PHOENIX, 20 Jan. 2014. The consumer products world is like a bowl of cherries; the telecom products world is a little more serious and like a box of chocolates; whereas, the embedded computing world is like a jar of jalapenos, joked Matt McAlonis, development engineering manager, TE Connectivity, adding “what you do today, could burn you tomorrow.”
Engineers need to consider many factors when selecting system- and board-level components, including the application, environment, and life cycle. Every connection counts, McAlonis stressed during his talk at VITA’s Embedded Tech Trends in Phoenix this week.
Embedded computing trends include the demand for more speed and greater system sophistication and complexity, McAlonis notes.
Glenn R. Johnson, P.E., system architect, Kontron, agrees. Johnson and his colleagues are seeing demand for “faster, more powerful, and efficient processors” with an eye toward memory caches, multi-core, multi-threading, instruction pipelines, and other characteristics, he says.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) general processors hold many advantages for lower production volume digital signal processing applications, such as sonar and radar applications, Johnson explains. Among the key advantages is scale of economy, lending to the ready availability of affordable and powerful processors.
