Our Pervasive Product Philosophy

The line between the processing power of a microprocessor and microcontroller is becoming more and more blurred as time goes on. High-end microcontrollers based on architectures like the ARM support many of the features of low-end microprocessors. In addition, Linux and other similar operating systems have been ported to these chips.

Currently, the major hurdles to using a microcontroller as a generic processing node are their lack of complex memory management and their inablility to support much more than very simple multitasking. These limits require some careful software design but do not appear to be complete 'show-stoppers' to an attempt to create a simple processing cluster from a set of microcontrollers.

We believe that microcontroller-like processing nodes are the future of both pervasive and general computing. Therefore, it is only prudent to start looking at just how much of an intelligent system can be run on a collection of them.