Ellisys Bluetooth Vanguard is a Best-in-Class Bluetooth Protocol Analyzer

Ellisys Bluetooth Vanguard Advanced All-in-One Bluetooth® Analysis System

ARM TechCon is Arm’s premier industry event, where developers, analysts, and media gather from all around to hear the latest from the semiconductor giant. ARM TechCon 2019 has marked the 15th annual event hosted in San Jose. Arm TechCon 2019 showcased some of the industry’s best products and solutions in the market. Embedded Computing Design hosted a Best in Show Awards showing some of the most innovative solutions from the even. One of the notable award recipients is the Ellisys Bluetooth Vanguard Protocol Analysis System. Ellisys Bluetooth Vanguard Advanced All-in-One Bluetooth Analysis System is being regarded as the most advanced and comprehensive Bluetooth Protocol analyzer ever made mostly because it delivers new advances designed to ease the increasingly complex tasks of Bluetooth developers and many more. Building Bluetooth based applications can be a daunting challenge, especially when working with the wrong tools/equipment. Aside from Bluetooth wireless traffic debugging, other information […]

Arm Custom Instructions Coming to Armv8-M Embedded Processors

Arm Custom Instructions

So far Arm defined all instructions for their cores with the benefit of code portability between solutions, so code compiled for an Arm Cortex-M33 based microcontroller would run on another without modifications (we’re obviously talking about code running directly on the core, not using specific peripherals here). But with RISC-V open-source architecture many have seen the benefit of custom instructions for specific tasks, at the risk of potential fragmentation. With Arm Techcon 2019 now taking place, Arm has just announced support for custom instructions for ARMv8-M embedded CPUs starting with Arm Cortex-M33 cores. The implementation of Arm Custom Instructions for specific embedded and IoT applications will start in H1 2020 at no additional cost to licensees and without risk of software fragmentation using NOCP exception if the instructions are not available. Arm futher explains: Arm Custom Instructions are enabled by modifications to the CPU that reserve encoding space for designers […]

NXP i.MX RT1170 Arm Cortex-M7/M4 Microcontroller Clocks at One Gigahertz!

NXP i.MX RT1170 Gigahertz MCU

Microcontrollers used to be those cute little things that clock at 8 or 16 MHz, but in the last decade, Cortex-M3/M4 microcontrollers became more powerful with 100 to 200 MHz clocks being quite common. But with the introduction of Arm Cortex-M7 core about 5 years ago, microcontrollers are seriously starting to take over tasks that were previously reserved to faster microprocessors.  As I remember it,  the MCU frequency “race” started with STMicro STM32H7 in 2016 with an impressive 400 MHz, and NXP i.MX RT crossover processor clocked at 600 MHz a few years later.  But with i.MX RT1170 microcontroller, NXP has upped the ante as the new MCU combines an Arm Cortex-M4 core clocked at 400MHz with Arm Cortex-M7 core running at an amazing one Gigahertz (1 GHz). The documentation has not been released and we have limited information, but here’s what we know about NXP i.MX RT1170 key features […]

Group Theoretic Cryptography (GTC) Offers an Alternative to TLS’s ECC/RSA Security for Microcontrollers

SecureRF Group Theoretic Cryptography

The Transport Layer Security (TLS), sometimes incorrectly referred as its predecessor: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), helps securing messages over the network using symmetric cryptography, and optionally public-key cryptography (aka asymmetric cryptography). This works well in servers and computers, but with the Internet of Things, even low-power sensor nodes would benefit from secure communication. The trouble is that today’s commonly-implemented RSA- and Diffie-Hellman-type public-key protocols have a memory footprint that will not fit on resource-constrained microcontrollers systems, e.g. Arm Cortex-M0 based ones, and power consumption may also be an issue since many of those are battery-powered. I’m writing about this topic today, as there may be a better alternative for resource-constrained microcontrollers which I noticed in Arm Techcon 2019 schedule, with SecureRF Corporation’s session entitled “When it comes to connect IoT devices, how small is small?” that will present an alternative to TLS’s ECC and RSA based security that relies on […]

Arm Techcon 2019 Schedule – Machine Learning, Security, Containers, and More

Arm Techcon 2019

Arm TechCon will take place on October 8-10, 2019 at San Jose Convention Center to showcase new solutions from Arm and third-parties, and the company has now published the agenda/schedule for the event. There are many sessions and even if you’re not going to happen it’s always useful to checkout what will be discussed to learn more about what’s going on currently and what will be the focus in the near future for Arm development. Several sessions normally occur at the same time, so as usual I’ll make my own virtual schedule with the ones I find most relevant. Tuesday, October 8  09:00 – 09:50 – Open Source ML is rapidly advancing. How can you benefit? by Markus Levy, Director of AI and Machine Learning Technologies, NXP Over the last two years and still continuing, machine learning applications have benefited tremendously from the growing number of open source frameworks, tools, […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design