Embedded Design Lab INDIA

Have you ever come across a situation where you prototyped a project on a solderless breadboard and liked it so much that you want it on a PCB? Well, read on! So far we have been writing software programs, building binaries out of them and executing them on micro-controllers. It’s time to get physical now! This post, and a couple of upcoming posts will deal with this very thing – how to realize your project in hardware. We’ll deal with PCBs, and also learn how to design and fabricate them. PCB of NI myRIO (Source: National Instruments) Introduction to PCB Design If you are an electronics hobbyist you might have probably designed many electronic circuits and even prototyped them on a breadboard. Now it’s time to step up to the next level. Let’s design the same on a PCB. This article and a couple more of them will be addressing the topic of PCB designing. There are many types of circuits that you can design on a PCB – like analog, digital, RF – and...

Looking back at the continuously evolving smartphone market, it is amazing to note the role that the  ARM Cortex-A7  core has played. Previously the processor which initiated the uptake of multicore processing in mobile, the ARM Cortex-A7 is now an increasingly popular choice in energy-efficient mobile computing, enabling devices to achieve high-end functionality alongside all-day battery life and a very competitive price point. Devices based on the mature Cortex-A7 can now be typically found for well under $200, and this is driving widespread uptake in emerging markets such as Brazil and India. (Figure 1: ARM Cortex-A7 processor design) On top of its extreme energy efficiency, the Cortex-A7 incorporates many features of the high-performance Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A17 processors, including virtualization support in hardware, Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE), NEON®, and 128-bit AMBA® 4 AXI bus interface. It provides up to 20% more single thread performance ...

Right after the company announced the new Tegra X1 mobile SoC at a press conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, went on to announce the company's plans in the automotive space. As it turns out, actually, it will be doing quite a bit, and the way we see it, it may even be what the automotive industry needs. The first announcement in the category was the Nvidia Drive CX, which the graphics card maker calls a "Digital Cockpit Computer." The idea behind it is to be a single central computing system that takes care of all the displays inside the car. Nvidia believes that in the future, cars will have more and more screens built in, and having all of it managed from a central computer is what will make it shine. Today's high-tech cars have about 700 thousand pixels that need to be pushed, which isn't that much. Despite that, Nvidia built the Drive CX to be powerful enough to push up to 16.6 million pixels. This makes sense, though, as by addi...