At the Embedded World conference, Actel Corporation unveiled SmartFusion, the world's first intelligent mixed signal FPGA. Available in production quantities, SmartFusion devices feature Actel's proven FPGA fabric, a complete microcontroller subsystem built around a hard ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable analog blocks on a flash process.
The company also announced the immediate availability of its development environment for the SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. The ecosystem includes the Libero Integrated Design Environment (IDE) v9.0 with Synplify Pro and Identify from Synopsys, ModelSim from Mentor Graphics, and SoftConsole v3.1, Keil and IAR Systems software IDEs, plus access to leading RTOS and middleware from Micrium.

Virage Logic announced the availability of its new ARC 601 32-bit microprocessor core, the first ARC processor Virage Logic has brought to market since its acquisition of ARC International.

Micro Digital Inc. announced that smxWiFi, first released in June of 2008, has been upgraded to support 802.11n (high speed) and additional chips sets from Ralink. smxWiFi now provides support for USB WiFi dongles using the Ralink RT2500, 2573, and 2870 chipsets. In addition, it now supports PCI bus WiFi cards using the Ralink RT2860 and 2760 chipsets. Support for other chipsets can be added.

Bill Schweber, my friend and mentor in my early career as a technical editor at EDN, writes a weekly newsletter to support the Planet Analog web site he edits at TechInsights. Nothing new about writing a newsletter, most other sites do it as a way to increase visitors count, but Bill almost always shares an insight you will not find on the Planet Analog page. This week he shares his opinion on the use of the term "SoC".