The embedded industry is very active with innovations in all kinds of application areas. For Embedded Computing Design’s 2015 Top Embedded Products it was difficult for the team to narrow the nominees down to three we believed were best for today’s development challenges.

Silicon Winner: Cavium – ThunderX™ Workload Optimized Processor Family

Aimed at computationally intensive servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network, and secure compute workloads in the cloud, the Cavium ThunderX processor family is designed with a 64-bit ARM core. Designed in a 28 nm process technology, the family complies with the ARMv8 architecture specs. Different configurations are available, including single- and dual-sockets, high memory bandwidth (and large capacity), integrated hardware accelerators, and scalable Ethernet fabric. The result is an exceptional performance per dollar and per watt.

Silicon Winner: Ethertronics – EtherChip EC482

Consumers are demanding an increasing amount of throughput from their Wi-Fi access points as they stream television, sporting events, and movies, among other things. To help facilitate that technological feat, the Ethertronics EtherChip EC482 provides active steering technology for Wi-Fi and other 5 GHz applications. It does this by generating multiple radiation patterns from one antenna structure. Active steering intuitively “beam steers” for the best RF signal, achieving ubiquitous coverage regardless of the access point’s orientation or location. According to Ethertronics, download speed can improve by up to 46 percent faster downloads in such devices as set-top boxes, tablets, and Wi-Fi access points.

Software Winner: Quantum Leaps, LLC – QP

The Quantum Platform is a light-weight, open source software framework that provides a small footprint, event driven environment for the development of application software as “active objects” that run within the framework. The framework provides the ability to run with or without an operating system. The frameworks allows control of individual task execution and interleaving. The QP-nano runs in as little as 100-1K bytes with the QP/C, QP/C++ checking in at under 10 KB making it ideal for IoT applications with limited footprints as well as deeply embedded industrial, automotive, and medical devices.

Honorable Mentions

Cypress Semiconductor – EZ-PD™ CCG1 and EZ-PD™ CCG2

Mentor Graphics – Multi-Platform Solution for Industrial Automation

PNI Sensor Corp. – SENtrode wearable development kit

See the full list of nominees in the June issue of Embedded Computing Design magazine.