Quick Bytes from ARM Tech Symposium; Upto 50% of users viewed the 2012 Olympics on Smartphones
ARM conducts annual series of worldwide events to learn and share valuable information on latest ARM roadmap and related technologies. Developers, hardware designers from whole spectrum of embedded systems domain, attend these events. This edition of ARM technology symposium, Bangalore was held on 5th November with a jam packed audience from developer community. Many ARM partner companies like Freescale, NXP, Synopsys also attended this event, showcasing their spectrum of ARM based processors.
Key Note
The key note was delivered by Chief Commercial Officer, ARM. He highlighted the great opportunities that are going to present themselves before the
- embedded industry in near future. Some interesting facts from his presentation are:Up to 50% of the users viewed Olympics 2012, on their smart phones.
- 71% of the companies, worldwide are planning Buy Your Own Device (BYOD) support.
- Around 3 billion increase in middle class consumers in 20 years.
- More than 1000 companies are now working in the ARM ecosystem, ranging from big enterprises to startups.
The second speaker in the key note was Dr. Ajit Kalghatgi, Director (R & D), Bharat Electronics Limited. He discussed the challenges for embedded systems in the Indian perspective.
Tracks
The event was spread across three parallel tracks, with track 1 focussed on the future of ARM processor design, discussing topics like, “Recent energy savings by big.LITTLE technology developed by ARM” , “Next generation visual computing” and “The 28nm processor implementation”. Track 2 focussed on the hardware side of things, with sessions like “Beginners guide to ARM Cortex – M series micro controllers”, “Low power design techniques for embedded systems”, “Safety features in Cortex – R processor” and “Keil – MDK, the IDE for ARM”. Bryan Lawrence from ARMcambridge discussed about the spectrum of ARM processors which are available and can be used for applications as small as smart cards to digital signal processing intensive GPUs, during his session in the track 2.
Track 3 was focussed on the software part of the embedded systems. Sessions like “Coding standard for the ARMarchitecture”, “CMSIS-RTOS” discussed the development of a coding standard for ARM processors, which can help in code portability. Other sessions like “Optimizing your Linux/Android platform for battery life” and “Bring up and optimization of Android stacks for ARM big.LITTLE” were more inclined towards optimizing the software for better efficiency in terms of power and speed.
The stalls at the event were equally interesting, with some cutting edge technology on display. Sonim Technologies, makers of ultra rugged phones, displayed the officially toughest phone in the world (they hold the guinness world record for the model XP3300). The phone can withstand drop of around 82 feets on a concrete floor. However, its not been launched in the Indian market as of now.
Conclusion
Overall, the single day event was a great success with around 600 participants, that too, limited only because of limited seats. The next Technology Symposium from ARM was scheduled on 8th November, in Hyderabad. If you've missed out on the ARM events, you can still register for MobiSparks to know about all the movers and shakers in the mobile industry.
Click here for more updates on ARM events
Author Bio: Nitish Tiwari, is a software engineer based out of Bangalore with a keen interest in software, especially open source software. Along with fiddling with open source software in free time, he also writes for Linux for you (An Open source based magazine).
