Electronics engineers will be heading for Cambridge on Wednesday 5 October 2011 for the Embedded Masterclass conference. This one-day exhibition and conference will comprise a series of seminars and workshops aimed at imparting the latest technology for all aspects of embedded electronics engineering. There will also be a tabletop exhibition showing some of the top electronics products.
But do not expect a hard sell. Exhibitors are encouraged to send along engineers rather than sales staff for what is a by engineers, for engineers event. As its name suggests, Masterclass is about education.
Workshops
There will be six half-day workshops, three in the morning and three in the afternoon, each lasting two hours. The three morning sessions will start at 10.30am. There will be hands-on sessions on multi-core, multi-embedded operating systems, at look at the ISO26262 automotive standard for functional safety, and a practical demonstration on building an Intel Atom based embedded system.
The three afternoon sessions will start at 2.30pm. One will be a lesson on using Microsoft’s recently introduced Embedded Compact 7 operating system. There will also be a hands-on workshop using National Instruments’ Compact RIO for seeing how FPGA (field programmable gate array)-based COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) hardware, combined with the Labview graphical embedded development tools can reduce development time. The third afternoon workshop will provide practical techniques for developing safety-critical embedded systems.
Seminars
There will be a total of 12 seminars split into two streams of six each. One of the more intriguing of them seems to be delving into the world of science fiction when Mikael Bergqvist of Wind River will talk about alternate realities, time travel, x-ray vision and teleportation. Beam me up Mikael.
Other highlights include a presentation on single-mode Bluetooth Low Energy, a lower power version of the Bluetooth communications standard which will help preserve battery life – letting cell batteries last for decades. Writing bug-free software will be an ongoing theme from a number of presentations, looking at code quality, debugging, multi-core programming and software for safety-critical systems.
On the hardware side, there will be seminars on interconnect technology, prototyping and using custom processors. There will also be a talk on the work the European Artemis project is doing in creating projects across countries in Europe.
Information and Venue
The show will be held at the Menzies Hotel at Bar Hill, just outside Cambridge in England. The conference programme will start at 8.30am with registration and coffee with the seminar stream starting at 9.30am and the morning workshops starting at 10.30am.
After the keynote address, in which Regis Cheval from Intel will talk about the Intel architecture and the company’s Atom platform, the event will split into two streams so there will be a choice of programme. The final paper is scheduled to end at 5pm after which there will be a drinks reception.
For more details and to register, visit the Embedded Masterclass web site.
Steve Rogerson - Steve Rogerson is a UK-based writer specialising in television, technology, sports and beer.
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