Technical Publications

The design and development of electronic devices is no trivial matter - especially when the devices serve the medical industry. As the expense of developing electronic devices continues to rise, engineering teams are turning to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to address the cost issue. The question is, while COTS software is used in arenas such as consumer electronics, mobile phones, etc., can it also be used in the production of safety critical devices? This paper discusses the similarities and illustrates the benefits gained by using the Nucleus OS approach when developing today's medical devices.

Electronic devices are evolving at a breakneck pace as manufacturers strive to differentiate from the crowd with more features, lower power consumption, and a better user experience. Such enhancements might be great for the end user, but they cause major headaches for the software developer who must deliver ever more sophisticated software on top of ever more complex silicon, and still get products out the door on time and within budget. What's needed is a new kind of development platform which empowers electronic devices: flexible enough to be reused across a wide range of products and scalable enough to exploit the unique capabilities of any target silicon. Introducing Nucleus Platform Solutions from Mentor Graphics ...

Exciting times these are! The automotive technology industry is seeing a whole new trend taking shape. Car technology is just in its infancy and already there are many interesting concepts being rolled out from major car manufacturers all over the world. There have been early successes and minor setbacks in this highly competitive industry. This paper will attempt to outline some of the advances that have been made recently, and based upon past trends, will predict the direction this industry is going. In the mind of the author, this direction holds enormous potential for new applications of embedded technology, can bring a wave of new trends and mega-trends in the automobile industry, accounts for many years of sustained fruitful business for car manufacturers and increases value and functionality. It also decreases costs with every coming year for the person who matters the most: the car buyer.

Tokyo, Detroit and Munich, the race is on!

Many types of embedded software are driven by performance. Increasing performance of the software can lead to savings by requiring less CPU horsepower to run the application, thus enabling more functionality to be added, or by allowing the application to be possible at all. In the following article, I will show three techniques that have been valuable in measuring and increasing embedded software performance learned through my firsthand embedded experience.