[Engineering Feature] What's On The Dashboard Tonight?
When peering through the front passenger window of the latest model cars, you've got to wonder if you're staring at the dashboard or some conceptual, high-end home-entertainment center. Now, as the clamor grows to enrich the infotainment element even further, efforts are being expedited to process, manage, and seamlessly connect cars to specialized information and services. These range from GPS satellite navigation to entertainment, roadside assistance, real-time traffic updates, and...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] RapidIO Gives DSP "Farmers" Something To Crow About
Are you about to start a new design with massive signal-processing requirements, such as a media gateway or the latest MRI device? If so, consider using a DSP farm connected via the Serial RapidIO (sRIO) protocol, or just go out and buy a DSP "farm on a chip." Serial RapidIO is a high-speed, packet-switched, point-to-point protocol with a predictable low latency. It's ideally suited for connecting scalable DSP farms used in video transcoding, industrial imaging,...
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Daniel Harris
[Leapfrog: First Look] Ethernet And The 8-Bit MCU
Microcontrollers control and monitor a wide range of applications while maintaining a minimal footprint, often a single chip. The PIC18F97J60 family from Microchip performs these functions—and handles Ethernet networking, too. The chip is based on the 8-bit, 10-MIPS PIC18F architecture with an 8- by 8-bit hardware multiply. The 10BaseT full-duplex Ethernet support includes both the media access controller (MAC) and physical interface (PHY) (...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Processor's Precise Pulse Targets Power PWM
Timing is everything in dc-dc conversion. A high-resolution, 16-channel pulse-width-modulation (HRPWM) module from Texas Instruments can control the edge position to a 150-ps accuracy. This is a neat trick for the 100-MHz TMS320F28044, since it doesn't generate a faster clock internally to handle the 24-bit PWM support (Fig. 1). Instead, the chip uses the upper 16 bits in a conventional fashion with counter/compare ...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Designing With Class D Amplifier ICs
The switching amplifier, or class D amplifier, has risen quickly to prominence in consumer audio applications, from MP3 devices including mobile phone handsets to games consoles, LCD-TVs, and home cinema. The ace in the deck for class D is its vastly superior efficiency, which can be as high as 85 to 90% in practice. A linear class-AB implementation will usually achieve around 25% at typical listening levels. In handheld applications, the low power dissipation of class D allows...
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Eric Haber
[Ideas For Design] Ensure A Fixed Bias Current For Gain Blocks
RF gain blocks (amplifiers) are popular because they offer wide bandwidth, low noise, and ease of use. They're designed to operate with a fixed value of supply current because variations in supply current cause variations in the gain, compression point, and other crucial specifications. Typically, a series resistor sets the supply current to a value based on the known value of dc voltage at the RF choke. That voltage, however, can vary from part to part. For instance, the GALI-21...
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Ken Yang
[Ideas For Design] Auto-Resetting Circuit Protects Auxiliary Outputs Against Shorts
Many products require an auxiliary dc output to power external devices or subsystems. If such subsystems are to be hot-connected, the auxiliary output must be protected against short circuits. Schemes using fuses are slow and will cause the internal dc-rail to drop, possibly affecting the main system. The circuit shown in the figure provides pulse current limiting at a very low cost. It can handle momentary or...
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Kannan N
[POV: Point Of View] HDDs Hit The Road As Standard Features In Tomorrow's Cars
Over the past few years, automobile manufacturers and aftermarket suppliers have debated whether hard-disk drives (HDDs) belong in cars. Skeptics say that putting technology with rotating parts into an even larger body of rotating parts has the potential for problems. While the rationale might seem logical, today's automotive drive isn't your father's HDD. Arguments against the use of HDDs in auto applications— resistance to vibration and temperature extremes—have...
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Scott Wright
[Editorial] Thanks To Active Safety Systems, You Won't Buy It If You Don't Brake
I should have fastened my seatbelt. Our Cadillac, the world's first car with an auto-braking system, used GPS and wireless signals to determine its need to auto-brake and avoid hitting the car slamming to a stop in front of us! General Motors' Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) demo was one of the highlights of this year's Convergence, the semi-annual automotive electronics event held last month in Detroit. "Convergence" is taking on a broader definition as cars...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob! I have been reading and enjoying your stuff for many years! In this case (see "What's All This C-R Stuff, Anyhow?" Sept. 1, 2006, p. 18), I would say that capacitance has varied, not with frequency, but instead with applied potential. Various materials, especially ceramics, vary capacitance with applied voltage. (Yeah, but only a few percent... /rap) If we give cap time to charge up some, its capacitance can vary dynamically. (There ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Radical Transistor Concept Bounces Into Being
Quentin Diduck thinks it's time for a revolution in transistor technology. In fact, the graduate student at the University of Rochester claims the new ballistic deflection transistor (BDT) he's working on is as different from a conventional transistor as an old electron tube. As today's transistors edge closer to heat, electrical leakage, and other realworld limits, academic and corporate researchers are examining a variety of exotic barrier-breaking designs. Diduck, though,...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Teen's Mind Control Blasts Space Invaders
No joystick required. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine have developed a system that lets users play a video game using their thoughts alone. This achievement could lead to the development of biomedical devices that let patients control prosthetics simply by thinking about them. The researchers have been working with a 14-year-old boy with epilepsy. A grid on top of the surface of the teen's brain records electrocortiographic activity, feeding data to...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Digital] Navigation Controller Practically Drives Itself
Fujitsu is now the proud parent of the MB86297, a high-end graphic display controller (GDC) for navigation systems. Designed for the latest generation of automotive multimedia systems, it delivers high-performance graphics at speeds five times faster than any of its siblings (see the figure). This GDC provides fully configurable instrument clusters in the form of versatile human-machine interfaces. It supports fogging,...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Model Your System To Scale To Expose Potential Issues
Based on stories I've heard from fellow engineers and my own experiences, we easily could have avoided quite a few problems by building a model of the system to scale. Take connectors. If you've ever been on a team engineering a system, chances are you or someone on your team had some issue with one or more of the connectors. I once was on a design team responsible for building a system with several proprietary high-speed busses connected by complex connectors. I had a kit with...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Microsoft Signs Off On Two All-Solid-State Drives
Microsoft has officially qualified two of Samsung Electronics' flash-based solid-state-disk (SSD) drives as fully Windows compatible. The 16- and 32-Gbyte drives come in a 1.8-in. profile and offer 57-Mbyte/s read speeds and 32-Mbyte/s write times. The drives' target market is laptop users who want near instant boot and standby recovery with increased battery life. Microsoft ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] PC-Board Router Brings Smarts, Speed, And Skill To The Party
As anyone who's routed a pc board knows, a successful routing job combines intuition, speed, and good old-fashioned design chops. EDA vendors and pc-board-tool homebrewers alike have sought to build all of the above into automatic routing tools. But an algorithm that mimics the pattern-recognition capabilities of a good, experienced manual routing job has proved elusive. In its new topology-routing technology, Mentor Graphics may have come the closest to date to...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] A Hardware-Assisted Verification System For The Masses Arrives On Desktops
With an eye toward much broader deployment of hardware-assisted verification than was ever before possible, Cadence's Incisive Design Team Xtreme III series of accelerator/emulators simplifies the ability to move to and from simulation and acceleration engines. The system offers twice the performance of Cadence's earlier Xtreme Server systems, with a gain of from 10 to 100,000 times in simulation performance. Up to 72 million gates are supported. Now that...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Have Your LAN Cake And Eat It Too
You need all the advantages you can get when you're designing and building a wireless local-area network (WLAN). You want maximum range, the widest coverage,-optimized throughput, low cost, low power consumption, the greatest reliability, and minimum installation hassle. Yet even the most successful designs require some compromises. Then again, maybe they don't. The Xirrus XS-3900 is the ultimate WLAN access point (AP). This array combines 16 IEEE 802.11a/b/g...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] AMCs And MicroTCA Tackle Big Jobs
It's time for MicroTCA to grow, at least in volume. The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) approved the standard for the MicroTCA architecture this summer, and the availability of advanced mezzanine cards (AMCs) is accelerating. AMCs already have been used because they're part of the AdvancedTCA standard, where AMCs are plugged into AdvancedTCA carrier boards. While MicroTCA is hot in communications now, it also suits a range of embedded applications that can...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 32-Bit MCU Sports Dual Bus, USB, And Battery-Backed-Up SRAM
It seems everyone is changing their name these days. Philips Semiconductor is now NXP Semiconductors. NXP's LPC2300 and LPC2400 microcontrollers bring 32-bit ARM7 performance with 2 kbytes of SRAM and a real-time clock with battery backup. The LPC2300 has two ARM high-speed bus (AHB) buses, Ethernet, two CAN controllers, four UARTs, SPI, SSP, three I2C buses, I2S, ADC/DAC, and SD/MMC card interfaces. The LPC2400 adds a two-port USB Host with USB On-The-Go (OTG). Pricing starts at...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 8-Pin, 8-Bit MCU Targets Tiny Tasks
Freescale's 16-MHz MC9S08QD2 and MC9S08QD4 forego communication interfaces in lieu of a four-channel, 10-bit analogto-digital converter. The chips have a 16-bit timer and an additional dual-channel, 16-bit timer that can handle synchronized pulse-width modulation output. They also have a wide 2.7- to 5.5-V operating range. The onchip clock is accurate to 2% up to 105°. Each chip uses a single-pin background debug mode (BDM) debug interface. A demo board with an on-board USB debug...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Using The Right Tools: Embedded Scripting And Other Ideas
Ask embedded programmers what tools they use, and you'll usually find a common thread: C/C++, an integrated development environment (IDE) or their favorite editor/debugger, and a standard library or platform like Microsoft .NET. These tools work for most applications. But what happens when the situation turns into hammering a nail with a screwdriver? The screwdriver gets a good workout. Programmers who are more adventurous or enlightened look for a new tool. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Automotive 8-Bit MCU Likes LIN
The ST7L3 from STMicroelectronics cuts costs and board space in local interconnect network (LIN) control applications in automotive environments. The ST7L3 supports hardware multiply and has a master/slave LIN interface and a serial peripheral interface. Memory includes 8 kbytes of flash, 384 bytes of RAM, and 246 bytes of EEPROM. It includes a seven-channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter and dual 12-bit timers with dual-PWM (pulse-width modulation) outputs. Pricing...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Portable PC Targets Rugged Environments
Portable PC Targets Rugged Environments The SwitchBack-PC from Black Diamond Advanced Technology is a ruggedized version of the ultramobile PC (UMPC). It can run Windows XP Tablet PC and Linux. It also can be enhanced with a range of peripherals, such as a fingerprint reader, Breathalyzer, or laser range finder mounted on a detachable module on the back of the unit. www.bdatech.com ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dual License Covers Compact J2ME Database
The new version of McObject's Perst Lite is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) for open-source projects and as a commercial license for closed-source projects. The tiny database targets Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME) applications. Perst Lite's object cache does not depend on weak references used by other object-oriented database management systems. Most J2ME implementations don't support weak references because they complicate garbage collection....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RTOS Gets Revamped
Windows CE 6 is a marked improvement for Microsoft's smallest operating system, which has big aspirations. It can now manage up to 32k processes, each with an address space of 2 Gbytes. That's probably a bit much for a cell phone, but this embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) is finding a home in a wide range of very demanding applications. This incarnation supports the latest Windows .NET Compact Framework 2.0. It also will support the recently announced Network Media Device Feature...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] VMM Delivers Virtual Protection
VirtualLogix, formally Jaluna, has renamed and repartitioned its virtual machine manager (VMM) software—now available as VLX for Digital Multimedia, VLX for Mobile Handsets, and VLX for Network Infrastructure. This is a new version-of the VLX as well as a rebranding. The digital multimedia targets platforms such as Texas Instruments DSPs, while the network version adds support for the Intel CoreT2 Duo E6400 and T7400 processors, taking advantage of Intel's hardware...
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William Wong
[Component View] Go Mobile With Light, Rugged 19-in. Cabinet
The M2 series of modular 19-in. cabinet enclosures from Optima EPS balances light weight and ruggedness. The aluminum-frame enclosures come in 52-to 77-in. heights and depths to 42 in., and they're configurable in multibay systems. The series conforms to MILSTD-810F for a deployed transportation environment. Customers can specify the M2 series to various levels of ruggedness, depending on their application. Heavy-duty single or double-walled extrusions, internal...
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John Novellino
