New Products: More Packaging/Interconnects
The QMSS/QFSS series of shielded connectors provides electrical multiple unit (EMU) shielding by using shield plates along the connector’s sides and terminating them to the pc board via selected pins. Single-ended and differential-pair versions...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Design-For-Test Links Design And Manufacturing
Historically, testability is an afterthought in the design process. But heightening complexity of chip designs, and especially SoCs, forces testability (and manufacturability) to take a more central position. It's no longer enough for test engineers...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] Storage Accelerator RAIDs Desktop Systems
A controller that delivers write throughputs and reliability levels beyond RAID 5 capabilities—sounds lofty, but the TD6405 SyncRAID controller achieves just such a goal. Developed by NetCell, it implements a low-cost RAID-like subsystem for...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] Search Engines Take On Larger Forwarding Tables
Implementation of high-speed packet-search subsystems has become critical in equipment like routers and layer 2/3 switches. Requirements to perform policy lookups, namely access control list (ACL) and quality-of-service (QoS), require...
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Dave Bursky
[Editorial] All The Pieces Fit For A/V-Enabled Cell Phones
Some technology watchers are still scratching their heads about Sprint's pre-Thanksgiving rollout of MobiTV, billed as the "world's first live streaming television content delivered to mobile phones," as part of the company's PCS Vision...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Fuzzy Logic Stuff, Anyhow? (Part VI)
Recently, I have been riding on various trains—BART in San Francisco, CalTrans trains, various people-movers in airports, plus the London Underground. I've even been on some ferry boats. At one time, claims were made that Fuzzy Logic could help...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Century Of Flight: Manned And Unmanned Aviation
It was cold and windy on Dec. 17, 1903 on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C. In a scant 12-second flight, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved a dream with the first powered heavier-than-air aircraft, marking the start of the aviation and aerospace...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] DDR SDRAM DIMM Interface Tackles FPGAs
The industry's first 400-Mbit/s double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM dual-inline memory module (DIMM) interface for FPGAs was proved on Altera's Stratix and Stratix GX FPGA families. Tested using DDR400 SDRAM DIMMs from Micron Corp., the...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Scalable Verification Supports DFV Flows
In today's verification methodologies, catching and fixing design bugs is often like trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. Most bugs are introduced very early in the design cycle, but they aren't caught until the final stages of...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Update: Mixed HDL/C-Language Design For FPGAs
Mixed HDL/C-Language design for FPGAs recently debuted, courtesy of Aldec Inc. and Celoxica Ltd. The Active-HDL+C integrated FPGA design environment combines Aldec's Active-HDL design entry and mixed-HDL simulation technology with Celoxica's DK...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Update: ASIC Prototyping Support
ASIC prototyping support has been built into Hier Design's PlanAhead hierarchical floorplanning and analysis software. The tool, which automates the design and integration of IP blocks within FPGAs, has been shown to help designers more quickly...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Linux Gets Interrupted
Linux no longer requires a customized kernel for real-time support, but extensions are still needed for hard real-time support. Also, uClinux was merged into the new release, so the 2.6 kernel now covers all systems from low-end, MMU-less MCUs to...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] News Clips
8/16-Bit TCP/IP Gets Wireless Ethernet Support The CMX-MicroNet TCP/IP stack now has 802.11b support with the addition of the Wireless Ethernet Add-On Option for CMX-Micro-Net. It supports 64- and 128-bit WEP (Wired...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Low-Power SBC Doubles Features
It's take two for the PowerNode3. That's two 1-GHz PowerPC G4 7457 processors with 2 Mbytes of RAM each. It has PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) slots along with two for Gigabit Ethernet. Three 4× high-speed links connect to the P0 backplane for PICMG...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Embedded Linux Front End Is Divisive
Qtopia 1.7 is Trolltech's latest release of its Linux-based application platform for embedded and handheld devices. Its updated architecture provides a better division between GUI and non-GUI application interfaces, allowing developers to pick...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Simple Data Capture Via USB
The Personal Measurement Device from Measurement Computing, dubbed the PMD-1208LS, plugs into a PC's USB port to provide provide eight analog inputs, two analog outputs, 16 bits of digital I/O, and a 32-bit counter. It supports National Instrument's...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 74-Gbyte SATA Drive Targets Enterprise
As Serial ATA (SATA) drives become more common in enterprise environments, Western Digital's 10,000-rpm WD Raptor meets the challenge with a 74-Gbyte capacity. The Ultra/150 Command Queuing (Ultra/150 CQ) technology boosts performance up to 30%. It...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit Links PCI-X
Avnet's PCI-X 64/133 design kit streamlines PCI-X interface development. The kit is based on a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA and the LogiCORE PCI-X IP Core. It includes the Jungo WinDriver Driver Development Tool for PCI devices. Pricing starts at...
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William Wong
[TechScope] New Facility Improves Biometrics
Typically, biometric technology manufacturers market their devices toward a range of different applications. But when security and safety are on the line, a one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective enough. That's why the University of Buffalo...
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Richard Gawel
[TechScope] IEEE Engineers Earn National Medals Of Science, Technology
On November 6, six members of IEEE traveled to the White House to meet President Bush and receive awards that salute their engineering accomplishments. These honors, the National Medals of Science and Technology, represent the nation's highest...
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Richard Gawel
[Basics Of Design] EDA: Tradeoffs Abound In FPGA Design Sponsored by: MENTOR GRAPHICS
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) arrived in 1984 as an alternative to programmable logic devices (PLDs) and ASICs. As their name implies, FPGAs offer the significant benefit of being readily programmable. Unlike their forebearers...
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David Maliniak
