Adlink Technology announced this week availability of the latest version of its intelligent middleware and management tool, Smart Embedded Management Agent (SEMA) 3.5, which is able to monitor and collect system performance and status information from devices and control system functions in a timely, flexible and precise manner.
New functionality offered in SEMA 3.5 enhances the already comprehensive feature set of the existing, proven SEMA solution. Adlink’s new SEMA 3.5 now supports various operating systems (OSs) such as Windows 10, and supports the latest x86 and ARM SoC generations.
SEMA system performance and quality has also been improved, with call speed increased by 60 percent and added support for concurrent access of multiple processes and software applications leveraging SEMA functions in parallel.
With SEMA 3.5, Adlink introduces an enhanced feature set and offers comprehensive hardware support at the board level. For instance, a history of last power-up sequence errors is logged, including detailed forensic information; this enables further investigation into technical issues in order to avoid unplanned system downtime. In addition, new 1-Wire support offers an easy-to-integrate serial interface that allows access to memory, security and temperature sensor devices.
SEMA 3.5 is supported on a broad spectrum of hardware platforms, with the majority of ADLINK´s computer-on-modules, single board computers and embedded computer systems being SEMA-enabled. The intelligent middleware runs on widely used embedded operating systems and supports both x86 and ARM architectures.
SEMA 3.5 is provided to customers at no-cost for use in combination with SEMA-enabled ADLINK hardware. SEMA 3.5 helps customers to improve system reliability, reduce maintenance costs and ease system integration of embedded systems. Hence, it improves time-to-market (TTM) and total cost-of-ownership (TCO), key requirements for producing competitive products.
“One of the many enhancements in SEMA 3.5 has been to extend the customization capabilities of the API we offer,” explained Dirk Finstel, executive vice president of Adlink’s Module Computing Product Segment. “This enables customers to develop tailored solutions and to integrate monitoring and control functions into their embedded systems.”
Initially designed for power sequencing tasks, the BMC has evolved to include many new and useful features throughout the years. Measuring system voltages and currents, controlling fan speed, accessing GPIOs and I2C bus are only a few examples of these new capabilities.
Being compatible with the latest PICMG Embedded Application Programming Interface specification (EAPI) reduces your effort to port existing calls to SEMA to nearly zero. On top of that SEMA provides an extended set of functions like showing and controlling CPU Operation Mode, to read out HDD S.M.A.R.T. data or to read out a comprehensive set of system data.
Providing the interface from the hardware to the operating system is one of SEMA®’s most important functions. The BMC first collects all relevant information from the chipset and other sources. Using the I2C driver and the Extended EAPI the application layer fetches the data and presents it to the user.
The application can be a local customer specific implementation or the SEMA Dashboard which can access the Extended EAPI also remotely and which shows the data in user-friendly graphic interfaces, suitable for supervision and troubleshooting.
