•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

And another real-time thing....

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

There’s something about bus standards that seems to lend itself to longevity. Following (more or less) from the last post, I have notification today of a webcast by TTTech Computertechnik, in just a couple of days’ time (4th September) on the subject of “Ethernet Networking for Critical Embedded Systems”. Ethernet is now over 30 years old, as TTTech observes. Its repeated extension to higher and higher speeds probably tracks quite accurately the Moore’s-Law growth in silicon device density over that time; however, although in the silicon space there were those who foresaw the progression of scaling all the way to atomic dimensions, I don’t recall anyone involved with the earlier generation of Ethernet positing Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet.
In any event, as the TTTech note says, “when Ethernet was developed in the first place, tasks with time-critical, deterministic or safety-relevant conditions were not taken into account. TTEthernet [the company’s own variant] expands classical Ethernet with powerful services to meet all new requirements.”
In similar vein, there’s a lot of noise about USB3.0 (“Superspeed USB”), although it’s less clear when that will become a mainstream variant of the ubiquitous interconnect format. One indication that adoption of a bus generation is about to take off is when the T&M companies make it a standard test personality on their instrumentation. Thus, today, we have LeCroy announcing a packaged USB3.0 test suite; read about it on our news column.
The T&M companies aren’t infallible in that respect, though; remember several years ago, when there was a scramble to introduce 40-Gbit/sec-capable data communications test gear, in the belief that the world’s infrastructure was about to step up to that speed? To be fair, it might well have done so had the dot-com collapse not happened. USB3.0 is probably a safer bet at this point; it’s interesting to speculate which would be the greater challenge; 40-Gbit/sec with the hybrid optical/electronic technology of 2001, in the controlled environment of the comms infrastructure backbone: or the speed of USB3.0, with today’s technology, but destined for the far less controlled environment of high-speed consumer gadgetry? Looks like you’ll be well equipped to test it, in either case.

Related entries in: Communications | High-Speed Design | Test & Measurement |

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission