Getting it right is the most profoundly important matter confronting system and software developers of safety-critical applications such as space flight, avionics, and any life-critical equipment. There are no predictable or predetermined answers.

Eclipse has ushered in a new generation of Integrated Development Environments and tools. Eclipse, though, was never intended to be used for embedded development, and has to be enhanced to meet the needs of embedded developers.

The new Intel EP80579 Integrated Processor with Intel QuickAssist technology and Intel Atom processor expand choices for today's embedded developers when it comes to employing multi-chip solutions in small form factor designs. Advantech is taking advantage of the benefits these products offer by incorporating multi-chip solutions into systems that will power a variety of products in several markets including telecommunications equipment.

One of our regular Small Form Factors columnists recently commented that low power is the new black reflecting the tone of this seasons board introductions. Processors under 15W TDP, and in many cases much lower, are driving new form factors, devices, and ideas to places they werent able to go before.

With our aging population and rising medical costs, improvements to our medical system are foremost on many peoples mind. Embedded computing is having a profound impact on improvements in medical treatment.

Intel Atom processor has opened up new possibilities for designers tasked with designing small, lightweight, thermally constrained, fanless embedded applications that require longer battery life.

RadiSys and Nexcom are using the new Intel Atom processor and the Intel SCH US15W to develop small form factor, low power embedded modules that can help designers meet today's rigid design criteria.

Software debugging is recognized as one of the most time-consuming activities in the software development cycle. As teams try to get high-quality products to market at reduced costs under increased scheduling pressure, they run the risk of stalling on the challenges introduced by multicore development.

AdaCore, Verocel, and Wind River Systems joined together as a team to provide a real-time embedded development platform, which is used as the basis for DO-178B Level A safety critical application development for the Boeing 787. Wind River Systems provided VxWorks 653, the common core ARINC-653 operating environment that provides robust time, space and shared resource partitioning.

The Cavium Networks OCTEON family of multicore MIPS64 processors offers a scalable, highest-performance, and lowest-power solution for intelligent networking applications, ranging from 100Mbps to full-duplex 20Gbps. These processors, with one to 16 cnMIPS cores on a single chip, integrate next-generation networking I/Os along with the most advanced security, storage, and application hardware acceleration.

VPX represents the future of VME. Eschewing the still-relevant 25 year old parallel bus backplane in favor of serial switched fabrics, VPX supports literally hundreds of user-defined I/O lines at speeds approaching 5 GHz.