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I-WAY, THE HARD WAY

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı Big Stack Attack ı IP Silicon ı i-Who-Chip? ı And the Winner isı ı Sources and PDF

BIG STACK ATTACK

Which brings us back to the topic of this monthıs column, prompted by a session called "Towards the $10 Web Connection" that I organized at the recent Embedded Internet Conference held in Santa Clara.

Now, everyone knows you can take a 32-bit CPU, a bunch of memory and a big league OS (Windows, Linux, RTOS) to host a standard computer network stack. Instead, my session focused on emerging technologies that start with a blank slate and recast the problem in terms of less expensive alternatives. For the most part (e.g., Microchip, Ubicom, Rabbit, etc.), the solutions boil down to identifying the mandatory protocols and coding them from scratch on 8-bit MCUs.

The only exception is iReady. Theyıve made a lot of hay with their hardware stack approach, most notably found at the heart of the popular Seiko 7600A chip. [2] But now, it finally appears iReady is going to have some company joining them on the hardware stack bandwagon. Letıs get ready to rumble!

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