Thought Leadership

ESC Silicon Valley

By Colin Walls

This week it is the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California. It is one of the biggest gatherings in the world dedicated exclusively to embedded systems – probably second only to the annual Embedded World, which takes place in Nuremberg, Germany. The conference itself consists of numerous streams of high quality classes on a wide range of topics, the attendance of which attracts a fee. Alongside the conference is a free trade-show, where just about every vendor in the embedded space has a presence of some kind.

I have attended ESC SJ most years since the mid-1990s. Over that time, I have seen it grow, move from San Jose to San Francisco, contract somewhat and return to Silicon Valley. On a number of occasions, I have presented papers in the conference, which is always interesting. This year Mentor Embedded has a strong presence. We have two papers in the conference: one by myself on USB 3 (sadly I ran into a logistical problem and cannot present it in person, but I have an excellent alternative speaker signed up); the other paper is on MCAPI and will be presented by a real expert from our engineering team. Our booth (#1902) includes numerous demos and a theater area covering a wide range of technical subjects in bite-sized (i.e. no more than 15 minutes) chunks:

  • “Android! Android! Android! – How to Adapt Android for Your Next Embedded Product”
  • “Freedom from the Complexities of Embedded Linux”
  • “Ready to Start in under 15mins: The Next Generation of Nucleus”
  • “Build Fast, Debug Fast and Ship Faster with Sourcery”
  • “Multicore Communications using OpenMCAPI”
  • “High-performance Packet Processing for Networking and Telecom Equipment”

If you want a copy of any of the presentations, please drop me an email. Two days of hands-on workshops are running concurrently with the show, which illustrate, in deep technical detail, the key Mentor Embedded technology supported on TI and Freescale platforms.

If you are in the vicinity, ESC is well worth a visit. If you are there, do stop by and say Hi. Hope to see you there.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/embedded-software/2011/05/02/esc-silicon-valley/