A colleague recently told me that his young child, having been raised on iPhones and iPads, was amazed to find that the screen on his dad’s laptop did not respond to touch. His story reminded me of that wonderful scene in the movie Star Trek IV, where Scotty tries to use a computer by speaking into the mouse.

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?

Freescale's re-engagement with historical Power Architecture (previously known as PowerPC) CPU business segments, such as communications, industrial, medical, military, robotics, and surveillance systems, began in earnest at the June 2008 Freescale Technology Forum when the company unveiled its first QorIQ (pronounced "Core IQ") product families.

A decade ago, ARM processors were mainly found in cell phones, disk drives, and few other specialized applications.  These days, they seem to be everywhere, from microcontrollers to tablet PCs.  During this same time period, digital signal processing (DSP) tasks—such as multimedia and communications functions—have also become increasingly common in a wide range of systems.  Given these two trends, it’s no surprise that there’s been a big uptick in products using ARM processors to implement digital signal processing tasks.  

I recently spent a day at the Design Automation Conference (DAC)—an event that has been a mainstay of the EDA industry for many years.  One of the interesting things about the exhibit floor at DAC is that you always find a mixture of new companies—often with interesting new ideas—alongside established names that have been pillars of the EDA community for decades. It’s a bit of an adventure to walk the aisles and see what’s being offered.

A new industry association, the Embedded Vision Alliance, is being formed to help embedded system designers harness computer vision in their products.  BDTI, which has initiated the partnership, believes that computer vision—extracting meaning from images and video—is poised to proliferate into a wide range of applications in the next few years.