[Engineering Feature] Tag It!
WHAT IS IT? RFID, or radio-frequency identification, is a short-range wireless technology. It goes beyond bar coding to mark, identify, and track everything from products to people. RFID uses electronic tags or smart labels to electronically store a unique identifying number instead of a printed bar code. Each tag consists of a single chip with an EEPROM containing the ID number and a radio transceiver or transponder. A popular tag...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Advances Give LEDs/OLEDs That Extra Twinkle
Light-emitting diode (LED) technology is on a tear. Higher brightness levels, higher efficiencies, longer lifetimes, and decreasing costs have spun out from a barrage of advances in heat dissipation, packaging, and processing. LEDs made from indium-gallium-nitride (InGaN), aluminum-indium-gallium-phosphide (AlInGaP), gallium-nitride (GaN), silicon-carbide (SiC), and yttrium-aluminum-garnet (YAG) processes now come in red, amber, red-orange, blue, cyan, green, and white,...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: Industry First] Accelerometer Offers Economical Low-G Sensing
Portable handheld consumer electronics have proven successful market-wise for microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) sensors. This is particularly true for sensing low levels of gravity and protecting data in devices that fall and crash on the ground. Low-g sensing is a tough technical challenge for design engineers, requiring extremely sensitive sensors with low noise levels and very small footprints. Because these sensors target consumer items, they also must be...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Partition Hybrid Linux/RTOS-Based Systems
Partitioning a multiprocessor system poses a challenge to embedded-systems architectural designers. This is particularly true in complex multifaceted systems that must provide both "hard" time-critical functionality and large-scale information-processing services. To deal with these disparate requirements, such systems often contain a mix of different processors to handle hard real-time aspects, such as digital signal processors (DSPs), plus powerful conventional processors (CPUs) for...
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David Kalinsky
[Ideas For Design] Simple Power Supply Suits VoIP/PoE Applications
Designing a power supply that meets the demands of Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications can be challenging. The low component-count power supply depicted in the figure meets these specifications without the need for complicated circuitry. The circuit shows a typical converter for a powered device (PD) as defined by the PoE standard. The schematic includes the necessary circuitry for "discovery" and "classification," along with a...
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Robert Mayell
[Ideas For Design] Single Supply Yields 0- To 5-V Ramp
Using standard circuits and no auxiliary voltage generators (such as charge pumps or inductive dc-dc converters), it's difficult to build a precision, rail-to-rail ramp generator that operates on a single supply and resets to a well-defined level. Figure 1 implements such a circuit using a bootstrapped series reference and an op amp with rail-to-rail I/O and very low bias current. The ramp is generated by a constant charging current into capacitor CRAMP. This is...
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Ahmad Ayar
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[Ideas For Design] IBA-Based Power Solutions Demand System-Level Protection
In many computing and communication applications, the intermediate bus architecture (IBA) with non-isolated point-of-load (niPOL) converters continues to displace conventional distributed and centralized power solutions. Key drivers of this trend include the increasing number of system voltages, their higher output currents, tighter regulation requirements, and lower total system cost. While meeting these needs, many IBA/niPOL solutions don't include certain protection mechanisms that come...
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Bob Thomas
[Editorial] Real-Time Motion-E Capture Makes Dance A Digital Art
As many of you know first hand, integrating the digital and analog realms is a real work of art! It's also, literally, a new art form. I had a chance to experience the premiere of Motion-e, a dance/motion-capture fusion. Motion-e uses real-time motion-capture to enhance live performance, with artificial intelligence (AI) interpreting dancers' movement and generating digital graphics and sound. While I'm not a dance aficionado, I love the nexus of arts and technology. This cool new...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Math Still Matters In Electronic Design
In a world full of automated design tools, do we need to worry about the mathematical details in our models? As engineers, the notion of "doing the math" often conjures anxious memories of pulling "all-nighters" at university, solving differential equations, and inverting matrices. So, it is with some relief that we find that there are tools that handle many of those tasks for us. Today's engineer does much more than enter models and run simulations. In fact, analysis...
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Tom Lee
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Nap Stuff, Anyhow?
I like to sleep. I like to wake up. But I don't like to wake up at 1:40 a.m. and not be able to get back to sleep for a few hours. Two o'clock, 3, 4... and this lying in bed is not restful. Finally I may get back to sleep at 5 and when I wake up at 7, the newspaper is waiting for me to read it. I'm not off to a good start on the day. I think I've solved this problem. When I wake up at 2 a.m., I wait for barely 1/2 hour, and if I can't get to sleep, I get up. I read some...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Land Of The Rising Sun—And Technologies—Hosts VLSI Symposia
The IEEE 2005 Symposium on VLSI Technology will celebrate its 25th anniversary June 14-16 in Kyoto, Japan. But don't let its age fool you. This conference will highlight cutting-edge CMOS front-end to back-end processes that use features as small as 32 nm. Attendees also can learn about the latest silicon processing and dielectric materials. And, the hottest memory cell structures for flash, magnetoresistive, and dynamic memories will be detailed in various...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: The Industry] DC-DC Converters To Reach $7.8 Billion In 2008
If you're looking for a powerful market, check out dc-dc converters. According to a study by Venture Development Corp., the global merchant market for dc-dc devices tallied $5.5 billion in 2004. On top of that, the field is going to hit $7.8 billion by 2008. VDC cites three factors contributing to this growth. First, the proliferation of lower voltages at higher current levels has fueled an increased use of distributed power architectures with point-of-load converters across more...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Fast 14- & 16-Bit ADCs For Comm & Instrument Apps
The multicarrier, multimode receivers in next-generation cellular infrastructure equipment will need analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with higher spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is to help deal with the basestation near-far problem (capture of weak signals in the presence of stronger signals in the same frequency band). Fortunately, equipment designers can look to Analog Devices' 14-bit AD9455 ADC. With input frequencies of up to 300 MHz, its...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Active ORing Gains Traction
The first active-OR controller was introduced last year. Now there are two, and the price has been squeezed down so a controller and MOSFET cost about the same as passive ORing with Schottkys. It has been customary to use multiple ac-dc converters for redundancy in 48-V dc systems for telco and server applications, isolating them from each other with Schottky diodes. Essentially, the diodes perform a logical-OR function on the supply voltages. This is...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Digital PLL Cuts The Jitter In Sonet/SDH Networks
The ballooning amount of Sonet/SDH optical network applications made Silicon Laboratories quick to act. Its Si5318 clock multiplier, targeted at OC-48/STM-16 speed-level systems (2.488 Gbits/s), should also find use in systems that employ forward error correction and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks. The Si5318 suits OC-48 line cards that need a clean 155.52-MHz clock to drive the transceiver between the small form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical module and the framer/mapper...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Clock Generation Gets Redundancy And Reduced Skew
As clock speeds increase with each generation, it gets tougher to produce a clean clock that can be distributed with minimum skew to multiple circuits. But Exar's Intelligent Dynamic Clock Switch (IDCS) line of clock-driver ICs makes clock generation easy. These ICs take a clock oscillator input and generate multiple clock outputs with minimum skew and redundancy. The XRK-7933 has a 33.3- to 100-MHz output and targets computing applications. The XRK7955 has an output range...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Revamped CPU Family Delivers Topnotch Throughput
A spate of recent CPU releases from Advanced Micro Devices offers designers higher-performance options for servers, workstations, and portable systems. The Opteron model 248 HE from AMD keeps the power drain to just 55 W while running at 2.2 GHz. It's a good match for single-CPU systems like blade severs, network appliances, storage servers, and other high-performance systems that have a limited power budget. In 1000-unit lots, the CPU costs $851 each. A slightly...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Flash-Based FPGAs Keep Costs Down, Performance High
How do you get low-cost nonvolatile but reconfigurable FPGAs based on a 0.13-µm flash process? Easy. Lattice Semiconductor used the programmable-logic fabric developed for its EC family of SRAM-based FPGAs to craft the LatticeXP series, which loads the SRAM cells from an on-chip flash memory. The lowest-cost member of this FPGA line will cost less than $6 each in large volumes. The five initial members of the LatticeXP family will pack from 3k to 20k lookup-table logic...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Test] Test Live Or Recorded Compressed Video Faster
Video compression standards are becoming more complex, even as time-to-market pressures increase. An answer to this dilemma is the MTS400 series Compressed Video Test System, which lets users automatically monitor, analyze, and debug both live and deferred-time video transport streams. The result is faster detection and correction of even intermittent system faults. With the instrument's program-centric graphical user interface, users can quickly isolate and investigate...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Flexibility Is Key In Vector Network Generator/BER Analyzer
As wireless system standards proliferate, test equipment must become more flexible. The MG3700A vector network generator fills the bill by incorporating a fast baseband arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) with a large signal memory, as well as a 20-Mbit/s bit-error-rate (BER) analyzer. The unit supports 3.5G signals, including high-speed data packet access (HSDPA), in addition to emerging 4G technologies. The generator features a 250-kHz to 3-GHz (6-GHz optional) range...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Built-In Processor Makes Source-Measure Units Speedsters
The Series 2600 system sourcemeter instruments are modular, scalable devices for building automatic test equipment (ATE) systems and making precision dc, pulse, and low-frequency ac source-measure tests. Developed by Keithley Instruments, the series consists of the one-channel Model 2601 and the two-channel Model 2602. These instruments perform up to 12,600 readings/s. In high-resolution mode, they make 24-bit measurements. The source of this speed is Keithley's embedded...
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John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] Yield-Modeling Platform Readies ICs For Tapeout
IC yields are becoming much more limited by process technology than by the IC designs themselves. And with each process generation, optimal yields have fallen progressively lower. Some experts expect that, without intervention, yields at 65 nm likely will be in the single digits. Thus, a design-manufacturing gap has opened and is widening with each process generation. Ponte Solutions believes the way to come at this problem is through visibility into yield problems at the...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Equivalence Checker Handles Sequential Logic
For electronic system-level (ESL) methodologies to come to fruition, designers need to be able to nimbly move between levels of abstraction, especially when it comes to sequential logic. Design is done on a continuum that ranges from transactional-level models to fully timed RTL representations. But there's been a lag in tools that enable verification between levels of abstraction. The SLEC product family from Calypto Design Systems addresses this lag. Touted as the...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
A NODE-HIGHLIGHTING FUNCTION is among the new features in L-Edit v11.1, Tanner EDA's analog/mixed-signal design platform. This function lets users display all of the geometry connected to a node in a circuit layout, regardless of hierarchy. Users can quickly identify and debug differences between layout and schematic netlists. Node highlighting improves design productivity significantly during layout-versus-schematic (LVS) checking. For example, when LVS indicates an open circuit...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Single-Chip Networking
Cutting the bill of materials (BOM) usually means trimming the number of chips and components. One may be "the loneliest number," but a single-chip solution is the goal of most designers—especially when it comes to networking. To that end, designers are starting to exploit Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). PoE is suitable for powering Ethernet-equipped microcontrollers like Freescale's 16-bit MC9S12NE64 (see "Building A One-Chip Web Server," ED Online 9115), Digi's...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] FPGA Module Networks Soft Processors
Compact networking packages are no longer limited to single-chip Ethernet-based MCUs, with the release of Memec's line of FPGA-based mini-modules. The 30- by 65.5-mm modules sport a Xilinx Virtex-4 with on-chip PowerPC cores or a Spartan-3 FPGA and an RJ-45 connector. Some versions come with an on-chip Ethernet media-access controller, while others implement Gigabit Ethernet via a separate chip. The modules offer 76 I/O lines that can be single-ended or differential pairs. They also...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Single-Chip Network MCU Handles Java/DSP Chores
The 177-MHz NS9360 MCU targets compact network applications. Digi's chip is based on the ARM 926EJ-S, the most powerful ARM-based processor core with DSP support. The core also has ARM Jazelle Java hardware acceleration. Standard interfaces include 10/100BaseT Ethernet, a memory controller, host and device USB 2.0, an LCD controller, I2C, IEEE 1284, four serial ports, and up to 73 GPIO. The IDE uses Digi's royalty-free NET+Works platform, which includes Express Logic's...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Graphical Toolkit Offers Fast MCU Customization
Graphical system design and simulation lean toward the expensive realm of high-end tools like the MathWorks' Matlab or Unified Model Language (UML) products. Test tends to be overkill for small embedded projects. Thus, Cypress Semiconductor created the PSoC Express tool specifically for its 8051-based, mixed-signal PSoC microcontroller. PSoC Express is very manageable and easy to learn, given the limitations of the target processor. The PSoC chip contains a collection of analog...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tiny ARM Packs A Punch
It's only 5 mm on a side (25 mm2). But the extremely small wafer-level, chip-size package (WCSP) houses a 32-bit microcontroller with some impressive memory and peripherals. The plastic WCSP is robust enough to handle standard surface-mount processing, so designers get performance without breaking the budget. A layer of copper evenly distributes heat when attaching the chip to a board. The ML67Q406x (see the table), and its external-bus ML67Q405x sibling, use a 33-MHz ARM7TDMI...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Light Sensors Sponsored by: MICROSEMI CORP.
What are the most common types of light sensors? Two of the most common light sensors are phototransistors and positive-intrinsic-negative (pin) photodiodes. Both generate signals that vary with ambient incident light levels and are most commonly used in display backlighting applications. A phototransistor's output response is typically a voltage, while a photodiode's output is typically a current (Fig. 1). ...
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Roger Allan
[Quick Facts] Standard Footprints Hide Design Diversity Sponsored by: RO ASSOCIATES
Not Just About POLs When looking at the Intermediate Bus Architecture (IBA), there is a tendency to focus on point-of-load (POL) dc-dc converters and the various control and monitoring schemes while skipping over the upstream bus converter that steps down the front end's 48 V to the bus-distribution voltage. In fact, a great deal can be said about bus converters. Not all bricks are created equal. Input Voltage Range's Big...
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Don Tuite
