Norco announced a Mini-ITX motherboard equipped with an Intel QM67 chipset, supporting Intel's “Sandy Bridge” Core i7/i5/i3 processors. The MITX-6920 supports up to 8GB DDR3 RAM, and offers four RAID-capable SATA ports, three PCI Express interfaces, a 3G SIM slot, plus generous quantities of gigabit Ethernet, serial, and USB connectivity, says the company.

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Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new single-core TMS320C6671 member of its multicore TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) family, as well as enhancements to its TMS320C6670 radio system-on-chip (SoC). In addition, the company released a free multicore software development kit (MCSDK) update for its C66x DSPs featuring updated Linux kernel support, optimized DSP libraries, and support for the OpenMP programming model.

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Moxa announced a fanless, Intel Atom N270-based computer intended to be a network video recorder in railway and industrial applications. The V2416 includes two bays for hot-swappable disk drives, a CompactFlash slot, VGA and DVI-I video outputs, four serial ports, and dual gigabit Ethernet ports with M12-type connectors, the company says.

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NetLogic Microsystems announced a new version of its Linux-ready XLP processor family that doubles the number of MIPS64 cores on board to 16. The XLP864 supports up to 2GHz clock rates and, with the help of more than 80 processing engines, enables 80Gbps throughput and 120 million packets-per-second (Mpps) performance, says the company.

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Lenovo is readying an Android 3.0 tablet that offers a pen option and plugs into a keyboard dock, says and industry report. Meanwhile, Archos announced its seven-inch, Android-based 7c Home Tablet, and Samsung is rumored to be building Amazon's first Android tablet.

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Barnes & Noble announced an automatic update this week for its Nook Color e-reader that turns the device into more of a low-cost Android tablet. New features offered by the 1.2.0 update include 125 apps, an email application, and support for Adobe Flash, says the online retailer.

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A Texas jury ordered Google to pay $5 million in damages to Bedrock Computer Technologies for infringing on a patent related to Google's use of Linux on its servers. The ruling could enable Bedrock to extract settlements from many more Linux-related firms, and it also suggests that Google will struggle to defend itself against Oracle's lawsuit over Android, writes patent expert Florian Mueller.

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Verizon Wireless will begin selling a 4G LTE-ready 4.3-inch “Droid Charge by Samsung” Android phone on April 28 for a whopping $300 plus contract. Meanwhile, Verizon says the 4G- and Android-ready HTC Thunderbolt has been a hot seller, and Motorola has confirmed that the Verizon launch of its Droid Bionic phone will be delayed until summer.

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E-Con Systems announced a one megapixel “wide dynamic range” camera module that supports 720p video at 30 frames per second. Available in an evaluation kit designed to plug into Texas Instruments' Cortex-A8-based OMAP3530 EVM, the e-CAM1M_CU10630_MOD is equipped with an S-mount lens holder, and offers an OmniVision OV10630 sensor, offering provide excellent low light sensitivity, says the company.

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Portwell announced a modular 1U network appliance that supports Intel's recently announced Xeon E3 CPUs. The CAR-4010 comes with eight or 16 gigabit Ethernet ports, up to 16GB of RAM, two or four hard disk drives, a CompactFlash slot, PCI Express expansion, and a front-panel character display, the company says.

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Canonical confirmed that it will ship Ubuntu 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”) on April 28, and announced a new online trial version of the Linux operating system. The U.K.-based company also announced some new details of its server edition, including easier provisioning and a fully certified J2EE stack.

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SanDisk and its manufacturing partner Toshiba announced a 19-nanometer (nm) process technology for fabricating flash memory chips. The companies will begin sampling a 64 gigabit (Gb), 2-bits-per-cell (X2) monolithic flash chip later this quarter, with volume production following later this year — enabling smartphones and tablets with 128GB flash disks by early 2012.

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The Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated a quadruped robot intended to test gait control and locomotion — and eventually mimic the movement of a triceratops. The flexibly jointed, 3.1-foot FROG-I robot runs Linux on an Intel Xscale PXA270 processor, communicating via Wi-Fi with a host computer, while lower-level functions are controlled by two Texas Instruments DSPs.

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Enea announced a major upgrade to its embedded Linux development environment, incorporating Timesys' LinuxLink development software. The newly renamed Enea Linux PlatformBuilder is initially available in a “ELPB-NE” version for NetLogic Microsystems' MIPS-based multicore XLP, XLR, and XLS processors and combines Enea's former Eclipse-based framework with the LinuxLink configuration and build system, says the company.

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Open Invention Network (OIN) announced a 28 percent increase in membership in its open source patent protection licensing service since the beginning of the year, bringing the total to 334 corporate supporters. The 74 new organizations covered under OIN's royalty-free license include Hewlett-Packard and Facebook, as well as smaller Linux-focused entities such as Clonezilla and Mandriva.

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