Embedded World is a good opportunity for design engineers not only to see the newest products in embedded systems, but also to connect with fellow engineers from semiconductor manufacturers, IP cores providers, and EDA tools companies.

If you’re a, FPGA design engineer like me, what should you look for at Embedded World this year? All the major FPGA manufacturers will have a stand: Altera is in Hall 5, Stand 280, Microsemi is in Hall 1 at Stand 660, and Xilinx is also in Hall 1 at Stand 205.

Last year’s Xilinx booth (and companies that were part of their ecosystem, like Mathworks, Lauterbach, etc.) was focused on the Zynq MPSoC, with demos running on an ASIC emulation platform. This year, the first Zynq devices are available, so there will be more demos, especially for ADAS and embedded vision applications thanks to the device’s graphics capabilities.

Altera’s demos will follow two threads: automation and video. The automation solutions will show a smart factory demo and SIL3 functional safety IPs. The video demos will show an OpenGL ES-compliant graphics IP core and video processing/analytics.

If you’re looking for a system-on-module with an FPGA at Embedded World, you’ll find several suppliers like DAVE Embedded Systems (Hall 4, Stand 481), Enclustra (Hall 1, Stand 101), EnSilica (Hall 4, Stand 546), Iveia (Hall 1, Stand 205), and Trenz Electronic (Hall 1, Stand 208), just to name a few.

If you’re looking for debug tools, Exostiv Labs (Hall 4, Stand 560) extends the capabilities of a traditional on-chip logic analyzer with an external probe with several gigabytes of memory. The data is transferred from the FPGA to the Exostiv probe using one or more multi-gigabit serial channels.

High-level design tools will be another hot topic, from Xilinx’s Vivado HLS (now also available as a WebPack) to Mathworks’ MATAB code generation, in C or HDL (shown in Hall 4, Stand 110). CoSynth (Hall 4, Stand 532) will showcase its new OpenCL interface to Zynq FPGA systems.

Several companies will showcase their IP cores. A few examples:

• 1-Gbit/s TCP/IP hardware IP core from Easics (Hall 4, Stand 140)
• Flexaware many-core IP for analytics applications from Recore Systems (Hall 4, Stand 335)
• Xylon and eVS will showcase ADAS demos at the Xilinx booth (Hall 1, Stand 205)

I hope you enjoy Embedded World and I hope to see you there!

Matteo Vit is Director and Principal Design Engineer at Starware Design (Cambridge, UK) where he specialises in hardware and software embedded systems design. Matteo has worked for a range of companies from HPC to defence, from start up to multinational.