"Post-graduate studies" at the Embedded Systems Conference

In that context, the many Sponsored Sessions at the ESC are to me like a course of "post-graduate studies" in the field, looking and hearing how specific companies and developers are deploying products based on these techniques.

Once you register for the ESC Fall 2009 in Boston, there will be numerous opportunities for post-graduate studies in any particular area of embedded systems design you desire. Fourteen companies have signed up so far for the Sponsored Sessions, including Texas Instruments, Microchip, Microsoft, NXP, IBM, Cypress, Renesas, Klockwork, Grammatech, Numonyx, and CMD.

Microchip, Texas Instruments, Microsoft and NXP will dominate the Sponsored Sessions with more than 25 out of almost 50 presentations. Topics of the presentations include 8-16 bit vs 32-bit MCUs, Non-volatile Memory Design, Ethernet solutions for MCUs, USB design, Digital Filtering on an MCU, building an embedded Web Server, Zigbee versus proprietary wireless design, and embedded streaming media.

Of particular interest to me will be several of the sessions by NXP on its Cortex-M0-based LPC1100; several presentations by Microsoft on its various embedded OS offerings, including Windows Embedded CE and Windows Embedded Standard as well as IBM's presentations on "Modeling in an Agile World," and "Multicore development using a model-based approach." Maybe I will see you there. (Embedded.com Editor Bernard Cole, bccole@acm.org)