ESC: Day 1

4/5/2006 10:13 AM EDT

It's finally stopped raining here in San Jose, where this year's Embedded Systems Conference is being held. That's great news for show attendees, as well as the local San Jose folks. The show opened yesterday afternoon, with the usual bright lights and news splashes. And the day closed with a huge highlight, the Second Annual ACE Awards, presented by the editors of EE Times.

Some of the top stories I heard revolved around new microcontrollers (based on ARM CPUs), and new power-management schemes, particularly an innovative buck-boost converter developed by Texas Instruments. One vendor, Connect One, has taken its wired LAN technology and cut the cord to go wireless.

As you might expect, the operating system vendors were at the show in full force. Express Logic continues to squeeze more functionality into a tighter kernel in its RTOS. In the Microsoft booth, Freescale showed a video camera that it co-developed with Microsoft and Toshiba.

That's it for now. Check back again for the next report.