[Engineering Feature] UWB Seizes The USB Terrain... And That's Just The Start
I would be worried if I were a USB cable manufacturer. The beginning of the end is here—maybe not a complete end, but one that would make me rethink my product strategy. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) short-range wireless technology is now widely available, providing wireless connections between computers and their peripherals at a rate up to 400 Mbits/s. Be sure that wireless USB is just the beginning of its applications, because it offers data rates and other...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] 3G Takes Charge But 4G Looms Large
Sure, almost everyone is inextricably tied to a cell phone these days. But how much do we know about these phones? What technology drives them? And what can we expect in the future? Once you get past the alphabet soup of acronyms, the landscape gets intriguing. 3G IS HERE • Most people own 2.5G phones, which still get the job done (see "Perspective From The Past" ). Voice calls remain their primary...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] RF Development Tool Fits On A USB Stick
If you don't need the complexity that ZigBee or Bluetooth offers, but wireless capability is still a design requirement, then check out Texas Instruments' eZ430-RF2500 (Fig. 1). This device combines TI's 16-MHz 16-bit MSP430F2274 microcontroller with Chipcon's CC2500 RF transceiver chip on a removable target board (Fig. 2). This low-cost development tool is designed for...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Tires Put Pressure On RF
Tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) soon will be required on most vehicles. Designed to meet these upcoming standards, Freescale Semiconductor's MPXY8300 can fit in each tire (Fig. 1). Typically, the chip and its battery would be mounted on the valve stem. A central control unit would receive information from these remote sensors and give drivers real-time information. A TPMS can help extend the life of a tire...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Simplify Video De-interlacing And Reformatting
Most common video signals require preprocessing before encoding by video-compression codecs, which requires data to be in 420 planar format to achieve higher processing performance. For example, broadcast standards such as NTSC and PAL may need to be converted from an interlaced format to progressive scan, and they frequently require the chrominance and luminance information to be reformatted as well. In particular, video from CCD cameras is captured in an...
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Zhengting He
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Adjust 555-Based Generator's Duty Cycle Without Affecting Frequency
A free-running generator built on the standard configuration of the 555 timer can't provide a duty cycle of exactly 50%. That's a well-known fact. Fortunately, there are several ways to get around this problem. The best is to place an extra resistor, R3, between the two regular resistors, R1 and R2, and the chip's discharge pin (Fig. 1). The problem is that variations in R3 strongly affect output frequency (...
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Jordan Dimitrov
[Editorial] Engineering The Wireless Future From RFID To 4G
Welcome to Electronic Design's third annual Wireless Everywhere issue. This edition comes at a time when 3G cellular is in full swing and other technologies such as Ultra-Wideband (UWB) and nearfield communications (NFC) are beginning to penetrate the market, much like the state of Wi-Fi several years ago. And no matter where you look, you'll see wireless devices all around. Beginning with our Industry Techview, assistant editor Kristina Fiore delves...
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Joseph Desposito
[POV: Point Of View] High-Speed Bluetooth Takes A Bite Out Of Certified Wireless USB
As Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radios near mass production, manufacturers and experts alike forecast a collision between the two major protocols that will ride upon this new high-speed technology: High Speed Bluetooth and Certified Wireless USB. As both use the same WiMedia UWB radio, their emergence has led many experts to assume that one technology will dominate across all types of devices and uses, much as earlier technologies—such as Wi-Fi and even...
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Michael Foley
[Pease Porridge] What's All This God Stuff, Anyhow?
There's an old story about an American visiting Ireland. As he was imbibing a beer at a tavern, one of the locals asked him, "Now, are ye a Catholic or a Protestant?" The American replied astutely, "Neither. I'm an atheist." Then the canny Irishman asked sharply, "Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?" These days, trying to prove whether you're a Sunni atheist or a Shiite atheist in Iraq doesn't sound very easy, either. Yet it might be...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Reviving Tesla's Wireless Power Initiatives
While scientists at the turn of the 20th century were experimenting with the wireless transmission of information, like radio, Croatian-born inventor Nikola Tesla had a grander vision (Fig. 1). He imagined the wireless transmission of power—to supply "light, heat, or motive power anywhere—on sea, or land, or high in the air," he told The New York Times in 1904. With the help of the October 2006...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Chip Set Simplifies Low-Frequency Design
The collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis on August 1 was a catastrophe. But it should provoke a greater effort to monitor the movement and stresses of buildings, bridges, and rail tracks using strain gauges, piezo sensors, and other inputs receiving vibration sensor data. For designers, that means a need for low-frequency and ultra-low-frequency filters. The eponymously named AnadigmFilter1 chip set is available as a circuit-board module as well. It...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] 8-Bit, 2.2-Gsample/s ADC Offers 6.9 ENOB At 1600 MHz
Sometimes it can lighten your day to find a chip that seems to be intended to be its own worst enemy, even if it really isn't. The data sheet for Maxim Integrated Products' MAX109 8-bit, 2.2-Gsample/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC) lists radar warning receivers and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) speed-detection guns as its first two target applications. In the automotive market, radar detectors are supposed to warn speeders of a police presence. But LIDAR...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Apollo Would Approve Of This Self-Powered Wireless Sensor
The Sun God has been frowning on humanity for quite some time now as we continue to make little use of his gift that keeps giving—solar energy. But EnOcean Inc. gives him a reason to smile with its EVA120C wireless sensor kit, which relies on the company's STM110C solar-powered transmitter module (see the figure). Its small solar cell offers an integrated energy store for unrestricted functionality that lasts 60 hours...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Charge Your Gadgets Without Plugging Them In
We've all been there, forgetting to plug the cell phone, MP3 player, or other portable electronics into the recharger at night, leaving it a useless lump the next day. Part of the problem is the system itself, depending on a direct, wired link to the power infrastructure. But what if you could put your gadgets down, and they could absorb energy from the ether? Based on 10 years of research, Fulton Innovation's award-winning and heavily patented eCoupled technology...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] Cadence, Mentor Team To Open Up SystemVerilog Verification
When the SystemVerilog hardware description language (HDL) came onto the scene a few years ago, it promised true openness and interoperability. Here, crowed the hype, was an HDL that would enable designers to build testbenches and capture them in verification IP (VIP) that could be reused time and again. Further, these verification testbenches and IP would be portable across platforms and distributed environments from various EDA vendors. But the reality hasn't...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Accellera Approves Open Verification Library As Standard
Accellera has given the nod to version 2.0 of the Open Verification Library (OVL) as an Accellera verification standard. The OVL supports assertion-based verification (ABV) with Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, and the Property Specification Language (PSL). The standard includes an open-source library of assertion checkers that allow reuse in various verification environments. The OVL itself is a vendor-neutral and language-independent assertion methodology to...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] VCXOs Transmit More Data
Noise-reducing DSM technology and a proprietary low-noise architecture give the XpressO voltage-controlled crystal oscillators (VCXOs) from Fox Electronics low levels of jitter and high performance that allow more information to be transmitted than traditional programmable oscillators. They have a frequency range of 1.0 MHz to 1.1 GHz and stabilities as tight as ±20 ppm. Next-day shipping is offered for samples, and production quantities are shipped within 10...
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Staff
[TechView: Wireless] Remote Controls Go From IR To IF
An essential piece of our everyday technology is about to change. At its Technology Forum in June, Freescale Semiconductor announced its EC-net entertainment control platform, which will dispose of the typical infrared (IR) remote control that we all know and love and replace it with IEEE 802.14.4 technology (see the figure). Despite more than 30 years of service and billions in daily use, the IR remote control has...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] 60-GHz CMOS Transmitter Stimulates Millimeter-Wave Developments
How would you develop a wireless product for the 60-GHz band—yes, 60 GHz? That's millimeter-wave territory. Services exist up there now, but building 60-GHz mm-wave gear isn't an everyday design challenge. Yet as we run out of spectrum space in the lower bands, and we're just about there, more and more designs will push into the outer limits of radio. Toshiba may have a solution. Unlicensed products may be built and sold in the 57- to 64-GHz band in the...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Threads Make The Move To Open Source
The release of Intel's Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) coincides with the company's announcement to take it open source. Both are significant announcements. TBB is designed to make efficient use of multiple processing cores in a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) environment (see "Multiple Threads Make Chunk Change" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 13645). C/C++ applications utilize TBB syntactic extensions. The latest version of TBB is based on...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Module Puts Its Finger On The Pulse Of Security
Biometrics continue to be an important security solution, with fingerprint recognition among the most common implementations (see "Biometrics Wields A Double-Edged Sword" at www.electronicdesign. com, ED Online 10605). Atmel and ODI Security have combined forces to design a module that simplifies system integration. The Fingerprint Matching Module uses Atmel's FingerChip sensor and a specialized ARM7 microcontroller (...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ZigBee Kits Everywhere
ZigBee and 802.15.4 are hot these days, even though the bandwidth tops out at 250 kbits/s. Chips are available from a variety of sources. Yet many developers will use modules to simplify designs and eliminate the Federal Communications Commission approval process. I've been reviewing many of these ZigBee/802.15.4 kits, including those based on modules (see "ZigBee Kits" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 11570, and "ZigBee Kits 2" at ED...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 3U CompactPCI SBC Handles Harsh Environments
Concurrent Technologies' rugged, low-power, 3U CompactPCI TP 302/320 single-board computer (SBC) supports the 1.4-GHz Intel Pentium M processor LV 738. It uses the Intel 855GME GMCH chip set and supports up to 1 Gbyte of soldered 333-MHz DDR SDRAM. Its industrial version can handle from 40°C to 85°C. It has four serial, four USB, two Ethernet, two Serial ATA, and two IDE ports. It also supports front- and rearpanel DVI interfaces with resolutions of up to 2048...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ARM Goes Hyper
Trango Virtual Processors is delivering its virtual-machine manager (VMM) hypervisor for the ARM6 platform. The VMM supports up to 256 virtual machines (VMs) on ARM1136J(F)-STM, ARM1156T2(F)STM, and ARM1176JZ(F)-STM CPU cores. The VMs include debugging and power-management support. Global services and resources can be configured using the company's Eclipse-based software development kit (SDK). ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Real-Time Java Gets Data Distribution Services
Real-Time Innovations' Real-Time Specification for Java Extensions Kit for RTI Data Distribution Service and Sun Java Real Time System brings the Object Management Group's Data Distribution Service to Java developers. It allows distributed and heterogeneous systems written in C, C++, Ada, and Java to share information using DDS. Pricing begins at $7200 for UltraSPARC and x86 hosts. www.rti.com...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Wireless Wide Open?
It was bound to happen. Hacking into Apple's iPhone via its Web browser shouldn't surprise developers (see "Security Firm: iPhone Can Be Hacked" at www.electronicdesign.com,ED Online 16177). The iPhone is based on Apple's OS X operating system and applications, which have tended to draw less fire from attackers than Windows. But large systems are bound to have holes. Most developers don't have to contend with the iPhone yet. Yet the number of new networked devices,...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Phones Go Open Source
Cell phones have been closed devices since their inception, but things are changing as standard platforms emerge. Open-Moko's Neo 1973 is a stylish device with a 266-MHz ARM-based Samsung S3C2410 system-on-a-chip that runs GNU/Linux and has a GNU/Linux-based development environment. The software platform uses the X window system and the GTK+ toolkit. It has a 2.8-in. VGA TFT color display, 128 Mbytes of RAM, and 64 Mbytes of NAND flash with a 512-Mbyte SDIOcapable ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Software-Defined Radio Platform Gets Tiny
Gumstix and PrismTech are partnering to bring software-defined radio (SDR) to the tiny (80 by 20 mm) Gumstix platform. The PrismTech Spectra OE SCA-compliant software runs on the XScale microcontroller on top of Linux. The software includes an SCA 2.2.2 framework, CORBA middleware, and CORBA Object Services. PrismTech's model-based Spectra Tool suite supports the system. www.gumstix.com ...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] WiMAX Products And Services Roll Out
What is WiMAX? WiMAX means Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. Also known as 802.16, it is an IEEE broadband wireless standard designed for high-speed wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable TV and DSL or 3G cell-phone access. What is the status of the standards? Both versions of the 802.16 standard are fully ratified. The earlier standard, 802.16d (also known as...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design FAQs] NAND Flash Memory
What is NAND flash memory? NAND flash is a type of nonvolatile memory that is accessed like a mass storage device (e.g., a hard drive). A form of electronically erasable programmable readonly memory (EEPROM), NAND flash is programmed, erased, and reprogrammed in large blocks. It's called NAND because at the circuit level, it's similar to the NAND logic function. Another type of flash is NOR flash (...
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Daniel Harris
[Engineering Essentials] Do-It-Yourself Wireless Design
Not a wireless engineer? Got a C in your college class on Maxwell's equations? And you want to add wireless functionality to your next project? Don't worry about it— it's easier than you think. Wireless can be a great choice to give a project cache or distinguish it from the competition. Just follow a few key guidelines, and you can graduate to the level of wireless engineer. For the sake of reference, "short-range wireless" here doesn't refer to cell phones...
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Louis E. Frenzel
