[Success Story] A Prescription-less Portable Defibrillator
Clever design, close attention to human safety issues, and a top man-machine interface make the Philips HeartStart portable home defibrillator one of the hottest medical electronics devices on the market. Although other companies make portable defibrillators (Agilent Technologies, Cardiac Science, Welch Allyn, HeartSine, Defibtech, Medtronic, and Zoll Medical, to name a few), the HeartStart is the first to be available over the counter without a medical prescription. The device is...
—
Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Timing Analysis Rounds The Corner To Statistics
In a perfect world, fabrication of silicon ICs would be a perfectly predictable process. Not only would every chip be absolutely identical, but there would be no variations from wafer to wafer, or lot to lot. In such a paradise, all chips would meet their predicted design parameters. They would all run at the designers' intended speed, no faster and no slower. All would meet their timing specifications. There would be no clock skew, no IR-drop surprises, and happiest of all, no need...
—
David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] PMBus Controller Takes A State-Machine Approach
Recent announcements of several PMBus-based ICs for digital control of distributed power makes one fact clear: There are two different approaches to controller architecture. On the one hand, controllers are based on high-resolution, high-speed analog-to-digital converters with DSPs in the feedback loop. On the other, controllers employ comparators and hardwired digital proportional-integral-derivative (PID) state-machine filters. Zilker Labs has introduced the first product to use the...
—
Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Use Forward Voltage Drop To Measure Junction Temperature
Semiconductor junctions ? from the millions of transistors used in ICs to the large-area compound junctions that make high-brightness LEDs possible ? can all suffer early failure due to increased heat. This becomes an even larger issue when feature size shrinks and current requirements expand. Even normal operation can create heat buildup, raising the junction temperature. Such elevated temperatures may increase the amount of defects within the junction, decreasing performance and shortening...
—
Jason Chonko
[Ideas For Design] Low-Cost Battery Monitor Checks Battery-Operated Microprocessor
A recent project required an inexpensive microprocessor that could be battery operated and indicate if the batteries were low. I chose Microchip's PIC16LF84A for the microprocessor because it was simple to program and could operate between 2.0 and 5.5 V dc. However, the PIC16LF84A doesn't have analog or comparator inputs. To meet the design criteria for a battery monitor, I went with Microchip's inexpensive MCP100315 Microcontroller Supervisory Circuit. It costs $0.33 each in...
—
Luke Barker
[Ideas For Design] Good One-Shot Is Based On An LVDS Receiver
In the days of large split supplies, it was relatively easy to make a good monostable multivibrator. Even 5-V single supplies posed only a moderate challenge. Making a good one-shot to run on 3.3 V is more difficult, though. The variation of CMOS thresholds limits their usefulness for precise timing. Plus, limited voltage " headroom" can make designing a good reference plus comparison circuitry difficult outside the environment of monolithic matched parts. However, newer devices...
—
William H. Morong
[POV: Point Of View] Digital Techniques Ready To Power Electronic Systems
Digital power-supply control has certainly captured the attention of the power electronics industry during the last 18 months. It has gone from papers presented in those "catch-all" sessions at power conferences to having its own sessions and even its own conference. What has happened to raise digital power from an interesting student project to an active market segment? Power supplies and microcontrollers are not strangers. Micros have been monitoring and...
—
Rich Valley
[Editorial] Putting The Mind At Ease With Heart-Smart Devices
Whether it's an iPod for the teens or a 40-in. plasma HDTV for Dad, consumer electronics are the in-demand "toys" on this year's holiday wish list. But this issue's Success Story (p. 38) covers the design of one consumer device, the Heart-Start defibrillator, that's serious business. Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is the leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming more than 340,000 lives a year. That's more than breast cancer, prostate cancer, AIDS, house fires, handguns,...
—
Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This AMT Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 2)
As I said in my last column, I don't mind filling in my tax forms.* I can usually look at the 1040 forms and figure what is happening. If I am normally in a 33% bracket, I can tell that the tax is really at a marginal (incremental) rate of 36.8%, or whatever. But in the AMT, I cannot decipher my marginal rate. I may get the nerve to go in and increment my income by $1000 and see what the real change is. But it would take me a couple of hours, and I'd have to be sure I was not...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Digital Photography Sharpens Focus On Technology
Cell phones with cameras are everywhere. But why don't we see cameras with cell phones? Wireless technology has already become a product differentiator in digital photography. Kodak introduced its Wi-Fi-equipped Easyshare One last January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and began shipping it in late September. In October, Nikon released the 12.4-Mpixel D2X professional single-lens reflex (SLR) and the Coolpix 8-Mpixel P1 and 5-Mpixel P2 cameras (...
—
Ron Schneiderman
[TechView: The Industry] Will iPod nano's Display Problem Spill Over To Video Version?
The successful launch of Apple's iPod nano MP3 player in September was marred by complaints regarding its display. Shortly after its introduction, some users noted cracks in the screen. Apple said this flaw was limited to 0.1% of all units shipped so far. But is Apple now headed for a new round of display problems with the video version of the iPod, released in October? A dissection of the nano conducted by iSuppli's Teardown Analysis service indicated that the total unit cost of...
—
Vinita Jakhanwal
, et al.
[TechView: Analog & Power] Motor-Monitor/Vibration-Analysis Chips Have It All
In designing wireless sensor network (WSN) machine monitoring and vibration analysis, the physical size of the sensor end-point modules must be minimized. To meet that goal, Quickfilter offers a monolithic four-channel alternative to using a DSP and supporting components for the edge-of-network filtering function. The QF4A512 provides software-configurable input voltage ranges and gain settings for each channel. Its software-configurable anti-aliasing filters then handle signals...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Low-Cost HBA Offers High Performance
The iSNAP 2110 host bus adapter (HBA) from Silverback Systems affordably brings a new level of performance to storage-area networks-(SANs). While Fibre Channel still reigns over SAN connectivity, the Ethernet-based serial version of the long-popular SCSI (Skuzzy) interface has made huge inroads simply because it permits the use of in-place Ethernet wiring for SAN operations. Designed for servers and workstations, the iSNAP 2110 accelerates iSCSI and TCP operations in SANs,...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Hot RISC Processor Enables Consumer Voice Over Cable
With Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) becoming more popular, cable operators are looking for a low-cost way to provide it to existing customers. Broadcom’s BCM3368 voiceover- cable modem system-on-a-chip lets set-top-box vendors incorporate all the usual functions of a DOCSIS-compliant cable box, but now with VoIP capability and more. Broadcom’s VoIP firmware runs on the Viper enhanced RISC processor. Thanks to its speed, architecture, and DSP...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] 16-Bit Architecture Grows To 1 Mbyte
The boys in Dallas may hate to hear it, but Texas Instruments has a 20-bit microcontroller. Actually, TI's 16-bit MSP430X architecture incorporates a bank of registers that can be manipulated as 20-bit pointers or 16-bit data registers (see the figure). The pointers provide direct access to 1 Mbyte of program or data memory. The 20-bit registers have limited arithmetic capability designed for memory addressing. Meanwhile, the...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Hard-Core Journaling File System
Journaling file systems (JFS) provide robust storage. Green Hills Software's Partitioning JFS (PJFS) moves journaling into the embedded space. It works with the Green Hills Integrity real-time operating system. As a result, partitions can take advantage of Integrity's multiple independent levels of security (MILS) architecture (see the figure). This can prevent security breaches, such as when a higher-security application tries to write...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Processors Offer MPEG-4 Encoding/Decoding
Speculation about the first products based on Texas Instruments' DaVinci DSP platform has come to an end with the introduction of two highly integrated digital video processors. The TMS320DM6446 performs full MPEG-4 video encode and decode, while the DM6443 only performs video decode (see the figure). The chips do a lot more than video, though. They can handle JPEG decoding, decode audio for media player applications, and manage...
—
Dave Bursky
[TechView: Test] Channel Emulator Handles Multipath Testing
Multipath can be a big problem in traditional single-input/single-output (SISO) Wi-Fi systems. One answer is to come up with a multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) standard that takes advantage of multipath to boost performance. The next-generation Wi-Fi standard (IEEE-802.11n) will do just that. In response, Azimuth Systems Inc. has introduced the ACE 400NB channel emulator (see the figure). It reproduces 4-by-4 multipath...
—
John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Protocol Analyzer Targets UWB Radio
The UWBTracer protocol analyzer from LeCroy targets radio traffic based on the WiMedia Alliance's Ultra-Wideband (UWB) common radio platform and the USB-IF standards' Certified Wireless USB (WUSB) (see the figure). It can capture and decode WiMedia and Certified WUSB traffic exchanged over the air. It also provides full capture and analysis of media-access control and physical-layer interface traffic between modules or chip sets....
—
John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] PC-Board Design/Simulation Suite Melds With LabView
In the Series 9 edition of the Electronics Workbench Multisim, Ultiboard, and Ultiroute PCB tools, National Instruments has achieved a synergy between its LabView graphical development environment and the world of the electronic hardware designer. Multisim 9 now sports a seamless link to the recently released LabView 8 as well as NI's SignalExpress interactive measurement software. The resulting environment bridges the gap between popular design and test tools. Using Multisim 9,...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Open Current-Source Model Unifies Timing, Noise, And Power
As IC designers migrate to 90-nm processes and look ahead to 65 nm, it's more critical than ever to supply implementation flows with accurate physical models. Timing, noise, and power effects at these geometries are heavily interdependent and can no longer be analyzed in isolation. To this end, Synopsys now offers a unified current-source modeling technology that enables comprehensive analysis of these effects. The Composite Current Source (CCS) modeling technology was initially...
—
David Maliniak
