Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

The rugged PPM-TX single-board computer from WinSystems is network-enabled, so it can send and receive information over the Internet even as it performs its primary functions in hot or cold industrial environments. It can even function as a simple web server, says WinSystems Vice President Bob Burckle, allowing manufacturing engineers, for example, to check the status of their remote equipment from any desktop browser. "We have been driven by our customers to make sure that every new product we bring out is network enabled," Burckle says. The low-power, Pentium-based PPM-TX comes in a compact PC-104 format, and works over a temperature range of -40 to 85C without the need for forced-air cooling. It has an internal floating-point processor for math-intensive applications and MMX technology for compatibility with Windows, MS-DOS, and Linux. WinSystems: Enter 516

By 2006, according to Forrester Research, 80% of all new vehicles will have built-in terminals that provide wireless music, movies, and games. Intel's XScale technology, implemented in a new family of processors, aims to make it possible. "Consumers have experienced the benefit of telematics in emergency roadside assistance and basic navigation systems, but that's only the beginning," notes Patrick Kerrigan, Marketing Director of Intel's telematic operation. Two new XScale processors, the 400-MHz PXA250 and the 200-MHz PXA210, provide power not only for in-vehicle (telematic) systems, but also for multimedia cell phones, handheld computers, and other wireless Internet devices. The processors provide computation-intensive multimedia while being miserly with battery power. Incorporated multimedia technology improves sound quality, gives advanced graphics effects, and increases the number of frames per second in video. A special "turbo" mode revs up the chip's clock rates when number crunching is necessary and slows them down to save power when demands are low. Intel: Enter 517