Five Great Examples of the Latest Embedded Systems for Any Number of Applications

The world is becoming increasingly digital with the onset of Industry 4.0 and the already emerging Industry 5.0, and embedded systems have been at the forefront of many applications within those revolutions. A report from Global Market Insights shows embedded systems exceeded $100-billion last year and is expected to grow at a CGAR of over 6% by 2026 due in part by the increase of automated manufacturing, smart homes, wearable medical device, and more. The latest embedded systems are set to drive this trend, and below are five of the newest set to hit the market and propel embedded applications in many areas.

Trinamic’s TMC5160 SilentStepStick

Trimanic Motion Control has launched the company’s new TMC5160 SilentStepStick silent stepper motor controller and driver IC, which can manage motors up to 3A phase current at 35V. Trimanic states the TMC5160 SilentStepStick is more advanced than previous versions, and integrates the latest versions of StallGuard and StealthChop, which brings sensorless load measurement capabilities, stall detection, acts as a mechanical stop switch, and offers quiet motor operation. Those features bring increased efficiency and enable refined machines with fewer parts.

Beyond the integrated features, the TMC5160 SilentStepStick offers a voltage range of 8V to 60V and a resolution of 256 micro-steps for each full step. It also features Step/Dir/SPI interfaces, configuration via SPI/CFG pins, standby current reduction, and can handle 10V to 35V motors with up to 3.0A RMS.

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E4 Computer Engineering’s E4 RK008 Thunder-X2-Based Node

E4 Computer Engineering has announced the validation of the company’s E4 RK008 node, designed around Marvell’s ThunderX2 64-bit multi-core Arm microprocessor, and outfitted with a pair of Nvidia V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The E4 RK008 is envisioned for single-entry servers, and are equipped with 2X ThunderX2 processors, large memory capacity, enhanced I/O capabilities, and the latest SSD storage technology. Moreover, the E4 RK008 is optimized for HPC (High-Performance Computing) and AI applications, code development, and any computer-intensive workloads by balancing performance and power efficiency.

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Abaco Systems’ SBC3511 3U OpenVPX Single Board Computer

Abaco Systems has upgraded the company’s recently announcedSBC3511 3U VPX SBC (Single Board Computer), which now features Intel’s 9th generation i7 6-core Intel Xeon E-2276ME (Coffee Lake) processor, which hums along at 2.8GHz (up to 4.4GHz in Turbo Mode), and is targeted at embedded applications. Abaco states the SBC3511 3U VPX can handle the 40GigE data plane for alignment with the SOSA (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) 3U I/O-intensive SBC plug-in card profile, along with the CMOSS standards.

Beyond the Xeon E-2276ME, the SBC features a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+, up to 32Gb of DDR4 SDRAM soldered with ECC, 10GBASE-KR control plane, IPMI controller, PCIe, and 1000BaseT Ethernet. It also packs DisplayPort, USB, Serial, SATA, and GPIOs. The SBC3511 3U VPX is also equipped with a host of security features, including a physical unclonable function (PUF), user-accessible hardened cryptographic blocks, asymmetric authentication, and side-channel attack protection, along with other silicon-based AT services.

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X-ES Xpedite2500 XMC Module with UIltraScale FPGA

X-ES has introduced itsXPedite2500 XMC module with integrated Xilinx Kinetix Ultrascale XCKU115 FPGA for user-customizable, high-bandwidth data processing applications. X-ES states their user-programmed device comes outfitted with ample resources for high-end logic and signal processing, with over 1.4M system logic cells, 5,520 DSP slices, and 79.5Mb of block RAM. The XPedite2500 features up to 8X PCI Express Gen3 interfaces, and up to 8Gb of DDR4-2400 SDRAM in four 32-bit channels.

The PCI Express interfaces utilize P16 connectors, which can be replaced with up to 8X HSS (High-Speed Serial) ports if needed. The XPedite2500 XMC module also offers LVDS I/O via P16, and an optional P14 connector can provide additional LVDS and LVCMOS I/O. X-ES also provides an FPGA Development Kit (FDK) for Xilinx Vivado, which includes IP blocks, HDL, test benches, Linux drivers, and complete example designs.

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SECO’s COMe-C42-BT7 COM Express Type 7 Module

SECO has entered into the network & communications and storage markets with a new COM Express Type 7 line of HPC modules. Their first entry, the COMe-C42-BT7, a COM Express Rel. 3.0 Basic Type 7 module outfitted with an AMD EPYC Embedded 3000 series processor in quad-core or eight-core variants. Networking and connectivity have been boosted with 4x 10GBASE-KR interfaces,1x 1GbE port with NC-SI, 4X USB 3.1, and 24x PCI-e Gen3 lanes. The module also comes outfitted with 4X DDR4 SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 128Gb of DDR4-2666 ECC memory.

The COMe-C42-BT7 also features 2X legacy UARTs (16C550 compatible), along with SPI, SM Bus, LPC bus interfaces. It’s also compatible with Windows 10, Windows Server, and Linux OS 64-bit operating systems.

These are just several examples of the latest embedded systems hardware that can be utilized for any number of applications, including telecommunications, automated manufacturing, transportation systems, high-volume data processing, and more. Like all computing hardware, embedded systems will continue to evolve as new technology is introduced, and it will be interesting to see what the next evolution will add.

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