Last week I was in Nuremberg assisting at the Embedded World Conference. This is not my first time there, I was there also in 2023 but this year was special, it was my first year as a speaker, talking about real-time simulations on FPGA, but I am going to talk about that later. Before I went, I was pretty sure that, again, the most used word in the conference would be AI, but even it was at every booth, there is another word with almost the same appearance ratio, Cybersecurity, or Cyber Resilient Act (CRA).

CRA

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with a digital component through the introduction of mandatory cybersecurity requirements for manufacturers and retailers, governing the planning, design, development, and maintenance of such products. To summarize, all the work done in desktop and server hardware and software now has to be implemented into the embedded systems, which has been a need since many years ago. Regarding the FPGA, the CRA indeed also applies and I will write an article focusing on the CRA for FPGA soon.

In addition to the CRA, some new products were shown. The first one, the new Red Pitaya Gen 2.

RedPitaya Gen2

Honestly, Gen2 has almost no change with respect to the previous generation. They have maintained the same Zynq7000 platform replacing the Zynq7010 with the Zynq7020, and in just one variant they have increased the RAM memory from 512 MB to 1 GB. Also, the micro USB has been replaced by a USB-C, but the USB version is still 2.0. More than a new generation seems more like a restyling, or a Gen 1.5, with some disadvantages from my point of view. For example, they used USB-C connectors to interconnect different STEMlab boards, and I am always afraid of using connectors that have a purpose, to other interfaces with different purposes, since it is very easy to connect the USB-C from a computer to this interconnection connector, and we don’t know what can happen.

Where I saw many changes in in the software defined radio (SDR) platform aimed to replace the Analog Devices Pluto board. the new Jupyter SDR.

Jupyter SDR

We have a new open-source SDR platform based on the new ADRV9002 transceiver. As a central controller, they have replaced the Zynq7000 device that we can find in the Pluto board, with a Zynq MPSOC, the XCZU3EG, which has allowed to the designers include SATA, Display Port, USB, and Ethernet. The ADRV9002 is a 2x2 transceiver with a frequency range from 30 MHz to 6 GHz, the same range that we can find on USRP devices. And, if this is not enough, the device can be powered over POE. I couldn’t find the cost for this device but we can expect an increment regarding the Pluto SDR.

Another interesting device that I found in this year’s Embedded World, but I am not 100% sure that they are new, is the 10Base-T transceivers for automotive. They allow with just two wires to create an Ethernet network with the vehicle, but in practice, they can be implemented in any device, I don’t know now how, but I think that this type of communication for multi-processor systems will be widely used in some years.

What I noted in the Embedded World these last years is how are growing the embedded systems. Some years ago, embedded systems were small, low-power, with limited computing power. Now, we can find embedded systems, like the ones based on the AMD Ryzen Embedded platform, that are as large as desktop computers. Also, the clusters based on Raspberry PI devices are huge.

Finally, As I said before, I was there as a speaker talking about my project Open Hardware Simulator. I showed in this blog some power converter models that I deployed on FPGA, but I am preparing new models and also a complete ecosystem with dedicated hardware. I will keep you updated here.

So, that was my visit to the Embedded World, talking with many different people, making new friends, and trying to translate it into new collaborations to bring you new articles. If you live in Valencia, Felices Fallas, and if not, see you in two weeks.