I had quite a few folks from Twitter and LinkedIn ask me to blog about my Droid adventures, so I thought I’d post some initial thoughts after a week of use.

I am not missing my Treo 680 at all, plus the Droid is half the thickness and a lot easier to carry around. I’m also greatly appreciating not dropping calls on Verizon Wireless like I was very often on AT&T Wireless (sorry, but it’s true - I do not live in the wilderness and was sick of dropping calls at my desk). But that’s just the beginning.

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Every once in a while our industry serves up something that takes everyone a bit by surprise, sometimes not in what happened but in the how or who. Yesterday was one of those days.

The news that Cavium Networks is acquiring MontaVista software just kinda showed up. The second part - MontaVista being bought - wasn’t that big a surprise. After all, we’d seen Intel take out Wind River and Mentor Graphics take out Embedded Alley so far this year, so it was just a matter of time before MontaVista had to pair up.

But Cavium Networks? Not a single person I know had that name on the list. What do we have, here?

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You might have noticed a story last week on Microsoft signing a deal to enable Bsquare for distributing Windows Mobile. This is an important development for embedded device designs. I got some insight behind the why and what of this agreement from a recent conversation with Steve Dearden, VP of Solution Sales for Bsquare.

“Microsoft was trying to focus on making a small number of customers successful”, according to Dearden, working with high volume phone makers like Samsung, LG, and HTC. He added that Microsoft can compete very effectively on the “wow factor” for these high volume customers.

But what’s left is still a very large opportunity for embedded designers.

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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.