Here is a very interesting write-up that may provide a glimpse of where flash memory will evolve. I am sorry to note no mention of SNDK, however SSTI, AMD and FLSH are very favorable mentioned.
As the future plays out it will be interesting to see which market, embedded flash vs. removeable flash cards will grow fastest (as opposed to growing company specific EPS faster!)
Summer Embedded Systems Conference proves business is booming!!
It is interesting to see the pictures found at this URL!
Ref: ( embeddedtechnology.com{70102FC2-57E8-11D4-8C55-009027DE0829}#Embedded Technology )
7/12/2000
By Bruce A. Bennett
If anyone doubts that business is booming in the embedded computing market, a quick visit to this week’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Summer in Boston, would have laid those doubts to rest. For a small conference held in the middle of summer, when many people plan vacations, the attendance was very impressive. Most of the technical sessions played to good crowds and the exhibit area was extremely crowded throughout the day.
Compared to its spring and autumn cousins, ESC Summer is really small. This year they had an expanded trade show section and about 60 or 70 companies took advantage of it.
So what were some of the more interesting products they were showing?
Silicon Storage Technology (SST) (408-735-9110) was showing off samples of their new ATA-Disk Chip (ADC), which they announced to the world on Monday. The device, which looks a lot like M-Systems DiskonChip memory device, is actually quite different. According to Sam Nakhimovsky, the ADC utilizes SST’s SuperFlash technology and standard ATA/IDE protocol to provide the same functionality and compatibility as a conventional IDE hard disk drive. The new device has a built-in microcontroller and file management firmware that supports the standard ATA protocol, meaning the host system, whatever that may be, does not require any additional or proprietary software such as a Flash File System (FFS) or Memory Technology Driver (MTD). The ADC, which is packaged in a 32-pin DIP package, is currently available in 8 MB to 64 MB capacities and will support 5.0V and 3.3V operation. The plan is to offer increased capacities in the future.
Speaking of memory, M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd. (510-494-2090) was showing off their recently announced DiskOnChip DIMM2000 designed for low-profile applications. The DIMM2000, so named because of its standard 144-pin dual inline memory module (DIMM) configuration, is less than 4 mm thick, meaning it can be designed into virtually any kind of device, regardless of how tight space constraints are. Capacities range from 16 to 256 MB. M-Systems was also showing its popular Fast Flash Disk (FFD) 2.5” product line which now boasts capacities of up to 2,432 MB for the IDE version and 2,688 MB for the SCSI version.
The theme of this year’s ESC Summer was “Connect to tomorrow’s complete embedded solutions,” which, as you’ve probably figured out by now, had a lot to do with Internet connectivity. Internet devices were, to coin a cliche, the “flavor of the month” at this year’s show. Everyone, it seems, including some of the most respected names in the electronics industry, are trying to figure out how to make money by hooking their products into the web. Some stand to make a lot of money if they’re successful; others are just hopelessly spinning their wheels.
One that I think stands to make a lot of money is Analog Devices, one of the biggest names in the business. Analog Devices has formed a partnership with a very innovative company called eDevice (212-856-0000), a developer of Internet-enabling solutions, and together I think they’ve come up with a very marketable idea. What they’ve done is mated eDevice’s SmartStack Internet-access software to one of Analog Devices’digital signal processor (DSP) modem chipsets, paving the way for an entirely new generation of Internet enabled devices. What SmartStack does is integrate all of the software protocols needed to send or retrieve e-mails, transfer FTP files, or access the Web into a single DSP chip. Install one of these devices into a machine – any machine – and the possibilities are virtually limitless. For example, imagine a soda vending machine that can automatically dial up a distributor when it needs to be refilled and tell the distributor how many cans of each type of soda it needs. Or a water meter that can automatically dial into a town’s municipal building once a month and, with no human intervention, deliver an accurate account of water usage for billing purposes. As I said, the applications are almost limitless.
A company doing similar work in the area of Internet enabling devices is eMation (508-337-9200). EMation specializes in helping companies to, as they explain it, “use the Internet to service-enable their world.” What does that mean? In essence, eMation provides the infrastructure that gives companies the ability to integrate “millions of remote devices” into their information systems, provide real-time data exchange with mobile service personnel via wireless and Internet technologies, and provide the secure transport of real-time information between a company and their various monitoring devices. In other words, if you require remote installation and configuration capabilities, they can provide it. If you want remote fault analysis and repair verification of a system, they can provide it. If you require consumables tracking and management, they can show you how to do it. Interesting stuff that has some real commercial applications, particularly in the field of industrial automation.
Anyone care to contrast this with the consumer application market?
Finally, a company called Reasoning, Inc. (650-429-0400), is providing a quality assurance service for software developers that I think will be in big demand once people find out about it. If you write code, you know how tedious, time consuming and expensive debugging it can be. But it has to be done. Missing a bug that crashes the system can be the kiss of death for a company. Well now there’s a company that will do it for you. Reasoning made their name (and a lot of money) recently uncovering Y2K bugs in the code being used my major corporations. Now they’re applying that technology to the code being written by their clients. Send them your code written in C/C++, for example, and a week later they will tell you what defects it contains in the following areas:
memory leak
bad deallocation
null pointer dereference
out-of-bounds array read
out-of-bounds array write
variable always uninitialized
variable conditionally uninitialized
According to Reasoning’s Ernie Kerstein, their system, called InstantQA Services, can find crash-causing software defects in virtually any embedded system. Can your programmers do the same thing by hand? Probably. But is that how you want to spend your company’s resources? Probably not. That’s why Embedded Technology.com thinks they have a very bright future ahead of them. |
