[Engineering Feature] Advances Trigger An Ultrasonic Boom
Faster, more powerful processing. A better handle on nonlinear wave propagation. Higher-performance transducers. The development of specialized contrasting agents. Advances in image and real-time signal processing. All of these factors are contributing to a renaissance in ultrasonic medical imaging. Healthcare providers already have an array of impressive tools at their disposal. But ultrasound manufacturers aren't sitting tight, as they pioneer innovative machines for...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Digital TV, Audio Boost Analog/Mixed-Signal
It's next to impossible to encapsulate the concept of "high-performance" analog in a few simple datasheet specs like bandwidth or conversion rate or resolution. Dimensions of performance, to borrow a term from Analog Devices, expand and contract according to the application, and they include less obvious factors like power consumption, package size, and even price. FOLLOWING THE APPS One way to sort out performance issues is to...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Cores That Share Chores
Reduce the size of a processing core, and usually more can fit onto one chip. IntellaSys took that approach with its Scalable Embedded Array (SEA) architecture, which resembles Parallax's Propeller (see "Eight 32-Bit Cores Take Flight In Multiprocessor Microcontroller," April 13, 2006, p. 62, or ED Online 12235 at www.electronicdesign.com). However, IntellaSys' SEAforth-24 uses a much simpler instruction set and a nearest-neighbor connection mesh...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Turn Capacitors And Inductors Into "Active Passives"
When designers think of passive components, they think of manufacturing tolerances for inductors and capacitors that are typically ± 20% or ± 10%. That's okay in theory, but not when these components are used in an actual application. Applying dc bias to a ceramic capacitor or current to an inductor, at a particular frequency, changes the characteristics of these components. Hence, the name ?active passives.? For example, a 10- µF , 0603, 6.3-V capacitor can measure as...
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Mathew Jacob
[Ideas For Design] Boost Stepper-Motor Switching-Logic-Sequence Performance
Sometimes less is more. Here, a quarter-step switching logic sequence for stepper motors offers several significant advantages over full-and halfstep modes—higher resolution, smoother drive, minimal resonance effects, and reduced settling time. The method uses a 16-step input sequence to produce 1600 steps per revolution in 400-step motors. At the heart of this quarter-step technique is a so-called half-excitation state, during which the ratio of motor current ...
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A.K. Karnal
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[Ideas For Design] Low-Quiescent-Current Regulator Withstands High Input Voltages
In automotive applications, more and more on-board modules need to meet stringent requirements for ignition-off current, with many modules requiring less than 100 mA of current. A controller-area network (CAN) interface IC and a microprocessor in sleep mode can easily consume half of this current, leaving little operating leeway for the power supply. On top of this, the module's power supply must withstand automotive battery voltages of 24 V ...
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Mark Scholten
[Editorial] Engineers Work Medical Miracles Every Day
The prognosis for medical electronics is very strong. While the aging baby boomers will drive growth, don't forget the rising middle classes in India and China. The worldwide market is more than $70 billion, with double-digit growth forecast for diagnostics and therapy, home medical, and imaging technologies. At a recent Texas Instruments press and analyst event, TI highlighted medical electronics as a major opportunity for both DSP and analog design. Combining its...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Don't Fret Over IC Obsolescence, Prepare For It
ICs are discontinued all the time. Last year, some 150,000 components were declared end of life (EOL). For some manufacturers, this isn't a problem. Their products are on to the next revision anyway. For more and more long-life systems manufacturers, though, obsolescence drains time and money. One study says a redesign could cost more than a half-million dollars. Fortunately, by following some common sense, you can protect your systems from obsolescence. ...
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Paul Short
[Pease Porridge] What's All This "Error Budget" Stuff, Anyhow?
I was just on the phone explaining how to do an "error budget" analysis on some fairly simple circuits to a young engineer. Later, I mentioned this while I was visiting with my friend Martin, and he said he had been quite surprised when he found that many engineers in Europe were quite unfamiliar with the concept of an "error budget." How can you design a good circuit without being aware of which components will hurt your accuracy? When I was a kid engineer...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Crusher Charges On To The Battlefield—All By Itself
It's seven tons of armor-plated all-wheel drive, and it lives up to its name. Developed by the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University, Crusher is the latest robot in the military's Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle Perceptor Integration (UPI) program. Representatives of the NREC say that this unique robot offers new strength, mobility, and autonomy features for the military's effort to keep troops out of harm's way. Crusher can...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Washing-Machine Controller Wrings Multiple Design Wins From One Platform
Recently, International Rectifier released its iMotion control platform for air conditioners in China and Japan (see "Air Conditioner Chip Set Is Way Cool," March 30, 2006, p. 36). This month, IR released a version for washing machines with a global market. The iMotion platform comprises a digital-control IC and a driver IC with on-board power devices. The control IC's 8051 core handles the user interface and a custom motion-control engine (MCE) that...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Device Server Makes M2M Implementation A Snap
If you've been trying to implement a machine-to-machine (M2M) application, you know you have to cobble together the right mix of computers, interfaces, and software. Now there's a faster, easier, and cheaper way. Lantronix's UDS1100 device server lets you network virtually any device in minutes. With the UDS1100, getting M2M data to corporate back-end systems has never been easier. It also can be used to replace with modems or dedicated modem hardware. Applications...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] FPGA Customizes PC/104 I/O Card
Diamond Systems is taking an approach to standard boards that has been common on high-end systems such as VME and CompactPCI. This approach uses an FPGA to deliver a level of customization that lets vendors deliver different functionality with the same piece of hardware. In this case, the vendor would configure the FPGA when the customer orders the board. Alternatively, the vendor may provide an initialization file to the customer, but the customer never programs the...
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William Wong
[TechView: Test] Versatile Measurement Platform Allows Affordable Customer Reconfiguration
With test equipment as expensive as it is, flexibility (read: reusability) is important. The M150 Measurement Platform from Cascade Microtech aims to please in that regard, with a variety of interchangeable standard parts and accessories optimized for multiple measurement needs. The M150 handles 150-mm devices for measuring semiconductor wafers, ICs, pc boards, MEMS, and bioscience devices. Applications can include device or process characterization and failure...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Test Scripts Automate Evaluation Of Wi-Fi Mesh Networks
Wireless mesh networks are growing in popularity as municipalities use them in Wi-Fi Access Point systems for high-speed broadband capability for first responders, residents, and businesses. But wireless mesh networks use a series of nodes to pass data and share bandwidth, rather than send and receive data from a single point. So testing has been very difficult, requiring an entire matrix of nodes that made setup difficult and results iffy. To simplify the...
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John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] Extensions Drop SystemC Into The Hardware Domain
Despite being touted early on as a higher-level alternative to HDLs, hardware modeling in SystemC has suffered for its lack of a path to implementable RTL. Further, SystemC does a poor job of expressing concurrency. Bluespec, which first came to market with extensions to SystemVerilog and tools for ESL synthesis, has turned its attention to the SystemC language and its applicability to hardware architecture and design. With its ESL Synthesis Extensions (ESE) for SystemC,...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PCIe, Where Are You?
The tide is turning for PCI Express (PCIe), but certain currents are running faster than others. The PC side is a veritable flood as vendors push the edge, especially when it comes to graphics (see "Bevy Of Computer Parts Adds Up To A Banner Year" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 11573) and RAID storage (see "Building A SAS RAID File Server" at ED Online 12386). Internally, laptops have made the same move. But plug-in interfaces using...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Fibre Channel To PCI Express Links SAN/NAS
PMC-Sierra's Tachyon QE4 targets storage-area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) applications by bridging between one or more PCI Express hosts and two or four 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel links. Each link typically will be tied to a host processor while the PCI Express links are connected to the storage RAID control processor. A pair of Tachyon QE4 chips usually is employed if the control processor is attached to Fibre Channel disks. PMC-Sierra's SXP 36x6G ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Choose OTG Or Ethernet With This 32-Bit MCU
Freescale's entry-level 80-MHz MCF5223x ColdFire family comes in two flavors. The first incorporates a USB 2.0 Full Speed On-the-go (OTG) interface. The other not only has a Fast Ethernet controller complete with a physical layer, it also can include hardware encryption and CAN 2.0 controllers. Both chips have 32 kbytes of SRAM and up to 256 kbytes of flash. Other common devices include queued SPI, I2C, three UARTs, four 32-bit timers, four 16-bit pulsewidth modulators,...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Graphical Programming Ready To Run Robots
National Instruments' LabView 8 was a hot topic at April's Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, especially when the discussion turned to Analog Devices' Blackfin. This looks to be a match made in robot heaven with the advent of the Blackfin Handy Board (see the figure). Fred Martin, assistant professor of computer sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, developed the Handy Board in conjunction with...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Perpendicular Recording Yields Big Disks
The next big thing in hard drives is perpendicular recording. These drives are now appearing, with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 among the largest. At 750 Gbytes, it's a major jump from its predecessor, the 500-Gbyte 7200.9. The new technology lets Seagate pack 188 Gbytes on a single platter, but increased areal density is only part of the package. A combination of features makes the drive about 10% faster. It's also very quiet—only 2.7 bels. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] UML Highlights MDD At ESC
Two major Unified Modelilng Language (UML) vendors, Mentor Graphics and Telelogic, had some major model-driven design (MDD) announcements at the Embedded Systems Conference, held in April in San Jose, Calif. Telelogic has teamed up with I-Logix. The match is a good one, as Telelogic has appeal in the enterprise and business space, while I-Logix is strong in the embedded development arena. Mentor Graphics also played some name games, so its Accelerated Technology solutions...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dual-Core Single-Board Computer Meets XTX Standard
Ampro's XTX 830 is an XTX-compatible (Extended ETX) Computer-on-Module (COM) that houses a 2-GHz Intel Core Duo processor with a 2-Mbyte L2 cache. The 95- by 114-mm board can handle up to 1 Gbyte of DDR2 small-outline dual-inline memory-module RAM. It also complies with the European Union's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances. Peripherals include six USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, parallel port, floppy interface, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, IDE and two Serial ATA...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PowerPC Packs Punch
Applied Micro Circuits' 400-MHz PowerPC 405EZ microprocessor targets networked industrial control applications. The 64-bit core includes 32 kbytes of SRAM. Its external bus with arbitration can handle a range of memory types, including flash and CRAM. Peripherals include Fast Ethernet, two USB 1.1 hosts and one USB 1.1 device interface, CAN, SPI, I2C, and serial. It also offers an eight-channel, 10-bit, 300-ksample/s analog-to-digital converter and a 10-bit, 30-Msample/s...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 50-MIPS 8-Bit MCU Fits In A 5- By 5-mm Package
Silicon Laboratories' 50-MHz 8051F41x integrates up to 32 kbytes of flash memory and 2304 bytes of RAM in a 5- by 5-mm, 28-pin quad flat no-lead (QFN) package. Thanks to the chip's SmaRTClock real-time clock, the MCU can automatically detect power-supply failures and switch to a battery backup that will allow continued operation of the 64-byte backup RAM down to 1 V. The family can have up to a 24-channel, 12-bit, 200-ksample/s analog-to-digital converter, dual ...
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William Wong
