty years (such as ground and flight test computers, ground station subsystems, radar subsystems, mission computers, DAL A certified computers, video platforms, as well as test and support equipment). CES is involved in the most advanced aerospace and defense programs throughout Europe and the US, and delivers innovative solutions worldwide.

VIP-7412The latest small form-factor (VITA 74) solutionfrom CES features a TI DaVinci™ video processorproviding multiple HD/SD streams of H.264,VC1, MPEG-4 Video, JPEG/MJPEG compression /decompression and multiple I/Os in a smallrurugged conduction-cooled format.

SAFE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONSfrom CESSAFE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS




through increased productivity or making more money by creating sources of revenue that didn’t exist before.

Predictive maintenance is one of the more compelling advantages of the IoT. Take, for example, a wind turbine. Typically located in remote places, on mountainsides or even at sea, uptime is critical for turbines. To prevent failure, operators historically sent crews of technicians out to the tur-bines to perform routine inspections and preventive maintenance according to fixed schedules—a labor intensive process with no guarantee that failure won’t occur. Today, smart sensors can predict failure in real time with great accuracy based on any number of symptoms, such as changes in blade vibra-tion patterns. Automatic software adjust-ments can often rectify the issue without the need for a crew onsite.

Moreover, control systems in the Cloud can collect data not only from the wind tur-bines themselves, but also from external sources, such as reports on airborne dust ac-

cumulations from the National Weather Ser-vice. The system can aggregate and analyze all these variables and determine precisely when a specific piece of equipment needs servicing or repair, avoiding unnecessary disruption or downtime and dramatically reducing maintenance costs.

Cost reduction is what initially attracts many companies to IoT solutions. However, once they experience the power of data ana-lytics, they begin to identify new business and revenue opportunities. Our forklift busi-ness mentioned earlier is one such example. Another is a medical device manufacturer that evolved from marketing stand-alone to connected biofeedback devices. The devices can transmit data directly from patient to doctor, eliminating the need for an office visit. In the process of creating greater ef-ficiency and reducing costs for both patient and provider, the company realized it was accumulating valuable data on multiple patients with similar conditions. Individual patient data, of course, must be kept confi-

dential by law. Once aggregated and ren-dered anonymous, however, the data yields patterns that are very useful to anyone who wants to better understand a particular med-ical condition. The company could create a new source of revenue by providing data on the progression of a disease for medical re-searchers and insurers.

The full potential of the Internet of Things is only beginning to be recognized, let alone realized. Those of us on the tech-nology side need to keep working closely with our customers to understand their busi-ness drivers. That enables us to develop the tools needed to overcome the challenges connectivity, security and manageability and turn exciting possibilities into realities.

Wind River Alameda, CA (510) 748-4100 www.windriver.com

Intelligent Networking

www.dolphinics.com

Peet to Peer Tranfers Reflective memory multicast

20 OCTOBER 2013 RTC MAGAZINE20 JUNE 2014 RTC MAGAZINE

In just over four years since its inception, the Yocto Project has become the de facto standard build system for custom

embedded Linux distributions. Virtually every major semiconductor manufacturer and embedded operating system vendor has joined the project, as well as several device and board manufacturers and independent software vendors. Many other organiza-

tions large and small are using the project as participants. Several commercial Linux distributions are Yocto Project Compatible, the official badge of Yocto Project compli-ance (see sidebar Yocto Project Compli-ance Program. p. 22). The Yocto Project is sponsored by, and is a collaborative project of, the Linux Foundation (Figure 1).

Looking back at the history of open

by Christopher Hallinan, Mentor Graphics

Complexity in processors and systems leads to complexity in software, especially with a vast open source entity like Linux. The Yocto Project helps developers navigate the path through complexity, hardware compatibility, source dependencies and open source license issues.

The Yocto Project: Challenges and Opportunities

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools, and methods to help developers create custom Linux-based systems.

Source Mirrors

UserCon�guration

Metedata(.bb + patches)

Machine BSPCon�guration

PolicyCon�guration

SourceFetching

Upstream sources

Metadata Inputs

Build System

PatchApplication

Con�gCompileAutoconf

etc

.debgeneration

.rpmgeneration

.ipkgeneration

Imagegeneration

ADEgeneration

OutputAnalysis for

PackageSplitting plus

PackageRelationships

QATests

Package Feeds

UpstreamProject

Releases

LocalProjects

SCMs(optional)

ImagesApplication

DevelopmentEnvironment

Output Packages

Process Steps (tasks)

Output Image Data

FIGURE 1

source projects, the level of commercial participation within the relatively young Yocto Project is nearly unprecedented. This can be seen as a testament to the util-ity of the Yocto Project. Some of the com-mercial products that have earned Yocto Project compatibility are currently listed on the Yocto Project website.

Why Such Rapid Success? A Technical Overview

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides tem-plates, tools and methods to help devel-opers create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products—regardless of the hardware architecture. The Yocto Project provides a solid foundation upon which to build customized embedded Linux plat-forms. This type of collaboration brings to-gether not only member and participating organizations, but also a large collection of open source projects that can be leveraged to build custom embedded solutions.

The Yocto Project integrates several open source projects to create a framework for building custom embedded Linux distri-butions. The foundation of this framework is called Poky, which is composed of tech-nology from two upstream projects: Open-

TECHNOLOGY INSYSTEMSThe Yocto Project Speeds Platform Support


TECH IN SYSTEMS


Embedded and the BitBake build engine. The OpenEmbedded project hosts a large collection of build instructions, a subset of which forms the oe-core layer within Poky. BitBake is the build engine responsible for interpreting the build instructions, collec-tively called metadata, contained within Poky’s oe-core and meta-yocto layers.

Poky is both a build system and a ref-erence embedded Linux distribution. Fig-ure 2 illustrates the elements that make up Poky. Additional layers of metadata can be stacked on top of Poky including BSP layers, middleware software layers and customer-provided application layers. It’s worth noting that the Yocto Project docu-mentation found within the Poky collection is surprisingly very good, given that open source software has a reputation for poor or non-existent documentation.

The most common type of metadata is a recipe. A recipe can be thought of as a set of instructions for building a software package, especially within a cross-devel-opment environment, targeting a specific embedded hardware platform on a particu-lar architecture (Figure 3). A recipe is a file containing build instructions (metadata) or more frequently a set of files in a simi-lar fashion to a C source file that specifies #include files. The Yocto Project con-tains recipes for many hundreds of soft-ware packages that facilitate building these packages in a cross-development environ-ment.

In addition to software packages, the Yocto Project also contains recipes for building the Linux kernel for a variety of

common reference boards such as the Bea-gleboard series based on processors from Texas Instruments, and the Sabre series based on processors from Freescale Semi-conductor. It also has recipes for building a cross-toolchain and standard runtime li-brary (C/C++), although most commercial OS vendors that market a product based on the Yocto Project ship with a commercial cross-toolchain, pre-integrated with a base-line Yocto Project reference distribution and build system.

Designing with Embedded Linux: Challenges

Saying that developing an embedded Linux distribution is non-trivial is like say-ing one hundred million lines of code is a lot. Of course it is! Software complexity is spiraling rapidly due in part to the advances in hardware platforms and system-on-chip (SoC) processors. Many of today’s embed-ded devices are targeted at the “Internet of Things” and contain SoCs with integrated peripherals such as advanced graphics en-gines supporting OpenGL/ES, SD/MMC and Flash storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Eth-ernet, USB host and device interfaces, and often contain hardware accelerated video and audio codec engines.

Building embedded Linux systems involves integrating hundreds of disparate software packages from scores of open source and commercial software reposito-ries scattered around the globe. Moreover, a custom hardware platform requires a com-patible Linux kernel ported to that specific hardware platform, and most likely a boot-

The various elements that comprise Poky.

Reference BSPs

Bitb

ake

Docs

oe-core

meta-yocto

scripts

FIGURE 2

loader also customized to the hardware. A cross-toolchain tuned and optimized for a given architecture is also required.

Package version selection can be the most challenging aspects of integrating many unique and unrelated software pack-ages. Indeed, many if not most of these software packages are developed and maintained by disconnected communi-ties, and therefore are released with inde-pendent and often unpredictable cadences. Software packages that depend on other underlying software packages (for exam-ple, applications that depend on underlying system libraries) must be version matched for correct operation. While most develop-ers would never break backward compati-bility intentionally, incompatibilities occur with striking regularity between “related” packages.

Such incompatibilities are most evi-dent in software packages that contain many dependencies, such as graphical and user-interface programs. These often have long dependency chains, requiring font libraries, widget libraries, device librar-ies (e.g., USB) and other system libraries such as network utilities and system con-figuration utilities. Consider mplayer for example, an open source media player. The Yocto Project build instructions for mplayer enumerates 21 dependencies (mostly libraries) required to build many of these libraries, which have dependen-cies themselves. All of these libraries and their dependencies must be tested and confirmed to work together, even though they are largely developed independently, on different release cadences and without formal cooperation.

Developers and the organizations they work for need to be aware of open source licensing issues. This is another significant challenge for manufacturers of embed-ded Linux devices. A typical embedded Linux distribution contains upward of one hundred or more different open source li-censes. Take a look at an Android or other smartphone for an example of the hundreds of pages of license text found on these de-vices. Some organizations have policies preventing the deployment of certain open source license types, and this also presents a challenge. The Yocto Project has tools


TECH IN SYSTEMS


and facilities to help manage the legal chal-lenge of deploying open source software.

What’s NewProbably the most visible addition to

the Yocto Project in the last six months has come in the form of additional mem-ber companies and project participants. Freescale Semiconductor joined as a gold level member. LG, Dell, and Renesas and OS Systems also joined as silver members. Six new entities registered as Yocto Proj-ect Participants in the last few months. A dozen new products or open source proj-ects have registered and received approval by the Yocto Project Advisory Board in the last year. These include a GENIVI base-line, providing a reference foundation for an automotive Linux platform, as well as Linux products from Enea, Wind River, Intel and Mentor Graphics, among others. The Yocto Project website maintains a list of members, participants and products reg-istered under the Yocto Project branding program.

Toaster: One of the most interesting new technical features of the Yocto Proj-ect is the “Toaster” appliance. Toaster was due out with Yocto Project 1.6 in April of 2014. Toaster provides the developer with Web-based viewing tools to look deeply into the build. Using Toaster, one can dis-cover why packages were built, examine dependency chains and list the packages in a given image. One of the most useful fea-tures of Toaster is the ability to view each package’s metadata, and discover what files were responsible for modifying each meta-

data variable. Prior to Toaster, this was a tedious chore.

Hob: While not exactly new, Hob con-tinues to attract developer attention within the Yocto Project. Hob is a graphical user interface for BitBake. Hob is most useful for a newbie to the Yocto Project to be able to make rudimentary changes and modi-fications to the project configuration. For example, Hob can be used to select what image type to build (graphical versus non-graphical, for example) and to select what BSP to build. Hob can also be used to add functionality to the base image. For exam-ple, using Hob, one can easily add software packages to the file system image. Hob has many configuration menus that allow the developer to select from a list of items, when it may not be apparent to the newbie what the choices are.

The Yocto Project has achieved trac-tion in the industry because it enables a wide selection of software to be easily assembled into a coherent system. It will continue to be an important source of tech-nology to both do-it-yourselfers as well as commercial vendors of hardware, software, operating systems and tools.

Mentor Graphics Wilsonville, OR (800) 547-3000 www.mentor.com

Yocto Project www.yoctoproject.com

busybox Metadataglibc

sysvinit

inetutils

mtdutils

BitBake

FIGURE 3

Simplified Yocto Project build.

Yocto Project Compliance Program

The Yocto Project is governed by an Advisory Board (AB) made up of representatives from each of the mem-ber companies. One of the first tasks the AB set out to do was to define a branding program and rules for use of the Yocto Project logo and the Yocto Project Com-patible and Participant badges.

“Yocto Project Participant” is ap-propriate for organizations that visibly use and support the Yocto Project. Par-ticipant status is open to non-profit or-ganizations including other open source projects, and small companies up to eighty employees, as well as any organi-zation currently serving as a Yocto Proj-ect member organization.

“Yocto Project Compatible” is ap-propriate for products (commercial or non-commercial), BSPs and other Yocto-compatible layers, and related open-source projects. These components must be maintained and submitted by an open source project, non-profit organization, or Yocto Project member organization.

The main difference between these two designations encompasses what is being registered—organizations are Par-ticipants, while products and software components are Compatible. For exam-ple, a company may register itself as a Participant and then register appropriate products as Compatible.


For a number of years, Embedded Market Forecasters’ surveys have reported that acquisition cost and

source code availability are main factors when choosing an OS for embedded sys-tems. Hence, it is not surprising that Linux is the most widely used OS in embedded devices. Through source code access and collaboration, product developers have the best opportunity to achieve great pro-ductivity as well as software quality, thus focusing on creating highly differentiated and competitive products.

However, operating systems struggle to keep up with exponentially complex computer architectures. For the last de-cade, we have been facing a continuously increasing number of available CPUs based on MIPS, x86, PowerPC and ARM architectures, with respective 8-, 12-, 32- and 64-bit processor solutions. In addition to that, there is a high degree of flexibility that is required to deal with either con-strained or purposely optimized embed-ded systems. And all of this together with the lack of standardization leaves em-bedded Linux developers with over 200 different Linux distributions to choose from with the added complexity of cor-responding kernel versions, build systems and tools. Distributions focused on spe-cific purposes lack the flexibility required to accomplish target footprint sizes and

functionality needs, often requiring devel-opers to manually “hack” existing distri-butions, or even roll their own. The result is increasingly complex Linux operating systems that became a nightmare to scale, port and maintain.

If this “embedded meal” does not seem succulent enough, add a Greek salad of software licenses (e.g., Google’s Linux-based mobile OS involves over twenty different licenses) with the correspond-ing license compliance issues and let your legal department deal with it. Visualize a

confused team of platform developers sit-ting in a skyscraper’s top floor glass office discussing license incompatibilities with a group of lawyers. These involve “con-tamination” (as they refer to the copyleft effect), digital rights management risks, patent retaliation and other license com-pliance matters, as if they were speaking completely different languages.

All these issues represent a signifi-cant risk in getting an embedded solution to market, and the way to mitigate them is standardization. But this is nothing new.

by Jon Aldama, Enea

The Yocto Project—Portability, Compatibility, Support

FIGURE 1

The Yocto Project development environment.

TECHNOLOGY INSYSTEMSThe Yocto Project Speeds Platform Support

Adoption of the Yocto Project is the forward looking way to develop embedded Linux-based systems.


TECH IN SYSTEMS


There have been a number of efforts to standardize embedded Linux since 1999, starting with the creation of the Embedded Linux Consortium. ELC’s efforts focused on a platform specification meant to define application programming environments for Linux-based embedded systems with a sound footing in industry-standard be-havior. This work, known as ELCPS, was eventually transferred to the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in 2005, an organization that two years later would merge with the Free Standards Group and become the Linux Foundation. This last one is well known for being the biggest non-profit organization that supports the kernel development community, and for employing Linus Torvalds himself.

The Linux Foundation promotes, pro-tects and standardizes Linux. And in order to spread collaborative Linux development to new fields, it also hosts a number of other projects. In 2010, as an attempt to reach out to the embedded world, the Linux Founda-tion kick-started the Yocto Project, which, after aligning itself with the OpenEmbed-ded community a year later, became what it is today: a collaborative universal start-ing point for creating custom Linux distri-butions.

The Yocto Project is basically an um-brella project where the open source com-munity and industry come together to col-laborate on a set of tools and best practices for developing custom Linux distributions for just about any embedded system out there. See the “Cooking Analogy” box on page 26. In practice, one just chooses a CPU architecture (supported are x86, Pow-erPC, ARM and MIPS), selects footprint size and builds a working Linux system, in little time. The development environment (Figure 1) provides a validated set of soft-ware applications and libraries that let you add and remove thousands of components to get exactly the features you needed. Ad-ditionally, it provides a set of custom ap-plication development tools specific to your cross-environment (including emulated ones), as well as integration with Eclipse plug-ins for debugging, profiling and even features like power consumption analysis.

It’s important to understand that Yocto is not an embedded Linux distribution; it helps you create your own. It does that by enabling a high degree of flexibility and

customization while avoiding distribution-specific software policies that could ulti-mately interfere with product development. And this is particularly important when you are building Linux-based embedded products, since it is critical to have full control over the software running on your device.

The Yocto Project is the next step for embedded Linux. The Linux open source model has revolutionized the world. But now with Linux’ increasing dominance in the commercial world, it is becoming less about the open source model and more about the ability to quickly build, config-ure and rapidly deploy Linux. That’s why adopting the Yocto Project holds many benefits for companies. The most important one is being able to reuse your development efforts regardless of the hardware device you are working with. Yocto’s Board Sup-port Package (BSP) layer maintains a high level of independence from the underlying architecture. This means that rebuilding your software stack across a wide range of software platforms is often as easy as changing one line in a configuration file. One can only guess at how much time and money this saves from organizations that need to port a solution to a new board.

The next benefit is particularly inter-esting for your company’s legal depart-ment. The Yocto Project has some skilled developers with legal understanding—the so called License Infrastructure Interest Group. This group works on making a license-aware build system, making it possible to include or remove software components based on specific license groups and the cor-responding restric-tion levels (potential license propagation, etc.). It helps identify license incompat-ibilities such as the fact that the second version of the GNU Public License and the Apache License 2.0 are incompatible. It can even gener-

ate SPDX reports, which are basically a standardized way to make Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) inventories. So, if you are a lawyer working at a patent depart-ment of a company, and you have a couple of software licenses that keep you awake at night, you can just give a call to your in-tegrator and share your particular license black list, so that packages released under the undesired licenses are not included in the resulting distribution.

The Yocto Project involves hundreds of developers around the world with a wide variety of members from huge corporations to small companies, and even individuals. Yocto has support from silicon vendors such as Intel, Freescale, Texas Instruments and Renesas as well as software operating system vendors such as Enea, Wind River, MontaVista and Mentor Graphics. The list goes on. Companies that normally com-pete with each other come together and cooperate in a symbiotic manner, helping make the project compatible with almost all popular processors available for embed-ded designs. But do not forget the fact that the Yocto Project is hosted by the Linux Foundation, which means that it remains independent from any particular company or vendor.

There is no doubt that the Yocto Proj-ect has improved and continues to improve platform development a great deal. Not surprisingly, a recent report from the Linux Foundation shows that collaborative prac-

FIGURE 2

Enea Linux 4.0 product offering.


TECH IN SYSTEMS


tices are increasing exponentially. Open source projects are unquestionably paving the future for computing. The only weak-ness of the open source model is the lack of defined support. While software commu-nities are often replete with helpful folks, the support provided is still on a best effort basis. This might not be good enough for companies dealing with tight production schedules or angry customers. The good news is that when you make a Yocto-based solution, it automatically shares the frame-work with OSV members that provide commercial distributions from the project. And thanks to the project’s high degree of portability, commercial support is within arm’s reach without forcing you to adapt to a completely different build system. The only thing you need to do is choose the OSV profile that is best suited for your solution.

The Swedish company, Enea, whose operating systems have dealt with the tele-com industry for over 40 years, is a sup-porting member of the Yocto Project. Its

commercial distribution, Enea Linux 4.0 (Figure 2), is the result of its involvement and collaboration, and is the key for pro-viding commercial support. Enea Linux targets the networking and communication market segment and focuses on and has contributed to such real-time extensions as PREEMPT_RT, core isolation techniques and the so-called NOHZ patch. A recent contribution from Enea aims at taking the project one step further toward car-rier grade level. The goal is to unify ef-forts in order to collaboratively provide Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) compliance for Yocto-based distributions. CGL is a set of specifications that detail standards of availability (“five-nines,” “six-nines”), scalability, manageability and service re-sponse characteristics for use within the telecommunications industry.

Enea Phoenix, AZ (480) 753-9200 www.enea.com

YOCTO’S COOKING ANALOGY

The Yocto Project uses a cook-ing analogy to refer to some of its elements. • BitBake: This is a make-like

build tool that is one of the main OpenEmbedded contribu-tions to the project.

• Recipes: A fundamental part of BitBake as they define each individual piece of software to be built.

• Hob: It is a graphical user inter-face for the build system. It’s a British word for a cook top.

• Toaster: Previously known as

Web Hob, it is a Web-based in-terface to the build system.

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by Gerd Lammers, Real-Time Systems


Virtualization solutions for real-time and embedded applications are available now, and there are multiple implementations and approaches available to choose from. But what are the right questions to ask and the things to consider? It is important to look at the different approaches and understand some of the key attributes that an embedded, real-time hypervisor should possess.

Understanding Hypervisors and System Consolidation

I t is amazing just how long it takes sometimes for new technology to become mature enough so it can be

applied successfully without too many unwanted side effects. For hypervisor technology on Intel x86 platforms, this is definitely something that can be said. In this case, engineers did not adopt them just because of a lack of trust in consoli-dated systems running on a single hard-ware. Simply said, the different pieces of technology needed to build secure and deterministic real-time hypervisors were just not there a decade ago. Over the last few years this has changed. Low-power multicore processors are state of the art, and hardware assisted virtualization tech-nology (e.g., Intel VT) now allows the makers of hypervisors to build secure, high-performance virtualization prod-ucts. And, as always, there are tradeoffs, and no “one size fits all” solution when it comes to hypervisors. While their gener-

al use is for the consolidation of multiple cores into a single system (Figure 1), the specific selection depends on the particu-lar requirements and application. Here we examine hypervisors used in products for industrial automation but which may also be applicable to other fields where hard real-time performance and security are essential.

When choosing a hypervisor for an embedded application with real-time re-quirements, there are a number of impor-tant things to consider, for example: the “Type” of hypervisor used, security as-pects, real-time performance, scalability, portability and ease of use.

First of all, there are several differ-ent types of hypervisors available. The so-called “host-based” hypervisor is implemented as an application on top of a host operating system like Windows or Linux. Host-based hypervisors not only depend on the host operating system to

be up and running, but scheduling and ac-cess to hardware devices is also provided by the host operating system, adding a non-deterministic layer between the guest operating system and hardware. Thus it is only by default that they provide virtual or emulated devices for the guests to work with because all the real, physical devices are already serviced by the host operating system installed on the hardware. These restrictions obviously rule out real-time applications (Figure 2).

On the other hand, a “bare metal” hy-pervisor is a hypervisor that runs directly on the hardware with no host operating system getting in the way (Figure 3). This is the only way to provide determinism and direct hardware access with unmodi-fied drivers to an OS. It is pretty clear that while a “host-based” hypervisor is prob-ably great for IT or Server Virtualization, it is not suitable for hard real-time, robust applications in an industrial controller or medical device.

When considering “bare-metal” hy-pervisors, there are again different imple-mentations. There are bare-metal hyper-visors that use virtualization supported in hardware monitoring, as with Intel VT, and that potentially limit guest operating system access to protected resources like memory or devices of other guests run-ning in parallel. This approach of course means that the hypervisor must occasion-ally “step in” to modify or block access to the hardware, which leads to jitter in the system running on top, therefore causing a loss of determinism.

FIGURE 1

The purpose of a hypervisor is “system consolidation” and coordination of multiple CPUs on a single die.

Hypervisors and Virtualization

TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT




Real Time and/or Security At the other end of the spectrum, there are solutions in which the operating systems are configured or patched to limit access to only a portion of the underlying hardware, allowing a guest to run alongside a second operating system, which then is virtualized the same way. The big benefit of this approach is that it eliminates any and all virtualization overhead because the operating systems run directly on their assigned portion of the hardware without a hypervisor getting between them. As a consequence of this type of solution, however, there is no provision for security and no hypervisor monitoring, limiting or preventing an operating system from accessing resources owned by different guests. In a time where security plays an ever more important role, this might not always be the best choice; direct, “unmonitored” hardware access should probably not be given to operating systems that are targeted by malware or hackers, such as Microsoft Windows, the most commonly used operating system for human machine interfaces (HMIs). On the other hand, when it comes to real-time operating systems (RTOS), it might be very advantageous for best performance if both virtualization overhead and jitter can be eliminated. Like everything else, it is a trade-off. An ideal hypervisor would provide choices between “hardware -monitored” hardware separation, secure execution of guest operating systems, or the

configuration of a guest operating system executing in a mode for “best-possible real-time performance.”

The question of security has become more and more important over the last few years. To satisfy basic security con-cerns, operating systems should execute completely independent of each other, uti-lizing hardware separation with Intel VT. But security starts the moment the hard-ware is turned on. A perfect hypervisor for industrial automation would support a full “chain of trust,” starting with the ini-tial execution of the BIOS, the boot loader and then the hypervisor. The hypervisor should provide end-to-end security in the startup phase, making sure that ev-erything that is loaded, including its own configuration, is signed and unmodified before and during the boot process. Then, at runtime, the hypervisor would still have to manage access rights to programming interfaces (APIs) and shared memory sec-tions or any other intersystem communi-cation or guest operating system control functionality.

Getting to Real TimeNext on the list of things to consider

is real-time performance and determin-ism of an RTOS running as a guest op-erating system on a hypervisor. Because this is one of the most challenging hyper-visor requirements in industrial applica-tions for products like motion controllers, it is therefore right at the top of the list of criteria when hypervisors are evaluated. In hypervisor design there are different things that need to be done properly when hard real-time behavior is of vital impor-tance. Even when going with a bare-metal hypervisor design, there is no guarantee for real-time performance, and quite a few things must be taken into consider-ation when developing a hypervisor with hard real-time deterministic behavior. Among the first things to be implemented, but only after thinking them through carefully, are interrupt handling for and scheduling of guest operating systems. Fortunately, on x86 hardware used for hy-pervisor designs or system consolidation, the days of single-core processors lie in the past. Dual-Core, Quad-Core or even larger processors can be used nowadays, and these new chips are often cheaper and

require less power than a single core Pen-tium did only a few years ago.

Multicore processors permit each guest operating system to “own” one or more CPUs exclusively, which eliminates the need for a hypervisor to schedule op-erating systems. In addition, each guest can execute without interruption just as if it had been deployed on its own dedicated hardware board (Figure 4).

Interrupt handling can also be a prob-lem when implementing applications with hard real-time constraints. If interrupts must first be captured by a hypervisor be-fore they can be passed to the target guest operating systems, this would clearly in-crease interrupt-latency times and jeopar-dize determinism, even more if this hap-pens at high frequency. The best real-time performance can therefore be achieved if interrupts never have to go through soft-ware but if the hypervisor uses the capa-bility in the Intel architecture (no matter if standard laptop or small embedded board) to route interrupts directly in hardware to the CPU(s). In this fashion, just like on native systems, target guest operating sys-tems execute without first making a detour through software. Even after satisfying all of the above criteria—a hypervisor that runs directly on the hardware, provides security and doesn’t interfere with RTOS scheduling or interrupt latencies—there are still more aspects to consider.

On an Intel x86-board, there are more things to be aware of. Intel put in more

FIGURE 2

A “host-based” hypervisor is implemented on top of a host operating system running on the physical hardware.

FIGURE 3

A “bare-metal” hypervisor runs directly on the hardware and offers virtual or real hardware interfaces to the guest operating systems.


TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYED


and more clever features for reducing pro-cessors’ power consumption by reducing CPU voltage or speed or if needed gaining additional computing power by overclock-ing one CPU while slowing down a second CPU. This is of course completely coun-terproductive for an RTOS running on that second core. A hypervisor used in hard real-time applications has to take all of this into consideration and be able to block access to features like Turbo Boost, power manage-ment or other functions that could poten-tially have a negative system-wide impact.

And then there are certain other re-sources that require protection—like the last level cache of a processor, or the bus to access the main memory of the system, which is shared between guest operating systems. If, as in typical industrial auto-mation applications, a hypervisor is run using Microsoft Windows as a graphi-cal user interface and an RTOS in paral-lel—when accessing shared resources, i.e., the memory bus or last level cache—the RTOS should always have priority over Windows. Whenever a conflict of re-sources occurs in a particular system, a hypervisor should always be able to prior-itize the RTOS over the GPOS (Figure 5).

Reliable CommunicationAfter having reviewed the security

and real-time aspects of hypervisor de-sign, we come to a short but very essential topic, namely communication. If multiple operating systems are deployed with great separation, how are they to communicate with one another? Before the trend to con-solidate systems, an Ethernet was usually used for intersystem communication. This means that a hypervisor should make con-

solidation quick and easy by providing a virtual network for operating systems to communicate with each other. Such a net-work could also be used, for example, to provide remote display functionality and access network drives or a physical net-work. Communication via shared mem-ory, interrupt-based event system and time synchronization between guests should of course be available as well.

Although we already discussed secu-rity, hard real-time performance and in-tersystem communication, we should now briefly consider the equally important questions of usability, portability, scal-ability and flexibility. Unlike consumer products, which are often stable over their life-cycles, industrial automation systems are generally longer-lived. Constantly driven forward by demands for better per-formance and efficiency, industrial sys-tems must often be upgraded within a few years of initial product deployment.

Since the technology on which indus-trial systems are based advances so rap-idly, it is also likely that such systems will have to be re-hosted on a new industrial PC, probably equipped with next-genera-tion processors. If such a system depends on hypervisor technology for its proper functioning, the underlying hypervisor must be correspondingly upgradeable.

Therefore, the ideal hypervisor will run on many different platforms, from Atom to Xeon, from dual- to many-core processors and from small embedded modules to server boards. It will provide developers with hassle-free, out-of-the box experiences without help from spe-cialists. The hypervisor that meets all these requirements by design will accel-erate time-to-market while keeping devel-opment and maintenance costs in check. In a time where multicore is everywhere, embedded hypervisors are here for good. But not every hypervisor is good for every application.

Real-Time Systems Ravensburg, Germany +49 (0)751 359 558-0 www.real-time-systems.com

FIGURE 4

Partitioning of Cores. Example of Quad-Core configured with a Dual Core for Windows and a single core each for two RTOSs.

FIGURE 4

CPUs each with L1 and L2 caches and a shared L3 cache, and a GPOS and RTOS illustrating shared cache topology.

• Learn how embedded systems are evolving to become more connected, pervasive, distributed, and intelligent

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used so loosely that the technical issues behind specific “embedded virtualiza-tion” implementations are often not fully appreciated. Many people think that the only solution is to use a hypervisor, but this type of virtualization comes at a cost. And variations within hypervisor usage models cause OEM product developers to trade off adaptability and costs.

Machine builders face some of the trickiest problems. The desire to con-solidate workloads to add features and minimize costs is bringing together dis-crete system elements. Some of these (specifically Windows-based HMIs) have evolved to be PC-based and are being combined with real-time controllers per-forming special functions (e.g., motion-control subsystems) along with the need for networking capabilities (machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud) added in. The PC-compatible portion is the most cost-driven, and engineers who design and maintain these supervisory systems are accustomed to dealing with a relentless flow of hardware and software changes. Separately, the real-time portion, closest to where the real work is getting done, comes from a world that is both resistant to change and risk-averse. Consolidating these environments requires embedded virtualization, the hosting of heteroge-neous operating system environments—both real-time and non-real-time—on the same platform.

Consolidation of various processing workloads using partitioned multi-core PC CPUs has been the promise

of embedded virtualization for over a de-cade. There is a continuum of initiatives, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M), which in-volves merging different application types

onto the same platform. The initiative’s primary value proposition is the opportu-nity to reduce system costs while enhanc-ing the number and type of services sup-ported.

The technologies are in fact prom-ising, but the devil is in the details, as they say. The term “virtualization” gets

TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTHypervisors and Virtualization

Choose Your Embedded Virtualization Solution WiselyUsing virtualization to consolidate various types of functions on multicore platforms is becoming increasingly popular. When evaluating virtualization approaches, however, the desire to employ the newest technologies needs to be traded off with the value of preserving elements of old designs.

by Kim Hartman, TenAsys

FIGURE 1

The term virtualization applies to a wide range of implementations. Embedded virtualization is applied to only those solutions that preserve determinism.




Critical Success FactorsAs experienced developers of embed-

ded systems are well aware, there are some key trade-offs among the critical factors leading to success of a new design effort. The challenge of achieving success is in deliver-ing the existing mission-critical services without missing market window timing or overspending on the solution. Significant in-vestments in building equity in market posi-tion and intellectual property value for ex-isting products must be carefully protected. Though it may be tempting to start with the latest tools, experienced project leaders know that this can easily inject delays into the project and risk not meeting core market requirements altogether. A more pragmatic strategy is to reuse as much of an existing application as possible, enhancing the sys-tem with services to enable new connectiv-ity and interoperability features.

Obviously, most embedded designs in-volve a merging of old and new design ele-ments. But the problem of providing reliable support for legacy content has caused many OEMs to delay embracing the compelling use models of modern multicore processors. In this regard, different embedded virtual-ization approaches provide different levels of support for multicore processing and varying levels of complexity in achieving the prime objective of consolidation.

Embedded Virtualization Is About More Than Just Hypervisors

There exists a continuum of tech-nologies that pro-vide the means to run multiple operat-ing systems on the same platform. For embedded virtual-ization we are inter-ested in comparing and contrasting the range of approaches, which on the one hand yield the high-est real-time perfor-mance and on the other hand are the

most versatile. Consider the chart in Figure 1. At the

far end of the spectrum are Type 2 hosted hypervisors and full virtual machine manager (VMM) solutions. These were designed for and are generally applied to IT-type problems (e.g., VirtualBox and VMWare), where deterministic execu-tion in the guest operating environment is a non-factor, and therefore these systems don’t qualify as supporting embedded vir-tualization.

Simply moving into the range of Type 1, bare metal hypervisors do not yet guarantee sup-port for determinism (as with KVM and Hyper-V). Similar to hosted and full VMMs, they pro-vide a complete PC environment, mak-ing them very easy to use, but the lack of real-time respon-siveness disqualifies them for use in de-terministic embed-ded applications.

Moving along the continuum brings us to determinis-

FIGURE 2

TenAsys’ Hard Real-time Hypervisor (HaRTH) technology (configured as eVM for Windows). Explicit hardware partitioning is used to enable the CPUs to work autonomously, independent of one another.

tic Type 1 hypervisors, which can sup-port real-time processing. There are two classes of these. The first uses the famil-iar Type 1 hypervisor approach, but also provides the needed guest-to-core affinity, enhanced with virtualized services only where absolutely needed. This approach ensures the guest retains its deterministic and real-time capabilities and provides the greatest versatility in supporting leg-acy RTOS, general or proprietary OSs, all without need for modification. TenAsys’ HaRTH, a hard real-time hypervisor tech-nology running inside the company’s IN-time RTOS, is an example of this. When HaRTH is configured to support hosting a single guest alongside Windows, it results in a product that TenAsys calls eVM for Windows (Figure 2).

The other class of deterministic Type 1 hypervisor is supported by most other embedded hypervisor vendors. Figure 3 is a diagram commonly used to depict such an approach. While also providing for partitioning services and core affin-ity, members of this class are built to sup-port a more narrow set of guests. This is primarily due to the requirement that the guest must cooperate directly with the hypervisor it is running on. Para-virtual-ization techniques are often used to sim-plify the services a host hypervisor must provide by relying upon the guest to use proprietary para-API hooks. This may be an effective way to improve some type of

FIGURE 3

A Hypervisor can use para-virtualization to enable the use of multiple heterogeneous OSs in a system.



guest operations, but it limits the adapt-ability of the hypervisor and leads to the use of modified, and most often, propri-etary RTOS and GPOS guests.

Regardless of the approach of deter-ministic Type 1 hypervisors, they can all support time-critical applications. And when PC chipset services (e.g. Intel VT-d) are not available, developers of guest-based applications will likely have to modify the drivers of any bus mastering devices to compensate for a lack of physi-cal address translation. This makes selec-tion of the hardware platform a bit more complicated as there is as yet no estab-lished embedded virtualization specifica-tion for Intel-based PCs.

Explicit Hardware PartitioningAs with any deeply embedded de-

vice, the highest performance is always obtained through explicit hardware parti-tioning. In a Windows-based system, this process is done by modification of the base RTOS to work in cooperation with the Windows environment on the same platform. Partitioning is done explicitly with the help of standard Windows APIs. Both run natively, right on the associated CPUs (Figure 4). Neither operating sys-tem is affected by virtualization, as there is no hypervisor to take context away. As

Windows runs natively, there is no violat-ing the Microsoft licensing restrictions of running embedded versions (e.g. WES7) on a virtualized platform.

Explicit hardware partitioning, intro-duced in 1997, is the longest time-tested

FIGURE 5

A mixed hybrid system. Multiple HaRTH instances could be used, hosting multiple copies of Linux (e.g., a Windows HMI could be replaced with one hosted on Linux).

FIGURE 4

Explicit hardware partitioning of OS environments with Microsoft Windows and INtime on a 4-core Intel processor.

solution in the market. Developing ap-plications for TenAsys’ INtime for Win-dows RTOS features the use of a native or WIN32-like API and the familiar Micro-soft Visual Studio line of IDE products. This design environment in itself saves substantial costs and time in bringing consolidated solutions to market.

Hybrid approaches can lead to inter-esting solutions. Consider running a deter-ministic Type 1 hypervisor on a dedicated core next to Windows. This combination of explicit hardware partitioning and hy-pervisors creates a unique characteristic similar to a hosted Type 1 solution, but features isolation (partitioned CPUs) and real-time functionality.

Other non-real-time configurations with Linux on the same platform can yield some interesting solutions. Consider running a hardened Linux-based firewall /VPN appliance on its own core next to Windows (Figure 5). Assigning the sys-tem Ethernet to Linux and connecting to Windows using a shared memory based on virtual LAN produces a network-hardened platform without any additional hardware!



So Which Virtualization Solution Do You Choose?

Deciding which virtualization solu-tion to choose depends, of course, on sev-eral factors. These include how extensible your system needs to be in terms of per-formance, functionality and ease of use, and how much legacy content you want to preserve. Bringing your legacy application to a consolidated platform along with new workloads could mean extensive porting costs to different OSs where a para-virtu-alized solution is used, or it could be done with legacy software stacks. When port-ing an application is an acceptable option, an explicit hardware partitioned solution supporting both Windows and real-time will have the best overall performance and can save substantial costs with reuse of familiar Visual Studio toolsets and in-tegrated I/O stacks.

Conversely, with IoT increasingly becoming a reality, you may want to take advantage of best-in-class software from multiple, as in more than two, different OS environments. In that case, a solution in-volving a hypervisor may be optimal. IoT systems can drive a drastic shift in design objectives, and can intensify the chal-lenges of balancing the needs of deeply embedded systems with the richness of the Internet environment. Major among these are the need to provide security and

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The key to selecting which approach is best for your application is planning. Examine your requirements and pay par-ticular attention to valued legacy IP. Look at the needs in the kind of processing your customers will want to do, and also the technology trends in the individual ele-ments of your solution. For example, up-dating embedded systems not only to be Internet aware, but also to couple with Internet-based software resources, is mo-tivating engineers to plan for maximum flexibility and extensibility in their de-signs. Deciding on a particular para-virtu-alized solution could restrict their design’s ability to evolve. New software is continu-ously being developed that OEMs may want to take advantage of economically in future product versions, and designers want to be able to easily take advantage of processors with an increasing number of cores.

TenAsys Beaverton, OR (503) 748-4720 www.tenasys.com

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Industrial Automation

ger the bottleneck of the control concept. Distributed I/Os are recorded faster than is possible with most local I/O interfaces.

Breaking the BottlenecksIn modern systems, the master con-

troller has now become the bottleneck of performance. We require a high capac-ity of calculation in order to process with

The extremely high performance of modern real-time industrial Ethernet, such as the EtherCAT technology, enables control concepts that could not be realized with classic fieldbus systems. With Ether-CAT, a communication technology is available that matches the superior com-puting capacity of modern Industrial PCs. The result is that the bus system is no lon-

Modern automation systems need to integrate several distinct prod-ucts: the PLC and I/Os, the Mo-

tion controller, the HMI for human ma-chine interface, communication gateways and router for Internet access. However, technology has not yet allowed a better integration of these devices. The main is-sues for better integration are related to the physical dimensions of the electronic board’s power consumption, the presence of several non-uniform connectivity stan-dards and the low bandwidth of the bus systems.

It is still very common in industrial automation installation to find differ-ent communication gateway devices that reduce the overall performance and the system reliability but which are needed to create bridges for different fieldbuses. For the last decade the bottleneck of the tradi-tional concept was in the low performance and high latency of the bus systems.

Recently, the use of industrial Ether-net and the strong diffusion of the stan-dard for connecting different devices have made it possible to create greater integra-tion and uniformity of the interfaces be-tween the different devices.

by Claudio Ambra, Exor International

The advance of integration and the standardization of system interfaces significantly increases the performance and efficiency of industrial control systems. The next step is the integration of control and interface functions onto a single die that unites CPU with FPGA.

Integrated HMI, Control and Communication Platform for Industrial Automation

FIGURE 1

A typical industrial automation application with industrial real-time Ethernet connection and the most important components.


INDUSTRY WATCH


cycle times of less than 1 millisecond for PLCs and motion cycle machines, and the controller should ensure a very precise network-wide time base with a low jitter.

If we add to the picture the need to send/receive several packets from other devices such as the operator interfaces, Internet gateway (CAN bus, legacy serial ports), devices that are connected though a different fieldbus, or remote clients, the problem becomes very complex and the architecture of single master CPU suffers (Figure 1).

The remote client in the same figure must be able to access the real-time da-tabase of the main controller in order to locally or remotely view the different tags of the application, and to enable access in reading and writing to the system settings, PLC configuration (recipes), trends data upload/download, Web Interface, alarms and events management.

All these accesses to the application server and the PLC controller increase the number of interrupts from the differ-ent industrial controllers, creating latency problems for the real-time system. In these control applications that are based on in-dustrial Ethernet, it is also necessary to completely decouple the real-time fieldbus Ethernet from the non-real-time Ethernet connection (Figure 2).

One possible solution to this prob-lem is to use powerful Industrial PCs with Core i5 and i7 CPUs and up to four cores combined. While the PC architecture is a very high-performance platform, it is cur-rently not flexible enough to integrate the

FIGURE 2

The non-real-time Ethernet connections to HMI, mobile device, etc., are separated from the real-time industrial Ethernet.

different communication standards used in industrial automation. In addition, the PC with an i7 CPU core is not a platform with low enough power consumption, and its reliability for industrial control is not optimal.

Another interesting solution would be to integrate the various components that are installed inside the cabinet into an industrial single platform (all-in-one solu-tion) in order to reduce the wiring and in-crease the performance of the bus system interfaces (Figure 3). This also improves the interfacing of the various hardware and software modules that are necessary for the automation of the process.

Bringing It to a Single DieThe ideal industrial automation plat-

form should have a high-performance mul-tiprocessor architecture that solves the prob-lem at the architectural level of connection between different CPU boards/modules and integrates into a single component. A key at-tribute of convergence is integration of and access to a broad range of control, connec-tivity and HMI functionalities, made prac-tical by Moore’s Law and from embedded technology.

Today, Moore’s Law has proven an all-important influence on advanced automa-tion technologies for legacy PLC, HMI, I/O, CNC safety and motion technologies. This has resulted in the ability to integrate several CPU cores, powerful peripherals and FPGA technology in the same high-performance component.

For example, Altera’s Cyclone V FP-

GAs provide the industry’s lowest system cost and power, along with performance levels that make the device suitable for differentiating an industrial control mas-ter device with integrated all-in-one PLC controller, HMI controller, communication gateway and remote Web Internet or mobile clients. The solution is optimal for industrial automation and lower power consumption compared with the industrial PC platform. It provides efficient logic integration capa-bilities in an innovative SoC platform with integrated Dual Core 925 MHz ARM Cor-tex-A9 and FPGA.

Exor International has created a plat-form for this type of architecture with a JMobile SoC (JMSoC) solution PLC+HMI architecture (Figure 4). This architecture combines performance and flexibility in an all-in-one embedded solution-based dual core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and FPGA technology. This serves to increase the flexi-bility to add customized peripherals that are needed to extend connectivity and to drive different display types.

The high-bandwidth on-chip backbone connecting the Altera Cyclone V SoC CPU and FPGA fabric provides over 100 Gbit/s peak bandwidth and is suitable for sharing data between the ARM processors and de-vices that are implemented in FPGA soft-ware.

JMSoC it is an industrial automation platform comprised of hardware and soft-ware components that provide a complete solution for control, connecting equipment and visualizing data. The runtime is de-signed to optimize the performance and the size of memory (e.g., 512 Mbyte DDR + 1 Gbyte Flash disk) running on an Embedded Linux Real-Time Altera Cyclone V SoC platform. The result is a single device that integrates everything in an all-in-one SoC component. Using JMobile Studio’ object-oriented programming, a GUI application can be developed in a few weeks without writing a single line of code in C language.

JMobile Studio is used to program the JMSoC for GUI design as well as to pro-gram the communication interface with CoDeSys 3.x for Motion / SoftPLC Control application provide by the German firm 3S. The functionality of the control such as I/O and drive is guaranteed by the EtherCAT Master integrated in CoDeSys 3.x runtime for Linux.


INDUSTRY WATCH

timely manner. JMSoC suite provides mul-tiple communication interfaces associated in the FPGA.

Because of the internal FPGA, be-yond the USB, Ethernet, Serial and CAN ports, it is also possible to make further customizations in the FPGA with the ad-dition of other connections, such as digital I/O, analog interfaces, DVI ports and more. The JMSoC solution ensures a high degree of flexibility and reliability thanks to the combination of mixed solutions of ARM cores and FPGA, and numerous other use-ful interfaces.

JMobile is an innovative software so-lution for the design of HMI applications in a simple and intuitive way. It is a power-ful and versatile tool designed for the rapid creation of new applications, and for easy updating of existing projects, in order to provide a solution for the end customer that is tailored to their needs. JMobile includes among its main features: simplicity and im-mediacy of use, programming efficiency, and graphics based on SVG technology with full object-oriented design properties.

This new platform provides users with advanced control options and remote supervision with a client-server architec-ture based on Web technologies, therefore making it compatible with smartphone and tablet devices. In addition, the ability to capture, store and share data in higher-level structures makes it an effective tool for integration across the enterprise. The developer can program an HMI within a single development environment (JMobile Studio) and choose to download it on op-erator panels or on industrial PCs.

HMI +PLC integrated architecture has just followed Moore’s Law from the consumer and IT markets into industrial controls. The innovative architecture, “all-in-one” JMSoC-based Altera Cyclone V SoC ARM-FPGA legacy control platform has proven that an optimized and cost-ef-fective platform that reduces energy con-sumption is able to match the requirements of a complex industrial control automation application.

Exor International Verona, Italy +39 045 8779023 www.exorint.net

mance, the architecture of the PLC is cre-ated using two different processors to de-couple the applications of the video con-trol and HMI from the connection with other real-time devices. Both CPUs run different threads and interrupt the oper-ating system on different processors. All interrupts that come from communication with external clients go to one CPU so that they do not create interference with the real-time PLC program execution on the other, ensuring the execution of the program with very low jitter.

The ARM Cortex A9, with its inte-grated Neon media processing engine for media and signal processing accelera-tion, is an architecture that can meet the real-time requirements and have very low probability of not servicing interrupts in a


Through Link layer optimizations, the solution is capable of handling cycle times well below the millisecond. The solution adopted was EtherCAT Master, based on Open Source Automation Development Labs (OSADL) Linux real-time operat-ing system, which allows for easy and fast deployment of EtherCAT customized ap-plications as well as porting of existing applications on the compact and powerful master controller.

The first problem solved by the ar-chitecture in Figure 5 is the separation of the real-time control (I/O, Motors) in the domain of one millisecond from the other tasks related to the HMI, and the commu-nication with the different devices in the time domain of 50 milliseconds or more.

In order to ensure the highest perfor-

FIGURE 4

Integrated HMI and control solution.

FIGURE 3

Integration and efficiency are further enhanced by integrating multiple intelligent components inside the same cabinet.


INDUSTRY WATCH

FIGURE 5

HMI+PLC schematic block.

SPECS I/O OS SUPPORT

Intel® Atom™ SoC E38xx series (multicore options available)

64-bit Intel® VT-x support

Open Source Intel® Graphics for Linux*

Expansion port

HDMI

MicroSD slot

USB 3.0

GbE

SATA

GPIO

SPI

PWM

I2C

USB 2.0

Android 4.4

Linux (Support may vary by distro)

Intel® Atom™ Processor-Based Open Hardware Platform

To learn more and join our community, visit www.minnowboard.org

MinnowBoard MAx

$99 MSRP

2.9” x 3.9”

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.


PRODUCTS &TECHNOLOGY

Fast 5M GigE Vision Camera – 51 Frames per Second

A new 5M camera can reach speeds up to 51 frames per second (fps) in fast mode. This new Genie TS from Dalsa combines the industry’s latest image sensor technology with a newly optimized camera platform to deliver the widest, most powerful feature set ever in a GigE Vision camera. Unique to the Genie TS camera family is a feature that allows the cap-ture of multiple Regions of Interest (ROI), sig-nificantly reducing the amount of data trans-ferred and simultaneously allowing systems to focus on events that are critical to the inspec-tion. This form of data reduction decreases the amount of information transferred, saving on bandwidth and minimizing data transfer along the GigE link.

The Genie TS is engineered to meet the ever increasing speed and image clarity re-quirements of machine vision. All features are easily accessible with Teledyne Dalsa’s ad-vanced Sapera Essential or other GigE Vision-compliant third-party software; and like all Genie cameras, this latest model is GigE Vi-sion-compliant based on the AIA (Automated Imaging Association) GigE Vision Standard. The Genie TS M2560 monochrome camera is suitable for a wide range of inspection ap-plications including intelligent traffic systems (ITS), entertainment, medical, food and bever-age inspection, electronics and printed circuit board (PCB) inspection, and many others. A color version of the camera will be available later this year.

Teledyne Dalsa, Waterloo, ON (519) 886-6000. www.teledynedalsa.com

FIND the products featured in this section and more at

www.intelligentsystemssource.com

Optical Zoom, Full HD, USB 3.0 UVC Camera with Auto Focus, Auto Exposure

A 3.0 MP UVC-compliant USB 3.0 optical zoom camera is ‘plug and play’ on Windows and Linux with no addi-tional device driver software required and works with standard Windows (Direct-Show) and Linux (V4L2) software. The See3CAM_30Z10X camera from e-con Systems is based on a 1/3” optical format, 3.0 MP CMOS Image sensor and this sup-ports HD (1280x720 aka 720p) streaming at 60 fps and Full HD (1920x1080 aka 1080p) streaming at 30 fps.

The camera has a high-performance Image Signal Processor (ISP) built in that performs a variety of functions including 3A (Autofocus, Auto Exposure and Auto White Balance). The See3CAM_30Z10X contains a step-per-motor-driven lens assembly that supports an optical zoom of 10x (focal length 6.3 mm to 63 mm) and a digital zoom of 6x. The stepper-motor-driven Zoom and Autofocus lens assembly is tightly coupled with the image sensor and the ISP circuitry. The zoom and autofocus is fast, accurate and consistent, some of the key requirements for such high-zoom cameras.

The camera also supports still image capture at full 3MP (and in compressed JPEG format). The supports the burst capture feature which allows the user to capture up to 8 images continu-ously on a single external trigger event. This burst capture feature will allow our customers to capture a set of images on a single click and then let the user to choose the one that they think the best.

See3CAM_30Z10X currently supports Windows Vista/Windows 7 operating System. Linux support will be available soon. Building applications with the See3CAM_30Z10X is simple—any DirectShow-compatible application can use the camera, much like any other UVC-compliant webcam. However, the camera features supported are not the common features and they are exposed to the user through the set of APIs provided by e-con Systems.

e-con Systems, St. Louis, MO (636) 898-8788. www.e-consystems.com


PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGY


13 WhatneyIrvine, CA 92618Toll Free: 800-866-6008Fax: 949-420-2501Email: [email protected]

The Right Formula for BuildingIntelligent Systems?

Computer on ModulesComputer on Modules

Advantech Computer On Module series includes COM Express , ETX and Qseven, all supporting fanless operation in various small form factors while supporting CPUs ranging from Intel Atom to Intel Core i series. Advantech COM Design-in Services covers all your needs from design-in process, volume production, to product lifecycle management, all backed up by our expert integration team. We make complex COM technology easier while our customers make their applications successful.

Expert-Integrated COM Design-in Services for Long Term Success

®

COM Express Compact

COM Express Basic

SOM-6894 4th Gen. Intel Core™ i7/i5/i3/Celeron Processor

4th Gen. Intel Core™ i7/i5/i3/Celeron Processor

SOM-5894

Qseven

Intel Atom™ Processor N2600 with NM10

SOM-3565

ETX

AMD G-Series Processor with A55E

SOM-4466

®

®

COM Express Compact®

®

®

®

COM Express Mini

Intel® Atom™/CeleronProcessor E3800/N2930/J1900

SOM-7567

®

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SOM-6867 Intel Atom™/ Celeron Processor E3845/N2930

® ®

UltraScale Multi-Processing Architecture Aims for All Programmable Multi-Processing SoCs

Xilinx has introduced the UltraScale Multi-Processing System on Chip (MPSoC) architecture for Next Generation Zynq Ul-traScale MPSoCs. Building on the industry success of the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoCs, the new UltraScale MPSoC architec-ture extends Xilinx’s ASIC-class UltraScale FPGA and 3D IC architecture to enable het-erogeneous multi-processing with “the right engines for the right tasks.” Xilinx debuted the All Programmable SoC with the intro-duction of Zynq-7000, and with UltraScale MPSoC, Xilinx is inventing the first All Pro-grammable MPSoC.

This new All Programmable MPSoC architecture provides processor scalability from 32 to 64 bits with support for virtualiza-tion, the combination of soft and hard engines for real-time control and graphics/video processing, waveform and packet process-ing, next generation coherent interconnect and memory, advanced power management, and technology enhancements that deliver multi-level security, safety and reliability. The UltraScale MPSoC architecture enables breakthroughs in system performance and integration at lower system power by com-bining heterogeneous multi-processing with extremely fast FinFETs, leveraging TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process.

These new architectural elements are coupled with the Vivado Design Suite and abstract design environments to greatly sim-plify programming and increase productiv-ity. This includes C, C++ and OpenCL-based design abstractions, third-party system level abstractions from Mathworks and National Instruments, and IP-based design abstrac-tions and automation. These environments enable easy software migration from the de facto standard 28nm Zynq-7000 All Pro-grammable SoCs. The new MPSoC archi-tecture will be supported by the expanding ecosystem of SW, Middleware, OS support, Debuggers, IP tools, boards and design ser-vices for Zynq devices.

Xilinx, San Jose, CA (408) 559-7778. www.xilinx.com


Compact COM Express Type 6 with High Performance and Ultra Low Power

A new COM Express Type 6 Compact size computer-on-module (COM) takes full advantage of the mobile fourth generation Intel Core processor (formerly known as Haswell-ULT) to provide a compact, high-performance COM solution with outstanding graphics capabili-

ties. The cExpress-HL from Adlink Technology targets embedded systems in medical, digital signage, gaming, video conferencing and industrial automation that need outstanding CPU and graphics per-formance, but are constrained by either size or thermal management requirements.

The Adlink cExpress-HL features a mobile fourth generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3 processor at 1.7 to 3.3 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 5000 (GT3), delivering up to 50 percent higher graphics performance than the previous generation graphics card, while still keeping thermal de-sign power (TDP) under 15 watts. The small footprint of Intel’s system-on-chip solution allows it to fit onto the COM.0 R2.0 Type 6 Compact size form factor of 95 x 95 mm. Though small in size, the cExpress-HL provides rich I/O and wide-bandwidth data throughput: three indepen-dent displays (two DDI channels and one LVDS), four PCIe x1 or one PCIe x4 (Gen2), four SATA 6 Gbit/s, two USB 3.0 ports and six USB 2.0 ports.

The cExpress-HL is equipped with Adlink’s Smart Embedded Management Agent (SEMA), which provides functions including watchdog timer, temperature and other board information monitoring, and fail-safe BIOS support—all to ensure system reliability. SEMA al-lows users to monitor and manage standalone, connected or remote sys-tems through a Cloud-based interface. A COM Express Type 6 Starter Kit is also available. The kit includes a COM Express Type 6 reference carrier board, adapter cards, debug board, board support packages and all necessary cabling and documentation.

ADLINK Technology, San Jose, CA (408) 360-0200. www.adlinktech.com


advertisement_multicore_7,375x3,375.indd 1 30.01.2012 13:34:54



Industrial Temperature ARM Single Board Computer with Web Connection

An industrial strength ARM embedded single board computer is based on the Atmel AT91SAM9X25 processor. The iPAC-9X25 from Emac has an industrial temperature range of -40° to +85°C and utilizes 4 Gbytes of eMMC Flash, 16 Mbytes of Serial Data Flash (for boot) and 128 Mbytes of DDR RAM.

The iPac-9X25 is a Web-enabled micro-controller with the ability to run an embedded server and to display the current monitored or logged data. The Web connection is avail-able via two 10/100 Base T Ethernet ports or 802.11 wireless Wi-Fi networking when using the proper Linux modules and adapters. This microcontroller has all connectors brought out as headers on a board and has the same footprint of a standard PC/104 module at 3.77” x 3.54”. The iPAC-9X25 is well suited for industrial temperature embedded data ac-quisition and control applications.

The iPAC 9X25 has one RS-232 serial port with full handshake (RTS/CTS/DTR/DSR/RI), two RS-232 serial ports (TX and RX only), one RS-232/422/485 serial port with RTS/CTS handshake, two 10/100 Base T Ethernet ports, two USB 2.0 Host ports, and one USB Device port. The board has up to seven channels of 10-bit A/D (0 to 3.3 volt) and an internal real-time clock/calendar with battery backup. It also includes 21 GPIO (3.3V) lines on header, 8 high drive open col-lector dedicated digital output lines with con-figurable voltage tolerance, 16 GPIO (3.3V) on header, 2 PWM I/O lines with additional 4 PWN lines shared with A/D. The iPAC-9x25 has 5 Synchronous Serial I/O lines (I2S), 5 SPI lines (2 SPI CS), I2C Bus, CAN Bus, a micro SD socket, an external Reset Button provision and red Power and Green status LEDs. Quantity one price starts at $198.00.

EMAC, Carbondale, IL (618) 529-4525. www.emacinc.com

JTAG Controller Speeds Measurement TasksXJTAG, a supplier of boundary scan technology, has

released the XJLink2 3070. Approved by Agilent Tech-nologies, it provides convenient, integrated access to XJTAG’s test and programming tools from Agi-lent i3070 ICT machines. The combination of XJTAG’s advanced connection test and non-JTAG device testing/programming with the i3070’s measurement capabilities makes capturing defects easier than ever.

The product serves primarily to streamline the production line. With combined testing and programming, the number of stages and han-dling operations can be significantly reduced. It is also possible to program devices while performing ICT to increase throughput. The XJLink2 3070 is completely configurable. Pro-gramming speeds close to the theoretical maximum of a device can be achieved using the advanced features of the XJLink2 3070.

The XJLink2-3070 is compatible with the standard USB XJLink2 so boards can be de-bugged at a repair station without having to develop a separate test setup. A flexible license also aids ease of use, with the product able to contain an XJTAG software license and allow standalone operation without additional dongles or network access. Alternatively, the system can be licensed from a network server allowing the maximum use of your XJTAG products without having to move licensed hardware between machines.

The XJLink2 3070 fits into one slot on the Agilent i3070 utility card, however multiple systems can be added to the same card or additional utility cards for supplementary test and program capabilities, for instance testing panels of boards.

XJTAG, Cambridge, UK +44 (0)1223 223007. www.xjtag.com

Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA (408) 345-8880. www.agilent.com

Fieldbus Protocol Stack for Modbus Connects Industrial Devices

Modbus is an open, mature and straightforward protocol designed to connect industrial devices. A new implementation of the Modbus protocol, emModbus by Segger, enables communication with any other Modbus-compliant device. emModbus supports communication via UART (ASCII, RTU) and Ethernet (Modbus/TCP and Modbus/UDP). Multiple interfaces in the same product are supported. Master and slave protocols are supported and can be used in the same product. Each Interface can be con-figured at runtime, making it possible to build a pretested library, which then may be deployed in multiple projects.

emModbus follows the same strict coding standards that enable Segger to create highly efficient middleware. The emModbus stack has a very small memory footprint, below 4 Kbyte code size, and needs less than 1 Kbyte of RAM including buffers. The C code is completely portable and runs on any target. Using the OS abstraction layer, any RTOS can be used with emModbus. emModbus can be used completely without an RTOS as well.

SEGGER Microcontroller Systems, Winchendon, MA (978) 874-0299. www.segger.com


8-Port SATA III Drive Array Offers Extreme Data Bandwidth Capability

A high-speed controller and storage mod-ule supports up to eight SATA III ports and over 2 terabytes of onboard capacity in a sin-gle 3U VPX slot. The new Model 5335/6 from Elma Electronic is suitable for applications demanding exceptional characteristics in both data capacity and read/write performance.

The Model 5335/6 is seen as a PCIe Gen2 x8 connection to the host as it provides the link to a storage array where capacities exceed 8 Tbyte across four slots and where data band-width exceeds 1 Gbyte/s.

With RAID 0/1/5/10 support, the storage array system can be configured to maximize bandwidth or provide data redundancy for critical applications. The onboard controller provides an additional six SATA III backplane ports for building a high-performance, high-capacity storage array using Elma’s 553x fam-ily of dual-drive storage carriers across four total slots.

The rugged modules perform reliably in the harsh conditions found in many defense and industrial applications, ranging from ground, ship and airborne systems to signal in-telligence, engine and automation control and mission-critical information systems.

Using solid state drives, the convection-cooled versions operate from -40° to +85°C and the conduction-cooled versions operate from -40° to +75°C. Consult Elma for higher temperature requirements. Operating shock of all boards is 40 Gs at 11 ms, half-sine wave; vibration is 2 Gs from 15 Hz to 2,000 Hz. Pric-ing for the units typically starts at $1,600 de-pending on the version and drive choice.

Elma Electronic, Fremont, CA (510) 656-3400. www.elma.com



COM Express Mini Module Powered by Atom E3800 & Celeron N2930/J1900

A COM Express Mini Type 10 module fea-tures Intel Atom E3800 or Celeron N2930/J1900 with significant CPU and graphics performance improvements. Measuring only 84 x 55 mm, the SOM-7567 from Advantech supports onboard memory up to 4 Gbytes and 64 Gbyte flash mem-ory, making it a perfect fit for portable applications and rugged requirements. Based on Intel Atom E3800 Family or Celeron N2930/J1900 processors, the SOM-7567 is capable of providing 100% better CPU performance and five times faster graphic processing speed than previous generations. The model can support up to 15 simultaneous 1080p full-HD video decode for the surveillance industry, which requires multi-display solutions. The upgrade to three Gen 2 PCI Express and USB 3.0 enables higher data transfer speeds.

Featuring business card-sized dimensions, SOM-7567 offers high performance with low power consumption. It has wide range voltage input from 4.75 ~ 20V and flexible options from one to four cores for selection. The small form factor platform makes it suitable for applications in medical, factory, or portable devices. The onboard flash and memory has anti-vibration features, ideally used in rugged solutions for the vehicle or transport market. Better yet, the advantage of graphic processing and media performance makes it excellent for multi-display solutions in the surveillance industry. SOM-7567 also comes with Advantech SUSIAccess and API bundled for system integrators to centralize monitoring and management of all their embedded devices, and remote recovery if they fail.

Advantech, Irvine, CA (949) 519-3800. www.advantech.com

40G AdvancedTCA Switch Blade for Bandwidth-Demanding Applications

A new 40G AdvancedTCA (ATCA) switch blade features a Broadcom BCM56846 10/40 GbE Fabric Interface Switch, Broadcom BCM56334 24-port GbE Base Interface Switch, and Freescale QorIQ P2041 quad-core Local Management Proces-sor. The aTCA-3710 from Adlink Technol-ogy provides fourteen 10 GbE SFP+ uplink ports and supports a total of 640 Gbit/s band-width for use in 14-slot 40G ATCA shelves. Targeting new generation 4G/LTE telecom applications in network monitoring and se-curity, access point controllers, video stream-ing and deep package inspection (DPI), the aTCA-3710 is ideal for service providers re-quiring fast, high-quantity data throughput processing.

The aTCA-3710 40GbE ATCA Fabric Interface switch blade is compliant to PICMG 3.0 R3.0 and PICMG 3.1 R2.0 standards and positioned as a high-performance server switch that, along with CPU/NPU blades and Adlink Software for Networks (ADSN), can be used to constitute a 40G ARIP for next

generation applications. With rich front panel I/O and a hot-swappable design, the aTCA-3710 guarantees high availability, scalability and easy maintenance.

ADSN is comprehensive, optimized middleware that allows operators to easily configure, manage and monitor switch status. Adlink’s 40G ARIP utilizes the ADSN mid-dleware and fully validated hardware build-ing blocks like the aTCA-3710 to expedite system deployment at a lower cost, allowing customers to enjoy shortened time-to-market and increase their competitive advantage.

ADLINK Technology, San Jose, CA (408) 360-0200. www.adlinktech.com




USB Plug and Play Comes to the NI LabVIEW RIO Architecture

National Instruments has announced four new R Series boards (USB-7855R, USB-7856R, USB-7855R OEM and USB-7856R OEM) with USB connectivity, which help en-gineers add FPGA technology to any PC-based system using one of the most widely adopted buses on the market. These products, based on the LabVIEW RIO architecture, are a result of the company’s continued investment in the R Series product family.

The LabVIEW RIO architecture is an in-tegral part of the NI graphical system design platform. A modern approach to designing, prototyping and deploying embedded moni-toring and control systems, graphical sys-tem design combines the open NI LabVIEW graphical programming environment with commercial off-the-shelf hardware to dramati-cally simplify development, which results in higher-quality designs with the ability to in-corporate custom design.

Key features include the Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA to implement tasks like custom tim-ing and triggering, synchronization, multirate sampling, high-speed control and onboard sig-nal processing. Improved I/O takes advantage of analog input and analog output rates of up to 1 MHz for closed-loop control tasks, as well as digital I/O (DIO) rates of up to 80 MHz.

In addition, selectable logic levels from 1.2 to 3.3V enable adjustment of DIO levels to

meet specific application requirements. There is also selectable gain for analog input ranges, which lets you get more resolution at lower voltage ranges.

National Instruments, Austin, TX (512) 683-0100. www.ni.com

Virtex-7 Transceiver 3U VPX Rugged Board for Communication and Radar Systems

A two-channel, wideband transceiver 3U VPX board is based on the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The Model 52751 from Pentek is suitable for connection to HF or IF ports of communication or radar systems. Its built-in data capture and generation features make it an attractive turn-key solution without the need to develop additional FPGA IP.

The Model 52751 includes two 500 MHz 12-bit A/Ds followed by two DDCs, and two 800 MHz 16-bit D/As with a DUC. Factory installed Virtex-7 FPGA functions include two A/D acquisition modules, a D/A waveform generation IP module, data multiplexing, channel selection, data packing, gating, triggering, synchronization and memory control. Programmable decimation and interpolation ranges for each DDC and DUC cover transceiver signal bandwidths from 4 kHz to 200 MHz.

GateXpress PCIe Configuration Manager is a FPGA-PCIe hard-ware engine for managing the reconfiguration of the FPGA. At power up, the GateXpress manager immediately presents a PCIe target to the host computer for discovery and enumeration, giving the FPGA time to load from Flash. Once booted, the GateXpress manager offers multiple options for dynamically reconfiguring the FPGA with a new IP image, handling the hardware negotiation and streamlining the loading task. GateXpress also allows dynamic FPGA reconfiguration across the PCIe interface through a runtime software task on the host computer.

A key benefit of the GateXpress manager is its ability to use a default power-up configuration image in non-volatile Flash memory to enable booting of a system. Once booted, the sensitive mission sig-nature configuration image can then be uploaded into the FPGA by the system host from a disk file, a network source or even a radio link. Thus, no non-volatile version of the sensitive mission image exists in the module, affording a high degree of security in the event of loss or capture of the system.

For systems that require custom functions, IP can be developed us-ing the Pentek GateFlow FPGA Design Kit, extending or even replacing the factory-installed functions. Pentek ReadyFlow software board sup-port packages for high-level C-language development are available for Linux and Windows operating systems.

The Model 52751 3U VPX board is available with ruggedized and conduction-cooled versions. The board is also available as an XMC module, Model 71751, designed for both rugged and commercial envi-ronments; in cPCI, Models 73751 & 72751; in AMC, Model 56751; and in PCIe, Model 78751. The Model 52751 3U VPX module with 4 Gbyte of memory starts at $16,995.

Pentek, Upper Saddle River, NJ (201) 818-5900. www.pentek.com


Industrial Grade Embedded Computers Feature Multicore Atom E3800 Processors

A line of multicore Intel Atom E3800 embedded computers is designed to operate from -40° to +85°C. The feature-rich SBC35-CC405 series of embedded PCs from WinSystems includes onboard USB, Gigabit Ethernet, serial ports, and additional I/O expansion through MiniPCIe and IO60 connectors. A low-profile thermal solu-tion creates a rugged platform base that protects the PCB assembly and provides convenient four-point mounting. These off-the-shelf in-dustrial computers are designed for rugged embedded applications requiring extended temperature operation, long-term availability, and provide a wide variety of I/O expansion options to meet unique proj-ect requirements.

The SBC35-CC405 series features the latest generation Intel Atom E3800 family of processors in an industry standard 3.5-inch SBC format COM Express carrier. The processor is integrated us-ing a Type 6 COM Express module supporting a quad-core, dual-

core or single-core processor and includes up to 8 Gbyte of DDR3L SDRAM. The Intel Atom E3800 family delivers numerous enhance-ments over previous-generation Intel Atom processors including im-provements in computational performance, energy efficiency, power management, virtualization and security, while maintaining a low thermal design power (TDP) range of 5W to 10W. The Intel Genera-tion 7-based graphics engine supports up to two simultaneously active displays with interfaces available for analog VGA, DisplayPort 1.1 and LVDS connections.

For networking and communications, the SBC35-CC405 in-cludes two Intel I210 Gigabit Ethernet controllers with IEEE 1588 time-stamping and 10/100/1000 Mbit/s multi-speed operation. Four Type A connectors support three USB 2.0 channels and one high-speed USB 3.0 channel. Two serial ports support RS-232/422/485 in-terface levels with clock options up to 20 Mbit/s in the RS-422/485 mode and up to 1 Mbit/s in the RS-232 mode. The SBC35-CC405 series also includes two MiniPCIe connectors and one IO60 connec-tor to allow additional I/O expansion.

For additional flexibility and ease of system integration, the SBC35-CC405 is designed to operate over a wide input power range from 10-50V DC. Enclosures, power supplies and configuration ser-vices are available for turn-key OEM embedded computing platforms.

Linux, Windows and other x86 operating systems can be booted from the CFast, mSATA, SATA, or USB interfaces, providing flex-ible data storage options. WinSystems provides drivers for Linux and Windows 7/8 as well as preconfigured embedded operating systems. The single-core E3815-based SBC35-CC405-3815-2-2 is priced as low as $499 in OEM quantities.

WinSystems, Arlington, TX (817) 274-7553. www.winsystems.com



Virtex-7 Software Radio Module for Extremely Wideband Signal Applications

A one-channel, 3.6 GHz 12-bit A/D or 2-channel, 1.8 GHz 12-bit A/D XMC high-speed data converter module is based on the high-density Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The Onyx Model 71741from Pentek can digitize signal bandwidths up to 1500 MHz. The front end ac-cepts analog RF or IF inputs on a pair of front panel SSMC connectors with transformer cou-pling into a Texas Instruments ADC12D1800 12-bit A/D. The converter operates in single-channel interleaved mode with a sampling rate of 3.6 GHz and an input bandwidth of 1.75 GHz, or in dual-channel mode with a sam-pling rate of 1.8 GHz and input bandwidth of 2.8 GHz. A built-in AutoSync feature supports A/D synchronization across multiple modules.

A powerful DDC intellectual property (IP) core sets the Model 71741 apart from the competition. The DDC supports a single-chan-nel mode, accepting data samples from the

A/D converter at the full 3.6 GHz rate. It also operates as a dual channel DDC when the A/D is set for 2-channel 1.8 GHz operation.

GateXpress PCIe Configuration Manager is an FPGA-PCIe hardware engine for manag-ing FPGA reconfiguration. At power up, the GateXpress manager immediately presents a PCIe target to the host computer for discov-ery and enumeration, giving the FPGA time to load from Flash. Once booted, the GateXpress manager offers multiple options for dynami-cally reconfiguring the FPGA with a new IP image, handling the hardware negotiation and streamlining the loading task. GateXpress also allows dynamic FPGA reconfiguration through software commands as part of the run-time application.

The Model 71741 XMC module is de-signed for both rugged and COTS environ-ments and is available in cPCI (Models 73741 and 72741), AMC Model (56741), PCIe (Model 78641) and VPX (Models 52741 & 53741). The Model 71741 XMC module with 4 Gbyte of

memory starts at $22,695. Additional FPGA options are available. Delivery is 8 to 10 weeks ARO.

Pentek, Upper Saddle River, NJ (201) 818-5900. www.pentek.com


8-Bit Microcontroller Family with Intelligent Analog and Core-Independent Peripherals

A new family of 8-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) combines a rich set of intelligent analog and core- independent peripherals with cost-effective pricing and eXtreme Low Power (XLP) technology. Available in 14-, 20-, 28- and 40/44-pin packages, the 11-member PIC16F170X/171X family of MCUs from Microchip Technology integrates two op amps to drive analog control loops, sensor amplification and basic signal conditioning, while reducing system cost and board space. These new devices also offer built-in zero cross detect (ZCD) to simplify TRIAC control and minimize the EMI caused by switching transients. Additionally, these are the first PIC16 MCUs with peripheral pin select, a pin-mapping feature that gives designers the flexibility to designate the pinout of many peripheral functions. The PIC16F170X/171X are general-purpose MCUs that are ideal for a broad range of applications, such as consumer (home appliances, power tools, electric razors), portable medical (blood-pressure meters, blood-glucose meters, pedom-eters), LED lighting, battery charging, power supplies and motor control.

The PIC16F170X/171X family features core-independent peripherals, such as the configu-rable logic cell (CLC), complementary output generator (COG) and numerically controlled os-cillator (NCO). These “self-sustaining” peripherals take 8-bit PIC MCU performance to a new level, as they are designed to handle tasks with no code or supervision from the CPU to maintain operation. As a result, they simplify the implementation of complex control systems and give designers the flexibility to innovate. The CLC peripheral allows designers to create custom logic and interconnections specific to their application, thereby reducing external components, saving code space and adding functionality. The COG peripheral is a powerful waveform generator that can generate complementary waveforms with fine control of key parameters, such as phase, dead-band, blanking, emergency shut-down states and error-recovery strategies. It provides a cost-effective solution, saving both board space and component cost when driving FETs in half- and full-bridge drivers for control and power-conversion applications, for example. The NCO is a programmable precision linear frequency generator, ranging from <1 Hz to 500 kHz+. It offers a step up in performance, while simplifying designs requiring precise linear frequency control, such as lighting control, tone generators, radio-tuning circuitry and fluorescent ballasts.

The new MCUs feature up to 28 Kbyte of self-read/write Flash program memory, up to 2 Kbyte of RAM, a 10-bit ADC, a 5-/8-bit DAC, Capture-Compare PWM modules, stand-alone 10-bit PWM modules and high-speed comparators (60 ns typical response), along with EUSART, I2C and SPI interface peripherals. They also feature XLP technology for typical active and sleep currents of just 35 µA/MHz and 30 nA, respectively, helping to extend battery life and reduce standby current consumption.The PIC16F170X/171X family is supported by Microchip’s stan-dard suite of world-class development tools.

Microchip Technology, Chandler, AZ (480) 792-7200. www.microchip.com


Reference Design for Bluetooth Smart Beacons

A new Bluetooth Smart Beacon Kit reference design allows demonstra-tion and develop-ment of iBeacon and proprietary bea-con hardware for iOS and Android smartphones to be devel-oped quickly and easily. The nRF51822 from Nordic Semiconductor is based on Nordic’s class-leading nRF51822 multiprotocol Blue-tooth Smart and proprietary 2.4 GHz-SoC.

Bluetooth smart beacons are low-cost, low-power Bluetooth low-energy wireless transmitters that can advertise their location to Bluetooth Smart Ready smartphones in close proximity. The nRF51822 Beacon Kit features an ultra small form factor of 20 mm diameter and is powered by a CR1632 coin cell battery. It allows developers and engineers to evolve their own beacon applications using Apple’s iBeacon standards, or create their own bea-cons based on their own specifications using Bluetooth Smart.

The kit works straight out of the box with companion smartphone apps for iOS and Android (4.1/4.3) smartphones. The firmware is available as source code from Nordic and allows example beacon scenarios to be set up quickly and easily to test out product ideas. It leverages the ability of the nRF51822 SoC to support full Over-The-Air-Device Firmware Upgrade (OTA-DFU) enabling all beacon firmware to be updated in place in a trans-parent manner. As each brand and model of smartphones exhibits different RSSI levels, the nRF51822 Beacon Kit has a tuning func-tion that permits consistent performance re-gardless of phone model.

With these features, the kit enables OEMs and ODMs to begin development of beacon hardware to be used together with as-sociated back-end services that will be typi-cally offered as complete beacon solutions. The major use case of the nRF51822 currently is for “contextual awareness,” providing us-ers with information relating their proximity to a Point of Interest (POI). Other applica-tion fields could include special deals at retail stores, products available in stock, exhibits in public galleries and museums, train and bus terminals and shopping list reminders.

Nordic Semiconductor, Sunnyvale, CA (408) 437-7751. www.nordicsemi.com


Suite of Offerings to Protect RTOS-Based Devices

A suite of product offerings is designed to provide an um-brella of protection for RTOS-based end points. This cross plat-form Intrusion Detection and Prevention from Icon Labs runs na-tively in a wide range of RTOS-based devices found in military, utility, industrial, medical and consumer IoT applications. In addi-tion to protecting from a wide range of cyber-attacks, the security information and event management (SIEM) integration provides monitoring and reporting of attacks upon the network to enable managers to help identify and track the source of the attacks.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention is provided through RTOS-specific threat detection and advanced packet filtering. This set of solutions provides protection from both internal and external threats whether malicious or accidental. Capabilities include de-tection and reporting of authentication failures and an API that en-ables protection and monitoring of device specific attack vectors.

The suite provides stateful packet inspection that filters pack-ets on the state of the connection along with static/rules-based filtering of ports, protocols and IP addresses. Threshold-based fil-tering monitors packet flows to block packet floods plus protocol-specific deep packet inspection for industry-specific application protocols. There is also active detection of port scans and probes, which frequently indicates an impending cyber-attack.

Enterprise connection is provided through optional exten-sions to connect and manage RTOS devices from enterprise policy management systems such as the U.S, Dept. of Defense, HBSS. Both security-related and device-specific events can be captured and logged for reporting to a variety of corporate SIEM systems.

For ease in integration and development, Icon Labs also pro-vides professional services capabilities to facilitate unique imple-mentation projects and product development. User interface from simple command line to web to corporate policy management systems can be customized to specific engineering design require-ments.

Icon Laboratories, West Des Moines, IA (515) 226-3443. www.iconlabs.com



DDR4 Memory Modules Offer Lower Power, Higher Bandwidth and Density Benefits

Now offering DDR4 memory modules, Virtium enables embedded industrial OEM customers to have early test and development access to the lower power, high bandwidth and density benefits of this latest DRAM technology. Delivering significant power savings of up to 40% and up to twice the bandwidth over DDR3, the new DDR4 modules from Virtium are attractive solutions for server blades, networking and telecom applications.

Virtium’s Very Low Profile (VLP) 0.72-inch or 0.738-inch and Ultra Low Profile (ULP) 0.70-inch memory modules are targeted for space-constrained applications. Continuing Virtium’s exclusive support for the embedded infrastructure market, these first DDR4 modules are offered in the lower profile ULP RDIMM height in capacities ranging from 4 to 16 gigabytes. The new DDR4 modules feature low 1.2V con-figurations with data transfer speeds of 1866 MT/s.

Virtium has stated that because of its sole focus on the industrial embedded market and because its customers are now doing a majority of their design work around DDR4, Virtium will fully support future proprietary FBGA and Intel-based chipset systems with a comprehen-sive DDR4 roadmap of memory module form factors.

Engineering samples of Virtium’s DDR4 ULP RDIMM modules are available now with DRAM from two of the industry’s leading manu-facturers.

Virtium, Rancho Santa Margarita, CA (949) 888.2444. www.virtium.com

Versatile Fanless Networking Desktop Platform A fanless, small form factor appliance can serve the networking

needs in a variety of environments from departmental IT, SMB, retail or factory floor. The PL-80550 from Win Enterprises features the Intel Atom D2550 processor and a choice of either 4 or 6 GbE LAN with by-pass function. The Atom processor provides performance at 1.86 GHz with low power consumption at 10W. The D2550 processor is available in dual-core design. Both processor options are partnered with an Intel ICH10R I/O controller. Wi-Fi capability is optional.

PL-80550 provides a compact footprint in a rugged aluminum chassis with surprising 6 LAN throughput in a small unit. System I/O includes 2x USB 2.0, and RJ-45 console port plus LED indicators to monitor power and storage activities for local system management, maintenance and diagnostics. The PL-80550 supports one mini-card socket. The unit offers an optional onboard Cavium Nitrox Lite CN505 chip to provide hardware-level cryptographic acceleration. The device is RoHS, FCC and CE compliant and available now.

WIN Enterprises, North Andover, MA (978) 688-2000.




Raspberry Pi Prototyping Kits for Through-Hole and Surface Mount Components

Surface mount Raspberry Pi Kits are now available with the Raspberry Pi Through-Hole Add-on Board from Schmartboard and a choice of many Schmartboard SMT to DIP adapters, which add the ability to use SC70, SOT, SOIC, QFN, QFN and DFN components.

The Raspberry Pi base board features an extra row of holes for easy access to Rasp-berry Pi’s General I/O signals along with rows of power and ground strips for easy power-up and flexibility. Pre-routed traces are provided to minimize the use of wire jumpers as well as a slot for the video cable to keep the cir-cuit clean and unencumbered. There is also a marked area where the Raspberry Pi USB and Ethernet Connectors are located to avoid conflicts. Headers are provided with enough clearance to cleanly and safely stack on the Raspberry Pi board, and there are circuits for four level shifters. All this is provided with Schmartboard’s signature offset through-hole grid, which expands part placement options.

The kits are currently available in con-figurations to support SOT 23, SC 70, SOIC .5 mm, .635 mm, .65 mm, .8 mm and 1.27 mm pitches and many QFP, QFNs and DFNs in both .5 mm and .65 mm pitches. More op-tions will be added as experience shows which package types are most needed.

The Through-Hole shields will retail for $13.00 bundled with the headers. The surface mount kits will retail for $18.00, and addi-tional SMT to DIP adapters retail for $6.00. Kits are available from Mouser Electronics, Fry’s Electronics, Micro Center, Radio Shack and directly from Schmartboard.

Schmartboard, Fremont, CA (408) 744-9900. www.schmartboard.com




Extended Temperature High-Density Isolated Serial Conduction-Cooled PMC

A high-density Isolated Serial Communication Controller is a conduc-tion-cooled single-width 32-bit PMC module suitable for applications in transportation, COTS, communications and process control. The TPMC378 from TEWS Technologies can operate with 3.3V and 5.0V PCI I/O signaling voltage. It provides eight channels of high-performance RS-422 asynchro-nous serial interface with P14 I/O. Each of the serial channels is isolated from the system and against each other by isolated transceivers with integrated DC/DC converters.

Each RS-422 channel supports a four wire interface (RX+, RX-, TX+, TX-) plus ground (GND). Two channels additionally support flow control with RTS+/- and CTS+/-. All channels generate interrupts on PCI interrupt INTA. For fast interrupt source detection, the UART pro-vides a special Global Interrupt Source Register.

Each serial channel of the PMC module has separate 64 byte receive and transmit FIFOs to significantly reduce the processing overhead required to provide data to and from the transmitters and receivers. The FIFO trigger levels are programmable, and the baud rate is individually select-able up to 5.5296 Mbit/s for RS-422 channels. The UART offers readable FIFO levels. All serial channels use ESD protected transceivers. ESD protection is up to ±15KV.

The TPMC378 offers an operating temperature range of -40° to +85°C. Extensive software support for major operating systems such as Windows, Linux, LynxOS, VxWorks, Integrity and QNX is available.

TEWS Technologies, Halstenbek, Germany +49 (0)4104-4058-19. www.tews.com

CompactPCI Serial PMC Module CarrierA new peripheral slot board for

CompactPCI Serial systems acts as car-rier card for a PMC-style mezzanine module. PMC modules are provided with a legacy PCI interface and are widely in use for industrial and scien-tific applications. The SK1-Chord from EKF Electronik supports the most com-mon 32-bit 33/66 MHz PMC modules.

The SK1-Chord is equipped with a PCI Express to PCI bridge for con-version of data from the CompactPCI Serial backplane to the onboard PCI parallel bus. The PMC module fits on the PMC connectors J11/J12 at 10 mm height. The SK1-Chord can be installed into any peripheral slot of a Compact-PCI Serial backplane.

EKF Elektronik, Hamm, Germany +49 (0)2831/6890-0. www.ekf.com


Advertiser Index

RTC (Issn#1092-1524) magazine is published monthly at 905 Calle Amanecer, Ste. 250, San Clemente, CA 92673. Periodical postage paid at San Clemente and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The RTC Group, 905 Calle Amanecer, Ste. 250, San Clemente, CA 92673.

Company Page WebsiteAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc. ........................................................................................... 52 ............................................................................................... www.amd.com/embedded

Advantech Corporation ..................................................................................................... 41 ........................................................................................................www.advantech.com

Cadia ............................................................................................................................... 51 ................................................................................................. www.cadianetworks.com

congatec, Inc. ................................................................................................................... 4 ............................................................................................................. www.congatec.us

Creative Electronic Systems .............................................................................................. 18 .....................................................................................................................www.ces.ch

Dolphin Interconnect Solutions .......................................................................................... 19 ........................................................................................................www.dolphinics.com

Grey Matter Consulting and Sales ..................................................................................... 23 .................................................................................................. www.greymatter-cs.com

Intelligent Systems Source ................................................................................................ 27 .................................................................................. www.intelligentsystemssource.com

Interface Concept ............................................................................................................. 39 ..............................................................................................www.interfaceconcept.com

Lauterbach ....................................................................................................................... 42 ....................................................................................................... www.lauterbach.com

Men Micro ........................................................................................................................ 35 ........................................................................................................ www.menmicro.com

MinnowBoard ................................................................................................................... 39 .................................................................................................... www.minnowboard.org

MSC Embedded, Inc. ......................................................................................................... 4 ..................................................................................................www.mscembedded.com

One Stop Systems, Inc................................................................................................... 11, 26 ............................................................................................www.onestopsystems.com

Portwell ............................................................................................................................ 7 ............................................................................................................ www.portwell.com

Real-Time & Embedded Computing Conference ................................................................. 31 ............................................................................................................... www.rtecc.com

Trenton Systems ................................................................................................................ 2 ................................................................................................. www.trentonsystems.com

TQ Systems GmbH ........................................................................................................... 15 ..................................................................... www.convergencepromotions.com/TQ-USA

WinSystems ...................................................................................................................... 5 ....................................................................................................... wwwwinsystems.com

Product Showcase ............................................................................................................ 35 .......................................................................................................................................

GET CONNECTED WITH INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS SOURCE AND PURCHASABLE SOLUTIONS NOWIntelligent Systems Source is a new resource that gives you the power to compare, review and even purchase embedded computing products intelligently. To help you research SBCs, SOMs, COMs, Systems, or I/O boards, the Intelligent Systems Source website provides products, articles,

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Thinking about how to take advantage of

“The Cloud” in your Embedded

Application?

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IVC-4700Ivy Bridge i3 & i7v 4 GigE Portsv GPS Dead Reckoningv mSATA SSDv EN50155

OPS-5332Freescale iMX6 A9v Quad Corev Onboard 1GB RAM,

4GB iNANDv Native Linux, Android

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Learn more at: www.amd.com/r-series

AMD Innovation ContinuesIntroducing the 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APU

The 2nd generation AMD Embedded R-series APU (previously codenamed “Bald Eagle”) delivers breakthrough graphics performance and power efficiency for a new generation of embedded systems designed to provide ultra-immersive HD multimedia experiences and parallel processing compute performance. The AMD R-series APU offers next-generation performance-per-watt compute efficiency in the x86 product category by allowing system designers to take advantage of

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA).

AMD’s 2nd generation AMD Embedded R-series APU is a revolutionary leap in processing performance, power efficiency and multimedia immersion for embedded gaming, medical imaging and digital signage applications.

4652_Bald_Eagle_Print_Ad_Development_R2.indd 1 5/30/14 10:43 AM

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