News

High points at embedded conference: Fixed, and other

• By Scott Adams
• December 2, 2002

Floating-point processors have altered the embedded development world, but not always for the best. These digital signal processing powerhouses consume power and increase cost. This has led some to look for ways to migrate designs with less robust but still quite able fixed point alternatives.

Enter The MathWorks, Natick, Mass. At the recent Embedded Systems Conference, the company demonstrated working automotive applications where its Simulink, Stateflow and Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder software was used to design and generate code for fixed-point controllers.

The software lets developers simulate behavior and assess trade-offs between floating-point and fixed-point designs, according to Paul Barnard, Control Systems marketing director, MathWorks. The software can automatically generate efficient implementations for either floating- or fixed-point controllers, and can optimize designs to reduce RAM, ROM and execution time in the generated code.

Also seen at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston: Source code analyst Programming Research Group, a Dublin firm which has recently created a U.S. subsidiary, said that its static analysis tools now support the Eclipse-based QNX Momentics platform .... Green Hills Software has released the royalty-free Integrity 4.0 real-time operating system for the Intel x86/Pentium platform ... National Instruments announced the LabView FPGA Pioneer System, an IDE that brings the company's graphical development environment to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) ... OSIsoft demonstrated its Echo 1.2 Embedded Component Historian Object for time series data archiving .... Meanwhile, Motorola announced a series of intelligent dynamic clock drivers for redundant failover solutions.