[Engineering Feature] Tuning In To Digital TV
Let's get one thing straight: Digital TV is not synonymous with high-definition digital TV (HDTV). It's much more than that. Digital TV encompasses not only HD, but satellite TV, cable TV, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), and mobile TV as well. So, is it the next big thing? Believe it or not, you likely have digital TV already, possibly several of them. And you may not even realize it. In fact, the number of digital TV sources continues to climb, as does the number of...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] March Of The Multibus MCUs
High-end microcontrollers often use large, complex crossbar switches and other technologies to maximize throughput and performance. Low-end microcontrollers typically feature a simple bus structure. But as performance increases, so does the need for more advanced architectures. Low-to mid-range microcontrollers are now moving into a new realm where balance is key. Crossbars offer some performance advantages. Unfortunately they do not scale well. This...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] White Power LED Lights The Way With A 160-Lumen Output
A new white-light LED sports a 160-lumen luminous flux output level at a 700-mA dc forward current and 61-lumen/W efficacy level (white color temperature of 5000 K to 10,000 K). And that's about 33% brighter than its nearest competitor, says the LED's developer, Cree Inc. The XLamp 7090 XR-E series power LED also puts out 85 lumens at 350 mA. According to the company, the LED's 700-mA total light output is higher than other devices on the market, even at twice the...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Digital Current-Mode Control Challenges Analog Counterparts
Digital control of switch-mode power supplies (SMPSs) is becoming practical thanks to the evolution of low-cost, high-performance devices with peripherals designed for power-conversion applications. Also, current-mode control is challenging voltage-mode techniques for SMPS digital designs. Combining digital control with current-mode topologies can bring higher performance than combinations of analog or voltage-mode approaches. Early SMPS designs used voltage-mode control. A...
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Bryan Kris
[Ideas For Design] Key Design Aspects Of CMOS Image Sensors Revealed
What’s going on inside the latest cameras has a lot to say about the state of the art in digital imagers. This report offers tear-down analyses of CMOS image sensors (CISs) in mobile phones and professional digital single lens reflex cameras manufactured by Canon, Micron, Omnivision, Sony, and Toshiba. It’s particularly interesting to examine the cell-phone end of the spectrum. CMOS image sensors have become the image capture technology of choice for the...
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John Parangalan
[Ideas For Design] Drive Large 7-Segment LED Displays Using Only 1 Or 2 MCU Pins
Many options exist to drive seven-segment LED displays, but most are limited to low output currents. The approach described here uses one 74ALS374 or 74AS374 octal latch, wired as a shift register, per digit. The 74ALS374/74LS374 can handle an output sink current of 24 mA per bit, and the 74AS374 can handle 48 mA per bit, suiting it for large bright displays. Using this approach, you can not only generate the numbers 0 through 9, but also leading zero suppression,...
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Hans Krobath
[Editorial] As Audio On Demand Hits Its Stride, Video On Demand Isn't Far Behind
When it comes to music, I'm old school. I buy most of my tunes on CD, and I even spin vinyl sometimes. While iPods are handy, a really good system should rumble your entrails. Still, I love the infinite variety of Internet radio and particularly my subscription to Real Networks' Rhapsody and its multimillion-song library. Being able to look up (almost) any song to play it when I want to hear it is a thing of beauty. But I'd never gotten around to integrating my stereo with my PC...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Try FPGAs For High-Performance DTV
Thanks to MPEG-2 compression, most major markets have accepted digital television (DTV). But stay tuned. H.264-AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10) and Microsoft's VCI compression standards promise even more dramatic advances for both standard and high-definition (HD) TV. Broadcast equipment OEMs will need to move to these newer compression encoding standards to effectively deal with current and future bandwidth requirements. In this design transition, the OEMs not only will...
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Todd Scott
[Pease Porridge] What's All This SiO2 Stuff, Anyhow?
The first time I noticed this, I was camping up in the Sierras. Some people will even read the fine print on a ketchup bottle if there's nothing better to read. But we didn't have any ketchup bottles. So I was reading the information on an envelope of some bean soup—beans, dried onion, salt, spices, etc.—and silicon dioxide? Hey, I know what that is, and I wonder who gives them permission to put sand in the dehydrated bean soup. When I got home, I...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Order Your Nanotubes Straight Up
Like an architect who designs skyscrapers, Timothy Fisher spends a lot of time thinking about building upward. But for Fisher, an associate mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, "building upward" requires only a tiny amount of height. Working with Purdue engineering professor Timothy Sands, Fisher has developed a method for vertically growing individual carbon nanotubes. The technique promises to lead to nanoelectronic devices with circuits and...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Turn Leftovers Into Electricity
Forget about doggie bags. Several of San Francisco's finest restaurants will be turning table scraps into electricity with technology from the University of California, Davis. Using an anaerobic phased solids digester, the Biogas Energy Project will process eight tons of organic matter a week into energy. Each ton can produce enough electricity to power 10 average California homes for a day. While many wastewater treatment plants and livestock farms use...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Latest EDA Tools Reveal Analog Design's Changing World
There is indeed a shortage of analog designers. But it's less a shortage of circuit wizards like Bob Pease than a dearth of well-seasoned engineers who could create user-friendly mixed-signal designs on a piece of silicon. The underlying need is for increased industry-university outreach to engineering undergrads. In the meantime, the EDA community is hard at work making mixed-signal chip design easier. For example, Cadence Design Systems recently updated its Virtuoso...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Security Processors Satisfy Next-Generation Networking, Wireless Apps
Networking and wireless applications, which are getting faster, need standalone security processors and new security algorithms that offer improved protection schemes and higher efficiency. Cavium Networks' Nitrox PX series of security processors fills that need. Target applications include integrated VPN/ firewall appliances, load balancers/L4+ switchers, 3G wireless infrastructure equipment, security gateways in telecom infrastructure, and storage-area network...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] 2.5/10-Gbit Ethernet Switches Slip Into PON Systems
Gigabit passive optical networks (GPONs) are a growing niche in delivering broadband services to homes and small businesses. Yet their growth has created a need for more and better switch chips to build scalable networking equipment that can handle an increasing number of subscribers. The latest Ethernet switches in Fulcrum's Focal-Point line fill this need. GPON, an ITU standard for passive optical networks, uses no active devices in the network. Downstream signals on 1490 nm at...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] UML And C No Longer Oil And Water
Many UML 2.0 products have been able to generate code for languages like Ada, C, C++, and Java from UML (Universal Modeling Language) models. Typically, though, the C developer was expected to learn UML. Legacy code would be maintained, but the new target would be UML. While it's not a bad approach, it doesn't always make friends. The new C support in the latest release (V7) of Telelogic's Rhapsody breaks the mold by allowing C developers to employ modeling while...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Low-Cost Development Kits Include C Compilers
Microchip's PICkit 2 Debug Express includes everything you need to start developing applications for the 44-pin PIC16F917 8-bit microcontroller. The kit comes with the MPLab integrated development environment (IDE) with assembler support plus a copy of Hi-Tech Software's PICC Lite C compiler. The package includes assembler and C tutorials. The USB-based debugger can be used with other PIC platforms. PICkit 2 Debug Express costs $49. Also, Atmel's $49 USB-based AVR Dragon...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Tiny RTOS Takes Low Cost Per Developer Route
IAR Systems is now moving into the low-end real-time operating system (RTOS) business with a product that complements its partners like Micrium and its uC/OS-II. IAR's PowerPac is designed for developers who need the basics. Its small, 2-kbyte footprint (for a typical Arm platform) has a very fast context switch. Limited to 255 priorities, it supports pre-emptive and round-robin scheduling. It includes typical RTOS features such as tasks, semaphores, mailboxes, and...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Fire Your Security Guards! Use Smart Real-Time Vision Sensors Instead
Well, maybe your security guards are safe for now. But thanks to the latest innovation from CSEM Microelectronics—a real-time miniature vision sensor that adapts to varying light conditions to provide automated responses—they won't get in trouble napping on the job. You may ask how this is possible. The system, called ViSe, enables real-time broadband monitoring of visual images under any light conditions. It lets OEMs engineer image analysis and...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Pre-Verified IP Blocks Make Designing MIPS-Based SoCs A "Snap"
MIPS recently announced SoC-it, a new platform for building systems-on-achip (SoCs) by "snapping together" preverified IP (MIPS-Verified) and a MIPS core. Based on core (kernel) and peripheral IP blocks, the platform includes development and real-time operating-system (RTOS) software. MIPS Technologies ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Use Secure Embedded Nonvolatile Memory To Protect Valuable Firmware
With advances in system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology, increasing amounts of intellectual property (IP) are residing in embedded software. Very often, software IP in the form of firmware gives chip vendors a competitive edge, resulting in a very successful (and valuable) OEM product. Protecting firmware from outright theft or from malicious modification by unauthorized personnel is a prime concern for chip developers. Flash-based firmware storage, either on-chip or with...
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Charles Ng
[TechView: Test] Analyzer/Exercizer Takes PCIe 2.0 Systems To The Edge
The PCI Express (PCIe) serial interface standard is replacing the older PCI and PCI-X parallel interfaces in computers and other high-speed equipment. Widely used in servers, storage systems, telecommunications equipment, and graphics in consumer products, PCIe uses from one to 16 bidirectional serial paths to transmit data at a rate up to 2.5 Gbits/s. The most recent version of PCIe, Version 2, should be a formal standard by the end of the year. PCIe2 doubles the data rate on...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Test] Speedy AWG Meets Digital Data, RF Test-Signal Generation Challenges
The quest for higher speed, wider bandwidths, and higher operational frequencies never ends. Just when you think the maximum has been reached, a new component, technology, or standard comes along to break the barrier. But Tektronix's AWG7000 series arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) is up to the task of testing these lightning-fast technologies, with 5.8-GHz analog bandwidth, 10-bit resolution, and a sample rate as high as 20 Gsamples/s. With these kinds of...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Equivalence Checker Formally Verifies Bug-Free RTL Clock Gating
Clock-gating techniques for power management are coming into greater favor among RTL designers. Often, designers will instantiate clock gating as a means of conserving power by turning off the clocks to quiescent sections of the system. Unfortunately, these techniques typically are employed late in the RTL-design game, so it's difficult to determine their effectiveness. Even more critical to ascertain is whether the instantiation of clock gating has introduced...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] RTL-To-GDSII Flow Encompasses Embedded Memory Test And Repair
Embedded memories are consuming a growing portion of overall die area. Thus, designers of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for embedded systems should consider a design flow that guides users through the process of designing testable and repairable embedded memories. To that end, Magma Design Automation has paired with Virage Logic to craft a reference design flow that includes insertion of design-for-test (DFT) elements throughout the design, verification, and layout phases...
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David Maliniak
[Basics Of Design] PXI Express
PXI Express is prepared to move test and measurement into the next decade. It builds on the PXI standard, offering higher performance and backward compatibility. As PXI was based on the PCI bus, PXI Express is built on the PCI Express high-speed serial interface. PXI Express gains much of its backward compatibility because of the compatibility between PCI Express and PCI....
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William Wong
