embedded world 2010 Show Report
Show Report - Live News - Product Highlights
Welcome to our embedded world 2010 Show Report.
embedded world, the biggest event of its kind, sets records every year – even in 2010, despite the difficult economic conditions. The number of visitors this year was up 16% over last year to 18.350. There were 730 exhibitors (+4% from 2009) and the number of international exhibitors was even up by 17%. A sign that embedded world has become a pan-european event.
The embedded world Conference and the electronic displays Conference had +7% more attendents then last year.
embedded world was again very well attended
Live News
Product Highlights
Here are some of the new products and solutions that were introduced at embedded world 2010.
Actel Corporation unveiled what it calls SmartFusion, claimed as the world’s first intelligent mixed-signal FPGA. These devices feature FPGA fabric, a complete microcontroller subsystem built around a hard ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable analogue blocks on a Flash process. The technology permits the
building of highly-agile SmartGrid sensors with greater flexibility in a smaller package, and the optimisation of hardware/software tradeoffs on the fly without board-level changes. All the data can be transferred from the processor to the FPGA or from the analogue section to the processor, or between the FPGA and the analogue section without going off-chip.
www.actel.com
New functionalities for the proven AR54 long-range wireless module was the highlight on the stand of Adeunis RF. Available in the 869MHz or 902/928MHz in FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) bands, these pre-certified module-modems can be qualified in compliance with the RTTE European Directive EN 300-220 / EN 300-489 and the American FCC Part 15.247 standard. They offer a complete radio solution with integrated digital radio transceiver, microcontroller and dedicated firmware.
Data transmission is performed via a UART serial interface. With a range of up to 6km the AR54 is designed for long-distance communication in control and telemetry applications.
Adeunis Sales Director Vincent Bulot with the company's 6km range radio modem
www.adeunis-rf.com
Altera presented the industry’s first TÜVqualified Industrial Safety Data Package for automation applications. Working in conjunction with German safety certification body TÜV Rheinland, the company has created a prequalified development tool chain including safety manuals and safety IP cores. The ability of FPGAs to integration DSP, microprocessor and ASSP functionality will shorten development time and lower total system cost in safety-critical industrial applications such as servo and inverter drives, safety devices and automation controllers. Included IP ensures system integrity in accordance with IEC 61508 (European Machinery Directive).
www.altera.com
Atmel Corporation announced a Floating Point Unit for its 32-bit AVR UC3 product family. This extra block will enable designers to replace a two-chip microcontroller and digital signal processing (DSP) solution with just one MCU for applications in the automotive and industrial control markets. A feature of the new microcontrollers is the architecture’s high digital signal processing performance: it provides fixed point and integer arithmetic support. The addition of a single precision FPU can reduce chip count to one.
www.atmel.com
Bluegiga showed the new WT41 long range Bluetooth module, which can achieve 1000 meters distance in optimal conditions and several hundreds of meters in typical environments. The Bluegiga WT41 provides +20 dBm output power which is the maximum allowed in Americas, Europe and various Asian countries. In addition to an RF power amplifier, WT41 also implements a low noise amplifier significantly improving the module sensitivity down to -90 dBm. The sensitivity improvement extends the WT41’s range to Bluetooth class 2 devices. WT41 module is available with integrated chip antenna or U.FL antenna connector. It is targeted for numerous application areas requiring the best possible performance and reliability for Bluetooth wireless data connections. With WT41 module, the OEMs can avoid the sudden “no coverage” situations as the link remains up even in most demanding conditions.
Bluegiga Technologies long range Bluetooth module WT41
www.bluegiga.com
Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year connectBlue launches ten Wireless LAN Development Kits designed to evaluate the company's third generation Wireless LAN modules OWL221a and OWL222a. The kits offer complete system functionality with an out-of-the-box testing capability designed to accelerate the customers’ product design, development and delivery. The Development Kit collection spans over a wide variety of customer development needs. The modules included in the complete kits are compliant with IEEE 802.11a/b/g and single stream 802.11n, utilizes internal antenna or external antenna, 3.3 - 5.5 VDC, SPI or SDIO interface and are fully radio type approved (FCC, IC and R&TTE).
connectBlue's Sales Director Martin Engdahl at embedded world
www.connectblue.com
Deutschmann Automation now offers its Unigate IC gateway also in an EtherCat version, offering a complete Ethernet-Gateway in IC-design (DIL32). The device contains all necessary components, such as microcontrollers, Flash, RAM, bus-chip and of course the analog components, such as optocoupler and bus driver.
Deutschmann also showed a new Developer kit containing a Developer board for Unigate IC, cables, power supply unit and the necessary software tools.
New Deutschmann developer board for Unigate IC
www.deutschmann.de
Digi International introduced what the company calls the "first foolproof programmable ZigBee module". With the XBee-PRO ZB customer applications can be programmed directly on the module, eliminating the need and cost of a separate processor and reducing time-to-market. Because the Digi-provided wireless software is isolated, customers can easily develop applications with no risk to RF performance and security. The module features an 8-bit Freescale SO8 microprocessor and offers an outdoor RF line-of-sight range of up to one mile. A product designed using the programmable XBee-PRO ZB can be updated remotely with new ZigBee profiles, feature updates or security enhancements.
XBee-PRO ZB enables application development without risk because the wireless software is isolated
www.digi.com
French company Erco & Gener showed a variety of industrial communication solutions, including the new GenIP 20i, an Ethernet GSM/GPRS gateway. It features a rugged aluminum DIN-rail housing, an intuitive, multi-language web interface for configuration and a high performance ARM9 processor. The gateway is available in a GSM / GPRS (GenIP 20i) and a PSTN (GenIP 40i) version.
Loïc Kervenec shows the GenIP Ethernet/GSM gateway
www.ercogener.com
Freescale Semiconductor and Hager SA have teamed up to develop a home automation system to give full control over a wide range of building control applications, such as automated meter reading, energy management and control of lighting, heating, shutter or curtains systems. Hager selected Freescale’s i.MX27 to power its Tebis home automation system. Tebis uses KNX bus technology to link with other networked devices and can be configured to control various applications with automatic switching to predetermined parameters.
www.freescale.com
www.hagergroup.net
Future Technology Devices (FTDI) announced the launch of their Vinculum VNC2 user programmable dual USB 2.0 host/slave intelligent SOC controller. It presents lower device cost as well as offering designers the capability to develop their own application firmware and programme the host controller themselves. VNC2 comes with a royalty free software IDE which includes a compiler, linker and debugger to fully use the increased memory and multitude of communication protocols. VNC2 includes a new, customised 16-bit MCU core, 256KB on chip programmable e-Flash program memory and 16KB of SRAM data memory.
www.ftdichip.com
Intel says that 10 processors from the 2010 Intel Core processor family and three new chipsets will be supported with a 7-year extended manufacturing lifecycle for embedded market segments. The new processors deliver smart, energy-efficient performance for embedded developers in communications, digital signage, retail, industrial and medical segments. To meet the specific space constraints, performance and graphics demands that are typical of embedded applications, Intel is supporting the 2010 Core mobile processors and pairing them with the Mobile QM57 Express chipset. Many of the processors also support the company’s vPro Technology which maximises system uptime by remote system security, maintenance and manageability for embedded applications.
www.intel.com
Among several new products on the stand of Ixxat was the CANobserver, a diagnostic tool for the long-term monitoring of CAN bus systems. It enables the physical and logical monitoring of CAN, CANopen and DeviceNet systems. The device is permanently integrated into the network and continuously monitors and records the data transfer. Sporadic negative impacts, such as external EMC interferences or a slowly deteriorating signal quality caused by worn plug connections, can be detected by the physical layer diagnosis and logical frame monitoring in a timely manner. Thus, the CANobserver is able to inform the system operator before any communication error occurs.
The Ixxat CANobserver for long-term monitoring of CAN bus systems
www.ixxat.com
10 Gigabit Ethernet switching on CompactPCI and VME platforms was on display at the stand of Kontron. The new Kontron CP6930 6U switch offers six SFP+ interfaces for 10Gb, two SFP interfaces for 1Gb Ethernet switching on the front and 24 GbE ports on the back. It fits into both CompactPCI and VME system chassis and offers an AMCC PowerPC for individually configurable application control and a Microcontroller for IPMI-based platform management. With the fully managed software environment and a comprehensive firmware package, the Kontron CP6930 is customizable based on the individual requirements of the installation. The new high-speed switch supports Ethernet and bridging protocols such as flow control, spanning tree, and link aggregation. The Ethernet implementation also supports QoS on all ports, as well as VLAN.
Kontron CP6930 supports PICMG 2.x and VITA 31.1 compliant high-performance switching
www.kontron.com
KPA (Koenig Prozessautomatisierungs GmbH) is a company that focuses on EtherCat products and services for various real time operating systems like RTX, INtime, QNX, VxWorks, Ontime, PikeOS, xPCTarget and various Linux- and Windows versions. In addition to EtherCat Master and Slave stacks, KPA also offers a Slave-tester for EtherCat. This software tool allows script based automated testing of slave-hardware. A useful tool for end of line programming (initial writing of slave’s EEPROM) or for automatically checking the correctness of new slave firmware releases. But the Slave-Tester can also be used for calibration: Connect signal-generators, sensors and loads, measure the input- and output
channels and write the gain and offset values to a non-volatile memory.
EtherCat tools on display at the stand of KPA
www.koenig-pa.com
The new XPort Pro made it's European debut on the stand of Lantronix. Having the identical form factor as the original XPort, of which more than 2 mio. were sold, this tiny Linux embedded server provides over five times the processing power and 32 times the memory of its predecessor. 32-bit processing power and ample memory can handle resource-intensive applications on a single platform. These features, together with advanced networking and security features, enable M2M edge computing with virtually unlimited customisation and application hosting potential.
To showcase the XPort Pro's customisation and application hosting potential, Lantronix has launched a Global Design Contest. The contest is open to all individuals with interest in network technology, including businesses, university faculty, students, research labs, engineers and design contractors. Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design. To encourage participation of students, a separate prize of $3,000 will be awarded for the Best Student Linux Design. Entries must be submitted by 6 August, 2010, and the winners will be announced at ESC Boston in September.
XPort Pro, a Linux embedded server about the size of two sugar cubes
www.lantronix.com
In addition to the well-known line of Switches, Media Converters and Industrial Wireless products, Moxa presented a range of ready-to-run embedded solutions for railway, marine, substation automation and renewable energy. These included the new line of Marine Panel PCs, DIN-Rail automation computer IA260 Series, RISC-based wireless embedded computer W406, embedded modules EM-1200 Series, and wall-mount communication computer V460/480 Series, UC8400 Series and V2100/2400 Series.
The world's first orchid with an embedded Serial-to-Ethernet converter (MiiNePort E1)
www.moxa.com
MultiTech is a company with more than 40 years of experience in M2M communications and claims to have installed 20 million devices. In Nuremberg the company had its current product line on display, including the iCell MultiModem. iCell uses HSDPA, EDGE or GPRS for wireless data communication. Available in desktop and panel-mount versions, the iCell is based on the Universal IP stack that allows for persistent or automatic connectivity, depending on the application requiremments.
The world's first orchid with an embedded Serial-to-Ethernet converter (MiiNePort E1)
www.multitech.com
Answering the need for energy efficiency in home automation and metering, Silicon Labs introduced what it claims to be the industry’s lowest power single-chip wireless microcontrollers (MCUs). The new ultra-low-power Si10xx wireless MCU family addresses the power and RF requirements of battery-operated home automation systems, smart metres, in-home utility monitors and security systems.
www.silabs.com
STMicroelectronics has released details of new low-cost 32-bit microcontrollers bringing the properties of the ubiquitous STM 32-bit core into applications served by lower-performing devices, normally the province of proprietary processor architectures. Upgrading legacy 16-bit designs normally means the use of high-end alternatives. The STM32 Value Line remedies this by combining a 24MHz ARM Cortex-M3 processor core with peripheral features optimised for typical 16-bit applications such as industrial equipment. At 24MHz with zero wait state embedded Flash memory access, the STM32 Value Line delivers up to 30DMIPS, outperforming most of the 16-bit processors.
www.st.com
Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) has announced the world’s first ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller to feature a single 5V supply. With high performance and low power consumption, the TMPM380FY combines serial connectivity with a number of on-board features and peripherals aimed at industrial and home ppliance designs. Integrated functionality includes the ability to drive motors and control IGBTs, high-accuracy analogue-to-digital conversion, and an Oscillation Frequency Detector (OFD) to facilitate hardware monitoring of the CPU clock e.g. to simplify compliance with home appliance safety standards.
www.toshiba-components.com
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