Embedded Puck

You can hardly see a hockey puck on television. A puck is minuscule, travels incredibly fast, and is usually obscured by a group of burly hockey players. On Saturday evening, January 20, at the NHL All-Star Game in Boston, Fox Television found a way to make hockey pucks visible to home viewers. Although the pucks appeared perfectly normal to spectators at the game, on TV screens they were surrounded by a blue halo (think of the blue circles that hide the faces of people testifying at high-profile, televised trials). At speeds above 75MPH, the blue halo turned red, and a trail extended behind it, like a comet's tail.

To accomplish this feat, the hockey pucks used in that game were each cut in half, rigged with a battery and a circuit board containing 20 infrared emitters, and then epoxied together. The pucks were activated by an electronic signal and had a battery life of about 10 minutes. An array of sensors surrounded the rink to track the puck and relayed information back to the camera following the puck. The information was then routed to the "Puck Truck," where the signal was massaged and then transmitted live to viewers. The delay time between the event on the ice and the transmission of the signal was less than 350ms.

Speaking of bizarre embedding practices, a number of semiconductor companies are betting their farms on the future of the x86 architecture as an embedded system foundation. Several companies have introduced products and established product road maps. The most dramatic recent example is AMD's announcement that the company will cease further development on the 29000 family and will instead devote its resources to the x86 architecture. SGS- Thomson and National Semiconductor have made x86 product announcements. Intel is focusing its 486 efforts in the embedded market. As one wag put it, everyone hates the x86 architecture, but everyone understands it. The products being introduced are based on cores ranging from the 186 to the 486. For those of you who assumed that 486 cores are enormous and generate enough heat to toast your croissant, fear not: design shrinks to 0.5 and 0.35 micron design rules coupled with lower power operation are making it possible to embed a 486 core on a die and still leave two-thirds of the die space available for peripheral functions.

The driving force for embedded developers is always cost, which can be evaluated in a number of ways. Time to market is one way. The time at which you enter the market will affect the total number of units you can sell. If you lose a third of your sales by being late to market, then it may not matter if you've saved some money on your processor. If you build a product based on a widely understood chip, with abudant development tools available, you can accelerate your market entry at the expense of a higher parts cost. The x86 architecture's appeal is its plethora of software development tools and the legions of engineers educated in the architecture.

Not only is embedded technology extending to niches you'd never expect, the likelihood that it will be based on x86 architecture is growing. Now, how long do you think it will take to embed a Pentium Pro-based system into a golf ball?