Embedded chip of Knowledge Date:   Thursday , June 09, 2011 SiliconIndia held the Global Embedded Conference India 2011 on 21st of May in Bangalore, a valuable and one of its kind conference which focused on the embedded systems that are deployed in commercial industry, military, automotive, avionics and defense space, industrial control, consumer electronics and telecom sectors. The opening keynote on Model- Based Agility for Embedded Systems Development, was given by Bruce Powel Douglass, Chief Evangelist for IBM Rational. Author of books like ‘Real time Agility’ ,’Real time –UML’. He describes Agile as a collaborative, incremental, and iterative approach to software development that can produce high-quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. Bruce demonstrated how UML Rational Harmony for Embedded Real Time Development eases the transition and improves communication between systems engineering teams and software development teams. After a fitting keynote, Ravi Boonapalli, Pre-Sales & Technical Marketing from Mentor Graphics gave a detailed description on Creating killer User Interfaces for Android with Inflexion. He said GUI has become a key differentiator in today’s embedded markets. With users becoming ever more demanding in their expectations, the GUI needs to be compelling and offer outstanding performance and responsiveness. In this session the audience learnt about Inflexion UI engine and Inflexion UI Express tool that enables rapid creation and customization of visually rich, highly usable GUIs. The conference was later divided into five tracks. Consumer, Industrial, Automotive, Telecom, Avionics and defense track. In the consumer track, Raman Venkatachar, General Manager – Heading operations, SlingMedia spoke on Developing cutting-edge embedded applications where he said, “The market space for cutting edge embedded applications has significantly increased in the past few years with consumers aspiring ‘cool’ products, which gives excellent opportunity to all sizes of companies to develop these ‘cool’ apps” Moving on to the Industrial perspective, Balachandran Ganesan from CMC expressed his views on ‘Challenges in developing Smart Meters’ where he said that the meters are simply not metrology measurement devices, they are becoming data points with advanced features support. Smart meter development face the challenge of mixed development approach like value engineering, re-engineering and NPI with significant convergence of technologies. At the automotive track the audience were gripped by the talk delivered on ‘Emerging Trends in Automotive Active-Safety Applications’ by Dr.Purnendu Sinha, Lab Group Manager of Electrical and Software Architecture Group, General Motors Technical Centre India. According to Dr.Sinha "Trend is a shift from warning-only systems (e.g., lane departure warning systems) to systems that actively control throttle and braking (longitudinal motion) and steering (lateral motion), leading to semi-autonomous and eventually fully autonomous vehicle operation”. Vishal Suresh, Assistant Director - Business development & Strategic partnerships from NXP Technologies clearly described about ‘Driving Growth & Innovation in Automotive Electronics’. He said that Energy efficiency, connected devices, Safety and Security will be the key macro growth drivers in the automotive electronics industry. “NXP is leveraging these macro growth drivers to develop innovative Concepts and products”. In the Telecom track, Ramesh Kankanala, Principal Applications Engineer, Microchip Technology prodded on the biggest challenges faced by telecom engineers, while delivering a talk on ‘Optimization of Power Converters’ Efficiency Using Digital Technology’ and said “Telecom engineers are addressing these issues by choosing Digital Signal Controllers (DSC’s) in the power converters design. DSC’s will support non linear control techniques to improve the power converters efficiency” said he. At the Avionics and Defense track, S.Umamaheswaran, Senior Research Staff from the Central Research Laboratory at Bharath Electronics Limited(BEL), spoke on ‘Software and Hardware co-design for Defense embedded systems’ where he clearly mentioned that the “Complexity of Defense embedded systems are gradually increasing”.The conference saw packed halls and excited audience sit through the sessions interacting, discussing, solving and resolving many issues concerning embedded systems. MentorGraphics were the sponsors for the Global Embedded Conference India.The exhibitors for the day were NXP, ftd Infocom, Manipal University, Duragon, Uchi Embedded Solutions, ESDS and Mapusoft.