By Stephen Las Marias, EditorEmbedded systems will drive innovation in new areas, and in almost all industry segments. That was one of the key takeaways during EDN Asia’s Embedded Systems Seminar 2009 (ESS 2009) held this week in Penang, Malaysia (August 25), and Singapore (August 27).
Featuring discussions and technical briefings on the latest in technology and market developments, ESS 2009 explored the issues encountered by the embedded design industry in line with its rapid evolution, serving as a platform for design engineers to not only bring forth their ideas, but also learn from each others’ technologies and experiences, for the continued advancement of the industry.
ESS Penang 2009During his keynote at ESS 2009 in Penang, Chandran Nair, Managing Director of National Instruments Southeast Asia, discussed about the impact of software-defined architectures on embedded systems. He mentioned that with the increasing complexity of systems and hardware amid the shorter development cycles, one solution is doing graphical system design. He also highlighted the FPGA technology, its benefits, and the advances in FPGAs, as well as how they can be implemented in embedded systems.
Ng Choon Sze, Technical Consultant, AEO EMG, for Agilent Technologies, provided a track on increasing test capability with scope-based protocol analysis, discussing analysis considerations, as well as advantages of protocol triggering and decode scope applications.
Kaw Kiam Leong, Field Sales Engineer for National Instruments ASEAN, meanwhile, provided a discussion on graphical system design, and how this is enabling advanced technologies. He touched on virtual instrumentation, as well as how designers can gain access to advanced technologies’ potentials through software.
Dr. Houman Zarrinkoub, Signal Processing Product Manager, The MathWorks Inc. (representing TechSource Systems Pte Ltd), on his part, discussed how early verification for signal processing systems can help engineering teams save time by helping them find software design problems early, when they are easier to isolate and less costly to fix. Dr. Zarrinkoub also presented on the same track for the Singapore audience during the ESS Singapore held August 27.
Tommy Lau, Field Application Engineer, North Asia, Greater China and Malaysia, for
Rabbit Products (representing Digi International Asia Pacific), highlights some of the latest developments from Rabbit Semiconductor and Digi International, including Rabbit’s SBC series and the MiniCore series.
Finally, Dr. Othman Sidek, Director for the Collaborative MicroElectronic Design Excellence Center (CEDEC), USM, gave a presentation entitled “From Sea to Space: Embedded System Research and Development at CEDEC”. He highlighted some of the embedded systems project done by CEDEC, including applications in the aerospace, environment, automotive, and medical, etc., as well as described the facilities and programs available at CEDEC for collaborative activities in this area.
ESS Singapore 2009For the ESS Singapore event, Ulf Schneider, President of the Microelectronics IC Design and System Association in Singapore (MIDAS), and Vice President, R&D, at Infineon Technologies Asia-Pacific, discussed in his keynote speech the growing importance of and key emerging areas for embedded systems technologies, the underlying trends, expected risk and key success factors, as well as challenges for implementation in software and hardware. He said that Asia will remain the major growth driver, and that one of the key success factors will be managing future complexities.
Phang Chuin Chiat, Sales Development Engineer, EMG, for Agilent Technologies, presented the track “Increasing Test Capability with Scope-based Protocol Analysis”.
Ken Ng, Marketing Engineer, National Instruments ASEAN, presented a track entitled “Field Programmable Grid Arrays (FPGA) – Future of Design, Prototype and Deploy”.
Wind River’s Vinay Panchdhari, Regional Manager, Field Engineering, highlighted the essentials for multicore software development in his presentation. He touched on multicore’s business potentials and software configurations, and overcoming multicore development challenges.
Ashwin Balvally, Regional Manager SEA, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms – Embedded Systems, highlighted some of the leading technologies from GE Fanuc. Finally, Buck Ng, Regional Sales Manager for Digi International – South Asia and Pacific, discussed Rabbit Semiconductors’ complete hardware and software-based solutions, its MiniCore Series, as well as its SBC Series.
The seminars are successful, and have attracted more than 300 visitors—mostly design engineers—and exhibitors.
ESS Penang was held at the Equatorial Hotel in Penang, Malaysia. ESS Singapore, meanwhile, was held at the Meritus Mandarin. For more information on EDN Asia’s Seminars, please visit
www.ednasia.com/Seminars.asp.
