Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) has announced new members of the Blackfin processor family targeting control-loop applications.  The new BF50x parts sport a much larger “executable” flash in place of the serial flash offered in earlier Blackfin chips, and integrate a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter suitable for control applications.

Although the economy appears to be on the mend, established technology companies and venture capitalists alike remain cautious about their investments.  When considering investments, acquisitions or major product purchase decisions, they are wary of accepting companies’ claims about their technology at face value and often turn to outside experts for technical due diligence evaluations to assess and manage risk.

Energy consumption is a chief concern for most embedded applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many obstacles hinder comparisons of processors’ energy consumption.

This month fabless semiconductor start-up Quartics introduced the QV1721, a video coprocessor SoC targeting applications such as netbook PCs, set-top boxes and high-definition televisions.  The QV1721 is intended to be used to offload demanding video tasks from the main CPU in a system. The chip provides high-definition video encoding, decoding, and transcoding functions, along with post-processing to improve perceived video quality.