News from Embedded World in Nurnber

News from Embedded World News, Nurnberg 14.02.2006

Actel
=====
Had no booth, but Actel-guy was moving around so I catched him.

Actel Fusion FPGAs: Delayed for 6 months. Do not expect Fusion silicon
samples or starterkit sooner! Dont beg, dont ask - all Fusion
silicon available has been allocated. This was really sad for me as
I did order and pay for Actel Fusion starterkit already last year.

Altera
======
Stratix IIGX sample shipping: week12 (end of march)
65nm FPGAs will be announced  in 2006 or in worst
case "within 1 year from today"
There was fractal-movie running on NIOS board
with DMA coupled hardware accelerator. When I
asked about the camera, then it was just a
matter of selecting different application using
touch-screen interface (KROS board plugged into
Avalon slot) and the camera demo was running.
I got a overshoulder bag with 12cm small ball
inside, my 2 year old daughter Anna likes the
ball a lot.

Atmel
=====
AVR32 Architecture was launched, they had a
gpraphical demonstration with real AVR32
silicon chip, well it was marked with code
name "Morgan" and there was no actual info
about any AVR32 'orderable parts' only benchmark
comparisons that seemed to prove that AVR32 ISA
beats ARM at 50% on all accounts.

STK525 starterkit (with AT90USB1286) was on display
priced 200EUR is immediatly available.

AT90USB1287 - real nice chip is also available
that is distributors must accept orders as
order entry from Atmel is open - so if your
disti says AT90SUB1287 is not orderable then
the disti has not up-to-date info.

USBKEY Demo board costs 30USD and is based
on AT90SUB1287 I did see it working at the
booth - this board is not immediatly avaiable
as there are 20 of them manufactured as of
today (2 of them being at embedded) but it
should be orderable and should be shipping
shortly as well.

Lattice
=======
On my inquirey: "LatticeSC sample silicon
is it available today?" the anser was yes.
But asking that a few more times the anser
changed to 2006 Q2, meaning that samples
for SC25 may or may not be available immediatly.
LatticeSC evaluation board (with SC25) is
however defenetly available immediatly on
a 'loaner' basis. Its a nice board with
PCIe 8 channel edge connector and lots of SMAs.
The question is SC25 suitable for 8 Lane PCIe
did not got full answer, should be yes, but
well no we dont have it tested and working
in 8 lane configuration. The first chip
available is SC25 in 378 package then SC25 in
484 and then if I am not mistaken SC80

Both LatticeSC and ECP2 devices are supporting
multiply configuration loading from industry
standard SPI serial flash.

ECP2 pricing is 50% of ECP, so smallest ECP2
has an pricetag of 3 USD. Smallest members
of ECP2 family are however last on the roadmap
the first member to be available is the largest
ECP2-70 with smallest ones following.

Pricing rule:
ECP2: 0.50$ per 1K LUT
SC: 3.0 USD per 1K LUT

Nec
===
World smallest microcontroller was presented
with a demo on credit card sized PCB, the IC
is in 1.9mm by 2.2mm Chip Scale BGA package
those requires less PCB area then MicroChip
SOT23 micro what was smallest micro so far.

PLDA
====
Supreme technical knoweledge! Was really nice talk.
They had PCIe demos for both Altera and Xilinx
based boards. On my request they also did online
live demo of working 8 lane PCIe solution using
a Altera Stratix-II board with 2 PMC 4 lane PHYs.
PLDA 8 lane solution has been integrated into
customer products (also with 2 10GBe interfaces
- using PMC phy and Altera FPGA). A new 8 Lane
board with Genesys PHYs and Xilinx Virtex4-LX
will be available in June and is targetted to
pass PCIe compliane at plugfest in July.

SiLabs
======
A girl handed me some invitation to
"USB and Industrial Connectivity Seminar"
At first I refused to take, it, but then asked
what does it cost - 99EUR, well I still refused
to take the leaflet and made a very pissef off
face saying "I tried to purchase the Toolstick
but wasnt able to get it". "Do you want one
right now?" she asked me. "Yes". At the end
she ended up taking it from the booth from
behind the glass. And I did take the seminar
ad as well, here are links to the seminars:

http://www.azzurri.com/go/mcuseminar2006
http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/en/usbseminars.htm
at azzuri link there is picture of what you get
free of charge at the seminar I list the items here
(as it not clear from picture)
1) Bag and some books
2) ToolStick (value 10.99 USD)
3) USB FM Radio (no purchase possible)
4) C8051F340 Development kit (value 99$ USD)
5) CP2201 Evalution Kit, no info ??? what is it?
there will be refreshments served.

Silica
======
They had 1 piece of Xilinx Spartan3e starterkit
at the booth. It did blink some LED's. If Silica's
stock is 1 piece it means that as of today they
are not yet shipping. Well shipping should start
any day form now I guess.
Both my youngest have now a ass-sledge with Silica logo,
hopefully there will be some snow around to check them
out.

Simple Solutions
================
3 new Spartan3e based modules! All of them
use parallel flash and multiboot feature.
The 500e based modules are shipping now the
100e based module will be shipping very shortly.

TI
==
20 USD USB development tool for MSP430
Similar to SiLabs toolstick, but the
'target' module can be removed from
the main part (TUSB3410 based)

TQC
===
Spartan3-1500 based module with MicroBlaze
uClinux and MicroWindows demo

Vmetro
======
8 Lane PCIe protocol analyzer was advertized
with 1 Lane version available at the booth

Xilinx
======
EDK 8.1SP1 has DDR2 support included and is
targetted for release on FEB 20.
For V4 MGT there was absolutly no commitment of
anyavailability date at all.

To have a rest I did sit down for a live
presentation. To my left an old guy with
all-white hair possible having a rest as
well, to my right was I think not a visitor.
That was the audience.
"Who has used PPC?" the speaker asked me for intro,
I pulled a DIP40 form factor board with Virtex-4FX12
(see www.hydraxc.com) from my pocket as answer :)
The presentation was about 'how to gain Ghz performance
with the V4 APU'. I think I learned it:
300MHz multiplied by 17 is 5.4 GHz!
That was the claim of the speaker.
For sure it got 2 heads turning, I looked
at the old man to the left and it was "What !?" on his
face. Oh well I wasnt so good at simple math at scool.
After that EDK was claimed to support PicoBlaze, what
is not true. And it was also claimed that PicoBlaze
can only be programmed with Assembler what of course
is also not true.
After that a comparison was done for pricing
Virtex4-FX: 35 USD
2.4GHz pentium CPU: >100USD
as a clear win for Xilinx. Hum at what qty does
V4FX silicon cost 35 USD? And what does a cheapest
2.4GHz pentium class CPU cost at the same volume?
Well that is something I do not know the answers.

After the presentation I looked around to see
faces I know or products I dont know, but did
not see any. Pitty.

Antti Lukats

PS my best gift item prize goes to perforce
http://www.perforce.com/
for a real balsa-wood model air-plane !
now having Andre (my 4 years old sun) as a pride owner

Antti schrieb:

> PS my best gift item prize goes to perforce
> http://www.perforce.com/
> for a real balsa-wood model air-plane !
> now having Andre (my 4 years old sun) as a pride owner

Your 4 years old s_u_n must be a bright kid, isn't it?

SCNR ;-)

Regards
Falk

ROTFL - I ended up looking with google for SCNR :)

well, I hope Andre (will be 4 on 5 May this year) is bright, but its
kinda hard to tell as he isnt talking so much, to the extent that makes
us to worry already. 3 words sentences do come(in 2 languages), but
thats about it. But he has its own view how to build things and has
great joy in drawing and painting, and does teach his daddy how to make
pann-cakes (this is no joke). As of that model airplane, well my wife
helped me to get it together - the weights at the front fuselage had
strip off glue for fixing (I assumed they are magnetic and can be used
to adjust the balance what happened to be wrong assumption).  Andre was
just plaing with it afterwards and was close to be late into the
kindergarten - the doors close there at 0900 sharp no exceptions.

Antti

Antti wrote:
> ROTFL - I ended up looking with google for SCNR :)
> 
> well, I hope Andre (will be 4 on 5 May this year) is bright, but its
> kinda hard to tell as he isnt talking so much, to the extent that makes
> us to worry already. 3 words sentences do come(in 2 languages), but

If he is being raised bilingually, it is perfectly normal to be a slow 
starter at speaking.  The kid has to learn two different languages at 
the same time, and that takes a bit longer to sort out.  If the two 
languages use very different sets of phononyms, it's even harder, as it 
also takes longer for the brain to train the ears.  Another influence is 
if he is getting on with life fine without saying much, then there is 
less incentive to learn.  It can all add up and make a great difference 
- my first kid was extremely fast to learn to speak, while our second 
was almost worryingly slow.

> thats about it. But he has its own view how to build things and has
> great joy in drawing and painting, and does teach his daddy how to make
> pann-cakes (this is no joke). As of that model airplane, well my wife
> helped me to get it together - the weights at the front fuselage had
> strip off glue for fixing (I assumed they are magnetic and can be used
> to adjust the balance what happened to be wrong assumption).  Andre was
> just plaing with it afterwards and was close to be late into the
> kindergarten - the doors close there at 0900 sharp no exceptions.
> 
> Antti
> 

Antti schrieb:
> ROTFL - I ended up looking with google for SCNR :)
> 
> well, I hope Andre (will be 4 on 5 May this year) is bright, but its
> kinda hard to tell as he isnt talking so much, to the extent that makes
> us to worry already. 3 words sentences do come(in 2 languages), but

Look at his this way. Today, people (not only in TV) are talking (too) 
much, but they SAY often nothing at all.
My parents said that I did not talk a word until the age of two, which 
worried my folks a little bit. But then, I spoke very clearly (they said).
That said, you see a genius does'nt need too much words. ;-)

> just plaing with it afterwards and was close to be late into the
> kindergarten - the doors close there at 0900 sharp no exceptions.

Yeah, since the kindertgarten is usully run be 100% women, its another 
proof that woman always want to educate (to drill ?) the kids, which is 
not bad at all, but sometimes annoying when they try to this with big 
kids (aka, grown up men, preferable husbands/boyfriends)
;-)

Regards
Falk

Antti <Antti.Lukats@xilant.com> wrote:

> Atmel
> =====
> AVR32 Architecture was launched, they had a
> gpraphical demonstration with real AVR32
> silicon chip, well it was marked with code
> name "Morgan" and there was no actual info
> about any AVR32 'orderable parts' only benchmark
> comparisons that seemed to prove that AVR32 ISA
> beats ARM at 50% on all accounts.

> STK525 starterkit (with AT90USB1286) was on display
> priced 200EUR is immediatly available.

> AT90USB1287 - real nice chip is also available
> that is distributors must accept orders as
> order entry from Atmel is open - so if your
> disti says AT90SUB1287 is not orderable then
> the disti has not up-to-date info.

> USBKEY Demo board costs 30USD and is based
> on AT90SUB1287 I did see it working at the
> booth - this board is not immediatly avaiable
> as there are 20 of them manufactured as of
> today (2 of them being at embedded) but it
> should be orderable and should be shipping
> shortly as well.

I was in Nuernberg today. Some more remarks:
Atmel:
The AT91SAM9260/1 look nice: Arm9, SDRAM interface, lots of peripherie (EMAC
on 9260), small target volume pricing and the 9260 with QFP208 package still
usefull for prototyping. Availability: "Soon" according to the people at the
Atmel boot. Talking to some distributor, I mentioned my quote "Atmel has a
long history of early announcements" and I was somehow confirmed in this
opinion by the remark that Atmel anounces the chip, waits for some big
design wins and then only really starts to produce the chip with
availability for small customers.

Philips:
The LPC3180 is another ARM 9 competitor. No  availablity  yet neither and
only in a prototyp prohibiting FPBGA320. Probably other variants will come.


-- 
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

"Antti" <Antti.Lukats@xilant.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:1140004004.835579.16060@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> News from Embedded World News, Nurnberg 14.02.2006
>
some fixes updates to my onw posting

> Lattice
> =======

> ECP2 pricing is 50% of ECP, so smallest ECP2
> has an pricetag of 3 USD. Smallest members
> of ECP2 family are however last on the roadmap
> the first member to be available is the largest
> ECP2-70 with smallest ones following.

fix: ECP2-50 is first device, ECP2-12 follows
with all members expected to be sampling in Q2

> SiLabs
> ======
> 5) CP2201 Evalution Kit, no info ??? what is it?

CP2201 is Ethernet MAC+PHY, packaged in QFN28, TQFP32
2 different parallel interfaces, will be officially launched on March 6th.

> Xilinx
> ======
> To have a rest I did sit down for a live

[snip]

if my commentary about Xilinx presentation has been qualified as
funny in bad sense, well I have been a REAL PAIN IN THE ASS
all my life at all presentations. The few small errors the Xilinx speaker
did during the presentation, well we all do mistakes. And as I said
I was never been good at simple math, and have done mistakes
a la 1 + 1 = 2 in the math class, so the 3 x 17 error at the
Xilinx presentation I should not have pushed onto it.

That I did not find anything new for me at the Xilinx booth that is
also quite understandeable from simple reason that I already did
know everything, and there was nothing that Xilinx announced
specially at Embedded as some other companies did. It doesnt
mean that I did not find nice Xilinx products at other booths
the Zefant S3e modules are pretty cool, and PLDA had working
4 lane PCIe demo with FX60 to name a few.

Antti

Just to update your story, regarding the LatticeSC.  The SC25 is
shipping now as we have a few samples for a board to be built early
next month.

Antti Lukats wrote:

>>SiLabs
>>======
>>5) CP2201 Evalution Kit, no info ??? what is it?
> 
> 
> CP2201 is Ethernet MAC+PHY, packaged in QFN28, TQFP32
> 2 different parallel interfaces, will be officially launched on March 6th.

This is now released, and on their web site.
Interesting device, 5mm package, with a small amount (8K) of flash.
Has (slowish) parallel bus, with Intel MUX'd option that opens into
256 registers, and the FIFOS/SRAM/FLASH are then accessed off that,
with AutoINC modes on the streaming access.

Missing is a SPI port option - would have been a low cost option ?
-jg