[Technology Report] Analog And Digital Inch Closer Thanks To Sensors
This year has seen all kinds of impressive sensor advances, whether they involve the applications they serve, the processes that make them, or even their packaging. Combined with wireless technology, sensors have become powerful tools. What does it all mean? It means a narrowing of the gap between our world of analog variables and the digital power of the computer, giving us a better understanding of our surroundings. Many of these sensors take advantage of microelectromechanical...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] PMBus: Digital Power Control Protocol
Probably the best 2005 development in power is the new PMBus (Power Management Bus) open standard specification. It defines a digital communications protocol for controlling power conversion and management devices. Taking part in this collaboration were power-supply and semiconductor companies such as Artesyn Technologies, Astec/Emerson Network Power, Intersil Corp., Microchip Technology, Summit Microelectronics, Texas Instruments, Volterra Semiconductor, Zilker Labs Inc., and others....
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Sam Davis
[Technology Report] An Inexpensive GSM/GPRS Phone-On-A-Chip
It was inevitable. Someone was going to put most of the circuitry for a cell phone onto one chip. Giants like Texas Instruments and Infineon have come close to doing it. But Silicon Laboratories grabbed the ring, integrating the most cell-phone circuitry on one chip. But does a smaller and less expensive phone counter the direction of most cell-phone designs? Yes, because today's trend slants toward more sophisticated feature phones or smart phones that include the cameras, audio,...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] In A Flat Year For EDA, DFM Shines The Brightest
It hasn't been a banner year for the EDA industry. For one, growth is flat throughout the industry. The state of EDA technology is a major concern among many designers. Even though leading IDM and merchant-foundries are taping out 65-nm test chips, the big question is whether or not tool support for 65-nm design is really ready. Among the biggest areas of concern is manufacturability. In our September 29 issue, I painted a less-than-glowing portrait of the current state of what...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Let Us Entertain You With Innovative Products
Entertainment makes up the largest sector of the consumer electronics market. Its broad array of products ranges from pocket-sized digital music players to 102-in. diagonal flat-panel displays for highdefinition TV. But in a year full of ingenious developments, three products really stood out: Apple Computer's iPod nano, Roku Labs' Radio Soundbridge, and Sharp's Aquos 65-in. LCD TV. BIG MUSIC, LITTLE PACKAGE The nano, Apple's...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] RAZR V3 Cuts To The Front Of The Cell-Phone Line
With so many competing electronic products, it's difficult to choose the best. Besides, what should the criteria be? Visual design, technical performance, financial impact, or something else entirely? Or how about all of the above? Introduced late in 2004, Motorola's RAZR V3 cell phone qualifies on all fronts. It smashed records for cell-phone sales in 2005. Its record 6.5 million units in the third quarter and over 12 million total sales to date boosted Motorola's overall handset...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Changing The Face Of Blood-Pressure Monitoring
The word "tensymetry" has no definition in Webster's Dictionary, but it's well known in the medical world. Developed by Tensys Medical Systems, tensymetry is a technology that uses a proprietary combination of biomechanical, electrical, and software engineering. With that powerful trio, it can perform accurate, continuous, real-time, and non-invasive measurement of a patient's beat-to-beat blood pressure in an operating room. The fruit borne from that technology has been...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] T&M Puts Signal Integrity In The Cross Hairs
This year, signal-integrity issues stepped front and center in the test and measurement arena—not that SI is a new problem for designers. But with the proliferation of communications standards, especially serial data formats at rates that are well into the gigabit range, SI has become paramount. Most new communications standards are for digital systems. When you're dealing with signals in the high megahertz and gigahertz range, however, calling them digital rather than...
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John Novellino
[Technology Report] Reverse Outsourcing May Be Best News Of The Year
This year's most engaging news came from a briefing by Julian Hayes of Wolfson Microelectronics, Edinburgh, Scotland, in September. Walking through the company's-plant, I saw a flat-screen TV disassembledon an engineer's bench. Wolfson was helping a Chinese customer optimize its use of some of the company's audio chips. The number of subassemblies in the design surprised me. "This doesn't look like a low-margin product designed to sell on price alone at discount outlets," I said. "There's...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] More Memory, Digital Logic Deliver Knockout Products
Now that a billion-plus transistors can fit onto one processor chip, the race to push CPU clock rates has reached a point of diminishing returns due to increasing power consumption. All is not lost, though. By turning to parallelism, CPU designers can still leverage all of those transistors to garner more performance. This past year saw the arrival of dual-core x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel, along with the promise of even higher core counts in future processors. Multicore and...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Far IR Promotes Safer Nighttime Driving
Driving at night can be a challenge, even for the best drivers. Statistics show that nighttime driving is two to three times riskier than daytime driving for drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. But as the driver's distance vision increases, so does the level of safety. That simple fact prompted the latest technology from Sweden's Autoliv Inc. The company joined BMW and other firms to develop a long-distance far-IR (infrared) camera system that lets drivers see some 300 m ahead....
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] MEMS Helps Slash Food-Processing Analysis Costs
Food and beverage content analysis is an important segment within the industrial-processing arena. Spectrometer instruments mounted on the production line perform this often expensive and cumbersome step for safety and grading purposes. But now microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have improved and simplified spectrometry, making it more cost-effective in industrial settings. This year, Polychromix introduced its programmable Digital Transform Spectrometer (DTS). Thanks to MEMS...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Bevy Of Computer Parts Adds Up To A Banner Year
The sum can be more than the parts when they're designed to work together. This is definitely the case with a gamer's desktop PC. Desktop systems are moving to more compact form factors, thanks to laptop technologies. Integration of features like networking and audio onto the motherboard continue. Still, high-performance systems and workstations are retaining board expansion and larger cases for peripherals like video. No component has remained static. Disk drives,...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Building PC Boards In British Columbia
Gregory Industrial Computer Ltd. (GIC) develops computer systems and command centers for the forest and lumber industries in the central and northern regions of British Columbia. "Ultimately, the automated tool changing was what made it [S62] more attractive than other options, but the multilayer board potential as well as operational flexibility were also factors and, of course, price," says GIC manager Greg Ford. "I can say that the learning curve was a lot easier than I had...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Build Your Own PC Board: A Designer's Dream
Electronic Design engineers cast their votes on the most popular Leapfrog article of this year and... insert drum roll here... the winner is LPKF Laser and Electronics' low-cost, S62 circuit-board plotter (Fig. 1). Not only is the article popular ("Build A Board In-House Without The Mess," March 31, p. 39, ED Online 9984), but the LPKF Laser and Electronics' webcast covering the S62 was and remains a very popular session....
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William Wong
[Ideas For Design] Readers' Choice: Efficient Emergency-Light Controller
Ken Yang was working at Maxim when he submitted this Design Brief. (He's since moved to the power group at a network equipment company.) The circuit turns on emergency lighting (in the form of a string of white LEDs) and turns them off again after about 10 minutes. The objective is to give personnel time to safely exit the building when a power outage occurs and then to shut off the emergency light to conserve battery power. Yet unlike the emergency lights most of us are used to,...
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Don Tuite
[Editorial] Best Of The Best: Kudos You Deserve
It's about time you got the recognition you deserve! You feel you're working longer hours on more complex projects, with tighter deadlines—while getting less respect. At Electronic Design, our goal is to help you keep up with your demanding world. With this special issue, we want to help you sit back and enjoy kudos for the significant accomplishments you've made over the year. The goal of this BEST Electronic Design issue is to recognize some of the year's electronic...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This AMT Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 1)
The IRS recently "invited" me to fill out a form that puts fear in the hearts of strong men—Form 6251 for the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). I was "invited" to find out if this form would show any more tax liability. Hey, I paid my taxes back in August. I don't mind paying my taxes. I don't mind filling in my tax forms. I have always done my taxes by hand without a computer or any professional preparer. (Actually, I never have any trouble filling in my tax forms. It's...
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Bob Pease
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Eclipse
Without a doubt, the open-source Eclipse version 3 has made a thunderous impact on the embedded development scene. It's rather surprising for a not-for-profit product that's making lots of money for vendors and developers alike. Such success comes from its cost cutting and provision of a non-discriminatory, extensible development platform. Plus, the plug-in architecture is well documented. In addition to its quality, Eclipse's openess is responsible for its marked influence this...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Jazelle RCT
The ARM architecture received a pleasant boost this year with the Cortex-A8 platform. Part of the new architecture adds the 16-bit Thumb-2EE instruction set that operates in the ThumbEE mode. Designers can license the Cortex-A8 architecture. However, this technology won't show up in the ARM-based embedded microcontrollers that dominate the 32-bit microcontroller arena until next year. The ThumbEE mode is part of the Jazelle RCT (Jazelle Runtime Compilation Target)...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] InfiniBand Busting Bandwidth
Do you need to move data around a cluster of processor blades quickly? Then check out InfiniBand. Mellanox shipped its double-data-rate (DDR) InfiniScale III 24-port, single-chip switch that supports a 20-Gbit/s transfer rate. The chip features an aggregate throughput in the terabit/s range, exceeding other technologies in performance while keepingcosts, processor overhead, and latency extremely low. The matching InfiniHost III host channel adapter draws only 3.3 W while pushing data around...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Low-Power FPGAs
How do the various field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) technologies rank with respect to standby power consumption? The three mainstream FPGA approaches significantly vary in static and standby power consumption due to the differences in the configuration technologies employed within the chips ? volatile static RAM cells, reprogrammable flash-based nonvolatile memory cells, and antifuse, metal-to-metal one-time programmable nonvolatile programmable elements (...
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Louis E. Frenzel
