Scheduled this year from Sept. 21 to 24 at Boston's Hynes Convention Center, the Embedded Systems Conference is branching out into some new subject areas, TechInsights says. Among these are sensors, lighting/LEDs, SIP (systems intellectual property), and
MEMS. (The latter has been defined by the
MEMS and Nanotechnology Clearinghouse as "the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication technology.")
Co-located this year with the
xTCA Ecosystems Conference, ESC Boston will also cover more familiar ground, including the latest in the conference's series of embedded device tear-downs, plus an ESC Expo that will feature products from more than 80 companies, TechInsights says. The conference will also include the latest in a series of BYOES (build your own embedded system) events, already familiar from past ESC Boston and ESC Silicon Valley shows.
The BYOES event should be of special interest, since it will feature an as-yet-unnamed Intel Atom-based system, running the first release of Windows Embedded Standard (WES) 2011, the organizers claim.
WES 2011, code-named "Quebec," is an embedded operating system for x86 devices that will be based on Microsoft's Windows 7. Microsoft hasn't yet announced a release date for Quebec as far as we know, except to say that it will be available "within a number of quarters" after Windows 7's release, so the version employed in the BYOES event will presumably be an initial public beta.
The IB995 (left) and BeagleBoard (right)
(Click either for further information)At recent ESC Conferences, single-board computers (SBCs) used in the BYOES events have either been given away to attendees or have been heavily subsidized. TechInsights has not yet provided further details about this fall's sessions except to say that the BYOES track will consist of seven classes, held over Monday, Sept. 21, and Tuesday, Sept. 22. At last year's ESC Boston, TechInsights "gifted" attendees who purchased five-day or "all access" passes with IBase
IB885 SBCs (above left), equipped with WES and Windows CE, or
BeagleBoard (above right) computers equipped with Linux.
ESC Conferences typically also include public teardowns of embedded devices, which in past years have even included a Toyota Prius. This year's "real-time teardowns" will include disassembly of a
BionX Bicycle Energy Management system and an
Optoma Pico Pocket Projector, says TechInsights.
Meanwhile, the organizers say, ESC Boston keynote speakers will include T.J. Rodgers, founder, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, plus designer Robert Brunner. Brunner is said to have done the industrial design for Apple products such as the Apple II, Macintosh, Newton, and PowerBook, and is one of the founders of the design company
Ammunition.
Last year, ESC Boston also included 12 sessions specifically devoted to Windows Embedded Standard (WES) and Windows CE 6.0, later
made available online by Microsoft. This year, a similar number of Windows-specific sessions is likely to be found. (So far, however, we found only one listed, Olivier Bloch's ESC-441,
"Windows Embedded and industrial solutions: From Sensors to Servers", scheduled on Sep. 24 from 10:45am to 11:55am.)
Further informationMore information on ESC Boston 2009 may be found on the TechInsights website,
here.
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