[Engineering Feature] IP Integration Is Standard Fare
The system-on-a-chip (SoC) era has reached the point where the assembly of such large, complex chips seems almost rote. From a high level, it would appear to be a formula process: choose a processor, choose a bus, bring together your memories and various peripherals, and that's about it. But integrating semiconductor-intellectual property (IP)—the large functional blocks that comprise these various major elements of an SoC—can indeed be a very daunting task....
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Demanding Applications Push NAND Flash Densities
The wheels of innovation are spinning at a breakneck pace in the world of NAND flash memories. With storage capacities hitting 16 Gbits, these memories offer the densest storage of any solid-state memory technology. Look fast, though, because further advances in cell structures, circuit architecture, and process technology will soon leave that number in the dust, raising the bar for NAND flash storage capacity and performance. Today, NAND flash memories are in high demand for...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] Mini CMOS MEMS Oscillator Marks A New Era For Timing
It took the combined experiences of several types of CMOS silicon designers to come up with the smallest high-performance low-cost microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) oscillator on the market. This feat was accomplished by SiTime, a startup fabless integrated circuit company based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The firm developed a vacuum-sealed MEMS First process that allowed the novel on-chip integration of the MEMS sensing element and temperature-compensation circuitry within...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Design High-Speed Data Links With Link-Level Simulation
The phrase "high-speed digital" evolved during the time of vacuum tubes and early digital computers.1 Ever since, the driving need for better system performance and higher clock speeds has presented greater challenges to designers. Those challenges became even more formidable when integrated circuits entered the picture. When Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the silicon IC in 1959, they introduced a whole new challenge—high functional integration in a compact...
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Graham Riley
[Ideas For Design] Control LCD Registers And Backlight Voltage With Two Wires
Many applications require a minimum number of conductors in the link between two areas of a device—for example, a flip-style cell phone. While a Mobile Pixel Link (MPL) device offers a convenient way to transmit high-speed RGB video data across three wires, the LCD display may still need a synchronous serial interface for configuration and control. In addition, the backlight can consist of multiple LEDs that must be driven with a higher voltage, and the voltage...
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Paul Brown
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[Ideas For Design] Simple Pulse-Width Modulator Controls Heater In Electric Jacket
A friend bought an electric jacket to wear on his motorcycle. But it was on all the time when it was plugged in, which made him sweaty at certain temperature ranges. He was looking for a way to control the heater inside the jacket. He tried the simple route and put a potentiometer in-line with the jacket. But he found that it got so hot, it began to smoke and melted his gloves. (The heater circuit draws upwards of 5 to 10 A.) To solve the problem, I designed ...
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Tom Burke
[Ideas For Design] Calculate System THD Without Measuring Noise
Designing total-harmonic-distortion (THD) measurement into a system usually involves a notch filter and a broadband ac measurement. The problem with this technique is that it measures both THD and noise. DSP-based test equipment can calculate just the THD, but this isn't practical for most portable equipment. However, system designers can add THD measurement capability by using a bank of band-pass filters set at the harmonics of the fundamental, along with a notch...
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John R. Ambrose
[Ideas For Design] Divide And Conquer The Resistive Divider
The resistive voltage divider—a basic circuit taught in every introductory electronics course—may cause some problems during its implementation. If you've ever stood in front of a resistor kit while punching values into your calculator, this article is for you. Typical kits don't include every value. So, finding an elusive ratio for which both values are commonly available can be a challenge. The small spreadsheet described below not only provides a...
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Karl R. Volk
[Ideas For Design] Use A PC Serial Port For Pulse-Encoded Communications
The simple method described here evaluates a one-wire device that uses pulse-width-encoded communications from a PC serial port. Communications errors such as parity and acknowledge are monitored. The hardware interface to the PC is a MAX232 driver/receiver, and the slave in this example case is a Texas Instruments TMP141 temperature sensor. The circuit can be expanded to four sensors on the same bus by using the TMP141's four programmable addresses derived from A0 and...
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Ed Rojas
[POV: Point Of View] Measuring The Metrics: Look Beyond The Obvious
Many of the metrics that companies currently use to determine and market their products' performance have become outmoded and need a new approach. Measurements commonly assigned to system performance—CPU clock rate, amount of main memory, storage capacity, theoretical aggregate bandwidth between the CPU and its primary memory subsystem—no longer are as relevant to most applications as they once were. Anyone who believes that these easy-to-quantify metrics...
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Larry Chisvin
[Editorial] Bridging The Ap Gap In Mobile Video: Finding The Sweet Spot In Suburbia
This week, I'm finally getting around to enabling the Vcast service on my Verizon phone. I'm interested in checking out these broadcasts, but as a commuter, it's hard to envision where mobile video fits into my life. At home, I already shell out for hundreds of satellite TV stations I never watch. (I hear the average subscriber watches 15 channels, and I'm below average.) And with broadband "always on" at home and the office, I watch more news video via the Internet than I do on...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Bivouac Stuff, Anyhow?
Okay, my old friends Mal and Jon and I were planning to hike up a big hill, Mt. Adams, near Gorham, N.H., in early February. On snowshoes. We'd have 3000 ft of snow to ascend, and it gets steep. We considered the potential terrain, like a lot of packed snow on the ground, which would be fine. But would there be a lot of new snow? A foot of new snow would really slow us down. Two feet of new snow would cause some serious problems, because in a group of three, each person has to do...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] University's Sensor Gets Fresh With Pharmaceuticals And Other Goods
Food, flowers, pharmaceuticals, and other perishables are next to worthless if they're about to spoil. Due to the unpredictable variables involved in shipping, expiration dates often can be unreliable. As a result, products that won't be fresh for long make it to retailers' shelves, while distributors toss away otherwise healthy items simply because their labels inaccurately say they're spoiled. A team of engineering students from the University of Florida has...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Dual In-Amp And Signal Isolators Sweat The Small Stuff
Two separate announcements from Analog Devices illustrate the importance of little things in how a company creates its products. One is a small-footprint instrumentation amplifier that makes an unusual boast about its datasheet. The other is an isolator that isolates the signal path as well as sensor power. The AD8222 is a dual version of ADI's AD8221 buffer for high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The chip was re-engineered so the die would fit into a 4- ...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] PS Controllers Rev Up For Peak Loads
A new family of power-supply (PS) controller ICs supports supplies with peak-to-continuous power ratios of up to 3:1. This would make it possible to build supplies with less expensive components for applications such as printers, whose motors introduce steep, momentary power spikes when a job is initiated. For example, an inkjet printer that uses 30 W during printing might require a burst of up to 80 W when the paper-advance motor goes into action. Other potential...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Multiplier Chips And Port Selector Implement Efficient SATA Interfaces
Also known as IDE, the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standard has dominated data transfer to and from hard-disk drives for years. But as the need to address storage units far from the server grows and transfer speeds increase, this parallel ATA standard becomes unusable. The Serial ATA (SATA) interface extends the range and speed of disk data transfer, solving these problems. Exar's Xstor port selector and multiplier chips make implementation of this interface fast and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Controller Combines USB And CE-ATA Support
Portable storage and communication have become increasingly important as mobile devices continue to multiply. Oxford Semiconductor's OXU140CM addresses USB and storage connectivity needs in a single chip. A host can use the memory-mapped interface to access USB and CE-ATA/MMC interfaces. CE-ATA/MMC can handle a range of flash and hard-disk media. The chip has two full-speed USB host ports and one high-speed port (see the figure)....
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] New Products
USB PHY Supports Intel XScale CPU In Portable Applications Standard Microsystems' USB3280 UTMI standalone transceiver has been optimized for Intel's last XScale processors. The 6- by 6-mm, 36-pin quad-flat no-lead package suits cell phones and PDAs where space and power are at a premium. The physical layer has USB-IF Hi-Speed USB certification. The chip costs $2.00 each in 10,000-unit lots. www.smsc.com ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Test] BER Testers Handle Tomorrow's Devices As Well As Today's
A trio of bit-error-ratio tester (BERT) products from Agilent Technologies cuts the costs of physical-layer testing today's 3G communications devices. They also should trim the laboratory testing costs of tomorrow's 100-Gbit systems. The tunable loop-bandwidth clock data recovery (CDR) option for the N4903A JBERT reduces the need for extra cabling and connections, which can degrade the signal. The E4898A BERT front end offers a wide data range and multiple built-in...
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John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] Platform-Driven ESL Suite Eases Software Pain
It was only a matter of time before an established electronic system-level (ESL) vendor cast an eye toward creating virtual hardware platforms. The concept of virtual hardware platforms isn't new, but an ESL vendor can bring a hardware perspective to the early development of system software. CoWare is attempting to do just that with its Virtual Platform family, which supports the creation, distribution, and use of virtual hardware platforms for software development ...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Startup Seeks To Automate Software Reuse For FPGA-Based Development Efforts
Typical next-generation system development projects attempt to reuse software from the previous generation. But a next-generation system screams for a next-generation processor architecture, and therein lies the rub. Often, when developers set out to migrate the embedded software from a previous processor architecture to a new one, all they have to go on is the assembly or binary code since it was developed for performance or memory reasons at the assembly language...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dual-Core Microcontroller Handles Industrial Apps
The DCIC9907 MCU is optimized for ac drive control. It packs a pair of 128-MHz ARM946 processors, two DMA controllers, two controller-area-network (CAN) controllers, and two Ethernet media-access controllers with PowerLink real-time extensions on one chip. Each processor has 16 kbytes of instruction cache, 4 kbytes of data cache, 32 kbytes of instruction tightly coupled memory (TCM), and 4 or 8 kbytes of data TCM. One processor is designated as the host, and the other ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 8052 Line Fits Embedded Data-Acquisition Market
Ramtron's mixed-signal Versa Mix 8051 line features up to 128 kbytes of flash, 1280 bytes of RAM, a seven-channel, 12-bit analogto-digital controller, and a 16- by 16-bit hardware multiplier with a 32-bit accumulator to handle DSP-style computation. It also integrates three timer-counters, a serial peripheral interface port, two UARTs, an I2C, and an RS-485/RS-422/J1708-compatible transceiver. Pricing for the Versa Mix 8051 (VMX51C1xxx) starts at $0.80 in a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Bridge PCI Express To Local Bus
Easier access to 66-Hz, 8- to 32-bit local bus systems is possible with PLX Technologies' PEX 8311 x1-lane PCI Express-to-local bus bridge. It includes root complex and end-point support. The zero-wait-state operation handles burst rates up to 264 Mbytes/s with two DMA channels. The channels can handle demand mode as well as block and scatter-gather transfer modes. The 8311 has eight mailbox and two doorbell registers plus four general-purpose I/O pins. The 1W PEX...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Eight 32-Bit Cores Take Flight In Multiprocessor Microcontroller
New processor architectures are rare, especially in the microcontroller arena. But Parallax created a chip that could rotate right into your next application. The Parallax Propeller consists of eight identical RISC-style processing units called cogs (see the figure). The chip runs on 80 MHz, but it only consumes 75 mA with all cogs running. If you cut back to one cog using the internal clock at 20 kHz, the power drain ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Bit Twiddling
Sometimes so many things pile up in the lab, I don't get around to checking them out until much later. Macraigor's JScan is one of those things. JScan builds on Macraigor's usbDemon, which is typically used for JTAG debugging. It provides IEEE 1149.1-compliant boundary-scan support that lets designers see the state of each point in the scan chain. It also allows designers to twiddle the bits. Boundary scanning is nothing new. In fact, it's a standard. Nevertheless, few ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Server Motherboard Hosts AMD Athlon 64 Or Opteron
The Asus K8N-LR server motherboard can manage a single-or dual-core 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 or a 2.6-GHz Opteron processor. The onboard nVidia display adapter leaves the 16x PCI Express available for expansion options like an SAS RAID adapter. Also incorporated are two 133-MHz, 64-bit PCIX slots; two 33-MHz PCI slots; and a Mini PCI socket. The board can handle dual-channel DDR400 memory in its four slots. PC peripherals include SATA support and a Broadcom BCM5751 PCI...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 32-Bit MCU Mixes Multimedia With Low Power Control
The AT32AP7000 represents the first of Atmel's AVR32 32-bit microcontroller family (see "A New Player In The 32-Bit Processor Field" at ED Online 11939 at www.electronicdesign.com). Its new architecture incorporates vector processing and power-management support that includes a split bus architecture and dynamic frequency scaling. It features a 1.8-V core and handles 3.3-V I/O. Peripherals include DMA support, dual Ethernet media-access controllers, a ...
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William Wong
[Component View] Small Enclosures Stand Up To Harsh Conditions
Extreme environments are no match for the Grip-Tech family of ergonomic handheld enclosures. The NEMA 4, fire-grade, polycarbonate parts come standard in black or white. They also have interchangeable, tactile thermoplastic-elastomer (TPE) rubber side grips that are available in eight standard colors or in a custom color. Molded with polycarbonate material, the Grip-Tech family will withstand extreme impact even at cold temperatures. The fire-retardant UL 94...
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Lisa Maliniak
[Design FAQs] Precision Analog Microcontrollers
What is a precision analog microcontroller? A precision analog microcontroller combines high-performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with a single-chip processor and peripherals that often are designed to augment the analog support. Precision analog microcontrollers are used extensively in applications such as industrial, instrumentation, automotive, and communications infrastructure. For example, particular...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Constant On-Time Buck Regulator ICs
How did the constant ontime (COT) buck regulator IC evolve? The COT regulator is a modified version of the basic hysteretic regulator shown in Figure 1. The basic hysteretic regulator IC consists of a comparator with input hysteresis that compares the output feedback voltage with a reference volt turning off the buck switch MOSFET. When the feedback voltage exceeds the reference voltage, the comparator output ...
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Sam Davis
