[Engineering Feature] U.S. Military Embraces Commercial Technology
We're so used to thinking of technology migrating from military applications to the civilian world that it's surprising to find an opposite migration. Satellite communication, spread-spectrum modulation, and fly-by-wire come immediately to mind as examples of the traditional military-to-commercial pathway (see "The Latest Mil-Aero Developments," p. 52). Hence, it's a little startling to hear about chip sets expressly designed to control washing-machine motors mutating...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] High-Speed Interfaces Supercharge Micros
High-performance microcontrollers (MCUs) crave bandwidth, which calls for moving new interconnect technologies like PCI Express, HyperTransport, Serial RapidIO, and Gigabit Ethernet on-chip. What will that mean in the long run? Enhanced performance. Reduced latency. Fewer support chips. The problem of large pin counts has been countered with the switch to scalable, packet-oriented interfaces. These interfaces employ high-speed serializer/deserializers (SERDES), which turns...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Wireless Sensors Land Anywhere And Everywhere
Rapid-fire advances in "sensor nets"—wireless sensor modules consisting of some combination of a sensor, controller, transceiver, battery, and antenna—are now yielding initial commercial implementations. Progress in hardware device miniaturization, tiny software operating systems, and lower power consumption levels have led the way. Some industry experts call these modules integrated on-chip radios. They act as intelligent nodes within a larger network comprising a...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: Industry First] Uncooled Thermal Imaging Has Mass-Market Appeal
Low-cost thermal imaging is here, and it's kicking the door open to mass-market applications. The culprit is a CMOS-compatible active thin-film technology platform devised by RedShift Systems Inc. The technology behind the platform is based on Princeton University's research in applying thin-film semiconductors to tunable optics. Traditional microbolometers use the thermo-electric effect to detect infrared (IR) signals in a semiconductor. Yet RedShift's technology employs...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Get More For Less By Using Class D Amplifiers
Decades of development and high-volume production generated mature amplifier technologies that satisfy the requirements of many market segments. Class A designs address more demanding high-end applications, while Class B and AB amplifiers serve the consumer market with cost, power, and performance tradeoffs. Class D technology, however, has changed the balance. With Class D, the power efficiency of audio amplifiers-once constrained to a range roughly between 30% and 50%-has...
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Julian Hayes
[Ideas For Design] FET-Input Instrumentation Amp Maintains 90-dB CMRR To 1 MHz
Figure 1 shows a benign means of interfacing a low-level, wideband differential signal to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The FET input stage (AD8066) draws only 6 pA of input bias current and presents only 2 pF of differential input capacitance. The overall circuit has an input referred noise of 10 nV/√Hz and a gain-bandwidth product (GBP) of 2 GHz. It maintains a common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) of over 90 dB up to 1 MHz, far...
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Brian Harrington
[Ideas For Design] Low-Cost Quad Op Amp Drives RF Modulator
The video circuit illustrated in Figure 1 combines an audio-subcarrier notch filter and group-delay equalization as required by the ITU-470 standard. It also includes an amplitude-adjustment capability for driving an RF video modulator in NTSC applications. (PAL operation requires a minor adjustment of the filter and all-pass values.) For best performance, the input should be driven from a low-impedance source, such as an op...
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Miles Bekgran
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[Editorial] Next-Gen Chips Propel Summer Design Sizzle
With the semiconductor market forecast calling for growth in the second half of the year, this summer has been prime time for leading chip vendors to present their visions for the coming wave. Hearing the latest at events hosted by LSI Logic, Freescale, and Philips, I was awestruck by the number of new features engineered into the next generation of chips. Chip manufacturers strive to create platforms that provide maximum flexibility and creativity. You unleash your...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Debugging Survey Says: What Works, What Doesn't
When stored-program computers were first invented, it didn't take long for people to realize that programmers would spend a large part of their time on debugging. As British computer pioneer Maurice Wilkes recalls in his memoirs, "By June 1949, people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part...
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Peter S. Magnusson
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: I'm running into a head-scratcher. I am working on a 2-µA current source (pnp transistor plus sense resistor in the emitter lead, and an op amp to control the pnp's base so the voltage across the sense resistor is constant) with as much compliance to use as much of the 5 V as I have available. (Constancy of current is important but I don't care too much whether it's exactly 2µA as long as it doesn't have much tempco/drift.) But I've only...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Jack Kilby, Inventor Of The Integrated Circuit
In my opinion, there are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it," said Texas Instruments chairman Tom Engibous. "Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, and Jack Kilby." The world lost the last of these geniuses on June 20 as Jack Kilby died after a brief battle with cancer. He was 81. Kilby transformed the world by inventing the first monolithic integrated circuit, which paved the way for the high-speed...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: The Industry] NRAM Vies For Universal Memory Crown
System designers long have envisioned a new type of memory—one that serves the needs of all products and uses equally well. Once perfected, this universal memory would deliver a set of performance and cost metrics that includes: the lowest cost per bit the highest density the fastest read and write speeds nonvolatility to store data when power is not present unlimited endurance an entrenched manufacturing...
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Mark DeVoss
[TechView: Analog & Power] DC-DC Converter IP Blocks For 0.18 µm Integrate Precisely Trimmed Reference Voltage
Four dc-dc converter intellectual-property (IP) cores from LTRIM Technologies with precisely trimmed voltage references made their debut at June's Design Automation Conference in Anaheim. Previously, the company had introduced cores for three charge pumps, two low-dropout regulators, and a current regulator. In both old and new products, the laser-trimmed voltage reference is the key differentiator. To achieve resistor and transistor matching in the reference without...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Delta-Sigma ADCs Interface Easily To Sensors
The LTC2480 delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) from Linear Technology feature a front-end design that can be driven directly from bridges, resistance-temperature detectors (RTDs), thermocouples, and other high-impedance sensors. This eliminates the drawbacks of on-chip buffering. The company's Easy Drive technology yields zero average differential input current, simplifying the design of front-end signal conditioning circuits. Traditional delta-sigma ADCs...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Kit Makes Quick Work Of DC-DC Supplies
Too often, designers tackle the power supply last. When that happens, the UF224 U-frame installation kit from V-Infinity makes it simple to use single-output, 2- by 2-in. board-mount dc-dc converters. There is no need to procure pc-board, metal frame, mounting hardware, and filtering and protection components. Screw terminals for input and output connections further increase the ease of installation. With the optional mounting adapter, designers can DIN rail-mount the...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Faster InfiniBand, Hard Disks, And Much More
The mailbag is overflowing and the interviews are booked solid, but some products have shot to the top of the stack. Mellanox continues to push InfiniBand where other fabrics have yet to tread. Already at the top of the game, the new double-data-rate (DDR) implementations double x1 link throughput to 5 Gbits/s. Mellanox released a complete set of DDR chips, including the InfiniScale III 24-port x4 switch, with almost 1-Tbit/s bandwidth at less than $25/port (...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] 3U CompactPCI SBC Tackles Transportation And Mobile Projects
MEN Micro's F11 single-board computer (SBC) sports a 933-MHz Pentium III or Celeron plus an Altera Cyclone FPGA to customize peripheral interfaces. The compact package contains two Fast Ethernet connections, two serial ports, two USB ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and video. The small-outline dual-inline memory-module slot can handle up to 512 Mbytes, and there is a compact flash slot. The board also can handle a 2.5-in. hard-disk drive. The board supports fanless operation....
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Little Micro Makes Big Flash
Atmel's latest 8-bit ATmega AVR microcontrollers are designed for large, low-power applications. The smallest part is the 64-pin ATmega 2561. The AVR's 32 register file is great for C programming. The chip also can wake up interrupts on up to 32 pins. Development kit and tools pricing starts at $79. Pricing for the ATmega starts at $4.75. www.atmel.com ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Multimedia Processor Delivers 3D Graphics, Security, And More
The i.MX31 multimedia processor delivers nearly 1 million-polygon/s 3D graphics for low-power portable media appliances. Developed by Freescale Semiconductor, it's based on an ARM1136JF-S processor core with 16-kbyte data and instruction caches and a 128-kbyte unified L2 cache. Its dedicated engines target vector math, 3D graphics, MPEG-4 encode, image processing, and Java execution. Freescale's Smart Speed power-management technology keeps the total power consumption to...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Security Supervisor Chips Protect POS Systems
The STM140x security supervisor chip family from STMicroelectronics takes aim at point-of-sale (POS) terminal applications. With these pin- and plug-in compatible chips, designers can easily upgrade systems as new features are needed. Consuming just 2.8 µA, the security supervisors stake a claim as the world's first chips to integrate all of the functions for detecting physical and environmental intrusion required by the major security standards. All of the chips are...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] FPGA Tool Suite Adds Native Static Timing Analysis
With so many ASIC designers moving over to FPGAs for implementation, FPGA tool flows are looking more and more like ASIC flows. Case in point: Actel's Libero IDE 6.2 adds native static timing analysis (STA), among other improvements, to an already ASIC-like FPGA design flow. The SmartTime STA environments support the growing complexity of today's FPGAs. In its timing analysis view, it graphically displays all of the design's clock domains and lets users add constraints...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Verification Closure Tool Watches Over Assertions
While assertions and assertion-based verification (ABV) help solve many problems, they also spawn new challenges. How do you write them? Did they cover the entire design? And when is verification complete? TransEDA's Assertain is billed as a "verification closure-management tool." But it's also a way to derive metrics that can tell users when their verification process is truly complete. Assertain monitors, measures, and manages the verification process in one integrated...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
3D PLANAR ELECTROMAGNETIC MODELING AND ANALYSIS now comes in a 64-bit version with Agilent EEsof's latest edition of Momentum. With this version, users can see significantly improved accuracy, capacity, and speed for design and verification of passive components and interconnects in RFIC, MMIC, and pc-board/hybrid/module projects. The 64-bit capability eliminates memory limitations and cuts EM simulation and verification time in half. The new version of Momentum, integrated into both the...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Microwave RF Transceiver Accelerates WiMAX Development
WiMAX equipment is now being developed for consumer broadband and back-haul wireless applications. Based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, WiMAX is getting easier to design every day. SiGe Semiconductor's latest WiMAX chip set should speed the creation of new set-top boxes and basestation systems (Fig. 1). The SE7051L IF transceiver is a biCMOS device that interfaces directly with most commercially available baseband...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Mobile Operating System Optimized For Portables
Do cell-phone users realize that they're carrying a highly sophisticated operating system (OS)? Probably not. Even if they did, would they care? Nope. But those of you who have to design the next generation of cell phones and other mobile devices know you're going to need something that scales better than the OSs now in use. And, it better support multimedia and all the other stuff that carriers want. Based on MontaVista's widely deployed Linux platform, Mobilinux 4.0...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[I Design] Wayne Burdick
I design products like I compose music: equal parts intention and exploration. While my goal in both cases is to create something unique, the enjoyment comes from taking a path I have not traveled. An interest in both music and technology seems common among engineers, perhaps reflecting the way our wetware works. In my case it was revealed early on. My father, after watching me rend TVs and radios into bits, bought me a Radio Shack electronic organ kit when I was eight. I...
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Wayne Burdick
[Basics Of Design] PXI: Modular Instruments For Design, Validation, And Test Sponsored by: NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS
The PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) bus builds on CompactPCI to deliver custom instrumentation and automation systems. The PXI standard defines a modular hardware and software framework for interoperability that allows developers to mix and match PXI chassis, controllers, and modules from different vendors. PXI systems also integrate timing and triggering chores. The PXI System Alliance (PXISA) promotes and maintains the PXI standard. This includes a hardware...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Voltage Conversion Without Magnetic Components Sponsored by: NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
What are typical charge pump applications? Charge pumps have come far in the past decade, from unregulated single-output ICs to regulated ICs with multiple output voltages. Output power and efficiency also have improved, so the charge pump can now deliver up to 250 mA at 75% efficiency (average). Most applications are in battery-based systems like cell phones, pagers, Bluetooth systems, and portable electronics. Major applications include powering white LEDs for...
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Sam Davis
