Dear Sir/Madam 

The Embedded World, exhibition & conference, in Nuremberg will be once more the meeting place for the international embedded industry. To give you a foretaste what will go on there we publish this newsletter. Enjoy it!

Wolfgang Patelay
Editor EPN

At Glance, in this issue

1. Products News 2. Articles 3. Design Tips 4. Market Research 5. Book of the Month

1| Product News

Industrial SBCs (Digital Logic)
The MSEP800L and MSEP855L are part of the Microspace EPIC (embedded platform for industrial computing) product family, designed with all standard PC interfaces on the front side (such as four USB V2.0 ports, two serial RS232 interfaces, a 100/10Base-T-Ethernet interface and a VGA port). The RoHS-compliant CPU boards uses a fan-less AMD Geode LX800 processor with 500MHz (MSEP800L) or an Intel Pentium M processor with 600MHz to 1.8GHz (MSEP855L).
Click here

FPGA-based development (Men Mikro Elektronik)
The "USM Universal Submodule" concept is about the development of M-Modules and PMCs that implement the desired functionality through an IP core in an FPGA. The functionalities can then be changed at any time through implementation of different IP cores.
Click here

Entry-level cell-phone platform (Agere Systems)
The TrueNTRY X125 cell-phone platform consists of semiconductor system chips, software and a product development kit. This entry-level platform targets a bill of materials (BOM) as low as $30, giving the cell phone market the potential to accelerate its growth rate substantially, particularly in developing nations such as India and China.
Click here

LM3S102 evaluation kit (IAR Systems)
IAR Systems announced a version of its KickStart kit that supports the Luminary Micro LM3S102, one of the members of the Luminary Stellaris family of microcontrollers which feature the ARM Cortex-M3 32-bit microcontroller core.
Click here

2| Articles

Embedded development on-the-go with a USB key
The rapid changes taking place in the industrial market require a fast jump into a new development environment for microcontroller-development systems. At the beginning of any great embedded-application concept there will always be a development tool. Wolfgang Lutsch from Texas Instruments describes in his article in EPN the eZ430 development tool which re-defines the term «ease of use", offering a complete MCU development system, so small and handy that it perfectly fits into your pocket.
Click here

Utilising phase-delay techniques to enhances 3D audio
Stereophonic sound is usually achieved only with a considerable amount of separation between the speakers. Applications such as hand-held computers and cellular phones, however, don't have that sort of luxury available. They must mount their speakers close together. Robert Nicoletti from Maxim explains in his article in EPN that for these products, designers need to simulate stereo by employing wave interference to cancel left-channel sounds in the listener's right ear, and right-channel sounds in the left ear.
Click here

3| Design tips

Low-cost RF sniffer finds 2.4-GHz sources
Whether you measure or use RF circuits that operate in the popular 2.4-GHz ISM (industrial/scientific/medical) band, cordless telephones, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth devices, and microwave ovens can radiate RF signals, causing unwanted interference. The circuit in the Design Idea by Vladimir Dvorkin from Linear Technology shows an easily assembled, low-cost, and portable RF "sniffer" that provides a quick and reliable reading of the ambient-RF-signal level in the 2.4- to 2.5-GHz frequency band.
Click here

Dynamic siphon steals current from USB port
A USB port offers a handy source of 5V power for auxiliary devices. A USB port not only supplies power to a microcontroller and other essential circuitry, but also provides enough extra current head room to charge a small battery or supercapacitor energy-storage element. The circuit described by Donald Schelle from Maxim Integrated Products in his Design Idea uses all available USB power by dynamically adjusting the amount of current delivered to the energy-storage device and thereby siphoning a relatively constant and maximum current from the USB port.
Click here

4| Market Research

Cellular handset market continues double digit annual growth
Unit sales of mobile handsets in 2006 increased almost 20%, and will continue with double-digit growth for the next five years, reports In-Stat. This growth occurred because of growing penetration within developing countries, the popularity of prepaid service plans, and the continued rollout of higher speed data networks.
Click here

5| Book of the month

Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems, by Tim Wescott
Many embedded engineers and programmers who need to implement basic process or motion control as part of a product design do not have formal training or experience in control system theory. This book presents mathematical background with sufficient rigor for an engineering text, but it concentrates on providing practical application examples that can be used to design working systems, without needing to fully understand the math and high-level theory operating behind the scenes.
Click here

Copyright 2007, Reed Business Information.
EPN and EDN Europe are members of the Reed Electronics Group

Reed Business France - 2 rue Maurice Hartmann, 92133 Issy-les-Moulineaux, France
Tel- +33 (0) 1 46 29 23 60