[Engineering Feature] Time Is Ticking... Lead-Free In A Year Or Else
For most of the industry, lead-free means home free. At least for a while. You have likely heard by now that the European Union (EU) adopted a new directive called Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS). It eliminates or significantly reduces the use of certain substances from electronic products beginning July 1, 2006. If you haven't already done so, now might be a good time to remove most of the lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), mercury (Hg), hexavalent chromium (Cr VI), and all...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] Denser, Faster Chips Deliver Knockout DSP Performance
When you look at it, the high-performance DSP market kind of resembles boxing. It's stratified, with ranks much like the featherweight, lightweight, welterweight, and heavyweight classes. You'll find multiple champions, each with the best high-performance solution for its specific strata. Audio DSPs range from low-cost consumer solutions to 24-bit, high-precision chips that target professional audio systems. Video solutions start with low-resolution quarter-CIF content...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] MEMS/Nano Advances Help Quench Sensor-Thirsty Apps
Defense, homeland-security, military, communications, and aerospace applications are on the prowl for MEMS/nano sensor innovations. Judging from this year's 2005 Sensors Expo & Conference, held June 6-9 in Chicago, Ill., microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) and nano technologies are poised to meet the needs of many industry sectors. Promising presentations covered homeland-security, reliability, military armaments, composite materials, and communications...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Try A Hybrid Flow To Overcome Hierarchical Design Limitations
In a flat design flow, placement and routing resources are always visible and available. Designers then can perform routing optimization and avoid congestion to achieve a good-quality design optimization. Yet large and optimization-intensive designs make flat design less desirable because of long tool run times and large memory-space requirements. On the other hand, conventional hierarchical design-optimization flows dramatically reduce tool run times and memory space...
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Kaijian Shi
[Ideas For Design] Bandpass Filter With Adjustable Q Has Constant Maximum Gain
Some applications, such as audio equalizers, require bandpass filters with a constant maximum gain, independent of the selected quality factor Q. But in a lot of well-known filter structures—such as Sallen-Key, MFB, state variable, and Tow-Thomas—when you adjust the quality factor of the second-order cells, the maximum gain changes...
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Joan Domingo
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[Ideas For Design] Bootstrapping Provides Power-Supply Startup Sequencing
In multiple-output-voltage power supplies, the topology may place restrictions on the startup sequence. This can be particularly troublesome in an isolated power supply, where a lower output voltage must be present before a higher output voltage. Typically, the higher voltage is the source of power for the lower voltage output. Consider a system with an isolated 48-V input supply with a 3.3-V/9-A output and a 1.8-V/3-A output. The 1.8-V output must be present at the load before the...
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Brian King
[Ideas For Design] Variable Overlaying Simplifies Firmware Design
In many instances of microcontroller firmware design, it's necessary, or desirable, to take four individual bytes and access them as if they were a single 32-bit variable, maybe as a pair of 16-bit variables, or even some other combination. One way to merge the four bytes into a single 32-bit variable would require reading the least-significant byte into the 32-bit location, then shift-left by "8," then OR in the next byte, then shift-left by "8,"...etc.—until the 32-bit...
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Dave Bordui
[POV: Point Of View] Taming The Complexty Of Network System Design
Various alternatives have been employed for high-performance networking and packet processing. Traditionally, ASICs have been used for the highest-level requirements. But their significant expense, expanded time-to-market (TTM), increased risk, and inflexibility often outweigh their speed and high-volume cost benefits. At the other end of the spectrum, general-purpose processors provide significant cost, flexibility, and TTM benefits but can't handle applications needing gigabit-class...
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Kevin Graves
[Editorial] EE's Vision Drives Millions In Data-Center Power Savings
A strong personal vision drives many of you EEs to "find a better way" to do things. When there's a market opportunity to realize that vision, you can make a huge impact. I can find no better example than Neil Rasmussen, EE and one of the founders of American Power Conversion (APC). A recent APC press day offered Rasmussen a platform for his "powerful" vision. It also showcased some great new APC technology, including fuel cells for data centers and a mobile data center in a...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Floobydust Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 14)
This year I'm going to start off with magazines: It is well known that huge (astronomical!) quantities of magazines—especially National Geographic—have been stored in a million attics across the U.S. This raises the center of gravity of the house and the Polar Moment of Inertia of the whole Earth. Physicists have predicted that the Earth will wobble excessively, its rotation will slow down to a critical speed, and then the Earth will fall out of its orbit...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Supercom 2005: Something For Everyone
Supercomm 2005 was huge. Nearly 30,000 visitors and more than 600 exhibitors attended the June show in Chicago, sponsored by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). These folks represent the main telecom system and equipment providers to companies that supply chips and other components. Several themes recurred throughout the show: the decline in the traditional telephone business and the rapidly increasing adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol; forthcoming...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Ethernet Switch-On-A-Chip Targets The IP DSLAM Market
Telecom carriers now use DSL to implement triple-play (voice, video, and data) services. SwitchCore AB's Xpeedium2Pro switch-on-a-chip IC family should help OEMs develop cost-effective equipment that will let carriers tap into these emerging triple-play services. These chips exploit the cost advantages of Ethernet while offering the same carrier-class reliability as legacy ATM equipment. The CXE 2139 is a 28-port Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) device that provides a complete layer...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] 65-nm Processes Target Next-Gen High-Speed And Low-Power ASICs
A pair of 65-nm CMOS processes lets designers implement ASICs with up to 120 million gates. Developed by IBM, these processes deliver twice the number of gates of the company's previous 90-nm offerings. These copper- and low-k-based processes also can achieve a gate density of 615 kgates/mm2 while keeping the power dissipation to less than 5 nW/MHz/gate. One process fits low-power designs, while the other suits high-performance applications. Both can set up...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Math Accelerator Puts A Supercomputer Inside A PC
Staking a claim to the title of world's fastest 64-bit floating-point coprocessor chip, Clear-Speed Technology's CSX600 can deliver a sustained 25 GFLOPs for DGEMM (matrix multiplication) calculations. Each of the chip's 96 very-long-instruction-word processor elements (PEs) can operate at 250 MHz. Each PE includes multiple execution units, starting with a floating-point adder and a floating-point multiplier (able to execute 32/64-bit IEEE 754-compatible operations)....
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Engine Adds Temperature Awareness To IC Flows
Physical IC design flows are studded with analysis tools for numerous parameters, including leakage power, IR drop, electromigration, and timing. Now, Gradient Design Automation seeks to add thermal analysis to the mix in the form of its FireBolt analysis engine, which creates a 3D full-chip temperature map to account for the electrical effects of thermal gradients across a semiconductor die. Today's design flows typically use a constant-temperature methodology, attempting...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Design-Rule Checker Bets The Farm On Parallelism
Promising full-chip design-rule checking (DRC) for designs of any size and at any technology node in two hours or less, Magma's Quartz DRC is a key component of the company's recently announced Cobra 2005.03 release. The truly scalable physical verification tool, which is a result of Magma's acquisition of Mojave Design, achieves its speed by applying fine-grained parallelism across a standard network (or "farm") of heterogeneous Linux machines. The tool's runtime is...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
THOUSANDS OF ASSERTIONS WRITTEN AUTOMATICALLY is the promise of a new Verilog-language variant and an associated toolset from startup Assertive Design. Through use of the DesignPSL language, which leverages the ability of the Property Specification Language (PSL) to capture design intent, designers can automatically create error and coverage assertions--many more than one per line of code. Tools include a source analyzer, assertion generator and simulator, and more. Pricing is set at...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Embedded Wireless: Too Many Choices?
So you finally got your device networked with Ethernet and it's time to go wireless. Good luck. First, you must determine whether you need cutting edge support like ZigBee, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), or run-of-the-mill 802.11g. This alone brings up a wide range of issues like required bandwidth, range, and placement of access points. One of the most important issues, though, is security. Security and wireless should go hand in hand. Yet designers often assume built-in encryption...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ZigBee Kit Gets Jump On Development
The JumpStart Kit from Ember comes with half a dozen development-board modules based on Ember's 2.4-GHz EM2420 radio transceiver. Each module includes its own 8-bit microprocessor, a removable low-profile antenna, batteries, and a power supply. That's more than enough to get a small ZigBee network up and running. The EM2420 platform is IEEE 802.15.4-compliant. The kit features EmberZNet, Ember's enhanced ZigBee protocol stack. A 30-day evaluation IAR C compiler license and 60 days of...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Get Linux Mobilized For Portable Devices
Mobilinux 4.0 from Monta Vista brings the 2.6 Linux kernel to single-chip cell phones based on hardware such as Texas Instruments' dual-processor OMAP chips. It's much more than an enhanced version of Linux, though, with features including advanced real-time support and boot times under one second. Mobilinux incorporates the Mobilinux Open Framework, which addresses functionality like dynamic power management (DPM) with the MontaVista Power Manager and a cross-platform DPM library....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Graphical Programming IDE Streamlines App Creation With Embedded Development Module
With National Instruments' LabView graphical development environment, even novice developers can create sophisticated data-acquisition or process-control systems by just selecting some virtual peripheral modules and wiring them together. Menu-driven configuration provides exceptional control over these software modules. The new Embedded Development Module (EDM) lets developers turn virtual peripheral modules into real hardware. The EDM software targets an array of 32-bit...
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William Wong
[TechScope] Parallel Files Earn Ross An Early Award
Researchers normally collect accolades at the end of their careers. But the U.S. Department of Energy goes out of its way to salute up-and-coming talent with its Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. And this year, a computer specialist was among the nine winners. Robert B. Ross of Argonne National Laboratory earned the nod through his design of parallel computer file systems and high-performance interfaces to manage large datasets. His work...
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Richard Gawel
