[Engineering Feature] Military R&D 101
Ray Baughman, director of the University of Texas' NanoTech Institute, sees a time when military leaders will send robots into battle. "They could fight ahead of American soldiers, take a bullet for American soldiers, and then, after giving them a shot of alcohol or diesel fuel, will fight on." Baughman is one of thousands of research scientists working at academic laboratories across the nation developing military-funded gadgets and systems that often end up becoming...
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John Edwards
[Technology Report] Video Processing Brings New Meaning To Motion
In the not-too-distant future, a single fiber-optic cable will deliver phone service, an Internet connection, and of course, digital television (DTV), movies, and other multimedia to the home. Until that time, though, most consumers will have to deal with some combination of plain-old telephone-service phone wires, digital satellite, cable, Ethernet, USB, wireless networks, and so on. If we narrow the focus to DTV and other forms of high-resolution video, most...
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Daniel Harris
, et al.
[Leapfrog: First Look] iSCSI Does 10G Ethernet
Storage-area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) move storage out of the box and onto the network. The Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) standard takes the SCSI standard and overlays it on the TCP/IP networking stack (Fig. 1), inserting SCSI commands and data into TCP/IP packets (Fig. 2). The idea is to make it easy for operating systems that...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Optimized Interconnect Eliminates Limits In Orthogonal Architectures
For modern high-performance electronic systems, it's common practice to break the system down into pluggable, line-replaceable modules. This gives system designers flexibility to connect subsystems with a variety of functions. It additionally allows for easy repair and upgradability. Backplanes often are used to electrically interconnect modules with each other via a multilayer printed wiring board (PWB). The most frequent packaging implementation of the backplane is...
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Robert Gustafson
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] LED Power-Management Strategies For LCD Backlighting
Most small-size color LCD displays today use white LEDs for backlighting. These systems usually involve handheld devices with an LED drive circuit powered by a battery whose output voltage varies over time. Therefore, an optimum LED driver design requires a system approach covering: Battery type LCD characteristics System power requirements and efficiency LED driver IC and its external components PCB layout...
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Fabien Franc
[Ideas For Design] Single-Supply DC Restore Amp Reestablishes Negative Sync
Video systems operating from single +5-V supplies use ac-coupled RGB and composite video signals that operate only within the useful dynamic range of the single-supply amplifiers in the signal chain. For example, if a single +5-V supply rail-to-rail amplifier has a useful dynamic range of down to a few millivolts of ground and up a few millivolts of +5 V, the incoming video signal plus sync must be constrained to that voltage range. Because the NTSC standard composite video...
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Bob Pospisil
[POV: Point Of View] Close The Security Disconnect Between Awareness And Practice
A sophisticated security infrastructure has developed over the past several years to deal with new threats to information security that seem to emerge on a daily basis. Security software, ever more capable and pervasive, can detect attacks that may have gone unnoticed for long periods in the past. Firewalls, proxy-server protection, intrusion-detection systems, and other solutions have similarly advanced in their ability to stem attacks. Many people believe...
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Brian McCarthy
[Editorial] Sharing New Technologies Helps One-Up Scheming Terrorists
The foiled airliner bombings last month reaffirm the challenge to keep a step ahead of terrorists. Also, the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks reminds us that the U.S. suffered a "failure of imagination" in our threat analysis and that our intelligence must not be locked in silos if we want to anticipate the terrorists' next move. When it comes to imagining new electronics for the military and homeland security, a similar information exchange is...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This C-R Stuff, Anyhow?
A resistor is a resistor, and a capacitor is a capacitor, right? Maybe, and maybe not. I'm doing some research in audio circuits. I've heard all the scientific claims that if two circuits measure the same, they ought to sound the same. This claim is refuted by the observation that they don't sound the same. That's a pretty convincing rebuttal. I gotta believe it. I'm an analog and measurement guy. If somebody says some audio circuits don't sound the same, I bet...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] RoHS Is In Effect, But What About China?
China has taken a different approach to the European Union's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) legislation in a number of critical areas. These include the date the restrictions become effective, labeling and testing requirements, and exemptions. The broad scope of the directive drafted by China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII), known as the Management Method for Controlling Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products (or "China RoHS"),...
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Ron Schneiderman
[TechView: Analog & Power] Charge Pump Helps 50-MHz Op Amp Crush Harmonic Distortion
Input crossover distortion has long been the bane of rail-to-rail op amps. The input stage for most R-R amps consists of p-and n-channel differential pairs (Fig. 1a). The result is that the stage's offset voltage varies with the common-mode input voltage. The nonlinearity as the input signal passes through the crossover point limits the amplifier's total harmonic distortion (THD) (Fig....
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Digital Voice And Video Get A New VDSL2 Solution
Digital subscriber line (DSL) technology provides the greatest percentage of broadband access in the world, with a market share exceeding 60%. As carriers roll out the faster ADSL2/2+/2++ systems, DSL is hard pressed to deal with the growing need for greater speeds as well as the new Voice over Internet Protocol and Internet Protocol TV services. Enter the still faster very high-data-rate DSL (VDSL) and VDSL2 (see "ADSL/ VDSL Micro-Primer" at ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Stop Worrying About Data Loss While Capturing Real-Time Sensor Signals
If you've ever been frustrated by data loss during real-time data capture at the most inopportune time, set your worries aside and consider using Anvil, Micro Memory's all-digital front end for real-time sensor data recording. Anvil is a first-to-market SDRAM-based solution that eliminates the need to record directly to a set of hard disks with irregular transfer rates (see the figure). Instead, use Anvil to record your...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Software Upgrades Enhance Compressed Video Testing
The increased adoption of digital video has brought about a real need to speed up and simplify the testing of systems that use compressed video. Video on demand (VoD), HDTV, and video over Internet Protocol (IPTV) systems are growing in number, with more on the way as broadband carriers gear up for increased video revenue. The speed and complexity of compressed video systems give test engineers fits in verifying correct operation isolating faults that produce less than...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Reusable Verification IP Fits Into Overall Automation Planning
With its acquisition of Verisity in 2005, Cadence set out on a path toward building an integrated verification methodology that spans the entire design cycle. The latest piece of that puzzle is embodied in a family of verification IP blocks that include an executable verification plan. The Universal Verification Components (UVCs) drive the management of the verification process. They also automatically calibrate, measure, and report on protocol compliance. Cadence plans...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Virtual Platform Exposure Makes Debugging Easier
With virtual platform simulation, developers can implement applications without resorting to hardware (see the figure). Development then can proceed prior to the availability of hardware. Additionally, it reduces the need for additional hardware platforms for programmers. Such a development approach is typical for electronic-system-level (ESL) simulation vendors such as CoWare, VaST, Virtio, and Virtutech as well as other...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit And Tools Target Multimedia Apps And New Processors
Priced at $895, Analog Devices' Blackfin Multimedia Starter Kit combines the ADSP-BF561 EZ-Kit Lite with the AV EZExtender and USB-LAN EZ-Extender boards (see the figure). The AV board has analog and digital camera interfaces along with audio I/O interfaces. The USB-LAN board provides a USB 2.0 and Ethernet interface. The software development kit (SDK) includes drivers for video encoders and audio codecs. It also comes...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Chip Set Fits Ultra-Portables
VIA's VX700 integrates north-and south-bridge functionality to support the company's latest C7 x86-compatible processor with a 533-Mbyte/s front-side bus. The combination suits Ultra Mobile PCs. The VX700 includes the UniChrome Pro II IGP core with 128-bit 2D/3D graphics support with connections to LVDS/DVI as well as VGA and HDTV and the Vinyl HD Audio controller. The Chromotion Video Engine's image enhancement technology delivers video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4,...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Linux First?
Texas Instruments (TI) had one operating system at the top if its list when it put together support for DaVinci, its latest dual-core ARM/DSP OMAP line—MontaVista's Linux. In fact, TI took this support a step further by eliminating the need for many developers to program the DSP directly using tools such as TI's Code Composer Studio. Instead, ARM-based Linux-device drivers implement features such as codecs and filters by loading the matching DSP code on the second processor core and...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] SDK Targets Emerging Robotics Market
"Microsoft sees great potential in robotics," says Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group at Microsoft. The company presented its community technology preview (CTP) of the Windows-based Robotics Studio development platform at RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006, where RoboticsConnection showed a tracked Windows XP-based robot using one of its Serializer .NET Robot Controller boards (see the...
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William Wong
[Component View] 5-mm Thick PLED Displays Replace LCDs
The models in a new line of polymer LED (PLED) displays from One Stop Displays measure only 5 mm thick with lighting. Many systems that use reflective LCD technologies can't expand into backlit technologies because of the thickness added by backlit modules. These new polymer LED displays act as 16-by-2 drop-in replacements for comparably sized reflective LCDs. The OSD1602-3 is one of five sizes of 16- by 2-character yellow-green emissive PLED displays that can add lighting...
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Lisa Maliniak
[Basics Of Design] Graphical- And Text-Based Programming: Complementary, Not Competitive
Most programmers have a favorite text-based programming language. Some programmers even get rather vocal when it comes to defending their favorite's pros and cons. In fact, the only thing that most programmers can agree upon is that it's a good idea to avoid mixing languages during development. The same level of loyalty can be found with graphical-based programming languages. That's because data and control flow representations tend to be more natural. Many programmers stay within a...
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William Wong
