[Engineering Feature] Chip Design Services Set Sail Offshore
After years of working for tech companies like California Micro Devices and Motorola, Gerald Smith wanted to spend the rest of his analog engineering career involved in independent, hands-on tinkering. He found a cause in the growing need for analog chip design services and set up a small design services company—Analog Design Consortium—in San Jose, Calif., with three other analog engineers last year. "We just don't have the number of analog engineers we need...
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Kristina Fiore
[Technology Report] Design For Manufacturing: Still Not Ready For Prime Time?
In EDA, two primary areas still have room for innovation. One is at high levels of abstraction (above RTL), where a stalwart band of startups as well as one or two of EDA's heavier commercial hitters continue to seek a solid and predictable path from an idealized functional specification to a concrete physical representation of a complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. The other fertile ground for innovation sits at the extreme back end of the design cycle, where...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] Thermal Trimming Revolutionizes The Resistor
The lowly resistor has been given a makeover. And if your job has anything to do with precision, you should pay attention. Microbridge recently announced its MBT-303-A eTC Rejustor, which is a series-resistive voltage divider in a small IC-style package (Fig. 1). Both resistors can be independently trimmed to any value between 21 and 30 kV with 0.01% precision. Also, the temperature coefficient (TC) can be adjusted independently....
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Innovate For Low Power In A High-Performance FPGA
Traditionally, digital logic has not consumed significant static power, but this has changed dramatically as process nodes shrink. Leakage current in digital logic is now the primary challenge for FPGAs as process geometries decrease. If power-reduction strategies are not employed, power consumption becomes a critical issue as static power can increase dramatically at the 65-nm process node. Static power consumption rises largely because of increases in various sources of...
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Paul Ekas
[Ideas For Design] Power-Saving Keypad Controls Multiple Keys Through One MCU Pin
Traditionally, interfacing a microcontroller with an n-by-m keypad required n + m of the microcontroller's I/O pins for keypad scanning. Keypad designs that conserve microcontroller pins have been developed, but they require additional resources, such as external ICs or a built-in analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The design presented here uses only one I/O pin and requires only resistors and a capacitor as external components. I/O is a bidirectional pin initially...
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Mehmet Efe Ozbek
[Ideas For Design] Simple Additions To Audio Amplifier Prevent Clipping At Higher Inputs
Amplifying the human voice presents some tough challenges. One of the toughest of these is providing enough amplification to make sure a soft-spoken person can be heard while allowing sufficient headroom for people who speak loudly. If the amplification is too high, a loud voice or noise causes clipping of the audio waveform, which makes the output signal unintelligible and harsh to the ears. One solution to this dilemma is to limit the signal with a nonlinear transfer...
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John Guy
[POV: Point Of View] Independent Contractor Or Product Design Firm—It's Your Call
When it's time to produce the electronic portion of your product, do you go to a design firm or an independent contractor? Both are good solutions, but they meet different needs. If you need your lawn mowed, you hire the kid next door. But if you want someone who knows what fertilizer to use and when to trim the trees, you hire a landscaper. Outsourcing began as a cost-effective manufacturing solution. In the 1990s, it expanded to include full-service product design. Today,...
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Alex McKay
[Editorial] Taking An Editorial Round Trip—From T&M To EiC
It's hard to believe that nearly 10 years have gone by since I started with Electronic Design as a technology editor covering the test & measurement beat. Some of you may even remember me from that time. Others may remember me from EEPN (formerly EE Product News), where I became editor-in-chief (EiC) back in May 2000 and continued in that role for seven years. It feels good to be back at Electronic Design. Only one of the editors from...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Canyon Turn Stuff, Anyhow?
Let's say you're flying a light plane, and you fly up into a canyon at 8000 feet. At 8000 feet, your turning radius is perhaps 600 feet. The canyon is 1000 feet wide. You'd like to turn and get out of the canyon, but there's no room to turn. And the canyon floor is rising too fast for you to climb out. Are you dead? Maybe not. I have been studying this for several years. Our good friends lost their daughter in a flying accident in a box canyon, just like that, about 10 years...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Science Center Gets High-Tech Revitalization
One of the most popular exhibits at the "old" Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., was the "touch tunnel," where little hands felt their way through a lightless maze. After a two-year renovation, the center has emerged from the dark ages. Now, little hands take surveys and browse news stories on touchscreen interfaces. The $109 million redesign reinvents the science museum concept, as its digital exhibits are interactive and visitors use personal technology to stay...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters Spark Controversy
The United States' National Electrical Code (NEC) recently expanded Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupter (AFCI) requirements (see "Arc-Detecting Circuit Breakers Will See Wider Use" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 15682). This decision led to some passionate mail from Electronic Design readers who said that AFCIs saved them from disaster or were totally incompatible with small appliance motors (see the figure)....
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] System Extends InfiniBand Cable Reach To 100 m
Intel's Connects Cables will have many designers wondering why they didn't come up with the idea themselves. These cables address the InfiniBand market, where this technology and its high data rate are widely used to interconnect multiple servers in clusters and in supercomputer installations. InfiniBand uses a four-channel copper cable 10 m in length with special connectors to achieve data rates up to 20 Gbits/s. These large, heavy, and very expensive cables put a real...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Deep Packet Inspection At 20 Gbits/s Improves Networking Monitoring And Control
Most packet protocols permit virtually any packet to encapsulate another. So, it's difficult for any network administrator to know just what is passing through the network. The solution to this pervasive problem is deep packet inspection, which usually means looking at the data payload of packets passing through the system. Software mostly handles this today, but it doesn't accomplish it at the usual line rates of 10 Gbits/s or even 1 Gbit/s. Also, it most likely doesn't...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Will Robots Come To Our Medical Rescue?
Even just a few years ago, robotic doctors seemed decades away. But many physicians now use a remotely controlled robot with a built-in video conference system to provide medical care. The RP-7 from InTouch Health provides a "remote presence" that allows physicians to interact with patients regardless of their physical location (see the figure). Such developments could revolutionize the way diagnostics are delivered, especially when...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] ASIC/SoC Prototyping System Handles Up To 28 Mgates
With up to 21 Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs, the CHIPit Platinum V5 prototyping system can handle ASIC and system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs of up to 28 Mgates. The system targets users who need early hardware prototypes for software developers or end customers, as well as those who wish to avoid cost-draining respins (see the figure). Based on Xilinx's Virtex-5 LX330 FPGAs, the system features an enhanced architecture, beefed-up debugging...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] VSIA's Demise Could Lead To New IEEE Standards
In the wake of the VSI Alliance's (VSIA's) announcement that it will cease operation, IEEE has formed two study groups to examine VSIA's Quality IP (QIP) Metric standard and encryption activities. The Quality IP Study Group and Encryption Study Group will evaluate VSIA technology with an eye toward potential new standards. The VSIA QIP Metric standard gives companies a way to evaluate intellectual property (IP) from internal groups or third parties for the components used...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Accellera Elects Companies To Its Board
The board of directors of Accellera, an industry consortium that drives EDA standards initiatives, has elected 14 corporate member companies to join it for the 2007-2008 term. Accellera Corporate Member companies for 2007-2008 include ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Denali Software, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Intel, Magma Design Automation, Mentor Graphics, Nokia, Novas, Rockwell Collins, Sun Microsystems, Synopsys, and Texas Instruments. The Accellera board includes...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Opening A CAN
Automotive and process control environments aren't the only homes for controller-area networking (CAN) these days. It can be found in everything from printers to robots. Topping out at 1 MHz, CAN uses a differential bus architecture (Fig. 1). Its packet data size is only 8 bytes, but this is often more than enough for embedded applications. In fact, the identifier is frequently used to indicate an event or value when there are no...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PCI Adapts CAN
ESD Electronics brings CAN to PCI with its CAN-PCIe/2000 adapter. The interface supports one or two ports that comply with the ISO 11898 and CAN 2.0B standards. It provides a way for a PC to control or be part of a CAN network. Opto-isolation is standard. Software drivers are available for Windows, Linux, and QNX. They support an extensive programming interface. A free CAN monitoring and analyzing program is also provided. The CAN-PCIe/2000 costs $570. ESD...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ARM9 USB Stick Speeds Ethernet And CAN Development
Hitex's $49 USB-based STR9-comStick contains a 96-MHz STMicroelectronics STR912 microcontroller that uses an ARM966E core and has 544 kbytes of flash and 96 kbytes of RAM. The USB stick also includes a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a 10/100 Ethernet media access controller (MAC), and CAN and UART interfaces. The package includes the Hitex HiTOP integrated development environment (IDE) and debugger, which supports the HiSIM Instruction Set Simulator. The system uses the...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit Turns Quickly Into Products
Developers can take NetBurner's $299 PK70 Product Kit and quickly turn their designs into networked devices (see the figure). At its core is the 147-MHz ColdFire 5270 32-bit processor plus 4 Mbytes of flash, 8 Mbytes of SDRAM, an SD flash card interface, an RS-232 serial port, and a 10/100 Ethernet interface. The system accepts a single Personality Blade that has access to the processor's I2C, SPI, and GPIO, plus two...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dev Kit Addresses 8- And 32-Bit Microcontrollers
Freescale's Flexis line spans the company's 50-MHz 8- and 32-bit cores, starting with the MC9S08QE128-based S08 core and MCF51QE128-based ColdFire V1 core. Flexis microcontrollers have common peripherals and pinouts and represent Freescale's idea of a Controller Continuum, enabling easy migration between 8- and 32-bit platforms. With Freescale's $99 Demoqe development board from PE Micro, developers can quickly start development with the two chips (...
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William Wong
[Component View] Low-Profile Inductors Suit Compact Systems
Available in 19 inductance values ranging from 1.0 µH to 1 mH, the 2900 and 2900L series of low-profile, drum-core, shielded, surface-mount inductors from C&D Technologies are well-suited to space-constrained applications. The models in the 2900 series measure 7.2 by 7.2 by 4.0 mm. The 2900L versions have the same footprint but feature an overall height of just 3.15 mm. The components' integral shield protects in systems where electromagnetic interference is a concern....
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Staff
[Engineering Essentials] New Peripheral Interfaces Challenge Designers
Given the range of digital and analog interfaces available, just about anything can be a microcontroller peripheral. However, most devices for storage, displays, and communication tend to use standard interfaces, such as Serial ATA (SATA) or USB. In general, microcontrollers rarely address all of these interfaces. Knowing what devices and interfaces are available is half the job of choosing a microcontroller platform. SOFT PERIPHERAL...
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William Wong
