ESC returns to Boston after three-year hiatus
Returning to Boston after a three‐year absence, the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) convened in May to address topics related to high‐tech design, biotech/life sciences, medical devices, and military and defense manufacturing.
Conference tracks addressed topics including connected devices and the Internet of Things, embedded software design, I/O and interfacing, prototyping, software quality, and teardowns.
The Curiosity rover and Mars Science Laboratory program were the focus of a keynote address titled “Anatomy of Mars: Challenges in Time and Space for Spacecraft,” presented by Luke Dubord, Avionics Subsystem Engineering, Flight Electronics and Software Systems, Autonomous Systems Division, NASA JPL.
“Any embedded system starts with the environment, wherever you are,” Dubord said. “Mars is really cold, with a mean temperature of -63°C with lows of -143°C and highs of 35°C. And atmospheric pressure is low—about one-hundredth of Earth’s. Those conditions can be mimicked on Earth. But the gravity on Mars is one-third of Earth’s, and while we can create temperature and pressure extremes in Earth-bound laboratories, “we can’t fake gravity,” he said.
JPL can test bits and pieces, but the project executes for the first time in the real environment. “There is no chance to repair your system, except to upload new software, which is a powerful thing,” he said, but the hardware must work.
Dubord described the project as a system of embedded systems. “Two compute elements [on the rover] run the whole show,” he said, although the descent stage needed enough smarts of its own to safely fly off when the landing tether was cut after depositing the rover on the surface. The bill of material might look like that of any embedded system, with a complement of processors, memory, and FPGAs. A software-defined radio handles communications.
Another keynote speaker, Cynthia Breazeal of the MIT Media Lab and founder of Jibo Inc., proposes putting an embedded system in every home—in the form of a “social robot”—one that employs “socio emotive AI” to develop a relationship with a family. Breazeal said she became interested in robots at age 10 with the appearance on the screen of R2D2 and C3PO: full-fledged characters that can interact with people. Now, camera and processing technology have evolved to the point where we can realize such capabilities in real robots.
Such robots can be coaches or counselors, assisting in weight-loss management, for example. And they can be preschool teachers or can even help relieve the anxiety of children during hospital stays, she said.
On the ESC demo floor, AdaCore, a provider of development and verification tools for critical software, highlighted its CodePeer 3.0, a new version of its advanced static-analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code. CodePeer 3.0 includes a variety of enhancements that help developers detect potential run-time and logic errors early in the software life cycle, and its deep analysis can directly support formal certification against industry-specific safety standards.
CodePeer 3.0 also adds many new features, including support for precise IEEE 754 floating-point semantics, added flexibility in analyzing complex projects, improved support for legacy Ada compilers, more precise diagnostic messages, and a new check on parameter aliasing. Tool qualification material for both the avionics and railway domains is available as a CodePeer 3.0 option.
CodePeer is fully integrated into Adacore’s GNAT Pro development environment and comes with a number of complementary static-analysis tools common to the technology—a coding standard verification tool (GNATcheck), a source code metric generator (GNATmetric), and a document generator.
Other exhibitors included Altium, which featured its Altium Designer for PCB design; Lauterback, which offers the TRACE32‐ICD debugger, TRACE32‐ICE in‐circuit emulator, and TRACE32‐FIRE fully integrated RISC emulator; and Ironwood Electronics, highlighting BGA and QFN sockets that support better than 75-GHz signal speeds as well as sockets for burn-in and test applications. And XJTAG presented its XJDeveloper graphical application that allows you to quickly and easily set up and run tests on a circuit; XJInvestigator, which permits you to diagnose manufacturing problems on failing boards; and XJFlash, a method for in‐system programming of flash devices through JTAG.
Participants included Rigol Technologies, which makes with the MSO4054 mixed-signal oscilloscope, the DG1000Z arbitrary waveform generator, and the DSA800 spectrum analyzer. Siglent Technologies highlighted its SDS2304 family of oscilloscopes with bandwidths of 70, 100, 200, and 300 MHz; its SSA3000 spectrum analyzers, which offer 1.5-GHz and 3-GHz bandwidths and can make EMC and VSWR measurements; and the SDG2000 ARB function generator. And Teledyne LeCroy showcased its 12‐bit High Definition oscilloscopes and WaveSurfer 3000 oscilloscopes.
Rohde & Schwarz also exhibited its oscilloscope lineup—including the RTO Series—and described effective ways of measuring low-voltage signals and performing debugging operations in both the time and frequency domains.
Also on display were the Tektronix MDO4000B mixed-domain oscilloscope, the MSO/DPO5000B mixed-signal oscilloscope, and the RSA306 USB spectrum analyzer.
ESC Boston was co-located with Electronics New England, BIOMEDevice Boston, Design & Manufacturing New England, PLASTEC New England, and Quality Expo Showcase. “These partner events are a perfect match—ESC is a conference for embedded hardware, software, and firmware engineers. And the other shows bring in hundreds of suppliers of electronics components, design systems, plastics materials, and products and technologies for biomedical device manufacturing,” said Nina Brown, events director, UBM Canon.