When you develop products that will employ a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection, you might need to dive into the nitty-gritty analysis of bus traffic. Previously, that meant struggling through binary, hexadecimal, or other low-level information to find and then interpret transactions. No software developer or hardware engineer wants to work at that level when tools can distance them from bits and bytes.

In the world of ICs with zillions of transistors, it's refreshing to learn about the introduction of a simple IC. Fairchild Semiconductor now offers designers a 5-pin LED flasher device, the FAN5646, that will operate on its own and flash an LED. Engineers often use a flashing LED to indicate a device remains ready for an operation, has dropped into a low-power "sleep" mode, or to indicate a setting for a piece of equipment. Some MP3 players and Bluetooth earpieces include this type of flashing LED.

The nomenclature ARM (the company) and its licensees use to identify processors can seem confusing because of the wide spectrum of vendors who sell ARB-based integrated circuits. You'll find a list of 200+ licensees for the Cortex, ARM11, ARM9, and ARM7 processor families on the ARM Web site. With four processor families, identification of devices shouldn't cause problems. But, within those families, you have subgroups.

You can find a complete written hands-on review of the Renesas CAN Dev Kit (RCDK8C) on the evalkits.com Web site. I shot the video review last week but it might take another week or so to get edited and appear on the site. Find the review directly at: www.evalkits.com/kit/Renesas-R8C-CAN-LIN-Development-Kit.