[Success Story] Setting The Standard For Hybrid Cars
With its sports-car look, avionics-like dashboard display, and an eerily silent and smooth start, it's no wonder that the Toyota Prius hybrid gasolineelectric vehicle is one of the fastest-selling cars of its type (Fig. 1) (see "Earning Market Share And Accolades," p. 44). Aside from these assets, though, it features one discriminating characteristic—it's a gas mizer. The U.S. Environmental Protection...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Structured/Platform ASICs Carve A Cost-Savvy Niche
Shrinking feature dimensions used in chipmanufacturing processes continue to push the complexity and density of the circuits to groundbreaking levels. But getting there comes with a heftier price tag when developing and fabricating high-end application-specific ICs (ASICs). In fact, most research analysts agree that at the 90-nm process node, taking a cell-based ASIC from concept to production will run between $10 million and $15 million. Plus, when designs...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] Visual Studio 2005: The New Way To Program
Though Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 dropped the .NET moniker, it remains the premier .NET development platform for hosting compilers that target this platform, such as Visual Basic, C#, and J#. It supports a wide range of third-party compilers and plug-ins rivaled only by the open-source Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). The key to Visual Studio's success remains in its interaction with the wide range of Microsoft products, from the base...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Drive Piezoelectric Actuators With Fast, High-Power Op Amps
In the last 15 years, high-speed piezo electric actuators have become less expensive to manufacture. Consequently, they find themselves as a favorite design choice for a growing number of applications. Piezoelectric actuators made their initial entry in medical devices, including surgical tools and ultrasonic testing in the late 1980s. It was for good reason. Piezoelectric actuators are the fastestresponding positioning element available with microsecond time constants....
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Sam Robinson
[Ideas For Design] Switch-Mode Control Tames Positive Motor Supply Voltage
This power supply is ideal for the circuitry that drives high-side p-channel MOSFET switches often found in motor controllers. It's especially useful for designs where the motor's positive supply voltage exceeds the typical 20-V gatesource breakdown voltage of the power p-channel MOSFET. There are three notable advantages to the design: It will always track the motor's positive supply voltage, which can be especially useful if the positive supply...
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Tim Davis
[Ideas For Design] –50-V, 1-W Power Supply Harnesses Unused µC Pins
Why not take advantage of the micro-controller included in many systems these days? This design uses microcontroller feedback to produce a ?50-V, 1-W power supply (see the figure). It leverages an unused analog-to-digital converter (ADC) input and a pulse-width-modulation (PWM) output to close the loop on a basic inverting single-ended primary inductance converter (SEPIC) topology. Varying the duty cycle of the...
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Steve Kendig
[Ideas For Design] Quasi-Resonant Controller Yields Synchronized Power Supply
To minimize the electromagnetic interference (EMI) and video noise caused by different signal frequencies inside the same piece of equipment, it's sometimes necessary to synchronize the switching frequency of the power supply (such as for tuner compatibility). Generally, using a fixed-frequency controller with an external oscillator, or at least an adjustable frequency, solves this. But instead of designing a different specific— and often...
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Nicolas Cyr
[Editorial] From Mpg To DARPA Challenge: Electronics Winning The Race
Gas at my favorite filling station fell to $2.59 today—quite a bargain after last month's $3.25+ prices. The relativity of fuel pricing has never been more apparent. A recent AP poll of consumers in eight countries shows what they felt was a fair price for a gallon of gas. Not long ago, most Americans would have thought $2 a gallon a steep price to pay. But in the wake of the Katrina-related run-up, we now say $2 a gallon is a fair deal. Meanwhile, in England...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] µTCA Is Ideal For Low- And Mid-Range Telecom Apps
AdvancedTCA (ATCA) and AdvancedMC stand poised to become the dominant blade and mezzanine expansion platforms for highavailability telecom applications. The product of a collaboration of major telecom OEMs, service providers, and suppliers, ATCA and AdvancedMC target an optimal telecom They address major bandwidth, availability, upgradeability, cost, scalability, management, interoperability issues. and AdvancedMC target an optimal telecom platform. They address major...
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Todd Wynia
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Logarithmic Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 2)
The IC versus VBE of modern transistors has some excellent log characteristics, as we have discussed.* If you ground a transistor's base and compensate for its VBE with a matching VBE, you can do some good logging over a wide range, from 1 mA to 1 pA, and really quite accurate from 100 pA to 100 µA. That's six decades where the limitation of REE' on the high end is the major limitation. Input leakage...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Inkjet Printer Draws The Line In Manufacturing Technology
Products can become more compact and flexible by effectively combining materials. With Dimatix's DMP-2800 line, designers can print a wide range of materials onto a surface with a high degree of accuracy (Fig. 1). These printers can place nanoparticlebased metallic and organic materials with 10-µm accuracy using a rotatable printhead system that handles variable print spacing (...
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William Wong
[TechView: Analog & Power] PMBus Gains Development Tool And Front-End Converters
The open-source Power Management Bus (PMBus) communication protocol is gaining ground. With Astec's DTX digital dc converter, designers will be able to prepare and evaluate a range of PMBus-compliant converters (see the figure). They also will be able to choose from an array of preprogrammed modules that emulate existing industry-standard converter types with or without a menu of additional features. The control...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Quad PoE Controller Handles Switches And Midspans
THREE EXTRA FEATURES previously unavailable in controllers for IEEE 802.3af Powerover-Ethernet (PoE) power-sourcing-equipment (PSE) make Maxim's MAX5945 unique. As the PoE specification requires, the quad controller provides discovery, classification, current limit, and dc and ac load disconnect detection to a powered device (PD). It also can operate autonomously or be controlled by software through an I2C-compatible interface. The novel features include...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Amp Interfaces Differential Signals To Single-Supply ADCs
The INA159 interfaces ±10-V signals from sensors in industrial applications to singlesupply analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Developed by Texas Instruments, this levelshifting difference amplifier presents an economical alternative to using complicated and expensive precision resistor networks and a high-performance operational amplifier with a dual-supply ADC. It's especially suited for driving up to 14-bit ADCs. A split reference connection simplifies biasing at...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Mobile Systems Get Performance Boost From Next-Gen ARM Core
Based on the next-generation ARM v7 architecture, ARM's Cortex-A8 processor delivers up to 2000 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS). It's optimized for low-power next-generation mobile devices. The dual-issue superscalar core includes the first implementation of ARM's NEON signal processing extensions as well as Thumb2 technology for better code density, improved energy efficiency, and higher performance (see the figure). This...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] 1.3-in. Format Sensor Delivers 1.3-Mpixel JPEG Images
WITH IMPROVED COLOR uniformity and sensitivity, Agilent Technologies' ADCC-3960 1.3-Mpixel image sensor processes images and delivers JPEG-compressed files to the host system. The company's enhanced-performance (EP) pixel architecture achieves a tenfold reduction in dark current and surface-state noise to deliver more brilliant color image reproduction than previous-generation image sensors. Additionally, the 1/3-in. format sensor offers 3.3-µm pixels. It can deliver lower...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Yield Diagnostics Tool Seeks To Apply Test Data
There's a large and growing gap between IC lithography wavelengths and the feature sizes of the ICs themselves. The result is more lithography-driven process variability, which has surpassed random-particle defects as the predominant yield-loss mechanism in nanometer ICs. One way to address these problems is to move more information from the manufacturing-test operations to the design side. Mentor Graphics' YieldAssist tool aims to do just that. In the process, it quickly and...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] ESL Tool Suite Beefs Up Its Software Analysis Side
ACCORDING TO research results, 52% of embedded system designs miss their scheduled completion dates. Why? The complexity of their architectures makes early analysis too hard for Excel spreadsheets. By exclusively licensing CARDTools Systems' NitroVP to complement its existing System Architect ESL suite, Summit has put together a package that facilitates hardware/software codevelopment at a stage that's early enough to avoid needless iteration and redesign. The...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
A GRAPHICAL DEBUGGER FOR C PROGRAMMERS helps improve the quality of results for FPGA-based software/hardware acceleration. Impulse's CoDeveloper Pro optimization and debug software complements its CoDeveloper C-to-FPGA compiler and gives C programmers quick interactive feedback on their programming choices. They can check the effects of loop unrolling, pipelining, and stage-delay strategies. Prices start at $4995 for CoDeveloper and $2495 for CoDeveloper Pro as an add-on option. Visit...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Get Theater-Quality Audio And Video On Your Cell Phone
The cell-phone market still has a lot to offer. Carriers soon will boost revenues by selling multimedia services such as real-time audio, video streaming, stereo music, digital photo imaging, and interactive games. All the handset manufacturers have to do now is add these features to their high-end models. And that's easier said than done, as designs get more complex as multiple coprocessors and special interfaces are added. Fortunately for these companies, the X115 chip set...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] AdvancedTCA In A Small Package
MicroTCA takes the AdvancedTCA high-speed serial interconnect to an all time low. Lower power. Lower price. Lower rack size—all pretty good lows. It uses Advanced Mezzanine Card (AdvancedMC) modules like this one from Artesyn (see the figure). The Kosai PM hides a 1.4-GHz Pentium M under the fins and up to 2 Gbytes of socketed double-data-rate (DDR) DRAM with error-correction coding (ECC). The card has a USB and...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Four-Port Gig Ethernet Card Plugs Into AMC Slot
The IanAMC-4GC card from SBE plugs into an AdvancedTCA or MicroTCA AMC slot to deliver Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. It comes in twoand four-port versions that support copper or fiber connections. Also, this single-width, fullheight module targets telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) requiring multiple Ethernet connections. The board uses Marvell Yukon 88E8062 Gigabit Ethernet controllers that support Marvell's concurrent data streaming architecture. The card...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] InfiniBand Links Dual-Processor ATCA Blades
AdvancedTCA is fabric-agnostic, enabling Diversified Technology to deliver an InfiniBandbased dual-processor blade. The ATC5232 contains a pair of 2.8-GHz Xeon processors in conjunction with Intel's E7520 chip set. The board has two x4 Infini-Band ports via Mellanox's Infinihost III EX and two 1-Gbit Ethernet ports. The processors can access up to 16 Gbytes of double-data-rate SDRAM with error-correction-code support. The board also has a front-panel 1-Gbit Ethernet port, dual USB...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Java Gets New Shot In The ARM
ARM's Jazelle RCT (Runtime Compilation Target) is part of the company's new processor architecture (see "Mobile Systems Get Performance Boost From Next-Gen ARM Core," p. 28). It replaces the existing Jazelle DBX (for Direct Bytecode eXecution) architecture, which executes Java bytecodes directly from memory (see the figure). RCT requires an ahead-oftime (AOT) or an in-memory just-in-time (JIT) compiler...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multiprocessor Core Speeds iSCSI Storage Processor Cores
DEVELOPED BY IVIVITY, the iDiSX 2000 runs Linux in its seven MIPS processors to handle highperformance iSCSI and FibreChannel chores. Its range of hardware accelerators minimizes system overhead and moves data quickly through its 10-Gbit/s SPI-4 interfaces. The iDiSX 2000 handles Fibre Channel, SATA (serial ATA), and SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives, providing access via network interfaces. It can support a range of RAID configurations using software running on the...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] New Products
Tiny Stick Runs Java, CAN, Ethernet, 1-Wire, I2C, And SPI That's definitely a lot to fit on a 72-pin SIMM Systronix TStik2 that also supports three serial ports. The module runs a JDK 1.1.8-compatible TINI Java on a 30-MHz DS80C400 8-bit processor with up to 1 Mbyte of RAM plus 2 Mbytes of flash. The TStik2 TINI Java includes garbage collection, dynamic class loading, and standard Java packages like XML and lightweight JINI. The TStik2 costs under $100, with a ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] EPIC Board Targets M2M Apps
Designed for machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, WinSystems' EPX-GX singleboard computer (SBC) includes a mini-PCI connector and PCI/104 Plus ISA and PCI connectors. AMD's fanless, low-power GX500 can access up to 512 Mbytes of double-data-rate SDRAM, CompactFlash, and an Ultra DMA 66 EIDE hard-disk controller. Communication interfaces include 100BaseT Ethernet, four serial ports, 24 GPIO, and two USB ports. The SBC also offers six-channel AC'97 audio support and a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Ada Takes On The Penguin
ObjectAda 8.2 from Aonix now supports Linux. It's also implemented as an Eclipse plug-in for integration with other Eclipse plug-ins. The Ada 95-compatible integrated development environment (IDE) includes a compiler, graphical debugger, library manager, and POSIX bindings. TCP/IP, CORBA, and X/Motif bindings are optional. Pricing starts at $5000. www.aonix.com ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 8-Bit MCU Lightens LIN Load
STMicroelectronics' 20-pin ST7Lite3 offers a LINSCI serial interface. It targets local interconnect network (LIN) applications in automotive and low-cost sensor and control applications. LINSCI significantly reduces the network protocol overhead, enabling the processor to do more. The chip also has an on-chip 1-MHz oscillator and four 12-bit pulse-width modulation timers suitable for handling motor control services. Pricing starts at $1.30. www.st.com ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] XScale Fits On Credit Card Module
Kontron's tiny (67 by 49 mm) X-board line gets a new addition with the X-board <GP8>, which is based on Intel's 80219 400- or 600-MHz XScale processors. The module supports up to 128 Mbytes of RAM, 16 Mbytes of graphics memory, and 32 Mbytes of flash. On-board peripherals include an IDE interface, two serial ports, 100BaseT Ethernet, AC'97 audio, and USB 2.0. The video interface supports LCD displays. Pricing for the line starts at $230....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ZigBee Transceiver Packs In 8051
Chipcon's CC2430 combines a 32-MHz 8051 microcontroller with an 802.15.4 transceiver. The combination can handle Chipcon's ZigBee stack. The chip is available in 32-, 64-, and 128-kbyte flash memory sizes. All of the devices have 8 kbytes of RAM. Current consumption is 27 mA in receive mode and 25 mA in transmit mode. There are two on-chip serial ports, hardware encryption support, an AES coprocessor, a battery monitor, and a temperature sensor. The CC2430's pricing...
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William Wong
[Basics Of Design] Evaluate Platform ASIC Options To Match The Best Silicon To Your Application Sponsored by: LSI LOGIC CORP.
When it comes to platform ASICs, designers have a wide range of options. Platform and structured ASIC solutions offer faster time-to-market and lower development costs than full cell-based ASIC designs. Additionally, they deliver more performance than high-density field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Of course, you must evaluate your specific system needs and choose a platform ASIC accordingly. Platform and structured ASICs have established themselves as attractive implementation...
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Dave Bursky
