Kevin Hess, VP of Technical Marketing at Mouser explores the value of distributors keeping pace with market trends by knowing their products and knowing their markets and creating timely and exact synergies between both, to stay ahead in the demanding and ever evolving embedded industry.
The creation of every new smartphone, portable medical device, or automotive driver assist feature serves as a constant reminder of how technology never stands still. ‘Quickly innovate or risk being left behind’ is the industry maxim heard everywhere. And nowhere is this cry more prevalent than among design engineers faced with the complex task of delivering the next technological wonder or ‘it’ thing.
As the convergence of communications and computing functions within components continues to advance, embedded systems are transforming into complex systems. Major components of embedded systems are microcontrollers (MCUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), analogue, real-time operating systems (RTOS), industry-specific protocols and interfaces. Embedded systems also span digital and analogue, sensors and actuators, software, mechanical items and many other components.
Ever present are new opportunities to develop and build more powerful, energy-efficient solutions around minimisation of size and low-cost. Important design characteristics at work are low power, real-time responsiveness, low thermal dissipation, small physical form factor, memory, regulatory concerns, ruggedness in design and other factors.
All of this adds a major design challenge for engineers when it comes to the selection of processors, operating systems, etc., as demands for functionality increase with rising time-to-market pressures.
The need for ultra-low power continues to dominate engineering discussions. One trick to conserving power is to do nothing, or next to nothing. A prime example: Microchip’s XLP families of products reduce current draw to 20 nA in sleep mode.
Never one to fall asleep in the area of innovation, NXP Semiconductors’ LPC1100L, based on the ARM Cortex M0, has recently been clocked at an astonishing 130uA/MHz in active mode. Texas Instruments’ 16-bit MSP430 MCUs and Atmel’s PicoPower MCUs are also amongst the stingiest on the market today.
In addition, relative newcomers including Energy Micro’s ARM Cortex M3-based Gecko MCUs continue to push the envelope in delivering ultra-low power.
In today’s world, convenience means portable, which in turn means low power systems running on batteries. Although low power has always been a goal, the trend towards microcontrollers with ultra-low-power consumption has accelerated in recent years.
Being green doesn’t necessarily mean low power. To reduce the carbon footprint, engineers need to make the most efficient use of power consumed.
In processor designs, the technique of using multiple cores to increase processing efficiencies is maturing. Texas Instruments’ new TMS320C66x DSP family boast as many as eight independent cores in a single die with both fixed and floating point DSP capability.
In addition, Freescale’s recent introduction of Kinetis and i.MX processor families are highly integrated ARM Cortex M4-based and Cortex A8-based micrcontrollers that feature multiple core types and up to ten operating modes for low-power operation.
Embedded system engineers also face the need to update their programming, debugging and testing skills to draw the best out of designs. Thus, many semiconductor companies are aligning with third-party development tool manufacturers for their expertise. Open source technology is greatly influencing the design of low-cost, highly functional and adaptable solutions.
With the requirements of both the end consumer and the electronic industry’s need for embedded design increasing so rapidly, every link in the chain – from semiconductor manufacturer to development tool maker to distributors – must constantly be at the cutting edge. To help design engineers around the world get their products to market faster distributors must have full product knowledge and availability of the most advanced products from the top suppliers.
With technology constantly advancing and new products emerging almost every day, design engineers, product managers and engineering teams need to understand the changes sweeping the embedded world. Having a trusted resource can help those involved stay well ahead of the technology curve impacting design and development.
