Chicago, Ill.— The Midwest version of this year's three Embedded Systems Conferences was held here on July 9-11. Though expected to end up smaller than the Sept. 6 - 9, 2001, event in Boston, attendees at Chicago's Navy Pier packed the aisles to discuss products and technologies. Keynoter and PC industry veteran, Robert X. Cringeley, stressed embedded systems' economic importance; predicted that Ethernet will win the network wars; added that PCs price versus performance curves are driving embedded systems toward PC technologies; and noted the emergence of "ad hoc networks" in which nodes discover themselves. In product news, OSE Systems announced the porting of the OSE real-time operating system (RTOS) to Analog Device's TigerSHARC DSP chip. CMX Systems introduced e-mail functionality for its CMX-MicroNet TCP/IP software stack. Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) announced formation of ELC-Europe, a vendor-neutral trade association, and ELC's board endorsed the ELC Platform Specification for basic OS services that must be supported in any compliant embedded Linux system. Green Hills Software said its Integrity real-time operating system now supports MIPS32 architecture and compatible processor cores.