Industrial control systems must have a minimal error rate, especially in harsh environments, which makes safe and secure system development crucial. The AURIX TC3x and TRAVEO T2G microcontroller product families from Infineon Technologies address these requirements with a wide range of integrated hardware functional safety and cybersecurity features. Both product families have extended their support…
New hardware support package available for MathWorks Simulink
MathWorks and Infineon Technologies have announced a hardware support package for the MathWorks Simulink products for Infineon’s latest AURIX TC4x family of automotive microcontrollers. Automotive engineers designing advanced electric vehicles, sensor fusion, and radar signal processing functions can use the hardware support package, even before silicon is available. With the package, they can validate use…
Renesas debuts automotive ECU virtualization solution platform
Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, recently announced an integrated automotive, electronic control unit (ECU), virtualization platform that enables designers to integrate multiple applications into a single ECU that are safely and securely separated from each other to avoid interference. The solution enables customers to adopt new electrical-electronic (E/E) architectures using MCU-based…
How to use interrupts with Arduino
Microcontrollers are designed to run concise firmware that’s dedicated to a specific application. The firmware is embedded software, which is written into the program memory. The firmware codes are typically short and designed to manage and execute several micro tasks down to the hardware level. Since microcontrollers are dedicated to a single application, these devices…
Renesas introduces RA6T2 MCUs for next-generation motor control
Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, has launched the RA6T2 Group MCUs, which feature a rich set of peripheral functions and hardware accelerator designed specifically for motor control. The new RA6T2 Group MCUs deliver a combination of performance, features, and cost-efficiency for motor control designs in home appliances, smart home, industrial and…
NI unveils product advancements in software-connected systems
NI has announced its latest product advancements designed to fuel innovation across the production process — from testing and validation to R&D and design. NI first unveiled these product advancements at NI Connect, a virtual experience dedicated to exploring how test and data analytics will shape the world’s newest innovations and provide engineers the information…
Xilinx’s new Versal AI Edge ACAP series delivers AI-enabled intelligence
Xilinx, Inc., a provider in adaptive computing, has launched its Versal AI Edge series, designed to enable AI innovation from the edge to the endpoint. With four times the AI performance-per-watt versus GPUs and ten times greater compute density, compared to previous-generation adaptive SoCs, the Versal AI Edge series is currently the most scalable and…
Hardware Software Co-Design
The aim of the project is to implement a system based on Hardware/Software Co-Design on a Spartan 3E FPGA board and a Microcontroller using Xilinx IDE tool. Alphabets and/or numbers are entered through keyboard (push buttons on the FPGA) and are in-turn displayed on the LCD display (on the Microcontroller), at the same time audio corresponding to the key being pressed will be played on a speaker. The system is implemented in both hardware and software. VHDL is used as hardware description language and C as software. Though this project can be implemented by use of either FPGA or microcontroller only, but that is not the aim here. We want to introduce this concept so that it can be applied later in problems where partitioning can actually make a difference in the performance.
Open Source Hardware
Open source software movement had to climb big hurdles to rise to the firm pedestal where it stands today. A notion that had started as early as in 1970s started to gain grounds only towards the culmination of the millennia. The recent spurt in the open source software market and in the open source movement itself makes us ponder on the next logical step. Open Source Hardware? Before we focus on the ‘Open Source Hardware’, let us see how Open Source Software works. Open source software is a software for which the source code is available to its users. Depending on the terms of the license, it can be read, modified, enhanced and redistributed under the same license. In software section, it works fine because the marginal costs involved with the distribution of software is effectively nil.