Intel Atom Processor “Cedar Trial” D2550 from Acrosser

AMB-D255T3 can support dual displays via VGA, HDMI or 18-bit LVDS. AMB-D255T3 has one MiniPCIe type slot and one PCI for customer’s expansion. The MiniPCIe slot works with SATA and USB signals that can be equipped with mSATA storage module.
AMB-D255T3 is certainly an excellent solution for applications that require powerful computing while still maintaining low-power consumption in a small form factor motherboard and has a complete set of I/O functions. Users can deploy the system solution with this fan-less mainboard easily. Ideally, it is a fast time-to-market weapon for system integrators.

for more information, please visit:
http://www.acrosser.com/News-Newsletter/62.html

More Acrosser's in-vehicle products release in MIMS!

With its specific geographic location, MIMS is truly a trans-lateral gateway for automotive businesses. If you are looking for Acrosser’s products or other innovative automotive components from Taiwan, do not miss the Taiwan Pavilion (Pavilion 8 Hall 3, booth number: R111) this year!
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Featuring our in-vehicle computer, AR-V6100FL!

for more info, please go to the website:
http://www.acrosser.com/News-Newsletter/61.html

Implementing embedded pc

Implementing the hardware is only one part of the embedded computer game. OEMs also face the challenge of implementing this embedded computer  ate-of-the-art technology in their new or existing applications, including validation and verification of the applications’ functionality and access to hardware functions and I/Os. To reduce the amount of R&D work, lower costs and shorten their products’ time to market, they seek ways to cut down their initial development and migration tasks. One approach is to make use of a hardware vendor’ migration services.

refer to: http://embedded-computing.com/white-papers/white-small-form-factor-sff-designs-2/

Battling power management

Most engineers and system integrators find it troublesome when installing car computers in their business vehicle. How often did hardware configuration or software programming take away from their business? Above all these worries, establishing steady power management becomes the most important issue before integrating the entire system. Acrosser’s In-Vehicle computer offers 6 stunning power management traits to overcome these difficulties.

"Status LED" versus "Power Delay Control"

Most of the In-Vehicle computers are not equipped with displays, making them difficult for users to act when error occurs. Installed with status LED, Acrosser’s In-Vehicle computer precisely reflects its status quo to its user.

However, in case of zero power supply occurring after switching off the vehicle ignition, Acrosser’s “power delay control” function enables the In-vehicle computer can still operate for a short period after switching off. Therefore, the user may upload or synchronize data with control center and complete the task.

ACROSSER Technology has provided a complete product line for In-Vehicle computers. The product line also gained more attention after winning the 21th Taiwan Excellence Award with 2 outstanding In-Vehicle computers: AR-V6005FL and AR-V6100FL. Acrosser also released its latest in-vehicle computer, AIV-HM76V0FL during late 2012. The company pride itself in offering not just products, but solutions. Please contact ACROSSER Technology for further consultations, volume quotes, or any other questions.

Product Information:

AIV-HM76V0FL

http://www.acrosser.com/Products/In-Vehicle-Computer/In-Vehicle-PCs/AIV-HM76V

0FL/In-Vehicle-computer-AIV-HM76V0FL.html

AR-V6005FL

http://www.acrosser.com/Products/In-Vehicle-Computer/In-Vehicle-PCs/AR-V6005FL/Intel-Atom-E640-AR-V6005FL.html

AR-V6100FL

http://www.acrosser.com/Products/In-Vehicle-Computer/In-Vehicle-PCs/AR-V6100FL/Intel-Core-i7／i5／Celeron-B810-AR-V6100FL.html

Award Information:

http://www.acrosser.com/News-Press-Release/86.html

Contact us：

http://www.acrosser.com/inquiry.html

Mini-ITX with multiple apllications

With a total board height less than 20mm, the slim fit feature of AMB-D255T1 makes it a perfect applicationalmost everywhere. With single layer I/O ports and external +12V DC power input, AMB-D255T1 can easily be equipped even in limited spaces like digital signage, POS or thin client systems. Also, the supporting video source includes both VGA and HDMI outputs to cater to a variety of needs. Many digital signage partners have showed great interests toward AMB-D255T1 for their business sector. AMB-D255T1 has one DDR3 SO-DIMM which supports up to 4GB DDR3 memory, mSATA socket with USB signals and SIM slot, and a DC jack for easy power in. For customers that are taking their entire system to the next level, AMB-D255T1 provides one PCI slot and one Mini PCIe expansion slot with a SIM card socket for further improvement. The mini PCIe expansion allows mSATA to function together with the system or multi module choices for USB signals module installation.( mSATA storage, Wi-Fi module, or 3G/4G telecommunication)

The key features of the AMB-D255T1 include: ．Intel Atom D2550 1.86GHz ．1 x DDR3 SO-DIMM up to 4GB ．1 x VGA ．1 x HDMI ．1 x 24-bit LVDS ．6 x USB2.0 ．4 x COM ．1 x GbE (Realtek RTL8105E) ．1 x PS/2 KB/MS ．1 x PCI slot ．1 x MiniPCIe slot for mSATA and USB device ．1 x SATA with power connector ．8-bit GPIO

AMB-QM77T1 is dedicated to multiple applications, such as industrial automations, kiosks, digital signages, and ATM machines. Supporting 3rd generation Intel core i processor, AMB-QM77T1 features an integrated GPU to support the following graphic libraries: DirectX11, OpenGL4.0 and OpenCL1.1. As for numbers of output, a maximum of 3 independent displays are supplied, which is a perfect solution for gaming/multimedia business. In addition, 4 USB3.0 and 2 SATA III connectors result in high data transmission.

Card sized SBC

The initial goal in creating the Raspberry Pi credit card sized, Linux-based Single Board Computer (SBC) – targeted primarily at education – was to develop a response to the decline of students engaging with computer science and related engineering disciplines. Our desire was to reverse the trend of children becoming consumers rather than creators. The following case study follows the hardware development process from an early failure, initial prototypes, and through to the finished production design.

Over recent years there has been an increasing trend for children to be consumers of digital content rather than be future creators or engineers. This trend is driven by manufacturers looking to provide a seamless experience for target customers on a variety of electronic platforms, from gaming consoles to tablets and laptop computers.
As a result, access to raw I/O has become restricted. Similarly, any packaged provision of a programming environment is an anathema to the products’ commercial goals. The knowledge required to create “hello world” or flash an external LED has become simply too vast and the opportunity to learn vital skills such as structuring/codifying ideas and debugging has been largely subsumed by a click-and-shoot world. Any motivation to get under the hood and see how these products work is largely dissipated by the impenetrable barriers presented by these “locked down” systems.




refer to :http://embedded-computing.com/articles/case-card-sized-sbc/

A new starter kit for COM Express(tm) modules..

A new starter kit for COM Express(tm) modules with AMD Embedded R-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) is now available. The intelligent starter kit MSC C6-SK-A7-T6T2 contains a COM Express(tm) Type 6 baseboard, an active heat sink with fan and two DDR3 memory modules.


The intelligent starter kit MSC C6-SK-A7-T6T2 contains a COM Express™ Type 6 baseboard, an active heat sink with fan and two DDR3 memory modules. Users of the kit are free to choose one of four COM Express™ Type 6 computer modules with Embedded R-Series APU from MSC’s MSC C6C-A7 product family. Furthermore, the starter kit is also offered with a 15 inch XGA TFT display with LED backlight. Different display types or touch screen panels are available on request.

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refer to:http://smallformfactors.com/news/msc-kit-com-expresstm-type-modules/#at_pco=cfd-1.0

Acrosser will highlight its latest endeavors on 2 major applications: networking and gaming

ACROSSER Technology announces our participation in 2013 the Embedded Systems Expo and Conference (ESEC) from May 8th to the 10th. The event will take place at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center in Tokyo, Japan. We warmly invite all customers to come and meet us at the west hall, booth number: WEST 10-61.

At the 2013 ESEC, Acrosser will highlight its latest endeavors on 2 major applications: networking and gaming. For networking, the latest Rackmount product from Acrosser, the ANR-IB75N1, will be on display during the entire event. As for gaming applications, Acrosser will exhibit its new All-in-One Gaming Board, AMB-A55EG1. The board features great computing and graphic performance, and high compatibility on multiple operation systems. In addition, Acrosser also stresses its focus on other product lines, including Single Board Computers and In Vehicle Computer AIV-HM76V0FL.

(Software) Manage risk in Java...

When it comes to software development, the old adage is best spun in a slightly different way: better "early" than never. Accordingly, static analysis can help those developing in Java to stay one step ahead of potential coding problems.

Today’s software development teams are under immense pressure; the market demands high-quality, secure releases at a constantly increasing pace while security threats become more and more sophisticated. Considering the high cost of product failures and security breaches, it is more important than ever to address these risks throughout the software development process. Potential problems need to be spotted early to prevent release delays or, worse, post-release failures.
Fortunately, there are numerous tools to help developers manage these risks, helping to identify potential problems early in the development phase when issues are less disruptive and easier to fix. They are readily accessible to developers and easy to use within many development environments. This applies to developers programming in any language; however, we focus on Java in this discussion (see Sidebar 1).
1.Static analysis helps mitigate risk
2.Selecting static analysis tools for Java
3.Checkstyle
4.PMD
5.FindBugs
6.Development testing – Tying it all together




...

refer to: http://embedded-computing.com/articles/static-helps-manage-risk-java/ 

Acrosser at International Exhibition Center in Tokyo

ACROSSER Technology announces our participation in 2013 the Embedded Systems Expo and Conference (ESEC) from May 8th to the 10th. The event will take place at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center in Tokyo, Japan. We warmly invite all customers to come and meet us at the west hall, booth number: WEST 10-61.Contact：
http://www.acrosser.com/inquiry.html

FPGAs have become some of the most important drivers for development

FPGAs have become some of the most important drivers for development of leading edge semiconductor technology. The complexity of programmable devices, and their integration of diverse high-performance functions, provides excellent vehicles for testing new processes. It’s no accident that Intel has selected Achronix and Tabula, both makers of programmable devices, as the only partners that have been granted access to their 22 nm 3D Tri-Gate (FinFET) process. In February, Intel also announced an agreement with Altera, which will enable the company to manufacture FPGAs using their next-generation 14 nm Tri-Gate process.

In parallel with driving manufacturing, FPGA technology development must also include enhancements to design tools and flows. As vendors strive to make their devices more SoC- and ASIC-like, they are also adopting standards and collaborating with EDA companies to integrate their tools more seamlessly. These collaborations are producing great benefits for designers, as FPGA design methodologies are leading the way in areas that the EDA industry has long been promising new capabilities, such as in Electronic System Level (ESL) synthesis, IP integration and re-use, and higher-level tools for software/hardware co-design.

FPGA design methodologies have long integrated EDA point tools, such as simulation and PCB design, into FPGA vendor’s design platforms. Now, vendors such as Synopsys, with their Synplicity tools, and Xilinx with Vivado, are collaborating to build more complete integrated top-to-bottom flows. To address the greater complexity of FPGAs that may now contain up to two million equivalent logic cells, Synopsys has added Hierarchical Project Management (HPM) to Synplicity. HPM supports distributed design teams and parallel development, enabling partitioning of RTL and sharing of design debug tasks. Xilinx has adopted the industry-standard Synopsys Design Constraint (SDC) timing constraints (to replace Xilinx proprietary UDC) in a design flow that can be driven from standard Verilog HDL.

1.EASING IP INTEGRATION

Easier integration and re-use of semiconductor IP, especially when sourcing from multiple vendors, has been one of the greatest challenges to SoC designers and EDA tool flows. With the advent of higher capacity FPGA-based SoCs that utilize embedded ARM cores, those same challenges are now extended to the world of FPGA design....

2.INDUSTRY STANDARDS ENABLE HIGHER LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION

Building on their 2011 acquisition of AutoESL, Xilinx also says that they have expanded their C/C++ system-level design library for High-Level Synthesis (HLS) in the new Vivado release. Xilinx is targeting the growing market for embedded vision applications, following on their participation as a founding member of the Embedded Vision Alliance, with support for industry standard floating point math.h operations and real-time video processing functions. Designers of embedded vision systems will be able to utilize Vivado HLS integrated with the Open Source Computer Vision Library provided by the OpenCV organization. OpenCV is an open source BSD-licensed library of computer vision functions, which supports Windows,Linux, Mac, Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Vivado users will be able to develop embedded vision applications for the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor system in Zynq FPGAs, augmented with special-purpose hardware accelerators built in the programmable logic fabric....

3.THE FUTURE OF FPGAS

 Advances in FPGA tools and flows are good news for designers of programmable logic systems as well as ASIC and SoC designers. At a recent Synopsys User Group tutorial on the Synplicity-Vivado flow, the large majority of attendees were involved in FPGA prototyping, where the latest high-capacity FPGAs have become critical tools for design validation and signoff for complex SoCs. By utilizing the same design languages and standards for both ASIC and FPGA design, much duplication of effort can be eliminated and faster time-to-market will result.

...

refer to :
http://dsp-fpga.com/articles/advances-in-eda-design-methodologies-led-by-next-generation-fpgas/

Industrial touchscreen LCD monitors

American Industrial Systems Inc. (AIS), has introduced a complete line of industrial touchscreen LCD monitors in several mechanical designs and paired with the latest in touchscreen technology to fit every situation.

.................

refer to :

http://industrial-embedded.com/news/ais-gaming-digital-signage-industries/0/

For tomorrow's communications networks...

IT managers are under increasing pressure to boost network capacity and performance to cope with the data deluge. Networking systems are under a similar form of stress with their performance degrading as new capabilities are added in software. The solution to both needs is next-generation System-on-Chip (SoC) communications processors that combine multiple cores with multiple hardware acceleration engines.


refer:http://embedded-computing.com/articles/next-generation-architectures-tomorrows-communications-networks/

New dimension in operating systems

Given the increased complexity of processors and applications, the current generation of Operating Systems (OSs) focuses mostly on software integrity while partially neglecting the need to extract maximum performance out of the existing hardware.

Processors perform as well as OSs allow them to. A computing platform, embedded or otherwise, consists of not only physical resources – memory, CPU cores, peripherals, and buses – managed with some success by resource partitioning (virtualization), but also performance resources such as CPU cycles, clock speed, memory and I/O bandwidth, and main/cache memory space. These resources are managed by ancient methods like priority or time slices or not managed at all. As a result, processors are underutilized and consume too much energy, robbing them of their true performance potential.

Most existing management schemes are fragmented. CPU cycles are managed by priorities and temporal isolation, meaning applications that need to finish in a preset amount of time are reserved that time, whether they actually need it or not. Because execution time is not safely predictable due to cache misses, miss speculation, and I/O blocking, the reserved time is typically longer than it needs to be. To ensure that the modem stack in a smartphone receives enough CPU cycles to carry on a call, other applications might be restricted to not run concurrently. This explains why some users of an unnamed brand handset complain that when the phone rings, GPS drops.

Separate from this, power management has recently received a great deal of interest. Notice the “separate” characterization. Most deployed solutions are good at detecting idle times, use modes with slow system response, or particular applications where the CPU can run at lower clock speeds and thus save energy. For example, Intel came up with Hurry Up and Get Idle (HUGI). To understand HUGI, consider this analogy: Someone can use an Indy car at full speed to reach a destination and then park it, but perhaps using a Prius to get there just in time would be more practical. Which do you think uses less gas? Power management based on use modes has too coarse a granularity to effectively mine all energy reduction opportunities all the time.

refer:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/performance-management-new-dimension-operating-systems/

About embedded virtualization

Virtualization means different things to users with different types of applications. Most forms of virtualization employed in IT server environments aren't of interest to embedded system developers because they don't ensure that processing of time-critical tasks is deterministic. Instead, the way for single and multiprocessor platforms to support multiple operating environments while maintaining real-time responsiveness is to functionally partition processor resources so that they are controlled by specific operating environments, which run directly on the processor silicon rather than on virtual machine implementations.

The origin of embedded virtualization technology came about with the idea of creating an environment where a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) could work alongside a General-Purpose Operating System (GPOS) such as Microsoft Windows. Embedded virtualization creates a partitioned environment in which the two OSs and the applications on them run on a single platform as if they were running on two separate platforms. The advantages of doing this are clear: system cost and complexity can be reduced if fewer processing platforms are required to serve the application’s computing needs. Product reliability can be enhanced as well if systems can be built with fewer hardware elements.

Back in the early ’80s, machine builders saw the opportunity to leverage the PC platform to build control systems for their machines. The first such applications were relatively simple, and the focus was mainly to leverage available hardware that was substantially lower in cost than specialized control hardware.

As the PC evolved with the addition of Windows, numerous application software packages were introduced, driving a new standard of Human Machine Interface (HMI) with supporting graphic engines and software tools. Machine builders saw the opportunity to use Windows to create advanced HMIs that could simplify their machines’ setup, operation, and maintenance. However, Windows-based PCs could not be used for portions of an application involving time-critical control because Windows, by itself, isn’t an RTOS and is not capable of performing control functions with determinism. Hence, embedded system designers would typically add a real-time computer subsystem to the machine in addition to the PC to deliver a full suite of product functionality.

RTOS suppliers, on the other hand, have not had the resources to build the kind of graphic software tools and support that are available for Windows. A few saw the opportunity to couple their OSs to Windows in order to add RTOS functionality to Windows-based systems on a single computing platform.

The benefits of combining an RTOS with Windows on one machine were obvious for embedded systems OEMs, but the technical issues associated with doing that were very complex. Running two OSs on one computer wasn’t a new concept; it had been done 10 years before on mainframes with virtualization technology. That technology virtualized the whole computer platform, essentially creating an interface layer between the OSs and the hardware much like modern server virtualization technology does today.

The fundamental problem with this is that isolating the OS and application software from direct access to the hardware causes nondeterministic time delays when the application software needs to interact with its I/O. Real-time applications, however, must have direct access (sometimes called bare-metal access) to the devices that the applications need to control, so that the software can write or read data to and from the I/O devices in a timely, deterministic manner.

refer:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/the-multiprocessor-multi-os-systems/#utm_source=Multicore%2Bmenu&utm_medium=text%2Blink&utm_campaign=articles

About Choosing a processor

 The days are over when selecting a processor was a relatively simple task, in light of today’s converged processing paradigm. But examining a few key considerations can ease the decision-making process.

Selecting an embedded processor used to be a pretty straightforward task. Of course, this was back in “the old days,” when the focus was on a limited set of functions, user interface and connectivity didn’t matter too much, and power consumption wasn’t such an overarching issue. In today’s realm of converged processing, where a single device can perform control, signal processing, and application-level tasks, there’s a lot more to consider (Figure 1). While there are too many aspects of the processor selection process to detail here, let’s examine some of the more prominent areas that system designers must consider.

 

Figure : Today’s converged processing paradigm makes selecting a processor a more complex decision than ever.

 

 

1.Processor performance

2.Hardware acceleration

3.Bandwidth requirements

4.Power management

5.Security needs

6.Safety and fault tolerance

7.Debugging capabilities

8.System cost

9.Signal chain

 

Refer: 

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/choosing-processor-a-multifaceted-process/#at_pco=cfd-1.0   

For more product information, you can visit Acrosser product pages.
http://www.acrosser.com