Products provide the pull for visitors to embedded world

There are many reasons for going to an industry event. For example, the conference programme (which is in English) at embedded world should attract around 1500 delegates to attend a selection of 270 workshops and lectures. Others may meet suppliers or even members of their own organisations who have congregated in the modern exhibition halls of historic Nuremberg. However, the driving force behind most visits to embedded world will be the chance to see, touch and discuss the latest products and technologies. With 900 exhibitors there will clearly be many of these, but here is a quick sample to whet the appetite. The second-generation R-Car family is Renesas' response to the growing demand for automotive SoC processors for use in driver information and assistance systems. With a CPU performance of more than 25,000 Dhrystone MIPS and 3D graphics with 260 million triangles, the 8-core R-Car H2 is the flagship of a scalable family based on the latest 28nm silicon process. Silicon Labs believes 2014 will be the year of the Internet of Things and as such will unveil a host of ultra low energy solutions with this in mind. Included in these are the latest low power 32bit MCUs in the EFM32 Zero Gecko range and the Simplicity Studio which covers a hardware configurator, build tools and real-time power analyser. Another company concentrating on the IoT will be Wind River who will be introducing a next generation real-time operating system (RTOS). The VxWorks RTOS has been reinvented in response to changes in the embedded market landscape and the company will discuss the product's new features that address the IoT applications, cloud, and security. Infotainment systems, early software development, and integration and verification of embedded subsystems will be at the heart of Cadence Design Systems' demonstrations. One solution on show is the Cadence System Development Suite, which accelerates system integration, validation, and bring-up with a set of four connected platforms for concurrent hardware and software design and verification. Distributor Rutronik will show the RFduino from RFdigital. RFduino is the first Arduino-compatible board that can communicate wirelessly with Bluetooth v4.0 compatible smartphones and tablets. The board includes a 2.4GHz Bluetooth module, the RFD22301, which could also be used for big production series after the prototyping with RFduino. The board contains a 2.4GHz transceiver, which can change over Bluetooth Low Energy, Gazell and ShockBurst, as well as a 256kbyte of flash, a 32bit Cortex-M0 core and I/O periphery. JTAGLive Studio from JTAG Technologies has been extended with a module aimed at the support of new IEEE P1687 (aka Internal JTAG) compliant devices. IJTAG/P1687 has been devised as an evolutionary extension to the basic IEEE 1149.1 and IEEE 1500 standards and describes how embedded (test) instruments within a device or SoC may be accessed using the conventional 4/5 wire JTAG port. Xilinx' partners will demonstrate solutions for smarter vision and smarter connected control systems. These include a Surround view driver assistance system in which the images from six cameras are integrated into a combined image which also performs lane-departure warning and blind-spot detection functions; a Smart sensors fusion system in which visual and thermal images are blended to assist in security monitoring; and an advanced vehicle detection system for autonomous driving employing parallel processing and analytics in hardware. Among the oscilloscopes on show from Rohde & Schwarz will be additions to the RTM family that integrate time domain, logic, protocol and frequency analysis. The RTM-B1 logic analysis option adds 16 logic channels to the RTM, which also features sampling rate of 5Gsample/s and memory depth of 20Msample. Based on the Intel Q87 Express chipset, mini-ITX mainboard D3243-S is part of the most recently launched family of industrial mainboards by Fujitsu and supports DDR3 1333/1600 SDRAM components as well as the complete range of fourth generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors with LGA1150 sockets. The mainboard is designed for industrial embedded applications in temperatures ranging from 0 to 60°C. The mainboard meets industrial standards concerning CE (EMC and safety), burst, climate, shock and vibration. Among the demonstrations featured by Toshiba Electronics Europe is a 'Digital Kiosk' that combines TransferJet, NFC and Qi wireless charging technology to show how rich digital content, including HD video, can be purchased and downloaded swiftly to mobile devices. The fully finished concept system shows how various emerging wireless technologies can function together to deliver new services. Based on Vault technology Altium's new Team Configuration Center (TC2), helps organisations centralise and standardise their design environment. Everything from design tool setup and configuration to document templates and manufacturing file formats, can be set up and automatically deployed to each engineer's desktop. This is a significant development, because failing to maintain a standard set of design styles and tool set-ups has an often overlooked impact on team productivity. Swissbit will be presenting the X-55 series of solid state disks which, when compared to standard devices, achieve endurance values up to ten times higher while maintaining consistent data retention. Diagnostic and monitoring features as well as deletion technology such as Secure Erase make the X-55 series suitable for cost sensitive industrial applications with tough requirements. The first Computer on Module to use the Intel Quark1000 processor will be introduced by ADLINK. The module in the SMARC short format (82 x 50mm) is the first Intel based module with a power consumption of 2 to 3W. The module will feature the Intel Quark SoX X1000, 2Gbyte of onboard DDR3 memory, two PCIe Gen2 lanes, Ethernet, USB2.0 host and device functionsm as well as other I/O interfaces. The DPP-HT50, the first intelligent high-resolution touch LCD for industrial applications, will be introduced by demmel products. The 5in iLCD has 500 cd/m² luminance and offers a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, with direct transfer of display designs from the 7in panel allowed. The Conga-QA3 Qseven module from congatec is based on Intel's E3845 Atom processor. Fitted with ceramic capacitors, the module is said to have an ample L2 cache, which can be shared by multiple cores, and much faster graphics than the previous generation. Freescale's Kinetis product portfolio consists of multiple hardware and software-compatible Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4 MCU families with low-power performance, memory scalability and feature integration. Families range from the entry level ARM Cortex-M0+ Kinetis L Series to the high-performance, feature-rich ARM Cortex-M4 Kinetis K and include a wide selection of analogue, communication, HMI, connectivity and security features. There will of course be many more new products released at and around the show – keep an eye on www.newelectronics.co.uk for all the latest announcements.