[Engineering Feature] Industrial 802.15.4, ZigBee, And Wi-Fi
Most industrial controls are wired solutions that are developed for reliability and safety purposes, as well as economic reasons. For instance, 802.11 Wi-Fi can be used with industrial Ethernet protocols that don't require specialized hardware or synchronization. Yet they do have one problem—collisions—that can be overcome with wired switches. An Ethernet switch can buffer incoming traffic because each connection is independent of the other connections...
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William Wong
[Engineering Feature] Industrial Power-Over-Ethernet
The IEEE 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) standard employs two of the four pairs in a CAT5 cable to deliver 48 V dc to a device. The device can use up to 15 W, which is more than sufficient for a wide range of peripherals (e.g., Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephones and a variety of control and monitoring devices). The existing PoE standard suits industrial Ethernet use, but it isn't optimal for a number of reasons. Most industrial automation systems run at 24 V, and most...
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William Wong
[Engineering Feature] Industrial-Strength Networking
Every line of microcontrollers includes a model with at least one Ethernet interface. That's why it isn't surprising to find Ethernet up and down the industrial control pyramid (Fig. 1). Ethernet has always been found in the upper reaches where management functions occur. But lately, it's been moving down into the fieldbus realm, which once was dominated by more than half a dozen high-speed serial interfaces like Modbus and...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] New Audio Technologies Resound On Many Fronts
Some fascinating developments have reverberated within the world of audio this year (see "Multichannel Audio, DDS Keep DACs Humming" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 11763). For one thing, the trend toward more channels in home-entertainment systems has somewhat reversed itself, thanks to ever-more sophisticated algorithms for "virtualizing" speakers. A certain "spousal acceptance factor" worked against installing all of the speakers that came with a 5.1...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] MNTs Serve Up Solutions For Tightening Space And Military Specs
The CANEUS 2006 Conference opened many eyes to one fact: Nearly every space program worldwide has found remarkable and successful roles for micro and nano technologies (MNTs). It's in response to the lighter-weight, smaller-size, less-power-dissipation, lower-cost mantra chanted by those involved with commercial outer-space, aerospace, and military applications. Held in Toulouse, France from Aug. 27 through Sept. 1, CANEUS included many technical presentations and...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Reducing The Design Impact Of DFT In The Nanometer Era
Design-for-test (DFT) is essential to ensure that complex designs can be thoroughly tested. Testing demands continue to increase as designs grow in gate count and fabrication process technologies evolve. Fortunately, advances in DFT techniques have avoided major design requirements and restrictions for test. In fact, some approaches have reduced the impact of test on designs. Structured DFT techniques are commonplace due to their high fault coverage and support...
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Jeff Boyer
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[Ideas For Design] Give Your Projects Under- And Overvoltage Protection With Hysteresis
This circuit provides undervoltage and overvoltage protection for dc input supply voltages (see the figure). Its undervoltage cutoff is 6 V, and its overvoltage cutoff is 11.5 V. When VIN is less than about 6 V, Q1 and Q2 are OFF; Q3 (a series MOSFET switch) is also OFF and VOUT = 0. When VIN goes over about 6 V, Q1 turns ON, turning ON the series MOSFET. Then, VOUT =...
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Kannan N
[Ideas For Design] Controller-Based One-Shot Creates Extended Delays While Saving Space
When I needed to create a simple tool to generate a long, event-triggered pulse, I started with a classic one-shot and a really large capacitor. This worked "pretty good," owing to the classic nature of the problem. There seemed to be no enthusiasm for using a small controller to provide the one-shot function, though. Nonetheless, there may be several advantages to doing so. Generally, larger caps have a wide initial tolerance and variation over temperature,...
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William Grill
[POV: Point Of View] For Truth In Testing, Try An Independent Lab
Despite industry standards, OEMs often face massive challenges in designing systems that integrate components from different vendors. Products often fail to truly comply with the specification—or fail to be fully interoperable with other components based on the same standard. And that happens despite reams of test results from the vendors' own labs, all based on criteria established by the standards organizations. Without an independent, third-party test facility,...
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Tom Wilson
[Editorial] Are You Taking Global Warming Seriously? MIT Offers Perspective
This year's Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT left me more on-edge than energized. The message from a keynote panel was a wakeup call to the seriousness of global warming and the need for immediate action. "It's not too late, but we must move away from fossil fuels... or ruin the planet for the next 50 generations," said Joseph Romm, founder and executive director of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions. Romm urged a massive investment in alternative energy as well...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This PLL Stuff, Anyhow?
I can't believe it took me so long to write this column. I designed some good, low-frequency phase-locked loops (PLLs) about 33 years ago and wrote them up but never got it published. When I moved from Philbrick to National 30 years ago, I got some good voltage-to-frequency converters going, using the new LM331. I also wrote application note AN-210 (still in print) about 1978, which you can see at ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Ion Trap Marks A Step Toward Practical Quantum Computing
Aquantum computer would be nothing less than a marvel. Unlike conventional two-state computers, it would encode information as quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can be a 1 or a 0, simultaneously both 1 and 0, or some point in between. Since a quantum computer could function in multiple states simultaneously, it would be millions of times more powerful than today's most robust supercomputers. Able to perform vast numbers of operations simultaneously, it would be ideal for such...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Flash Set To Complement HDDs
The notion of replacing PCs' hard-disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state NAND flash memory long has been pondered, but never given much serious consideration. Yet the success of Apple's flash-based iPod nano is spurring speculation that NAND could become a legitimate competitor for HDDs in PCs. Compared to HDDs, flash offers improved reliability, lower power consumption, silent operation, and faster access time. NAND also is more reliable than HDDs since it doesn't...
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Nam Hyung Kim
[TechView: Analog & Power] Adding A FIR Filter After An ADC Gets Simpler
The QF1D512 SavFIRe configurable finite impulse response (FIR) filter chip can follow any analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in industrial monitoring applications like vibration sensing, flow measurement and leak detection, medical patient monitoring and diagnostics, seismic, and sonar. Drawing the "Sav" part of its name from "simple and versatile," this Quickfilter chip also can be used as a co-processor device for controllers that have embedded ADCs. Its companion...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] POE Plus Gets A Boost
Another company has joined PowerDsine in introducing a Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) controller that anticipates the higher power capabilities addressed by the IEEE 802.3at PoE Plus task force. While PoE Plus is still very much a work in progress, Texas Instruments has introduced a 26-W powered-device (PD) controller. TI's eight-pin TPS2376-H lets designers implement a non-standard PD that draws up to 26 W from power-source equipment (PSE) with a minimum of 52 V...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] IP/Security Controller Chip Makes Wireless M2M Applications A Snap
Don't look now, but the machines are talking to each other. They're not plotting to take over the world, though. They're using the M2M (machine-to-machine) protocol to perform simple telemetry or control operations. M2M applications are finding wider adoption as communications options grow and costs decline to a practical level. Common applications include point of sale (POS) terminals, data collection terminals, telematics, power management, medical devices, elevator...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] Hello! VoIP In A Kit
Getting a product out the door quickly means starting from on top of a solid platform, not building from ground zero. That's one reason why I look at development kits in EiED Online. The better platforms get you started quickly and provide a solid base on which to build. Delivering a hardware or software platform often is the first step, with an integrated solution to follow. Digium's Asterisk represents that first step (see "Open-Source Platform Dials Into VoIP"...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Fingerprint Sensor Integrates With Trusted Pre-Boot Authentication Systems
Fujitsu's Full Speed USB 2.0-based MBF320 Sweep Sensor uses the TrustedCore preboot authentication (PBA), fingerprint-matching algorithms, and biometric software from Cogent Systems. The ultra-thin (16 by 6.5 by 0.9 mm) capacitive sensor has a hardened surface that can handle rugged environments. It provides 500-dpi resolution and 8-bit grayscale. Also, it consumes only 45 mW as well as only 150 µA in standby auto-finger-detect mode from 3.0 to 3.6 V. The unit...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] 48-Port PCI Express Switch Provides Flexible Port Configurations
PCI Express is replacing PCI-X in high-performance systems, increasing the need for flexible PCI Express switching. PLX Technology's PEX 8548, a 48-port PCI Express switch, can handle a range of configurations from three x16 PCI Express ports. It's ideal for handling a pair of high-speed video cards in a setup that has an x8 host port plus three x8 ports and four x4 ports for extensive peripheral access. This third-generation device complies with PCI Express 1.1, ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Big Brother Is Watching... Your Semiconductors
Ever wish you could spy on your semiconductors and make sure they're behaving properly? Now you can with Toshiba Teli's CS3930UV (see the figure). Made specifically for the detailed surface inspection of semiconductors (wafer inspection and lithography), factory automation precision applications, and solder inspection, this camera uses near-ultraviolet light to see superficial defects that may include small scratches, dust, and...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Use Serial RapidIO To Increase I/O Bandwidth In DSP Applications
As bandwidth requirements for applications increase at rapid rates, they depend on DSPs to provide the real-time signal processing. DSP applications that perform this real-time processing have hard real-time I/O requirements. A DSP with Serial RapidIO (sRIO) capabilities can meet these bandwidth requirements. There are two approaches in using sRIO to dramatically increase I/O bandwidth: direct I/O or messaging passing. The direct I/O approach, where data is read or written by...
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Todd Hiers
[TechView: Test] Advanced Search, Analysis Speed ID And Diagnosis
It's difficult to do any serious design or troubleshooting without an oscilloscope. But even with the best scopes, some problems are so elusive they defy solution. Intermittent problems are the worst. In some cases, it may be possible to sit and stare at the scope long enough to actually get a look at the glitch. But who has the time or patience to do that? Furthermore, some glitches are so subtle you may not recognize them without some serious examination. Lecroy's solution to...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Component View] Tiny, Lightweight Toggle Switches Light Up Your Application
Their extremely small size and light weight suit two series of illuminated toggle switches well for use in handheld devices or front-panel interfaces. The B series subminiature and G series ultra-miniature switches from NKK Switches feature toggle actuators made of clear polyamide, so the LED color fully illuminates the actuator. The B series also has a fully illuminated patent-pending bushing. The switches in the B series measure 0.516 in. high and wide and 0.346 in. ...
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John Novellino
