[Technology Report] Ethernet Becomes King Of The Networking World
CALLING ETHERNET A SUCCESS STORY IS THE understatement of the year. Ethernet is about as ubiquitous as you can get. Whatever happened to ARCnet, AppleTalk, Token Ring, MAP, FDDI, and the many other local-area networks (LANs)? Not only has Ethernet...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Ideas For Design] RISC Controller Backs Frequency Counter
Frequency measurement, often vital to design engineers, is the driving force behind this idea. Here, an AVR RISC controller-based circuit can measure the frequency of digital signals. It employs the PC as a user interface and sends the measurement...
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Dhananjay V. Gadre
[Ideas For Design] VC++ Program Converts Hex Strings To Integers
Binary numbers are seldom implemented in Visual C++ applications because C++ is considered a "high-level" language. Yet in communications systems, where information is transferred between two different devices through a network, using binary or...
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Zhe Lou
, et al.
[Editorial] Engineering Education Must Teach A Worldwide View
ALTHOUGH ENGINEERING SCHOOLS IN THE U.S. PROVIDE A SOLID TECHNICAL EDUCATION, students don't get a taste of what it's like in the real world, working in industry. Some exceptions exist for a fortunate few who manage to land an internship or set up...
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Dave Bursky
[Viewpoint] Designing At The Systems Level: Evolution Or Revolution?
System-level design garners more attention as the years roll by, due to the proposal of new languages, the development of design flows, and the formation of new standards committees. Yet, we ask questions about what system-level design really is....
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Perry Alexander
[Editor's Notebook] Butterfly Standards
One of my favorite sci-fi plots starts with a man entering a time machine with the dials set to some year in the ancient past. After the press of a button and loads of special effects, the man emerges in the midst of dinosaurs. Startled, he steps...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] C Standards: More Or Less
C and C++ standards keep compiler vendors in line, while system and application developers appreciate the portability aspects. But embedded developers de-mand more and sometimes less than what the standards specify. These days, DSP...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Development Tools
Flash DSP/MCU Ropes In C/C++ Merge a 32-bit DSP and a 16-bit microcontroller (MCU) into a single integrated unit and you've got one of Motorola's latest developments, the 56F800 architecture. Fast interrupt...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] News Clips
Integrity RTOS Supports x86Green Hills Software rounds out processor platform coverage with the latest release of its royalty-free Integrity 4.0 RTOS. It delivers a worst-case interrupt latency of 200 ns on the...
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William Wong
[Celebrating 50 Years] Flashback
FLASHBACK > 10 YEARS AGO DECEMBER 3, 1992 TO GET REAL-TIME VIDEO IN A PC'S window, most designers expect to contend with a complex video subsystem that has dedicated hardware to accelerate the...
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Staff
[Letters] Letters
More Kudos For Anniversary Issue Don Broadus, electronics engineer of testing, Exelon Corp.: I feel very privileged to have received your 50th anniversary commemorative issue. Its theme of...
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Various
[Forefront] OpenAccess Coalition Delivers
Establishing true interoperability for EDA tools for nanometer IC design recently took another sizable step forward. The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) has begun to beta test source code for Version 2 of the OpenAccess application...
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David Maliniak
[Forefront] MEMS Contribute To DNA-Analysis Prototype
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which uses temperature-cycling techniques employed in DNA analysis, can be handled by STMicroelectronics' prototype DNA analysis device. The chip's excellent thermal properties...
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William Wong
[Forefront] Charging Scheme Lets Portables Climb Out Of The Cradle
Wireless battery charging for portables is no longer wishful thinking. In lieu of the standard cradle charger, MobileWise's wire-free electric power technology uses a contact-studded Wire-Free-Electricity Base to deliver power to external mobile...
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David G. Morrison
[Forefront] Real-Time OS Sings With A High Performance Chorus
Jaluna-1 is a real-time component suite designed for carrier-grade projects requiring high performance and high availability. It is based on Sun Microsystems' Chorus microkernel operating system (OS). Integrated within Jaluna-1 is the C5...
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William Wong
[Forefront] Quad SERDES Provides Low-Jitter 2.5-Gbit/s Data Streams
Though the DS25C400 quad serializer/deserializer (SERDES) chip leverages backplanes intended for top data rates of 622 Mbits/s, it can deliver data at rates of 2.125 to 2.5 Gbits/s. All the while, transmit jitter levels are kept to just 0.25 UI...
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Dave Bursky
[Forefront] Second-Generation NPU Doubles Performance
The second-generation NP-1c network processor (NPU) has 50% more task-optimized processors (TOPs) than the previous NP-1. It's pin-compatible with the NP-1, though. Also, applications don't have to be recompiled because the TOPs are transparently...
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William Wong
