VDC attended the 2012 DESIGN West/Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose from March 27th through March 30th and met with more than 30 companies to discuss product announcements and a variety of industry trends impacting the embedded hardware market today.
I wanted to take a few minutes to thank the many outstanding people at the show that provided briefings to the VDC Embedded Hardware team. With our Migrating to the Embedded Cloud report in production, key trend elements we were especially attentive to included M2M connectivity of embedded computing products with cloud based services and infrastructure.
As the first part of this blog, I thought I would give some detail on the Embeddy winner. Then, in a follow up blog that will post next week I will highlight many other companies we met with and some of the new products and trends we heard about.
And now, without further ado, the winner of the VDC Hardware Embeddy award for the 2012 Design West / ESC show was Freescale for their Vybrid family of embedded controller solutions.
There were several things that impressed me about the Vybrid line. First of all there are several different combinations of features and performance that can be selected. This should make them very flexible and cost effective.
The second thing I noted was the heterogeneous architecture for the dual processors inside the device. One processor core was more powerful for the functions that needed it and the other processor core was more economical for less demanding functions. I would think that would make it an good fit in a world that is now demanding more embedded processing power while, at the same time looking for power economy as well.
Freescale looks to be providing product samples later this year and indicates that they will be ramping up production of them in 2013. It will be interesting to see how the market responds.