Greetings from San José, CA, the home of Korean-Thai-Tex-Mex fusion cuisine, the million-dollar starter home, and the Embedded Systems Conference. The 2007 ESC West reflected the maturity of the industry and did not contain any blockbuster technical breakthroughs, but there were a few interesting trends that made the show worth braving the high hotel room rates and the usual Silicon Valley traffic.
While digital signal processors (DSPs) have been finding applications in embedded systems for a long time, 2007 probably marks the point where they are almost as common as the RISC cores and PICs that traditionally do the majority of computing in the embedded space. Dual-core chips that combine a RISC and DSP were in evidence everywhere across the show floor in applications ranging from multimedia cell phones to set-top boxes. Another sign that the embedded signal processing (ESP) market is maturing is the greatly-improved quality of dual-platform development tools emerging from manufacturers like TI, Freescale and ADI, as well as an abundance of third-party sources like Green Hills, LynuxWorks and Wind River. Whether it's wireless, audio, or video, we'll be seeing ESP technologies playing a major role in future products.
Of course, not all embedded DSP capabilities come in the form of a conventional processor and often appear as specialized accelerator cores and FPGA-based solutions. Thanks to the dramatically increased logic density and reduced power afforded by 90-nm and 65-nm process nodes, FPGAs are becoming very cost-effective solutions for implementing many fixes in DSP/ESP functions such as compression, decoding, filtering, and some kinds of image processing. With the increased speeds and logic densities being offered in chips that cost as little as $2.50, it's becoming apparent that many applications could benefit from offloading repetitive, compute-intensive tasks to some sort of programmable logic. Between the dramatic improvements in price/performance ratios, and the rapidly growing assortment of code generation software and IP cores, I think that 2007 marks the year where FPGAs will become commonplace tools in the mainstream designer's toolkit.
Perhaps the most intriguing development at ESC was the keynote speech given by the noted spokesperson for global climate change and President-in-Exile Al Gore. In his talk, "The Democratization of Technology," Mr Gore wove together some of the material he developed for his recent documentary film on climate change with the discussions he's had with leading technologists to offer a hopeful prescription for the future. After presenting an update on the facts supporting his hypothesis that excessive dependence on fossil fuels is responsible for a large part of the dramatic climate changes we are seeing today, he challenged the engineers and entrepreneurs in the audience to use the same embedded intelligence on display at ESC to help solve the problem.
It was a big surprise to see Gore treated like a rock star by the audience of normally moderate-to-conservative engineers as he challenged them to design embedded products that use less power themselves and, more importantly, provide the intelligence to help the buildings, vehicles, and manufacturing systems they control trim unnecessary loads and operate at maximum efficiency. Turning to the source side, the self-described recovering politician shared his vision of re-engineering our power grid into an open-source distributed generating system, or electra-net. Using existing technologies and protocols, such a network would allow small and medium-sized renewable sources to come on line and share the load with the big centralized nuclear and fossil plants that have dominated the energy market for the past century. The only obstacles to realizing such a system are the artificial market barriers and regulations currently imposed by the utilities that lock out small producers, and the political will to eliminate them. Hopefully, we'll look at Gore's potentially Extremely Convenient Truths in detail in a subsequent column.
About the only real disappointment in the whole show was the much-ballyhooed debut of the custom motorcycle built for Intel by Orange County Choppers. The bike sported a remarkable four-cylinder engine created by tying together a pair of Harley-style V-twin blocks on a common shaft. Like the processors it was modeled after, this 250 hp Harlium Quad-Core was very sexy but also appeared to turn much of its rated output into unusable noise and heat. As a bike owner myself, I had to marvel at the bike, which sported the fattest tires I've ever seen and a beautiful custom paint job that was a micro-montage of IC artwork rendered in Intel blue and white.
I was less impressed however by the chopper's so-called digital dashboard which was simply a gussied-up mobile PC unceremoniously tacked onto the handlebars. From my perspective, the user interface seemed to be kluge at best and the lumpy box on the handlebars was an eyesore that broke the lines of the rest of the bike. 
For a high-tech company and a bunch of bikers that both pride themselves on slick innovation, I'd have expected something like a helmet-mounted display, a voice-enabled co-pilot, and perhaps a software-defined radar jammer. Even more annoying was watching a bunch of tough supposedly outlaw biker-types pimping their image for the likes of Intel. It comes as no surprise that they are now hard at work on another corporate ego machine for HP. I have enjoyed watching the antics of Mikey, Paul Junior and Paul Senior on their the show from time to time, but this tips the balance. Instead of watching those buffoons making shiny toys for the rich boys, I'll be spending more time on my modest but very fun-to-drive 1986 Honda Helix.
Comments? Questions? Sources for a luggage rack or other accessories for my Helix? Write me at: lhg at en-genius.net
