Communications> Optical
As the optical products guys at Silicon Labs, a chip company in Austin, Texas, like to say, “There is light at the end of the fiber.” While it’s good news, we probably won’t see that light until 2005. Some predict that the optical fiber business...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
Test And Measurement> Oscilloscopes
Today’s wider-bandwidth oscilloscopes are being readied to handle the challenges of faithfully and accurately measuring high-speed gigabit-per-second serial data rates and important attributes like eye diagrams and jitter. These instruments now...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Embedded> Software
Actual and de facto standards continue to drive products and, in some cases, innovation. The Java-based, cross-platform Eclipse development is a de facto standard that has garnered significant support. Watch for the Rich Client Profile to make it a...
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] Embedded> Overview
Promising technologies for embedded designs are ready for the big time. The overriding question will be whether or not there's enough demand for vendors to implement these technologies in sufficient quantities this year. Clear hardware leaders...
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] Embedded> Hardware
The landscape is changing this year from the flowers to the trees. PCI Express will have a major impact on system designs, permeating everything from consumer products to COTS. Peripherals will still be at a premium, but available products will make...
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] EDA> Design & Verification
Megagate SoC designs require a different verification strategy than designs of yore. Designs with a well planned verification methodology will get to market first. With die sizes increasing and the migration to 90-nm design rules under way, design...
—
David Maliniak
[Technology Report] EDA> Overview
You've heard this before: The design of complex ASICs, application-specific standard products (ASSPs), and SoCs at the register-transfer level (RTL) is a dinosaur on its way to extinction. Electronic-system-level (ESL) design, an approach marked by...
—
David Maliniak
[Technology Report] EDA> Prototyping & Implementation
While electronic-system-level (ESL) methodologies continue to be a hot discussion topic, the fact remains that an implementation flow from high-level design to silicon has yet to arrive. As a result, actual adoption of ESL design is at a standstill....
—
David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Power> DC-DC Converters
During 2003, the focus in dc-dc converters shifted from the actual converters to the distributed-power architectures using these devices. Sure, many announcements heralded better dc-dc converter performance. But even greater attention was paid to...
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Power> Supplies And Batteries
While walking through the exhibits at a power industry trade show last fall, I was struck by the number of vendors showing off flywheel power systems. These flywheels formed the heart of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), which were intended to...
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Visionaries> John C. Dvorak
Every time the technology domain goes through a downturn, too many people get fearful that somehow the tech scene is "over." They flock to bio-tech or agriculture or genetics, thinking it will be the next big thing. Unfortunately for them, the next...
—
John C. Dvorak
[Technology Report] Visionaries> Jack Gifford
From a strategic standpoint, the United States must do a better job of encouraging more of its youth to enter the engineering field. Engineering simply isn't as popular a discipline in the U.S. today as it was just 20 years ago. Some students pursue...
—
Jack Gifford
[Technology Report] Visionaries> John A. Turner
Computing resources flow bidirectionally along the Internet, connecting millions of computers. Could we do the same with our energy grid, perhaps even integrate our electricity and transportation delivery systems? Couple Internet communications,...
—
John A. Turner
[Technology Report] Test And Measurement> Analyzers
There's no slowing logic analyzers, literally and figuratively. Numerous performance and ease-of-use advances are waiting. Yet with the emphasis shifting from parallel data buses to serial data buses with multigigabit-per-second throughputs, the...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Components/Interconnects/Packaging> Components
The size of all discrete passive and active components will continue to melt away in order to match advances in shrinking IC geometries. The basic resistor, capacitor, and inductor components will increasingly go to chip form, and may eventually...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Components/Interconnects/Packaging> Overview
Progress, both evolutionary and incremental, never fails to keep the three foundation technologies of components, interconnects, and packaging in sync with the rest of the industry. Shrinking sizes, higher densities, and lower unit costs are...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Power> Management And Semiconductors
The word "simplify" might just be the battle cry for current-generation power-management ICs. So many of today's components are crafted with the intention of making it easier to perform power conversion, distribution, protection, or control....
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Power> Overview
In both good and bad economic times, certain factors will always remain steadfast. In the digital realm, Moore's Law has been more or less a constant for the past few decades. In the power electronics realm, a host of trends follow from Moore's Law....
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Memory
In general, the faster data can be retrieved, the faster the host processor can execute its algorithms. Internal parallelism on the processor side requires ever-faster data-transfer rates from external memory to keep parallel execution units active....
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Overview
Advances in all aspects of silicon manufacturing are delivering digital and mixed-signal circuits that run faster and pack more functionality than anyone had predicted just a few years ago. This year, new processors will run at 4 GHz. Others will...
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Standard Logic
Even as the IC industry continues its march toward total system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, there will always be a need for a gate here, an inverter there, a level translator somewhere else, or a stable clock source. Thus, standard logic survives,...
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Microcontrollers And Microprocessors
The 64-bit micro space will get a lot of play this year. For servers and workstations, the PowerPC, Itanium, Sparc, and Opteron architectures give users many choices, augmented by the increased use of Linux. These faster and cheaper processors...
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] Test And Measurement> Overview
System designers always look to the test and measurement industry for help. Validating and verifying their IC designs and end systems requires the most advanced tools. And, the T&M industry keeps responding with better hardware and software...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> ASICs
As more logic and memory are integrated onto ASICs, manufacturers and foundries are shifting from 130- to 90-nm design rules. The smaller transistors possible at 90 nm enable a near-fourfold increase in gate capacities, permitting designers to pack...
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Analog/Mixed-Signal> ADCs
Analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) architectures vary greatly in their performance capabilities. ADC application needs are even more diverse. So it should come as no surprise that the development of ADC chips is moving simultaneously in multiple...
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Analog/Mixed-Signal> Overview
Developers of analog and mixed-signal ICs have many options at hand to enhance the value of their products. They can soup up key ac and dc performance specifications. They can shrink device size or add more functionality to a given-sized device. Or,...
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Analog/Mixed-Signal> DACs
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) don't always garner the attention of their analog-to-digital converter (ADC) counterparts because DAC performance isn't a limiting factor in many applications. Nevertheless, monolithic DACs still play an important...
—
David G. Morrison
[Technology Report] Analog/Mixed-Signal> Amplifiers
Name the amplifier (op amps, digital amplifiers, servo amplifiers, and power amplifiers) and you'll find dramatic performance gains thanks to circuit design improvements and advances in semiconductor processing technologies. Lower power consumption,...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Digital Signal Processing
Digital-signal-processing (DSP) technology has made tremendous strides thanks to advances in semiconductor processing that allow more memory and compute resources to be integrated on one chip and architectural enhancements that let the processors do...
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Digital ICs> Reprogrammable Logic
Gains made in density and performance are pushing FPGAs into an ever more competitive position with custom-designed ASICs. On top of that, they're virtually going head-to-head with "platform" and "structured" ASICs. The demand for FPGAs remains...
—
Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Communications> Overview
Wireless is currently the most active and fastest growing segment of the electronics industry. If you said 20 years ago that some form of radio would dominate the attention of the electronic industry, you would have been laughed out of the country....
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Communications> Cell Phones
With cell subscribers in the U.S. numbering 152 million, virtually every adult and a large percentage of teens own cell phones. The cell phone has become the most common and popular way to communicate. Sure wired phones are still in place, but their...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Communications> Wireless
Wireless local-area networks (WLANs) are experiencing phenomenal growth as more enterprises extend existing LANs with wireless and more consumers add home networks. The IEEE 802.11b WLAN standard still dominates with its 11-Mbit/s data rate in the...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Editorial] Issue Overview> Joining The Optimist Club In 2004
I'm an optimist by nature. But cautious optimism has been the best even the most positive-thinking of us could offer in the last two years, considering the false starts in the economy and the global and national security concerns we all have been...
—
Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Forecasting Stuff, Anyhow?
Well, I am going to make a few comments about "forecasting." I will primarily observe that most efforts at forecasting are a waste of time. I remember when one of the CEOs of NSC in the old days (NOT Charlie Sporck) forecast that the semiconductor...
—
Bob Pease
[Basics Of Design] DC-DC Converters Sponsored by: DATEL
The Black Box. Put succinctly, dc-dc converter modules make it easier to implement on-board voltage conversion.They integrate all required power-conversion circuitry into a compact package that can be placed onto the board—often with no...
—
David G. Morrison
