[Engineering Feature] Cooperation Leads To Complex, Real-World Simulations
If you build it, they will control it. These days, the building is going on virtually since soft systems are faster and easier to build. Some systems may never be turned into physical entities, but knowing what will work ahead of time can save time and money. Yet the quality of simulations can vary significantly, especially when open-loop or closed-loop control is part of the equation. Likewise, the cost of creating more accurate simulations can be very high. It's...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] WiMAX: The Real Deal
Like any emerging technology, WiMAX (short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) has taken years to become available to the public. Even so, it took less time than most new wireless technologies. It developed quickly from an idea to a formal standard to real products and services in just a few years. Many chips are now available, and products are beginning to flow. But best of all, several large carriers are beginning to offer broadband wireless services with...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Embedded 32-Bit Cores Hit 1 GHz
The demands of multimedia are pushing hardware to extremes, requiring advanced architectures and support for multimedia single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instructions. DSP and graphics support also are part of the mix. Yet ARM's Cortex-A9 and MIPS32's 74K 32- bit cores both break the 1-GHz barrier. Chips based on these architectures will wind up in high-volume applications such as residential gateways with Voice over IP (VoIP) support,...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Practical Ways To Estimate, Implement, And Verify SoC Decoupling Capacitance
Deep-submicron systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) require a power-grid voltage drop of much less than 10% of VDD. Decoupling capacitors, or decaps, help achieve this goal by minimizing switching noise. Determining the amount of decap required for an SoC involves many considerations, but the task needn't be a chore. The approach described in this article allows you to allocate decap accurately and with minimal area overhead for deep-submicron (DSM) SoCs. This...
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John Pedicone
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Protect Current-Sense Amplifiers Against Overvoltage Transients
Certain current-sense amplifiers have to contend with frequent overvoltages. For example, a current-sense amplifier that monitors batterydischarge currents in an automobile must withstand high-voltage "load dump" pulses produced when loads are disconnected from the battery. This causes inductive spikes and overvoltages at the output of the alternator. If these pulses exceed the amplifier's common-mode voltage, the amplifier requires external...
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Prashanth Holenarsipur
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Simple Circuit Additions Power A Microcontroller Through Its Load
Many small microcontrollers require so little power that often they can draw what they need through their loads. This can simplify a system, reduce its cost, increase its reliability, and provide unexpected benefits. One example is an automotive check system that monitors a car's brake lights and indicates any faults through an incandescent bulb in the instrument cluster, LMP1 (Fig. 1)....
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John Firestone
[Ideas For Design] Microcontroller Interface Delivers Standard 4- To 20-mA Output
Voltage-to-current converters that feed grounded loads are common in industrial measurement and control applications. The conventional "textbook" circuit uses both positive and negative supply rails. An earlier article by this author titled "Voltage-To-Current Converter Works From A Single Supply Rail" (Electronic Design, Feb. 17, 2003, ED Online 2985) described a circuit that could power grounded loads and needed only a positive ...
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R. Jayapal
[POV: Point Of View] And They're Off! WiMAX, LTE, UMB, And The Race To 4G Wireless
By the yardstick of typical wireless standards, the development of WiMAX has been meteoric. In 2001, it became an acronym. By 2004, it was an approved standard for fixed service. By late 2005, it was an approved mobile standard. And today, it’s moving toward wide-scale deployment. The big question, of course, is whether WiMAX will live up to its potential as a classic disruptive technology and strike fear into the hearts of the proponents of the other communications services with...
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Justin Panzer
[Editorial] Power Electronics Technology Conference Gets A Makeover
I'll be travelling to Dallas, Texas, to cover the Power Electronics Technology Exhibition and Conference, formerly known as PowerSystems World. If you ever attended that event, you know that it attracted a mixed bag of power companies. In one aisle, you might have seen a company hawking its latest flywheel technology, while an aisle later you may have found a manufacturer of dcdc converter chips. That all has changed, and for good reason. David Morrison, editor of...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] Pease Porridge
Bob: As we were landing at O'Hare Airport last week, I was observing the runway and taxiway lighting. I immediately noticed that the lights are now LEDs. Would you believe that even these are designed to operate off the standard 6.6-A constant current system? (See www.flightlight.com/airportlighting/ 1.1/1.1.2.html.) This fixture is rated at only 3 W, which means it apparently drops 0.5 V at 6.6 A (perhaps 1.0 V or more with transformer losses?). There is still a power...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] TI Wireless Tech To Connect Medical Devices With HealthVault
For diabetes patients, a quick stick of the finger will soon reveal more than blood sugar levels. With glucometers that can wirelessly connect to Microsoft's HealthVault online health information center, patients can upload their stats and download relevant medical advice anytime, anywhere. Texas Instruments has agreed to bundle software on some of its existing wireless products so companies can produce connected medical devices that will...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Do They Play Nice Together? Don't Look At Chips And Reference Desgins In Isolation
What's more important in new product announcements- new levels of performance, or the availability of design tools that make those performance levels accessible? Many designers no longer have the luxury of enough development time to breadboard, refine, and test circuits assembled from parts from multiple chip vendors-assuming designers aren't paying too much of a premium for what the marketing people call a "platform" or a "solution." ...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] COTS LCD Controller Boards Tackle Harsh Environments Like Pros
With the proliferation of devices being deployed to harsh environments, commercial off-theshelf (COTS) parts are needed to keep up with the demand. And since LCDs can be found in just about every new design, it would be nice to have a controller that could handle the environment without batting a logic bit. That's why Digital View added two models to its Harsh Environment (HE) series of COTS LCD controller boards.The HE-1400 and HE-1600 are...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] 8051 MCU Gives Ferroelectric Memory A Try
The 8051-based VRS51L3072 microcontroller from Ramtron offers 2 kbytes of F-RAM nonvolatile ferroelectric memory. F-RAM memory was added to the Versa 8051 family for a quick and reliable nonvolatile data storage and processing system that's ideal for saving system status, data logging, and storing nonvolatile variables for applications ranging from sensors and meters to industrial controls, instrumentation, ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] ATPG Tool Meets Growing Demand For Scan Test Compression
As IC design sizes continue to double every 18 to 24 months, those charged with testing the finished product are challenged on multiple fronts. Test-data volume and testing time are expanding, while manufacturing throughput is reduced. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) predicts that by 2008 the industry will need 200 times more test-data volume compression, with the requirement growing exponentially over the next five years. ...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] True-3D Chip-Layout Editor Facilitates Stacking Of Disparate Wafers
Say you wanted to create a chip in which a processor fabricated in 32-nm process rules would be combined with memory done on a 65-nm process and analog blocks fabricated at 180 nm. This leads you to consider chip/wafer-stacking technologies, most of which are out of the question for existing layout editors. A favored technique for chip stacking, known as through-silicon via wafer stacking, allows distinct wafers to be stacked on each other and...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Programmable Spread-Spectrum Clock Generators Make EMI Reduction A Snap
Today's increasing processor speeds and bus and networking data rates have made electromagnetic interference (EMI) a major headache. EMI compromises a design and interferes with nearby circuits. It also forces special hardware measures to meet FCC and other regulations. Yet SpectraLinear's fully programmable SL15100 and SL15101 spread-spectrum clock generators (SSCGs) can drop EMI to a practical level. Spread-spectrum clocking is finding its way...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Basics Of Design] A Mechatronics Approach To FPGA Development
As field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) continue to drop in price while adding significant capability, their use has expanded greatly in industrial control and monitoring applications. And since FPGAs are in-system/field-programmable and highly flexible, while including a plethora of drop-in functionality, they are ideal for rapid development and upfront system verification. Add the capability of constructing algorithms built from...
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Daniel Harris
[Design FAQs] Resistor Trimming
What kinds of applications utilize precision resistor trimming? Obvious applications include setting operational-amplifier gain and offset and voltage regulator output (Fig. 1a and 1b). But there are many others, such as sensor bridges and various specialty IC applications (Fig. 1c). ...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] Battery ICs Charge, Gauge, And Authenticate
OEMs and battery pirates are constantly in a quality-control tug of war. So how do companies ward off deviants and dodge the lemons? Battery-management ICs fall into three basic categories: chargers, gas gauges, and authentication chips. Chargers control how a charging current is safely applied to a battery pack. Gas gauges tell the system how much charge is stored in the battery at any given time. Authentication chips indicate whether the installed battery is...
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Don Tuite
[EEPN In Electronic Design] OLEDs Set To Become Staples Of High-Res Displays
On Oct. 9, Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. revealed that it will create the market's first high-resolution active-matrix (AM) display panel using organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Samsung SDI will use Clairvoyante's PenTile RGB proprietary subpixel rendering technology to achieve this feat. Mating Samsung's expertise in display design and Clairvoyante's unique technology appears to be the ticket for meeting the top challenges-performance and...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Shielding Considerations For High-Speed Microminiature Connector Systems
As applications such as flat-panel displays and mobile phones enter the giga-level transferspeed range, connector makers are being challenged to provide compact designs that offer sufficient shielding to manage impedance control and noise emissions. Various methods are being employed for connectors across the board to address the dual challenges of reducing size while still controlling electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radiofrequency interference...
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Tom Tyrrell
