This article appeared inevaluation Engineeringand has been published here with permission.
您将学到什么：
- Information about the SiBRAIN standard
- “插件”嵌入式系统开发
- 从Mikroe的角度来看电子设计的想法
作为一个嵌入式电子系统设计师never an easy job, and in today’s disruptive evolutionary tech ecosystem, it’s getting even harder. Being an advanced product and/or service developer in the current environment is both enabled and challenged by the plethora of new technologies and solutions available. The ability to evaluate multiple solutions from a variety of vendors is becoming more and more valuable in the creation of a design.
从微控制器（MCU）选择的角度来解决嵌入式开发的这一方面，MikroElektronika(MikroE), recently released SiBRAIN, presented as a standard for a modular plug-and-play development board system to enable easy swapping of various MCUs on a SiBRAIN-socket-enabled development board（图。1）。This enables embedded designers to try out multiple devices in their development phase without a massive hardware investment. SiBRAIN cards currently exist that support MCUs from major manufacturers including Microchip, NXP, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments, with others to follow.
每个Sibrain板都是独立的，无论销钉计数或引脚兼容性如何，都可以满足不同MCU的特定要求。每张卡都有雄性和女性，高速，168针夹层连接器，带有Sibrain插座，设计可防止不正确的方向和放置。我们与Mikroe首席执行官Nebojsa Matic谈了有关Sibrain系统以及对嵌入式系统设计师的意义。
ee:Glad to have you with us, Nebojsa.
Neb Matic：很高兴来到这里。顺便说一句，每个人都称我为NEB，这要容易得多。因此，我是一名被迫经营公司20年的工程师。在Mikroe设定标准时，Mikrobus标准确实为我们提供了鼓励。基于该逻辑，我们走得更远，标准化了世界上所有微控制器的插座和附加板。
For example, a given legacy MCU card has a connector, it could be a pretty big one, it may be clumsy or delicate. You may not be able to put the MCU card back on the board when you remove it. So, we came up with this standard, we call it SiBRAIN. Why SiBRAIN? Because Silicon Brain, SiBRAIN, can do more than hold a microcontroller; you could also have Linux, or other OS, on such a board.
I’m looking forward to seeing an SiBRAIN card with Microsoft Azure Sphere, we already made an agreement with them to place media tech chips on that card. We already have an agreement and permission to do that with BeagleBoard. We don’t have an agreement and permission yet from Raspberry Pi, but we are looking forward to having it.
For the last 20 years we have been doing only dev tools and compilers. So, let me tell you something about MikroE. We are a 20-year-old company, with 80-plus employees, and we do only five things: development tools, compilers, peripheral boards, programmers, debuggers, and smart displays. Basically, we make a complete ecosystem for the development of any electronic device.
What is important for us is for you to know we are a highly organized group of people, with 2,000 of our own products. Most importantly, we release one new product per day. So, every day, at 10 o’clock in the morning, we introduce a new product, which never existed. It’s not 10 o’clock yet. So, I don’t know…
We set up an organization, with distribution, bookkeeping, an IT sector for our ERP system, production, marketing, and of course, sales, etc. We are like a small corporation, but we are so efficient, thanks to our ERP system, that we don’t need to have 500 people for what we are doing. The new card, by the way, it’s an SiBRAIN microcontroller card for PIC24, with a whole string of numbers afterward（图2）。这是一张100针卡，带有256K的闪存。
We release one new product per day. How many products do you think we should have in the pipeline to be able to release one new per day? Every day in this company there are 250 projects in one of 12 stages. The first stage is an idea, the last stage is the web page, which means it’s finished.
ee:What are your thoughts on helping the design engineering efforts of your clients?
Matic:We are focused on one word—time. When we think about ourselves, we think that we sell time—and the products we produce are just a vehicle for how we are selling the time. We like to really free up as much of the time of our fellow engineers as we possibly could. With the tools we produce, you will do the most with the time you have. So, that’s how we see ourselves. For example, I like to go fishing, so when you say time, I almost calculate immediately in fishing time.
我们提供全面的开发委员会，小型开发板，程序员辩论者，智能显示器，编译器和外围板。我们拥有最多的编译器。我们之所以如此之多，是因为我们从头开始制作编译器。我们有1,000个具有独特功能的外围板。因此，如果您带有五个插座的板，并且有五个插座和1,000个点击板，则可以为您提供数万亿个独特的组合。因此，请想象一下我们如何使工程更轻松。
ee:The nice thing about engineers is that you don’t sell them something by saying, “Now in purple," you know, if you have a direct benefit for an engineer, you’re going to get people who are going to use the solution. If you build it, theywill来。当然，您必须让他们知道它在那里，但是如果您有一个很好的解决方案，并且可以介绍它是一个很好的解决方案，那么您至少会得到聪明的客户。
Matic:我们希望使其成为其项目，以便工程师可以轻松地切换其项目中的微控制器。当还有另一个可能更适合您的项目时，它使您不得不仅依靠一条微控制器线。或者，试想一下，如果您是一家设计服务公司，那么该项目就离开了该公司，当然，他知道最适合使用的微控制器。在这种情况下，您要做的就是切换到另一张卡，另一个微控制器。
另一个例子可能是，如果您想向老板展示您的想法的工作原理，则可以使用最大的微控制器，其中最多的资源来向他展示。然后，当他说：“是的，让我们去做这个项目，”您可以以正确的价格和所有内容来缩小正确的微控制器。因此，有很多原因可以轻松切换MCU。这一切都与可伸缩性有关。您可以缩小尺寸以进行成本优化，或者如果营销带来一个好主意，但它增加了更多的内存，那么您可以在该系列中的下一个MCU进行。
A SiBRAIN card is very small, it’s basically 60 x 60 mm, and we have it for so many different microcontrollers already, more than 100 right now. The most important part of the socket is those two 168-pin high-speed connectors, which means we could place 300 or so pins for any microcontroller, which right now don’t exist in the world. All you need is to place your microcontroller on the middle of that card, and connect to the appropriate pins, and that’s how you get compatibility.
这是一个开放的标准，因此您无需向我们支付任何费用。如果您想在板上放置一个插座，如果要制作一张Sibrain卡，则取决于您。我们希望拥有一个更通用的工具，因为我们喜欢减少MCU切换时间，因为切换时间实际上是工程师讨厌的。
