Open Standards and the Rise of Embedded Ecosystem SoMs

My podcast guest this week is longtime friend of the show Matt Burns from Samtec! Matt and I chat about the trends driving the adoption of high performance, small form factor open standard SoMs. We also discuss the details of the PCI Express 7 specification and the newest endeavors being developed by the Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies. 

 

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Next-Generation Power Technology for Data Center Accelerator Cards

I want you to put your “imagining hat” on. If you don’t own an “imagining hat,” you’ll just have to imagine that you have one proudly perched on the top of your head. Let’s start by imagining an accelerator card whose core processing device demands 2,000 amps (my eyes are already watering).

Now imagine multiple accelerator cards on a motherboard in … Read More → "Next-Generation Power Technology for Data Center Accelerator Cards"

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 2 – The 1960s

Part 2 of this article series covers a period of explosive growth for the Heath Company as its amateur radio equipment kits captured a larger and larger share of the market. This article series is based on a presentation by Chas Gilmore (W8IAI), a life-long Ham who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company for more than two decades, … Read More → "“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 2 – The 1960s"

Predictions for Multi-Die System Designs in 2025

There’s a famous saying along the lines of, “Predicting things is difficult, especially about the future.” This quote has been attributed to many people, including Mark Twain, Niels Bohr, and Yogi Berra. In Yogi’s case, however, it’s usually phrased as, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

I know that when I staggered into the current millennium, … Read More → "Predictions for Multi-Die System Designs in 2025"

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 1 – Early Days through the 1950s

Late last year, I published a 6-part article series that recounted the history of the Heath Company and its world-famous Heathkits. The series was based on an interview with Chas Gilmore, who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company for more than two decades, eventually becoming VP of product development, marketing, and sales and finally EVP and General Manager. … Read More → "“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 1 – Early Days through the 1950s"

Hyper-Scan Fiber Sensing: A Revolution in Infrastructure Monitoring with Prisma Photonics

My podcast guest this week is Eitan Elkin, director of marketing at Prisma Photonics. Eitan and I discuss how optical fiber sensing can make a huge impact in infrastructure monitoring. We explore the details of the solution at the heart of Prisma Photonics: Hyper-Scan Fiber-Sensing, the applications that could take advantage of this technology including extreme weather events … Read More → "Hyper-Scan Fiber Sensing: A Revolution in Infrastructure Monitoring with Prisma Photonics"

February 6, 2025
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featured chalk talk

Ultra-low Power Fuel Gauging for Rechargeable Embedded Devices
Fuel gauging is a critical component of today’s rechargeable embedded devices. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Robin Saltnes of Nordic Semiconductor explore the variety of benefits that Nordic Semiconductor’s nPM1300 PMIC brings to rechargeable embedded devices, the details of the fuel gauge system at the heart of this solution, and the five easy steps that you can take to implement this solution into your next embedded design.
May 8, 2024
39,148 views
discussion
Posted on Feb 6 at 7:42am by Steven Leibson
The tradeoffs here are the added latency and the added incremental cost of CXL memory over local memory (due to extra memory controllers, memory expansion boards, and PCIe switches). If you don't mind either of those, then CXL can be used as a memory pool as you suggest.
Posted on Feb 5 at 11:03pm by sandeepsathe2008
Hi Steven, Very nice article. I read your previous article also. One possible deployment of disaggregated memory in a data center rack can be follows - - PCIe Backplane based rack - CPU blades in the rack will have only nominal DRAM - Rack will also have Memory expander blade(...
Posted on Feb 5 at 1:26pm by Steven Leibson
Thanks Chas. I'm hoping you're posting these articles to those Facebook groups. It'd be a shame for them to miss out. --Steve
Posted on Feb 5 at 11:02am by cgilmore@groupgilmore.com
As I am sure many of you know, there are a number of Heathkit related groups on Facebook. One nice feature of these groups is there are a number of former Heath employees who follow those groups and, from time-to-time they’ll respond to posts providing unique responses that come ...
Posted on Feb 3 at 10:46am by Karl Stevens
Thanks. That is almost the same as having a different compiler. Also I am guessing support for plain old C? C# has recently added conditional assignments which eliminates a lot of if/else/branch statements. So now we have a programming language source syntax that closely resembles the logic expressions ...
Posted on Jan 31 at 8:18am by Max Maxfield
Hi RedBarnDesigner -- I can't wait to hear what you think about "The Story of Earth" by Hazen. It's one of my favorites. A couple of others I always recommend are "The Disappearing Spoon" by Sam Keen, "Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell" by Dennis Bray, and "Life's Ratchet: ...
Posted on Jan 31 at 12:49am by tracker1
Rust is relatively tightly coupled with LLVM which is generally pretty straight forward for supported targets. Embedded use and support tends to vary a lot outside that. https://rust-embedded.org/ Is your best starting point. That said you should get some pretty reasonable code reuse.
Posted on Jan 30 at 1:50pm by RedBarnDesigner
Hi Max, Chris Packham is a naturalist and wildlife advocate and presenter with the BBC. He presented a series some while ago that went through some of the things that you mention from the very early days (geologically speaking) to discussing how humans have affected the planetary ecosystem. What I ...
Posted on Jan 30 at 11:30am by Max Maxfield
Hi Karl and Red (and Red and Karl -- no favorites here) -- I'm going to ask the folks from Ferrous Systems to chime in here -- in the meantime, what did you think to my wafflings about rust in the context of Earth's evolution (as opposed to the evolution ...
Posted on Jan 30 at 10:08am by Karl Stevens
C# is opensource, has conditional assignments that are more user friendly than using C if/else for conditions. Since I am a logic designer,my preference is to design rather than us an embedded processor with all the levels of cache, DDR, etc. At the lowest level, the C language ...
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SiC for the Future: Unlocking System Performance with Advanced Silicon Carbide
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Infineon
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Nick Powers from Infineon and Amelia Dalton explore the benefits of Infineon’s silicon carbide CoolSiC MOSFETs. They also explore how this solution improved thermal performance with the addition of .XT advancements, the benefits of top side cooling, and how you can use Infineon CoolSiC MOSFETs in your next design.
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2,997 views
Connecting the Smart Home with Matter, WiFi and Thread
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Charlie Ice and Haley Vu from NXP and Amelia Dalton chat about benefits of the Matter ecosystem. They explore the networking protocols supported by Matter, how WiFi and Thread work together in the Matter ecosystem, and how you can leverage NXP solutions for your next Matter design. 
Feb 3, 2025
3,982 views
TE Connectivity Heavy Duty Connectors/High Power Connectors
Battery energy storage systems can reduce energy costs, encourage trends toward clean energy, and help maintain grid reliability during peak demand. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Jason Roe from TE Connectivity and Amelia Dalton explore the key subsystems, architecture, and system solutions for residential and commercial battery energy storage systems. They also investigate the TE Connectivity heavy duty and high power connectors best suited for these kinds of applications and how you can get started using these solutions in your next design.
Jan 22, 2025
18,060 views
Simplifying Position Control with Advanced Stepper Motor Driver
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Jiri Keprda from STMicroelectronics and Amelia Dalton explore the benefits of the powerSTEP01 is a system-in-package from STMicroelectronics. They also examine how this solution can streamline overall position control architecture, the high level commands included in this solution and the variety of advanced diagnostics included in the powerSTEP01 system-in-package.
Jan 21, 2025
17,974 views
Solid-State Industrial Relays
Solid-state technology is a great choice for industrial relays because it is reliable, fast switching, and silent operation with an extremely long lifespan. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Hugo Neri from Littelfuse and Amelia Dalton explore the benefits of Solid State Industrial relays. They also investigate how ??Littelfuse proprietary technology improved the uptimes of their SSR product lines and how you can utilize Littelfuse Solid-State Industrial Relays in your next design.
Jan 15, 2025
35,246 views
Zonal Architecture: Making the Car of the Future Possible
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Molex
In order to keep pace with the ever-increasing design concerns for the future of automotive designs, we need to consolidate ECUs, reduce harness size and complexity, and reduce our overall design cycle time. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Marcelino Hernandez from Molex and Amelia Dalton explore how Molex’ MX-DASH Portfolio will make zonal architecture implementation a reality for a variety of different automotive applications. They also investigate the trends pushing a need for zonal architectures in automotive designs and the benefits that this new approach to connectivity solutions can bring to your next automotive design. 
Jan 13, 2025
28,996 views