[Engineering Feature] We Have Seen The Enemy, And The Enemy Is Heat
As the semiconductor industry traverses through the deep-submicron process nodes, each plateau along the way carries its own signature bugaboo arising from physical effects. At 180 nm, timing-closure issues got everyone's attention. At 130 nm, signal integrity was the topic of the day. At 90 and 65 nm, though, power integrity and leakage are weighing on designers' minds. We now pack so many active elements onto such a small slab of silicon that power density has reached...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] A Measure Of Opportunity Awaits In Electric Meters
Besieged by conservation issues, utility metering is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance—particularly electricity metering. That's because electrical distribution systems everywhere are fragile. Metering used to be the nearly exclusive domain of EEs with a power specialty. Today, it's wide open to chip, board, and system designers, as well as software writers. The reluctance-motor electrical-meter movement is more than 100 years old. Now, it's getting displaced...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Transistor Recovers From Midlife Crisis With Fundamental Material Changes
The semiconductor industry is about to experience a tectonic shift. Wave goodbye to traditional transistors based on polysilicon-gate electrodes and silicon-dioxide (SiO2) dielectric insulators, which had been used to make the transistor gate dielectric for more than 40 years because of its manufacturability and ability to deliver continued transistor performance improvements. Say hello to hafnium-gate dielectric insulators and new non-disclosed metal materials for the NMOS...
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Daniel Harris
[Leapfrog: First Look] Thermal-Monitoring Tools Become Hot Commodities In High-End CPUs
With high-end CPU and graphics-processor feature sizes shrinking to 90 nm and less, pressure mounts to find ways to manage the heat. Recognizing this, Standard Microsystems Corp. (SMSC) has unveiled a suite of six temperature sensors and two fan controllers specifically targeting such designs. The EMC1402, 1403, and 1404 sensors offer interrupt capabilities, while the EMC1422, 1423, and 1424 add system interrupt capability. The 1402 and 1422 are dual temperature sensors; the...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] The Right Calculations Add Up To The Ideal Power Current Transformer
Current transformers measure current or transfer energy from one circuit to another, so their design requires calculations different from their voltage transformer cousins. The reason for the difference is that current transformer magnetizing current is the load current itself, unlike voltage transformers, where magnetizing current is "separated" from the load current and has a value that's a small fraction of the total current at full load. We want to supply the load with...
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Gregory Mirsky
[Ideas For Design] Minimize Input-Supply Ripple Current In LED Driver Applications
Consumer-based LED applications have really taken off. You now find them in home lighting, airplane cabin lights, automobile lights, MP3 players, and elsewhere. In the past, most LED drivers were based on some sort of charge pump, where the input voltage was multiplied by two and the LED voltage was post-regulated by an internal low-dropout regulator. But some high-power LEDs require much higher current before they start emitting light. Therefore, most of today's...
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Ajmal Godil
[Ideas For Design] L-C High-Pass Filter Reduces Power Supply's Hum And Ripple
A previous Idea for Design described an R-C twin-tee circuit designed to reduce power-supply hum at 50 to 60 Hz ("R-C Twin-Tee Reduces Power-Supply Hum,"). This Idea for Design presents a new L-C high-pass filter that reduces both power-supply hum at 50 to 60 Hz and ripple at 100 to 120 Hz. The circuit is a relatively simple composite high-pass filter employing the classic design...
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Richard M. Kurzrok
[POV: Point Of View] High-Voltage Busing Makes Sense
There are two conflicting ways to increase power-distribution efficiency in data centers as electricity flows between the front-end voltage converter and the ICs on blade servers. One is to lower the bus voltages around the circuit board. The other is to raise them. There are compelling reasons to think that the latter approach is better—if it's done right. For high-end IT and telecom applications, traditional power conversion involves an ac to 12-V dc silver box...
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Stephen Oliver
[Editorial] Focus On Power-Efficient Design To Help Stop Global Warming
This year's One Powerful Issue takes on special significance given the widespread worries about global warming. With last month's unsettling report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, energy efficiency is now sizzling on everybody's front burner. Instead of cleaning up wasted energy via ever more elaborate cooling schemes, engineers are now thinking about power efficiency as one of the first tenets of good design. Power efficiency was one of the central themes...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This "Others Stay Lighted" Stuff, Anyhow?
The box of Christmas lights said "If one or more lights go out, others stay lighted." Yeah, sure. My wife bought several cheap boxes of 100-light strings, and they looked very nice. This year, she had great plans to drape them along a fence, which would look real pretty. But some of the strings were dead—kind of frustrating when you want to put the lights up now. I did some simple checks. If one bulb went open, the others in series went out. Yeah, 5-V...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Plug-In Hydrogen Hybrid Hits The Road In Washington, D.C.
Based on the exhibits at this winter's auto shows, cars powered by next-generation technologies aren't too far away. At January's 2007 Auto Show in Washington, D.C., Ford rolled out a version of its Edge crossover vehicle that combines a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery pack, a hydrogen fuel cell, and plug-in technology for fuel efficiency that exceeds 41 mpg with zero emissions—except for water vapor (...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: The Industry] Power = Performance = Price In Wireless And Consumer Technologies
Most large-scale chips for wireless, communications, and networking contain at least one embedded core for control or signal processing or both. As processing speeds have increased to keep up with the demand for the latest standards, protocols, and applications, these embedded processors have had to kick up their processor speeds. But this translates into increases in power consumption that can compromise or even become a knockout factor for a battery-powered device....
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Energy-Harvest Modules Provide Predictable Runtimes
Suppose you're designing a really low-power telemetry application— so low-power that you want to run it off free energy that you "harvest" from the environment. Let's say it's intended to monitor the vibration signatures of the wheel trucks in railroad boxcars and send data about those signatures to trackside collection points via a wireless link. Suppose further that you want to power the application from those same vibrations. Advanced Linear Devices' ALD...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Plug-In Switchers Meet Green-Power Specs
Here's an off-the-shelf series of wall-warts (small, self-contained, plug-in dc supplies for portable equipment) that not only meets worldwide energy conservation standards but also comes with its own assortment of twist-off power plugs. Advanced Power Solutions' 2K6S series delivers 6 to 12 W from 0- to 264-V 50- or 60-Hz ac inputs (...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] DSP Equalization Extends 10GE Serial Transceiver's Optical Fiber Range
For several years now, 10-Gbit Ethernet (10GE) local-area networks (LANs) have been available. But while the price has been high and adoption has been slow, 10GE finally may be on a roll(out). There's a greater demand for video on the Internet, which means a need for higher bandwidth switching capacity, virtualization, more sophisticated encryption, and increased storage capacity. Market data from Broadcom via Del Oro indicates that the number of 10GE ports will grow from a...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Sonet/SDH Transceivers Add 8-Bit Interface And Deliver Best In Class Jitter Performance
Sonet/SDH systems continue to dominate long-haul and metro networks because of their high speed and flexibility. Chip companies are helping to keep it that way with a continuous stream of improved ICs to give Sonet/ SDH a performance kick and a price reduction now and then. For example, Exar's OC-1/OC-2/OC-3 transceiver chips address cost-reduction trends and increased design margin needs on new and legacy line card designs in add-drop multiplexers, cross-connect...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Does Frequent Leakage Keep You Awake At Night?
When the days were old and the knights were bold and IP was invented, you'd wrap an insulator around your gate and leakage was prevented. As the insulator became thinner with process shrinkages, though, leakage became a problem. It's so bad, engineers are now having nightmares about their future 45- and 32-nm designs. "Subthreshold and gate leakage have become a large problems in deep-submicron technologies," says Dan Hillman, vice president of engineering at...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Make Your Devices Clone-Resistant
If you suspect your device may be vulnerable to cloning, it probably is! Often-cloned products include consumables like battery packs, digital-content playback devices, and electronic product peripherals. Designers must understand the types of attacks their product is likely to face. Some attacks duplicate the design entirely, which happened in 2006 with a well known cell-phone platform. More common attacks involve the reverse engineering of interface protocols. Still others...
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Benjamin Jun
[TechView: EDA] Macro Models Serve Dynamic Voltage-Drop Analysis For SoCs
Large macros and memories used in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs can save time, but they can also be a bear when it comes to verifying them from a power-integrity standpoint. Their internal physical and logical complexity, along with their sheer size, can be too much to handle for transistor-level analysis tools. Such tools can perform accurate voltage-drop analysis on each transistor's current waveform, but they lack the capacity for the job. Sequence Design's macro...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Oracles And Archeologists
What do you trust? These days, many people trust the Internet. When they have a question, they often "Google" the answer. Unfortunately, many Web surfers take the results they get as if they came from an infallible oracle. This wouldn't be too bad if the results of most online searches were good. In most cases, though, your surfing will resemble archeology because of the amount of digging (not digg digging) required to find your treasured answers. A great deal of...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Rigid Core Cage Keeps Cards Cool
Previous core cages from Tracewell Systems have a relatively solid frame. But recently, the company took a knife to this design and replaced the frame with a rigid core that permits better airflow along its edges. Known as the S42, it targets ultra-performance VXS/VME64X 6U cards as well as air and ground mobile communications (...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Numerical Analysis Tool Goes Multicore
Matlab 7.4 targets large datasets and productivity improvements. Developed by the Mathworks, it also supports Windows Vista (see the figure). As one of the top applications for algorithm development, data analysis, and numerical computation, Matlab and its 2D and 3D visualization...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Real Robots
Robots clean floors, search for injured people, and help remove bombs. They're also fun to play with. And now, improved platforms make robotic research and development easier. Designers can use the popular Roomba and Scooba robots as development platforms with iRobot Create, which supplies access to 32 sensors and the control module. A cargo bay provides space for custom enhancements like cameras and robotic arms. Lego's Mindstorm NXT may look like a toy, but its...
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William Wong
[Component View] Small Switching Supplies Approved For Medical Apps
The ASM Global Performance series of ultra-miniature open-frame switching power supplies features 10 versions with single outputs of 3.3 to 24 V dc and a power range of 10 to 15 W (see the figure). All of the models accept inputs of 90 to 264 V ac. The supplies, which incorporate corner...
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John Novellino
[Design FAQs] High-Power Class D Power Stage Sponsored by: INTERNATIONAL RECTIFIER
What is a Class D amplifier? A Class D amplifier converts an audio signal to pulse-width modulation (PWM). Its power stage efficiently amplifies the PWM signal and filters it to drive the speakers. The Class D designation means that the power stage biases and operates its output devices as switches. How do half-bridge and full-bridge Class D amplifiers differ? A half-bridge power stage uses a pair of switches in a totem-pole arrangement (...
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Sam Davis
[Engineering Essentials] Applications Dictate Power-Management Subsystem Design
Designing power-management subsystems, which supply and control dc power in electronic systems, is much more complicated now than it was five years ago. These days, designers must cope with ICs that operate below 1 V, may consume over 100 A, and employ gigahertz clock rates. In addition, such subsystems involve more than just power-supply design. They also include system-oriented functions that require application-specific ICs. A system viewpoint is necessary to set the...
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Sam Davis
