[Engineering Feature] Anticipating "The Big One"
Cell phones and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are obvious and easily accessible tools for consumers, but new products are popping up. One example is the most recent version of My-Cast. This mobile weather service developed by Digital Cyclone lets cell-phone users track tropical storms and hurricanes by navigating through their wireless carrier's ?Get It Now? cell-phone feature. For a service fee of $3.95 a month, consumers can see the projected path of a hurricane in real time...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] Back To Cool School
The heat is on for designers. Whether crafting nanoscale packages or giant supercomputers, today's engineers are under increasing pressure to get the heat out of their ever-higher-octane designs. To do this, designers look to solutions that include new materials with better thermal interfaces, innovative cooling techniques, better packaging approaches, and smarter design layouts using advanced thermal-management EDA tools. Since its inception, the electronics industry has chanted...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] Back To The Future With The 68K
Looking for a deterministic microcontroller that can be a good target for legacy applications? Then check out Innovasic Semiconductor's fido1100 microcontroller family. These devices are based on the 32-bit Motorola (now Freescale) 68000 and run an enhanced CPU32 instruction set that was used in the 683xx product line. But the fido1100 is more than just a reincarnation of the CPU32. In fact, just about the only thing the fido1100 shares with the 68K is the instruction set....
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] IP Networks And Emerging Video Apps Need Video Transcoding
Digital video compression is already an important technology in virtually every type of video application. As the trend toward media convergence continues, compression and interoperability will only become more critical. Among the most prominent digital video applications are DVD, HDTV, video telephony/ teleconferencing, and, more recently, video surveillance. Each of these consumer system-level technologies, however, has a different historical background. As a result, each has...
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Zhengting He
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[Ideas For Design] Dual-Phase Inverting Buck/Boost Supply Gets -5.2 V/15 A From 12 V
The most common use for a synchronous buck controller is high-efficiency conversion of a positive voltage to a lower positive voltage. But it can also produce a negative voltage from a positive voltage. In negative output applications, a buck controller can be configured as an inverting buck/boost device, where the negative output voltage has an absolute value either higher or lower than its positive input. To transform a buck converter to a buck/boost,...
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Mike Shriver
[POV: Point Of View] FPGAs: Architectural Innovations Open Up New Applications
FPGAs have always offered fast turnaround and on-the-fly reconfigurability, but at a higher unit cost. ASICs have promised a lower unit cost at high volumes, but only if designers can afford the time and high non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs associated with developing a custom IC. Traditionally, designers have selected FPGAs for lower-volume applications where the market demands a high degree of reprogrammability or quick time-to-market and where cost usually isn't a...
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Dennis Kish
[Editorial] All-Media Emergency Broadcasts Enhance Disaster-Monitoring Systems
We depend on electronics for extra-sensory-perception and protection. The need for early warnings increases as we continue to pack people into the most disaster-prone regions of the U.S. and around the globe— along the coasts and on the fault lines of the Pacific Rim. Our densely populated centers are also tempting targets for terrorists. Boeing recently received a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to build the SBInet, a 700-mile "virtual border fence"...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Bicycle Stuff, Anyhow?
A friend wrote to me that flying a plane is like riding a bicycle. It took me about four seconds to rebut him: “No, flying a plane may be a little similar, but it’s much different from riding a bike.” A plane can fly fairly stably with no controls. But a bicycle has to be steered and controlled so it doesn't fall over. And there's a big difference between flying a plane and riding a bike (or motorcycle): If you want a plane to turn, you can...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Liquid Lens Focuses On Low Cost And Power
A typical digital camera lens system can be extremely clever and effective. Yet it's also mechanically complex, requiring intricate gears and motors. Size, cost, and power consumption are key considerations, especially in camera phones. A new system, though, may remove those limitations. Rogers Corp. and Varioptic have collaborated to create a miniature high-resolution auto-focus system that uses a liquid lens (Fig. ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: The Industry] DTV Chip Market Tunes In To Success
The U.S. Congress mandate that all analog television transmissions cease by early 2009 is spurring accelerated sales of digital televisions (DTVs) and boosting the growth of the associated DTV chip market. DTV shipments are rising as the transition from analog to digital broadcast draws near, increasing by a whopping 70% in 2006 to reach 68 million units— and then another 42% in 2007 to hit 97.4 million units. Many other national governments are implementing similar...
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Shyam Nagrani
[TechView: Analog & Power] Something New In PGAs
What do you call a family of 900-kHz, selectable-gain amplifiers that provide a gain-select pin in place of a negative-input pin? Microchip Technology calls it the MCP6G0x family, with single, dual, single with chip select, and quad models. The company offers these devices as drop-in replacements for op amps, as microcontroller-controlled amplifiers, or as standalone gain blocks. The MCP6G0x amplifiers operate from 1.8 to 5.5 V with a 110-µA quiescent...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Simple-To-Interface Delta-Sigma Adds Mux
One challenge in using delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is that their input sampling currents can overwhelm high source impedances or low-bandwidth, micropower signal conditioning circuits. Last year, Linear Technology came up with an "Easy-Drive" family of delta-sigmas that addressed this problem by balancing the ADC's input currents (see the figure). The latest member of this family, the 24-bit LTC2498,...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Z-One Digital IBA Gets A Boost
Power-One has gained an ally for its Z-One digital intermediate bus architecture (IBA) standard. Micrel's MIC68000 family of linear regulators are interoperable with Power-One's Z-One point-of-load converters (POLs) and ZM7300 digital power managers. Until now, power-system designers could use only Power-One's switching POLs to take advantage of the Z-One concept. The virtue of Z-One digital IBA has always been its comprehensive control of POL sequencing, tracking, and slew rate,...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] The Key To IP Theft Prevention Is, Well, A Set Of Keys
If you've ever been to the Far East, you know you can get a genuine pair of designer shoes or jeans on the "black market" (okay, out in the open) for pennies on the dollar. That's because the factory is officially supposed to be closed at 5 p.m., yet it mysteriously continues to keep on humming along well after quitting time. The very same strategy is being used to steal intellectual property (IP) from " fabless" companies at the wafer test, packaging, and chip stages of...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Digital Design Tip: FPGA Signal Assignment Ordering
FPGAs are complex beasts these days, and the once trivial task of assigning signals to pins can be complicated and iterative. These guidelines for assigning signals to multipurpose pins force you to think about your signal assignments up front and reduce the chance of iterations based on a most-to least-constrained signal assignment process. One assumption that has been made here is that you have identified a target device family and part based on the approximate size of your...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] "Missing Link" Generates HDL Code From Simulink/Matlab Models
A persistent bugaboo in adopting electronic system-level (ESL) design methodologies is how to avoid wasting the work done above RTL. Certainly, designers of DSPs in particular have enjoyed using the MathWorks' Simulink/Matlab environment to design, simulate, and validate system models and algorithms. It's one thing to climb the ESL ladder. Getting back down to earth is another matter entirely. With the Simulink HDL Coder, the MathWorks hopes to have in place...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] First Galileo IC Receiver Fully Complies With GPS
GPS isn't the only navigation system around. The European Space Agency (ESA) is developing the Galileo Navigation System for the European Union. Unlike GPS, it will be under civilian control. But the two systems aren't all that different. SiGe Semiconductor's highly integrated SE4120L receiver uses software-defined radio (SDR) techniques to comply with both navigation standards. The Galileo system uses 30 satellites in three orbits 23,222 km high with a 56° inclination to...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Low-Power SBC Delivers High-Performance Video
EValue Technology's compact (5.7 by 4 in.) ECM-3711 single-board computer (SBC) runs a low-power, 1-GHz VIA Eden V4 processor with a CN700/VT8251 chip set with integrated ProSavage graphics. It can drive up to two low-voltage differential signaling displays. The board can handle 1 Gbyte of DDR2 SDRAM. It has 5.1 audio support, dual Realtek RTL8111B Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, a Mini PCI and Compact Flash socket, two Serial ATA interfaces, two serial ports, four USB 2.0...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Touchpad Integrates Fingerprint Security System
Synaptics Securepad combines a touchpad pointing interface with a compact fingerprint sensor. It uses Validity's LiveFlex technology, which uses high-frequency pulsed RF to look beyond the skin surface for a more accurate reading. It's located between the touchpad and its buttons, where it's less likely to be touched accidentally. It also offers the same form factor as the normal Synaptics touchpad. And, it adds a USB interface for the fingerprint sensor. It will cost...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RTOS And IDE Support Freescale i.MX31 And ColdFire Processors
Freescale's i.MX31 and Coldfire processors got a boost from Mentor Graphics, which now supports both with its Nucleus RTOS and its Eclipse-based EDGE Tool Suite. The suite's EDGE Debugger provides basic execution and memory control, plus advanced debugging features such as run-mode debug and kernel awareness when using an operating system like Nucleus or Linux. The debugger can handle multicore debugging. It also provides real-time trace, profiling, performance ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tiny Analog MCU Ideal For Dedicated Functions
Microcontrollers continue to shrink in size and cost. For example, Microchip's latest six-and eight-pin PIC10Fs have a footprint of only 2 by 3 mm, which is 30% less than a SOT-23 package (Fig. 1). Many discretes are larger than these devices. Because of an on-chip oscillator, these microcontrollers can utilize all of the pins except for the power and ground pins for peripherals. This is critical when the number of I/O pins...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] $100 x86 Runs Puppy Linux, Fits On The Back Of Flat-Panel Displays
Norhtec's tiny, fanless MicroClient Jr. houses a 166-MHz SiS 550 and 128 Mbytes of SDRAM. It's ideal for kiosks and embedded applications requiring a low-cost, networked processing element. The case matches the VESA FDMI mounting standard, suiting it for mating with LCD monitors, plasma displays, and other flat-panel devices. The 100BaseT Realtek 8100B Ethernet interface has PXE diskless boot support. The system also can boot...
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William Wong
