New Life for Aging Electronic Products
Many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) struggle to continue shipping aging or obsolete electronic products. Electronic products designed five to ten years ago are still relevant in the marketplace. Often these venerable old products have gained particular acceptance amongst a select group of customers. In many cases these old products fulfill a need in a unique manner. Examples include: designs that are grandfathered into an application due to regulatory considerations; designs having unique form-fit-and-function; designs running special software; designs subject to contractual support and service requirements; designs in which a new contract stipulates delivery of older gear as part of a larger system offering. Any one or all of these reasons can lead an OEM to continue the production of electronic equipment well into its end of useful component life.
From Quality Assurance to Total Quality Management: the Future of Automated Test Standardization
Design verification and quality assurance processes are the backbone of successful product development. Whatever the product, the ultimate goals are the same: to reduce development costs and accelerate time to market without affecting product quality.
532-MHz Freescale i.MX31 EEMBC Benchmark Scores
The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) recently published certified benchmark scores for the ARM processor-based Freescale i.MX31 multimedia applications processor. Tested with the ARM RealView RVCT 3.1 build 559 compiler, the new results supersede a previous set of certified scores using a GCC version 3.43 compiler. The 532-MHz Freescale i.MX31 was tested in an out-of-the-box environment against four EEMBC benchmark suites - AutoBench 1.1, ConsumerBench 1.1, OABench 1.1, and TeleBench 1.1 - yielding extensive data on the processor’s expected performance in automotive/industrial, digital imaging, office automation, and fixed telecom applications.
Atmel ATtiny167 AVR Microcontrollers
Atmel Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) recently introduced the ATtiny167 family of AVR 8-bit microcontrollers for LIN Automotive networking applications. The ATtiny167 is optimized for LIN slave applications. It will be qualified to AECQ-100 grade 0 and sustain ambient temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius. Combined with a LIN transceiver (such as ATA662x or ATA666x) it brings a complete solution for sensors in a gearbox, exhaust gas system, pumps or turbo. Samples for the ATtiny167 are available now. Packages are available in a 20-pin SOIC, 20-Pin TSSOP, and 32-pin QFN. The ATtiny167 will be qualified at 125 degrees Celsius in all packages and 150 degrees Celsius in QFN and TSSOP packages. It will be available for volume production in December 2008. Prices start at $1.48 in 10,000 quantities for the 125 degrees qualified version.
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