VDC attended the 2011 Embedded Systems Conference in Boston on September 27 and 28 and held face-to-face meetings at the conference with over 20 exhibitors. This year’s ESC included greater than 100 exhibitors and was part of what UBM Electronics called Design Days Boston. Design Days Boston featured four events including ESC as part of one show including DesignMED North America, DesignCon East, and designing with LEDs. These four programs span a wide range of technologies and interests and were supported by numerous technical sessions.
Conference organizers reported at the show that registration was up 10-15% year over year. During the course of the show VDC observed that floor traffic and booth attendance at exhibitors conducting training sessions in mini-classroom settings seemed to draw and hold the attention of attendees in greater numbers.
Companies need to make sure that they are realizing a positive return for their investments in these types of conferences. In many cases this translates to metrics such as show attendance, floor traffic, and quality of leads from attendees. Expanding ESC to a Design Days format that includes multiple unique design conferences in one is an approach that is sure to attract new exhibitors, engineers, and new energy.
THE “EMBEDDIES” GO TO:
Best of Show
VDC awarded our software “Embeddy” for best of show live on the conference floor to aicas fortheir JamaicaCAR application management system (AMS), which offers a secure framework for running Java apps that enable car owners to update their automotive infotainment system as new functionality becomes available. Designed with safety and security in mind, the JamaicaCAR AMS minimizes driver distraction and ensures that only properly vetted applications can access critical resources.
This new framework for automotive connected applications jointly developed with Harman International addresses many challenges faced by embedded software developers today. The system has been designed-in with stringent safety and security requirements and the resulting model supports access control and privilege management. Automotive OEMS will be able to integrate applications from suppliers while maintaining the same look and minimizing the need for customization. The new system will be offered on select trim levels in the 2012 Toyota Prius v, Prius Liftback, Prius Plug-in and the new Toyota Camry.
Honerable Mention
VDC awards an honorable mention to Green Hills Software for their announcement of MULTI Version 6 and Green Hills compiler 2012. These new releases offer improved optimization of code size and performance. In addition, the Green Hills Compiler version 2012 is now available as a standalone product that offers engineering organizations the flexibility to independently upgrade just the compiler when support for new CPUs is required.
Walking the Floor
AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada language tools and support services, announced the upcoming release of GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) 5.1 that is expected to be available in October 2011. The new release will feature extended support for C and C++, enhanced source editing and GUI features, and supported on most development platforms for both native and embedded software development.
Arium reviewed their recent announcement (mid-September) from the Intel Developer Forum for the support for the Intel Boot Loader Development Kit (BLDK). Arium’s SourcePoint debugger includes features that allow developers to debug source code used in BLDK development.
ARM conducted live demonstrations on their new DS-5 Linux Application Development System that includes DSTREAM debug and trace unit. In addition the company had demonstrations on their Microcontroller Development environment, MDK-ARM and their new ULINKpro debug and trace unit.
RTOS and tools supplier Enea demonstrated in their booththeir Enea OSE RTOS highlighting multicore support, LINX IPC software, and Optima Eclipsed-based IDE that includes system debug and profiling tools.
Express Logic announced its NetX Duo TCP/IP IPv4/IPv6 dual stack has been extended to include support for the IPsec protocol. A protocol suite for securing network communications, IPsec encrypts and authenticates each packet of a communication session and NetX Duo with IPsec support creates a virtual channel between two networks where packets are encrypted for security and signed for authenticity.
Static analysis tool vendor GrammaTech announced the next version of CodeSonar which incorporates new program analysis algorithms to identify data race conditions and other types of critical concurrency defects. In addition the new version includes a code-level metrics feature that will allow project managers the ability to track various types of metrics and set thresholds for automatically generated warnings when metrics are outside an expected range.
IAR announced enhanced support in the company’s IAR Embedded Workbench tool suite for STMicroelectronics recently launched STM32 F4 family of ARM Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers. In addition the company announced that their IAR Workbench IDE for ARM C/C++ was selected by HOLT Integrated Circuits as Holt’s development environment for ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller development for their MIL-STD-1553 application development kit.
LDRA Software Technology announced version 9 of the LDRA tool suite which unifies its tools with a common user interface, central repositories and performance optimizations for lifecycle traceability. In addition the company announced product integration with MathWorks Simulink modeling tools and their LDRA tool suite.
Micrium reviewed their recent announcement whereby Micrium products, kernels and complete RTOS solutions will be offered through Avnet Electronics Marketing.
Newark/element14 a distributor and community for design engineers conducted demonstrations of its online search and knowledge tool, the element14 knode.
Objective Interface Systems, a supplier of high-performance communications middleware solutions, reviewed their recent announcement that their ORBexpress product now supports Wind River’s VxWorks 6.9 real-time OS with Symmetric Multiprocessing on multicore platforms.
Parasoft announced a new release of their integrated Parasoft C/C++test development environment. New product highlights include support for an extended range of development environments, traceability reporting, complete system metrics calculation, and static analysis for 2011 CWE/SANS.
Reactive Systems, a software testing and validation company conducted demonstrations of their Reactis product line which includes Reactis for Simulink and Reactis for C.
Other leading embedded systems vendors in attendance at ESC/Boston included AMD, Altium, Avnet, Coverity, Digia-QT Commercial, eCosCentric, IBM, Intel, JTAG Technologies, KW-Software, Lauterbach, Logic PD, MathWorks, Perforce Software, SEGGER Microcontroller, Siemens PLM Software, SmartBear Software and others.
TRADEMARK ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Many names of companies, associations, technologies, products, and product types, etc. mentioned in this bulletin comprise Trademarks, registered or non-registered, owned by various entities. These are too numerous to mention individually. VDC acknowledges that ownership of these Trademarks exists and requests that readers acknowledge this as well.
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This Embedded Systems Industry Bulletin is published as part of VDC’s Embedded Software Market Intelligence Service. VDC has been providing embedded systems market intelligence for over 20 years.