ESC Boston

In just over a week, it will be the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston once again. Mentor Embedded will have a presence in the demo area and I will be making two presentations …

On the Mentor Embedded booth [#881], two demonstrations will be showcased:

• A multicore and multi-OS demo focussed on medical applications
• Industrial IoT gateway edge-to-cloud solution

Here are the details of my sessions:

Power Management in Embedded Systems – 08:00-08:45 Weds 13th

The importance of power management in today’s embedded designs has been steadily growing as an increasing number of battery powered devices are developed. Often power optimizations are left to the very end of the project cycle, almost as an afterthought. In this paper we will discuss design considerations that should be made when starting a new power sensitive embedded design, which include choosing the hardware with desired capabilities, defining a hardware architecture that will allow software to dynamically control power consumption, defining appropriate power usage profiles, making the appropriate choice of an operating system and drivers, choosing measurable power goals and providing these goals to the software development team to track throughout the development process.

Dynamic Memory Allocation & Fragmentation in C & C++ – 14:00-14:45 Thurs 14th

In C and C++, it can be very convenient to allocate and de-allocate blocks of memory as and when needed. This is certainly standard practice in both languages and almost unavoidable in C++. However, the handling of such dynamic memory can be problematic and inefficient. For desktop applications, where memory is freely available, these difficulties can be ignored. For embedded – generally real time – applications, ignoring the issues is not an option.
Dynamic memory allocation tends to be non-deterministic; the time taken to allocate memory may not be predictable and the memory pool may become fragmented, resulting in unexpected allocation failures. In this session the problems will be outlined in detail and an approach to deterministic dynamic memory allocation detailed.

If you are at ESC Boston, do stop by and say hello. If you would like a copy of either of my presentations, please contact me by email or via social media.