43rd Design Automation Conference

DAC is coming July 24-28 to San Francisco, CA. The largest EDA and design event of the year! Plan to attend technical sessions, panels, and MEGa (Multimedia, Entertainment and Games) sessions. Plus, visit over 240 companies on the exhibit floor. Strike technology gold at DAC. Register today!

The buzz of 'voice, video, data' was everywhere at the recent Chicago GlobalComm, and it is AdvancedTCA that hopes to ride this new wave in telecommunications deployment. Intel, for example, has made AdvancedTCA its telecommunications cornerstone with a cool microsite, early AdvancedTCA boards to 'seed the market', and support for the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) (to improve the interoperability of AdvancedTCA products).

Intel Competitor AMD is also keen on the technology, witness their recent partnership with Sun on Sun's Netra ATCA Blade Server. AMD also gained support from Wind River, here. The company hopes to bring the AMD Opteron™ into the embedded and telecommunications space.

Among board vendors, Performance Technologies seized the opportunities presented by both AdvancedTCA and AMD by combining them in new products. The company introduced a complete AdvancedTCA application-ready platform with AdvancedMC (AMC) functionality and 10Gb Ethernet fabric. The new offering, which includes a next-generation ATCA 10Gb Ethernet switch, two AMC compute modules and a new ATCA 10Gb AMC carrier blade, is the latest addition to the company's platform product line. Release and details, here.

Other vendors contributing to this flurry of AdvancedTCA developments include -

• Kontron - Kontron AT8020 AdvancedTCA processor board;
• Emerson Network Power - IMS and signaling demonstrations on AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC, and MicroTCA;
• AVIVA Networks, Inc. - ATCA and MicroTCA Security and Encryption Blade;
• Interphase - New ATCA Carrier Blade and 11 AdvancedMCs; and
• RadiSys - Promentum™ family of AdvancedTCA products (seven new ones).

Another technology area that like, AdvancedTCA, is at the "take-off" stage is "wireless sensors." Zigbee has gotten most of the press, but there are many deployments of wireless sensors that are 'Zigbee-friendly' if not fully compliant. Many companies are coming out with 'development kits' to make it all easy. Cirronet, for example, recently released a Low-cost ZigBee Basic Developer Kit.

Atmel also just came out with a very cool solution for AVR users who want to add Zigbee. The AVR Z-Link™ solution includes Atmel’s ultra low power, high sensitivity 2.4 GHz AT86RF230 802.15.4 radio, an ultra low power ATmega1281 or ATmega 2561 AVR microcontroller, and a small footprint, fully compliant media access control (MAC) software optimized for the AVR architecture. Full info with details on a $499 development kit, here.

Semiconductor vendors are also keen on Zigbee. OKI Semiconductor, for example, announced their IEEE802.15.4 based ML7065 2.4GHz ZigBee compatible radio kit. The kit contains the Oki ML7065 radio and Oki's ARM7TMDI-based 4060 Series Advantage Microcontroller. Details, here. Freescale announced Media Access Controller (MAC) software that supports the IEEE(R) 802.15.4 protocol on the low-power 32-bit ColdFire(R) architecture, here. The company also provides its own low-cost Zigbee development kit, here. And Ember released its EM260™ ZigBee co-processor, designed to make Zigbee easy with almost any microcontroller.

(conference, 4 stars) - 7/24/2006, Orlando

Freescale Technology Forum
If you design for automotive, consumer electronics, industrial control, motor control, networking or wireless applications, you won't want to miss this event. We've combined previous Freescale Semiconductor developer events, including the Smart Networks Developer Forum and the Embedded Connectivity Summit, with additional technology information from our company and our partners.

(conference, 5 stars) - 7/24/2006, San Francisco

Design Automation Conference
The 42nd Design Automation Conference (DAC) is the premier annual event for the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, focusing on the integration of EDA tools and design methodologies for effective system-level design.

(conference, 5 stars) - 7/26/2006, Scottsdale

Microchip Masters Conference
Microchip Annual Summer Technical Exchange Review Conference is a bi-directional exchange of technical information between the technical work force at Microchip and our strong technical partners including consultants, customers, third parties, distributor FAEs and design houses. MASTERs is an in-depth, highly-technical Conference structured to meet the needs of todays design engineer.

(conference, 4 stars) - 8/8/2006, Santa Clara

VoIP Developers' Conference
TMC is proud to announce the VoIP Developer Conference, an event dedicated to teaching conferees how to take advantage of all types of development in the IP telephony space. This is the one event that every developer in the communications space needs to attend in order to learn the state of the market as well as the future of VoIP and the development opportunities it affords them.

(conference, 5 stars) - 8/8/2006, Austin

National Instruments Week
Each year engineers and scientists from around the world gather at NIWeek to learn about technologies in computer-based measurement and automation, receive technical training, meet NI engineers, and share experiences with colleagues.