Track Letter From Niall Murphy

Attending ESC 2010 helps keep you at the cutting edge. Classes like “Do's and Don'ts of File System for Embedded Systems”, presented by Christian Legare, will teach you a technology that is becoming pervasive in embedded systems. Once upon a time you designed a system with a few K of EEPROM as storage but modern embedded systems have far more complex storage requirements and this class will show you the solutions and pitfalls.

Mutimedia IP phones are a classic embedded systems challenge – it involves high bandwidth communications, graphics on the user interface, cost challenges as it is a high volume product, and they have to have low power consumption, as many work on power-over-Ethernet. Jason Robertson discuses how these challenges are faced in his paper: “Reference Designs and IP Media Phones”. Even if you are not building an IP phone there are valuable lessons here.

A web server does not have to be that big or complex, and web access is the ideal solution for configuring many network appliances. If you already have a TCP/IP stack, it is not a huge leap to add a web server which makes your system accessible from the Internet. Charlie Mayne talks about how to integrate a small web server into your product in his paper “Embedded Web Server Development - A Case Study”.

This is a taste of what is on offer at the Embedded Internet / Telecom track of the 2010 ESC.