[Engineering Feature] Would You Believe...? Machine Vision Gets Smarter
Intelligent video’s expanding presence in all sorts of applications is driven by several factors: the shift from analog to digital sensing; improved wired and wireless networking; and more sophisticated software. The latest systems push beyond basic image sensing and capture capabilities to image analysis, thanks to powerful video-processing hardware and intelligent video software. Today’s intelligent cameras are replacing yesterday’s PCbased systems in terms...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Optimal Opto: A Marriage of Optics And Semis
For many years, engineers successfully integrated optics and electronics by using a standard silicon CMOS process for small-bandwidth structures like photodetectors. Advances in performance and integration densities continue to energize this niche, such as with the venerable silicon photodiode in terms of functionality. Photodiode advances may fall under the radar a bit, but more visible progress can be seen with ICs like detectors, sensors, LEDs, ...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] Embedded Algorithms Enable Low-Cost Cell-Phone Zooming
Digital cameras, by themselves and in cell phones, represent one of the hottest segments of the consumer market. To compete, designers need to lower their costs while improving performance. Tessera Israel achieves these goals as well as better reliability with software algorithms that eliminate the need for conventional mechanical zooming. The company’s OptiML Zoom uses optical distortion to zoom in on an image with up to 3X magnification. This solution...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Designing For High Speed In Current-To-Voltage Conversion
Communications channels used to be a challenging exercise in pure analog design. Today, modulation occurs in the digital domain in many systems. But the transmitted signal is analog, so there’s always a conversion. For any communications system, choices for the digital- to-analog converter (DAC) and its current-to-voltageconverting op amp depend on the required bandwidth. As DACs and op amps get faster, they move closer to the transmitting...
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John Ardizzoni
[Ideas For Design] "Intelligent NiCd Charger Avoids Battery Damage From High Currents
Care must be exercised when you try to “quickly” charge a nickel-cadmium (NiCd) cell or battery pack at a current density that approaches or exceeds one-third of its capacity (C/3). As the battery becomes fully charged, the high charging current raises both the internal cell pressure and temperature, which can quickly degrade the battery or destroy it. One way to avoid damage is to monitor the differential temperature (TDIFF) between the...
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Joseph Diecidue
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[Editorial] Are You Screaming For Help With Prototypes?
At last month's Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, I met with Duane Benson, the Web marketing manager for Screaming Circuits. The company assembles prototypes in as little as 24 hours for one or more boards. You simply send it a package of parts along with the unpopulated printed-circuit board (PCB), and Screaming Circuits will assemble it for you. Screaming Circuits’ assembly capabilities include machine-placed surface-mount...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This One-Transistor Op-Amp Stuff, Anyhow?
One day, back about 1966, I was going up the elevator at 285 Columbus Avenue in Boston to look at some production problems on Philbrick’s fifth floor. And who was in the elevator, but George Philbrick’s friend Jim Pastoriza. Jim was going up to show George his new analog computer demonstrator—portable and battery-powered. In fact, it was running, and he gave me a demo right on the elevator as we ascended. And, this modular analog computer ran on a couple of...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Digital] The "Ferros" Would Be Proud Of This New NVM
In ancient Egypt, the Horus of Gold represented a form of a pharaoh’s name most typically thought to mean “superior to his foes” and associated with eternity. These qualities would be highly desirable in any nonvolatile memory (NVM) product. Now suppose you could take a standard serial flash memory and add virtually unlimited endurance and the ability to perform write operations at bus speed. That’s right—no write delays after data reaches the memory device, and...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] Try-Before-You-Buy IP Distribution Program Segues Into Implementation
As FPGAs become an increasingly popular implementation platform, their complexity rises accordingly, thanks largely to the proliferation of processor and peripheral IP. A study done by Synplicity last fall found that one-third of all designs implemented on FPGA these days carries at least some IP. With so many designers implementing IP on FPGAs, it would be useful if they had a vehicle through which they can acquire, evaluate, and...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Will Virtualization Save The Day?
Will virtualization save multicore? Will it be the answer to a really secure system? It might. Designed to run on a single core, virtual- machine hypervisors give developers multiple virtual cores. Developers don’t need to care about whether there are enough physical cores available from an application standpoint. Of course, with more cores, you get more run time for virtual cores. But this doesn’t change how the applications are written or how they ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Virtualization Moves Onto Custom Microcontroller
VIRTUALIZATION MOVES ONTO CUSTOM MICROCONTROLLER Developers using Atmel’s line of microcontrollers based on its ARM-based CAP architecture (see “Chip Twists ARM With Custom Logic” at www.electronicdesign. com, ED Online 15982) can now take advantage of Trango’s Hypervisor virtualization software. CAP’s FPGA-style logic is locked down at the factory before the chips ship, but Hypervisor works on these as well ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] VMM Targets Handsets
VMM TARGETS HANDSETS VirtualLogix’s VLX for Mobile Handsets targets high-performance cell phones based on the ARM11. The platform can handle realtime operating-system (RTOS) clients as well as OSs such as Linux. The Eclipse-based VLX Developer supports the platform and includes platform configuration and monitoring tools. VIRTUALLOGIX • ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Hypervisor Gets Secure
HYPERVISOR GETS SECURE Green Hills Software’s Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor technology now delivers EAL6+ Common Criteria Security compliance. The technology runs atop Green Hills Software’s Integrity real-time operatingsystem separation kernel. The environment offers multilevel security, even providing trusted paths to shared keyboard and mouse interfaces as well as supoprt for multifactor authentication...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Microcontroller Combines LCD And Touchscreen Support
MICROCONTROLLER COMBINES LCD, TOUCHSCREEN SUPPORT Freescale’s Controller Continuum received another bump with the addition of the ColdFire MCF5227x LCD family of chips, based on the V2 core. A V3 version is available with a compatible but different peripheral complement, so the pinout isn’t the same. The MCF5227x includes an LCD controller that handles SVGA displays (800 by 600) and a resistive touchscreen...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Vector Floating-Point Unit Speeds ARM9
VECTOR FLOATING-POINT UNIT SPEEDS ARM9 NXP’s 90-nm, 208-MHz LPC32x0 is based on ARM’s ARM926EJ-S core plus a vector floating-point (VFP) coprocessor. The chip has 256 kbytes of SRAM plus 32-kbyte instruction and data caches. It can handle off-chip SDR and DDR RAM, NAND flash, and an SD memory card interface. Peripherals include 10/100 Ethernet, full-speed USB OTG, a 24-bit LCD controller, and a threechannel, ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multicore VMM Tames Windows
MULTICORE VMM TAMES WINDOWS TenAsys’ new eVM hypervisor allows a range of operating systems including realtime operating systems to coexist with Windows on multicore processors. It takes advantage of the Intel VT virtualization hardware found in Intel chips such as the dual-core and quad-core Core 2 Duo to support platforms such as Linux, QNX, and VxWorks. It can handle multiple cores as well as multiple...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Secure MCU Drives Network Applications
SECURE MCU DRIVES NETWORK APPLICATIONS Applied Micro Circuits’ 500-MHz PowerPC 440EPr incorporates floating-point support and a Turbo Security Engine to manage secure, high-performance network applications. It also can handle protocols like IPsec, STRP, and SSL. The 440EPr has dual Gig Ethernet ports, a 32-bit PCI interface, USB 2.0 host/device with integrated PHY, and a 32-bit DDR2 memory controller. It also...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Standard Serial Backplanes Dominate New Designs
It’s likely that your current designs have you pushing the proverbial envelope. If so, then high-speed serial interfaces are the way to go. Their overall bandwidth beats their parallel counterparts. Also, the newer technologies offer plenty of other benefits, such as lower pin counts and hot-swap support. The clear leader is PCI Express (PCIe), followed by Ethernet, Serial RapidIO, and InfiniBand. HyperTransport remains a chip-to-chip link, even though...
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William Wong
[Lab Bench] SUMIT Brings Big Improvements In Small Packages
Designing a small-form-factor system with interfaces like USB or SPI is relatively simple with a microcontroller and a custom board. But things get a little more interesting when you’re going between boards or starting with modules. Module standards like COM Express (see “COM Express: A New Standard” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online ...
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William Wong
[Analog/Mixed-Signal Design] Using Delta-Sigma Can Be As Easy As ADC
As an application engineer, I spend a lot of time convincing customers that a delta-sigma modulating analog-to-digital converter (ADC), or DSM, would be the best choice for their particular application. Then they come up with all sorts of excuses for why they prefer a successive-approximation ADC. I’ve come to the conclusion that they prefer successiveapproximation ADCs because they fundamentally don’t understand how a DSM works, perhaps because DSMs involve...
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Dave Van Ess
