[Engineering Feature] White Goods Become Smart Goods
Watch an LCD TV or surf the Web on your refrigerator. Chat with your washing machine. Let your dishwasher decide when the dishes are done. Enjoy a hot cup of joe with just the right amount of cream and sugar, dispensed by your coffee maker with skill that would put any barista to shame. And you won't need to wait decades for these advances. They're happening right now. There's a revolution in modern white goods as the industry moves from its electromechanical ...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Good Or No Good? An Insider Look At What Works For ESL
Electronic-system-level (ESL) design flows are for real. They're in use right now at some of the world's largest systems houses, and with those flows, chips are being taped out and put into production. So obviously, ESL flows can be made to work. But does this mean that everyone is happy with the state of the ESL art? In a word, no. ESL design, which comprises any tools, languages, models, or methodologies that operate at a level of abstraction higher than the...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] EPIC Express Rides The Rails
With the ink barely dry on the EPIC Express standard, Ampro delivers the Ready-Board 820, the first of possibly many EPIC Express products (Fig. 1). This Pentium M-based platform fits into the same space as the EPIC standard, but it swaps the large PC/104 Plus expansion connectors...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Add 10G Ethernet And InfiniBand, Then Mix Thoroughly
Cluster building is becoming ever-more common with InfiniBand, but these clusters never operate in isolation. This means a connection to the outside world, one that runs Ethernet. With the ConnectX hardware architecture from Mellanox, the two networking fabrics come together (Fig....
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Quickly Find Elusive Signal-Integrity Problems In High-Speed Designs
Traditional approaches to finding signal-integrity issues in high-speed electronic designs involve using hardware triggering to isolate the event and/or deep memory time acquisitions to capture the event and then find it later. The increasing speed and complexity of high-performance electronic systems are revealing some key deficiencies in the traditional event identification methodologies for oscilloscopes. However, a fundamentally new approach to event identification can...
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Lon Hintze
[Ideas For Design] Lithium-Ion Battery System Upgrades Require Power-Management Analysis
As portable electronic systems become more sophisticated, selecting the optimum battery requires an intensive analysis of the entire power-management system. Many manufacturers now consider lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries because they hold advantages over older battery technologies. However, upgrading from the older technologies to Li-ion isn’t possible as a one-to-one replacement. The first step in determining the feasibility of an upgrade is to fully describe the portable...
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Robin Tichy
[Ideas For Design] Supply Constant Power Level To A Varying Load Impedance
How do you deliver constant power when the load impedance isn't constant? That problem arises, for example, in trying to maintain a warm LCD display on an outdoor gas pump in cold climates. As the heating element changes temperature, its resistance changes as well. That variation is characterized by the temperature coefficient of the heating element. If you apply a constant voltage, power delivered to the load will vary inversely with the load resistance. In...
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Dave Sackett
[POV: Point Of View] Z-RAM Steps Into SRAM's Territory
Today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) designers face a myriad of challenges, not the least of which is shrinking the die size when memory dominates chip area and cost. And with each subsequent generation of silicon, that domination is steadily increasing. The reason for this is simple. As processors continue to get faster, main memory grows larger. In fact, with each succeeding generation, main memory access takes longer in terms of processor cycles. With memory latency...
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David Fisch
[Editorial] On The Go At Electronica, The Global Meet And Greet
With all the sausages, pastries, and beer I consumed, I should have put on a few pounds at Electronica. But I walked several miles each day at the show, trying my best to cover 3500 exhibitors spread out over 14 halls, racing from meeting to meeting. Despite the calories burned, there was no chance of seeing it all. Yet I still saw loads of new technology, much of it related to power management and energy efficiency in white goods, as well as Ultra-Wideband (UWB)...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Floobydust, Anyhow? (Part 14)
My old friend Robert M. Milne retired a few months ago as editor of Electronic Design after 23 years. RMM has been my main contact with ED for 15 years, ever since this column began. Bob has been very helpful, and a really good sport, about editing my columns. He can slice a few words out of a sentence without wrecking it, or chop a couple of small sentences out of a paragraph without changing the meaning quite an art. I will miss him a lot. He even tripped me up on...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Forget About Megapixels—Try A Single-Pixel Camera Instead
The idea of a single-pixel camera may sound downright weird. But Richard Baraniuk, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rice University, claims that a camera that captures several thousand points of light in rapid succession makes more sense, and is far more efficient, than one that simultaneously grabs several million pixels. We can take a picture with potentially millions of pixels, but using just a single detector element, he says. Baraniuk and...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Electronic Shirt Lets You Rock And Roll
You don't need years of guitar lessons to jam like Jimi Hendrix. You don't even need a guitar! Australia s Commonwealth Scientific Industrial and Research Organisation (CSIRO) has developed the wearable instrument shirt (WIS), which uses custom sensors to turn body movements into music. Users can play air guitar by moving one arm to pick chords and the other to strum the imaginary strings (...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Headphone Audio Shares Connector With High-Speed USB Data
Today's trend toward more functionality in portable products affects everything, including I/O ports. The FSA201 and FSA221 multimedia switches from Fairchild Semiconductor let designers run audio through their product's USB connector when it isn't being used for data. In that case, a cell phone could use either switch to supply audio to a headset or exchange data with a laptop via the same connector (...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Thermally Enhanced MOSFET Line Gets A Breakdown-Voltage Boost
Applications that often require MOSFETs with 200-V breakdown ratings include high-powered (up to 1000-W) class D audio amps, 48-V output ac-dc supplies (for synchronous rectification), brushless dc-motor drives (up to 1 hp), and isolated dc-dc converters operating from a universal input range (36 to 75 V). To deal with those applications, International Rectifier s first DirectFET-packaged MOSFET offers a 200-V breakdown voltage rating. Previous DirectFET MOSFETs offered a maximum breakdown...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Encrypted Hard Disk Keeps Secrets
Lock down your data without paying a performance penalty with Seagate s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 2.5-in. secure hard-disk drive with DriveTrust (see the figure). It incorporates full-disk, 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hardware-based encryption in addition to a...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] CompactPCI Gets Rugged Wi-Fi
MEN Micro's 3U F209L brings IEEE 802.11b to CompactPCI. It s based on an 802.11b PCMCIA Prism 2.5 chip-set adapter that allows upgrades to other wireless technologies. Outdoor range is 600 m. Also, the F209L operates over the industrial temperature range of 40°C to 85°C. Pricing starts at $640. www.men.de ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] SBC Mixes Multiple Connectivity Options
The LBC-GX500 EBX form-factor single-board computer (SBC) from WinSystems combines a 1-W AMD Geode GX500 and up to 512 Mbytes of SO-DIMM SDRAM with a range of wired and wireless communication interfaces, like MiniPCI-based 802.11, ZigBee, cellular modems, GPS, 100BaseT Ethernet, and glob-al-compliant dial-up modems.Peripheral interfaces include dual floppy interface, two UltraDMA 66 IDE interfaces, PS/2 keyboard/ mouse, six USB ports, 10 serial ports, and an optional 12-bit ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] ARM7 Gains Access To 2 Gbytes Of Memory
The Atmel AT91SAM7SE line’s external bus interface (EBI) provides direct access to up to 2 Gbytes of external memory in addition to 32 kbytes of RAM and 512 kbytes of on-chip flash. The dual-bank flash architecture permits full-speed execution while writing to flash. The memory protection unit (MPU) can prevent the microcontroller from booting from external memory. It also can prevent flash update and force code execution from on-chip flash. The system...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Latest 65-nm FPGA Stands For Flexible Power Gateway To ASICs
FPGAs need flexibility, which in the past related directly to the types of designs a given FPGA could implement. Wouldn't it be nice to have more control over power consumption in addition to design flexibility? Altera s Stratix III delivers that with its Programmable Power Technology (PPT). PPT maximizes the performance of high-speed paths while minimizing power usage elsewhere. Each logic, DSP, and memory block is analyzed to determine if it should be placed in...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Lead-Free DFM For PC Boards
OEMs should understand that the packaging, thermal characteristics, and footprints of eutectic and lead-free components can be different, and these differences can be the basis for potentially costly manufacturing errors. Lead-free components are packaged to withstand higher reflow temperatures, and they may or may not have different footprints. Component footprints, package types, and associated component spec sheets should be studied carefully during the pc-board layout...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Logic Analyzer Adds More Memory, PCI Express/FPGA Test Capability
Good logic analyzers are vital to digital design validation and debugging. But they re playing an increasingly vital role because of the explosive use of FPGAs and the increased use of multilane serial buses like PCI Express and Serial ATA. The higher-speed signals in newer protocols are forcing an upgrade in testing gear. And with more analog signals being digitized, there's a need for more bandwidth and flexibility in testing. Agilent's 16900 modular logic...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Test] Get An RF Vector Signal Generator For Less Than $10,000
Like luxury cars, good RF test instruments are expensive. Many engineers lust after some test instruments as if they were the latest 7 series BMW. PrecisionWave Corp. may be able to help without busting your budget. Its latest RF vector signal generator costs an unbelievably low $9990 (...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Suite Automates Hardware, Software, And System-Level Verification
In the electronic-system-level (ESL) realm, designers often can get a jumpstart on architectural definition and/or hardware/software co-design and verification. Yet the effort expended at these higher levels of abstraction is disconnected from the rest of the process. Cadence s answer is to bring its plan-to-closure verification methodology to the ESL domain. Through a combination of hardware and software tools, Cadence plans to extend the traditional ESL approaches...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Manufacturability Checker And DFM Optimizer Form Two-Pronged Assault On Systematic IC Failures
After a three-year development effort, Clear Shape Technologies has hung out its shingle as a design-for-manufacturing (DFM) technology house with systematic process variability as its target. Two flag-ship products will take a dual approach to addressing a leading cause of yield loss at 90 nm and below. InShape is a model-based, full-chip design-manufacturability checker that predicts accurate silicon shapes. Its model-based, nonlinear optical transformation algorithm quickly...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Make Your Own Software-Defined Radio
Designing a software-defined radio (SDR) just got easier. With interest in multiprotocol radios growing in a host of applications, your next design could very well be an SDR. Some of the next-generation radios requiring an SDR architecture include military radios, public safety radios, commercial radios, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers. The bulk of the design is in the software, but the hardware is still a challenge. Engineers can spend six months or more just...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] First "Legal" Wireless-Use UWB Radios Get Ready For Business
The Federal Communications Commission first approved Ultra-Wideband (UWB) operation in 2002. Lots of products have been announced in the hottest segment of the UWB market, wireless USB. But so far, none have passed the required FCC tests. WiQuest's Wireless USB dongle and hub are the first fully certified products. WiQuest Communications UWB chip set complies with the WiMedia Alliance OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) standard. One of the chips includes the USB...
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Louis E. Frenzel
