[Technology Report] LCDs Breakout In New Dimensions
For a flat-panel display technology that's relatively more mature than other competitive approaches, liquid-crystal displays show an unstoppable trend of improvements in all key performance aspects of flat-panel displays: contrast ratio, color...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] PC-Based HW/SW Tools Aid Design And Test
"We need more speed and accuracy!" say design and test engineers who work with PC-based instruments. Of course, the price for that performance must be within reason. Paying heed to that cry, National Instruments came up with the M...
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Roger Allan
[Ideas For Design] Simple Circuit Drives PCI Express With PCI Hot-Plug Power IC
Conventional PCI and PCI-X computer slots have four supply voltages available: +12, +5, +3.3, and 12 V. PCI and PCI-X cards rely on +5 V and +3.3 V for most of the power and are limited to 500 mA of load current on the +12-V supply. This...
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Ed Jung
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Emergency Light Turns White LEDs On When Power Goes Out
Power outages often occur unexpectedly, leaving you in total darkness. Whether in a hospital, a theater, or your home, such occasions call for an emergency lighting system that turns on automatically. The preferred emergency light source is...
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Ken Yang
[Editorial] 3D Projection Holograms: Reach Out And Try To Touch
While we were preparing this month's cover story on LCDs, I got an e-mail from a company working on the true bleeding edge of display technology--on "touchless holographic interfaces." Surely that's an intriguing technological innovation in and of...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Feature-Phone Memory: Making It Multimedia-Fit
As feature-phone growth skyrockets (Gartner Dataquest forecasts sales of close to 500 million units in 2005), designers are restructuring memory architectures to make them multimedia-fit. This means providing adequate memory to handle an...
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Zack Weisfeld
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Pease-Cohen Effect Stuff, Anyway?
Back in 1965, I designed one of the best op amps in the world, the PP25A. It had less than 1 mV of VOFFSET, and 150 pA of IBIAS, using good Amelco n-channel JFETs. Its yellow epoxy package had an impedance far above 1...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Analog & Power] Circuit Breakers Get Windows-Smart
Circuit-protection ICs that drive external power devices to shut off current to shorted loads certainly don't rate as a new development. What is new, however, are all-electronic, Windows-programmable rack-mount circuit breakers for...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Simplify 10 Gbits/s Over Fiber Or Copper
Improved implementation of high-speed optical interfaces for 10-Gbit Ethernet, Sonet/SDH, and Fibre Channel networks is the catalyst behind the XT38720 CMOS XFI interface. Crafted by Xignal Technologies AG, an intellectual-property company...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] RC Engines Lift Accuracy Of Parasitic Extraction
Traditionally, post-layout parasitic extraction has treated device and interconnect models separately. That paradigm falls apart partially at 90-nm geometries and more fully at 65-nm geometries, where complex physical effects are borne of the...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Pre-Silicon Validation Tool Adds VHDL Support
SpeedCompiler and DesignPlayer products for pre-silicon chip and system validation now support VHDL and mixed-language designs. Support for VHDL and mixed languages is part of a broad strategy on developer Carbon Design Systems' part to enable...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Tool Gives Programmable Logic Wings To Fly
The benefits of reconfigurable logic have long been known to earthbound engineers. But it took a collaboration between Xilinx and Sandia National Labs to come up with a way to get FPGAs into orbit and beyond. The pair has developed the industry's...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] PC-Board/System Design Tools Get Physical
By addressing many different aspects of physical design in a single environment, Flomerics' Version5 integrated design suite for pc boards and systems not only reduces design-cycle times, it also breaks down communication barriers between various...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
EDA tools go on the road through Tanner EDA's new commuter licensing model. Users can "check out" available licenses onto their notebook PCs for a predefined period. They can then disconnect from their company's network without losing access to the...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Compilers: Looking Under The Hood
There are probably a lot of engineers out there like me who used to get under the hood of their cars. Some may even remember what a timing light was for. At best, you can change the oil and spark plugs in today's cars. Still, it's nice to know...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Linux Brings Dual-Processor SBC On Board
The dual-processor SVME/DMV-182 single-board computer (SBC) now runs TimeSys Linux. The SVME/DMV-182 is based on dual 1.2-GHz PowerPC 7457 processors with Altivec enhancements. Incorporated is up to 1 Gbyte of double-data-rate SDRAM memory with...
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William Wong
[TechScope] Let Your Car Lead The Way
Forget about stopping to ask someone for directions next time you take a wrong turn. Just ask your car! The Honda Motor Company has integrated IBM's Embedded ViaVoice software into its in-car navigation systems. With the software's advanced...
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Richard Gawel
[TechScope] CCDs Power High-Definition-Video Camcorder
Purported to bring professional-quality video in the palm of your hand, Sony's HDR-FX1 Handycam camcorder records and plays back high-definition video with 1440 pixels by 100 interlaced lines of resolution. It's powered by the company's...
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Richard Gawel
[TechScope] Lobster Fishing Goes Wireless
There's more to finding good lobster than just throwing out a trap. Commercial fishermen correlate water temperatures at the ocean floor with locations where lobsters are most abundant. Current thermal measuring devices feed readouts to data loggers...
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Richard Gawel
[Basics Of Design] COM Express: A New Standard Sponsored by: KONTRON AMERICA
High-speed, serial peripheral interfaces demand a new approach to module design. The COM (Computer On Module) Express standard meets those challenges. Supporting many popular new serial interface standards, including PCI Express, USB 2.0, ExpressCard,...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Cell-Phone Handset Design Sponsored by: ANALOG DEVICES
Designing a cell-phone handset is a complex, multifaceted project with many issues that extend from the black art of RF design to efficient software development and virtually all other electronic specialties in between. Here are the basic design...
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Louis E. Frenzel
