Our staff has moved to Green Belt status over at the Intel Embedded Design Center’s Embedded Community pages. In the latest posts:

Jennifer Hesse’s series on in-vehicle infotainment continues to conclusion with part 2 on software, part 3 on a reference design, and the just posted today part 4 on new technologies. Really good reading.

Also, my series on digital signage started today with part 1 on make-or-break factors in signage apps.

Atheros has announced a couple of chipsets, the AR6003 with Wi-Fi and the AR6133 with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. These devices target not just mobile phones but other mobile devices like gaming and personal navigation. There are a couple highlights in these announcements to point out how the mobile chipset space differs from the desktop space.

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MIPS introduced their M14K and M14Kc lines today, with a couple of new wrinkles.

They claim the new microMIPS instruction set keeps most of the performance while reducing code size by a bit more than one-third. Both devices are fully compatible with the regular MIPS ISA. Using the new ISA can cut system costs through reduced memory requirements.

Along with a few other features, MIPS also took on one interesting feature that mostly gets overlooked: a flash accelerator block in the M14K.

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Change is a funny thing. A friend who’s an expert on organizational change told me once that there are three groups of people to watch for: those who asked for the change, those who will embrace it if they are helped to understand how it works and how they fit, and those that never will. It’s human nature, and I’ve given a lot of thought to that as I tend to live out on the edge.

This week, Wind River’s Ken Klein issued his first blog post on “Wind River’s Next Chapter“. Interesting reading. A couple other editors have commented on this post, so I thought I’d add maybe more than two cents.

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Really intrigued by the TI announcement at ARM TechCon3 of their new Sitara microprocessor. Yes, microprocessor. Not microcontroller. Cortex-A8. 500 MHz. Industrial temp range. Typical <1 W. Display controller. CAN controller. USB. Ethernet. Optional PowerVR SGX graphics engine for OpenGL ES. Unofficially, targeting Power Architecture with a much more popular core and one that's directly code compatible with TI's OMAP lines. Should be very entertaining to watch as competition in processor space heats up again.

Also news from TechCon3 by ARM on the new Cortex-A5 MPcore processor, targeting embedded devices. Better perf than ARM1176JS-S, but power and footprint of AMD926EJ-S - twice as power efficient. Includes TrustZone security and NEON multimedia engine. MPCore increases multicore scalability while containing power consumption. Fully Cortex-A8 and -A9 compatible so lots of software.

CEA held their i-stage competition yesterday, and Regen took home first place for their ReNu personal solar power generation and storage system. From the CEA press release:

Core to the ReNu system is the ReNu panel, a freestanding power module containing solar cells, a rechargeable battery and an intelligent user interface. The panel can be hung or placed in direct light to capture energy. When replenished by sunlight, a user can drop a ReNu panel into one of a series of Regen extensions to utilize the energy they have created. ReNu extensions include a phone charging system, personal audio, and task lighting. The ReNu panel can also charge an iPhone, iPod or USB device directly.

There are lots of ideas in designing green embedded devices and applications in each issue of our Embedded E-letter featuring the Deep Green department. Don’t miss out … subscribe now, and pick E-letter under Embedded Computing Design. Here’s a sneak preview from this month’s issue.

In prep for our EDA e-cast in two days, we had asked a question: when did RTL become an antique? We were seeing some evidence of this at the last DAC, but expected to see more. Right on cue …

Synopsys has just announced Synphony HLS, which takes on that exact question. HLS stands for High Level Synthesis, and integrates M-lanuguage and model-based synthesis to increase design and verification activity dramatically over RTL flows in complex, algorithmic applications.

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We’ve been thinking that the mobile phone carrier market might someday get saturated, and that the growth markets for connectivity are actually in devices or machine-to-machine (M2M).

We’re not the only ones thinking that. Consider the newest M2M company: Sprint.

PS: We covered DriveCam about a year ago in Small Form Factors, worth a re-read.

We’ve been working vigorously to make Embedded Computing Design and all of its pieces - the magazine, e-letter, e-casts, whitepapers, blogs, and more coming soon - come together in one direction. I know we’ve got an exciting plan together for 2010, and please give me 3:33 and I’ll explain.

Don, ECD 2010 preview, mp3

PS: you can now find me on Twitter, and also in the Embedded Computing Design group on LinkedIn. Jump in anytime.

… is the latest topic of a new post by Sharon Schnakenburg to the Intel Embedded Community, discussing the three frontrunner methods of virtualization. She’s got commentary from several of the large operating system vendors, and some insight on how Intel Architecture processors support virtualization with VT-x.

… our own Jennifer Hesse has contributed a new post to the Intel Embedded Community, discussing the genesis of GENIVI and other ideas. It’s a bit of a contrast to the Ford approach. She’ll be continuing this series in the next couple weeks.

As we look into a new decade for embedded computing, we’re not the only ones seeing in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) getting more and more important. The CEA and Ford held a presser this morning and a few comments were noteworthy.

Steve Koenig, Sr. Director of Industry Analysis for CEA, pegged IVI sales at $9.3B. He’s seeing a fourth screen developing, to add to the TV, PC, and mobile devices, and it’s in the car. But wait …

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Lately, we’ve been looking at the SoC landscape and seeing how it’s changed, with the combination of hardware and software being more critical than ever. Cypress has rethought the problem and extended their PSoC architecture with two important new announcements.

The current Cypress PSoC architecture broke some ground in programmable logic around a core, but with the addition of higher performance 8051 and ARM Cortex-M3 cores, high precision analog and digital logic, and a new programming environment, the PSoC family is now quite unique and represents the change we’re seeing well.

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I was intrigued by a note from FirstSolar crossing my desk today on their latest solar power plant agreement, both by the location and the size.

The agreement focuses on Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China. The city has roughly 1.4 million inhabitants, located in the high desert with ample sunshine. Interesting that the Chinese government is stepping in and underwriting a green project of this size using a feed-in tariff and joint investment with FirstSolar on local manufacturing.

In the MOU announced today, FirstSolar will build a 30 MW demonstrator next year, followed by phases with 100 MW and 870 MW completing in 2014, and finally a 1000 MW plant in 2019. The combined facility is one of the largest planned to date in the world.