When a small team at Intel began work on its second-generation 8-bit microcontroller in the summer of 1978, they took lessons from their first effort, the 8048, hoping to create something more flexible and enduring. Approaching five decades later, their creation, the 8051, is still going strong, although the current offerings… Read More
Merchant microcontrollers are usually made available in a wide range of variants based on one architecture with different peripheral payloads and packaging options. A couple of companies, notably Cypress with their PSoC families and Silicon Labs with the EFM8 Laser Bee… Read More
This is the second in series of interviews we will do with executives inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Geoff Tate was the founding CEO of Rambus and is now CEO and co-founder of Flex Logix (embedded FPGA). This one should be of great interest due to the recent $16.7B acquisition of Altera by Intel. We all now know the importance… Read More
18 months ago Renesas announced they were prototyping their SG-MONOS eFlash on 28nm, and at the time we said it would be a couple of years before actual product. Yesterday, Renesas revealed their partner in this effort is TSMC – no surprise – and hinted things are moving, with better performance than expected but on a longer qualification… Read More
We tend to focus on connectivity and sensors for the IoT, however there is a third element to what I call the “Edge Device Triad” that is just as important: actuators. Making things move with microcontrollers (MCUs) is a science in and of itself. For small size and low weight combined with decent mechanical power, designers are opting… Read More
At this week’s Embedded World 2016, Atmel is heading back to 8-bit old school with their news, straight to the low pin count end of their MCU portfolio with a significant upgrade to the tinyAVR family.
According to Atmel’s briefing package, development of the ATtiny102 and ATtiny104 has been in progress for some time.… Read More
I’ve spent my entire career in the tech space, being exposed to some of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies. But these days, the thing that excites me a most is how Makers are using technology to make the world a better place.
Consider this: The recent Hackaday prize challenged Makers to build something that matters … Read More
In the days of bit banging and single-threaded loops, programming a microcontroller meant grabbing a C compiler (or even before that, an assembler) and some libraries and writing bare metal code. High performance networking and multi-tasking was usually the purview of heavier real-time operating systems (RTOS) or, if an MMU… Read More
With electronic and software content in vehicles skyrocketing, and the expectations for flawless operation getting larger, the need for system-level verification continues to grow. Last month, we looked at a Synopsys methodology for virtual hardware in the loop, or vHIL… Read More
Consolidation is on-going in semi industry, as we learn that Dialog Semi just announced the acquisition of Atmel. Is it a good news for Atmel, or for Dialog ? Apparently not for the stock market, as Dialog stock went down by 20% within the last few hours… But we can try to look more in-depth at the potential synergy between these two companies’s… Read More
