Embedded Now Blog

I've been at the inaugural Renesas DevCon in San Diego this week, and it's been very interesting so far. The Renesas folks have been gracious hosts, and being in San Diego is always … well, pretty much perfect. And there have been a few surprises.

I met a long-time friend from my previous Motorola field sales life who now works for Renesas, and he commented that "we're the biggest company you've probably never heard of." While I'd heard of them, and that's somewhat true in North America due to the OEM nature of the business, it's clear from the attendees here that there is a core audience that is very familiar with them.

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As processor technology becomes more mobile appropriate, it opens up new doors for all kinds of applications. More processing power makes it easier for these devices to be more intelligent and to communicate wirelessly amongst themselves. The growth in intelligent mobile devices of all types is going to be phenomenal in the coming years. But, bany issues exist that hinder the development and growth of mobile devices.

To be mobile, they must be small and lightweight. They have unique thermal constraints because of the size. You can't simply throw large heat sinks and heat pipes on them to disperse the heat from the processors and chipsets. Fan are not good. They create a long list of design challenges that are more easily addressed by taking them out of the equation. Who wants a fan making noise and constraining how the device is used so as not to block the airflow?

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And when you do somewhere around 2015, you'll see $5B of the USS Gerald R. Ford cruising out there. The Navy made the award to Northrop Grumman yesterday, setting them up for design and construction of the first all-new class of aircraft carrier since the Nimitz class was designed in the late 1960s.

CVN 78 (rendering)

CVN 78 will be more automated, requiring 1000-1200 less personnel to run compared to the Nimitz class. An all new flight deck will feature a electromagnetic launch system (no more steam catapults, instead a big linear induction motor), and other features include improved weapons and material handling, advanced arresting gear, better nuclear propulsion, and 3 times the electrical generation capacity.

And probably more than a couple embedded computers, too.

After 14 years, $8B, and a whole lot of embedded computing and test & measurement equipment, the first beam in CERN's Large Hadron Collider ran around the entire 27km ring today, officially opening the world's most powerful particle collider for business.

CERN ATLAS

From the CERN press release:

"Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today's success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC's operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine's acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin."

Congrats to the many teams around the world who have played a part in this success.

Ever wake up with a song pounding in your head, and you haven't heard it for a while so there's not an immediate explanation? Step into my world for a couple minutes, if you would.

Change is a fascinating thing, and it's been quite engaging theater watching the political types try to define it, position it, capture it, and reposition it the last few weeks. Don't worry, I'm not taking political sides here - it's the trend that I'm interested in.

Because I know that you've sat in a meeting recently and the subject of the economy has at least indirectly come up. It's one of the core reasons so many people are focused on change.

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