Graduating from embedded world with honours

“The large number of highly innovative entries did not make it easy for use to choose once again, but every year it is great to see our industry’s innovation and dynamism. The products that were recognised make a key contribution towards the continued successful development of the embedded systems sector and the Internet of Things (IoT). The prize is the embedded system community’s way of expressing thanks and appreciation for its best members,” said Professor Matthias Sturm, Chair of the Trade Fair Advisory Committee and the chair of the jury.

Next system wins in the hardware category with HapticTouch
Next system submitted a haptic touch solution for the award. This technology offers tactile feedback on touch display surfaces and allows user interface elements to be found by touch before they are activated, as well as a scalable tactile configuration and touch force measurement. This solution features low power consumption and a flat structure.

The HapticTouch technology opens up new opportunities for human machine interaction in a wide variety of different applications and is well placed to advance the embedded community. The solution is also especially remarkable because it makes it easier or even possible in the first place for visually impaired people to access embedded systems.

PROVE&RUN impresses in the software category with ProvenCore-M
PROVE&RUN’s product is an evolution of its ProvenCore secure operating system. With ProvenCore-M, the company is adding a version for ARM Cortex-M V8 processors’ TrustZone security architecture to its ultra-secure operating system. Trusted execution environments (TEEE), secure operating systems and hardware and software-based hypervisors must be formally proven to withstand sophisticated remote attacks.

ProvenCore-M’s primary goal is to offer proven critical security services (booting, authentication and updates) at the TrustZone side. The developers of PROVE&RUN have formally proven the security features of ProvenCore-M, going as far as the generated code. ProvenCore-M is therefore highly resistant to attacks.

Mathworks triumphs in the tools category with HDL Coder Native Floating Point
The Mathworks HDL Coder is a tool for use in applications with a large dynamic range, such as signal processing and motion control applications. Native Floating Point allows synthesisable VHDL and Verilog code to be generated directly from single-precision Simulink models. The use of the HDL Coder eliminates the traditional need for fixed-point conversion, making work easier for developers and saving time. HDL Coder Native Floating Point generates target independent, readable, understandable and synthesisable register transfer level (RTL) models, also for many mathematical and trigonometric operators. This technology does not require floating-point conversation units or hard floating-point DSP blocks on the target ASIC or FPGA and can even be extended to embedded processors and programmable logic controllers without built-in floating-point units.