March 5, 2001 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: MARCH 5, 2001

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Transceiver chip set, Logic analyzers, Mixed-signal EDA, Embedded in ED

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March 5, 2001 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
Logic Analyzers Employ Speed And Channels To Keep Pace With Fast Technologies
Tracking down bugs in complex digital systems is a mighty challenge for design engineers, especially considering the rocketing speeds of microprocessors, buses, and other elements in these systems. To meet these challenges, manufacturers of logic... — Joseph Desposito

[Product Innovation]
Transceiver Chip Set Wrings Out GSM Phone Costs
Designing a low-cost multiband cell phone just got easier. Silicon Laboratories' Aero chip set provides a complete two- or three-band GSM transceiver using only a few external components. This three-chip set includes the Si4200 transceiver IC, the... — Louis E. Frenzel

[Design Application]
Automated Top-Down Design Rapidly Becoming Essential For Mixed-Signal Circuitry
Nowadays, the methodologies of top-down design and bottom-up verification are well accepted standards in the world of digital design. But this wasn't always the case. Prior to the availability of hardware description languages (HDLs), when designs... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Linear-RMS Phase Control Improves Thyristor-Based Thermostat
Precision temperature control circuits for small thermal loads like oscillator crystals and voltage references tend to be fairly easy to design. This is because simple, well-behaved, linear-output drivers running from regulated dc supplies are often... — W. Stephen Woodward

[Ideas For Design]
Compact, Inductorless Boost Circuit Regulates White LED Bias
The increasing use of color LCDs in handheld equipment has created a need for smaller and cheaper sources of white backlight. In the past, cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) and electroluminescent (EL) panels have been employed. But such... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Design Method Allows Tradeoffs In Anti-Aliasing Filter Design
This idea details a design method for making anti-aliasing prefilter parameter tradeoffs between several factors. These factors include the filter pass-band magnitude accuracy, the filter order (the number of poles), the ratio of sample frequency to... — Frank N. Vitalijic

[Editorial]
Creativity Burnout: Are Too Few Trying To Do Too Much?
Fantastic products have resulted from the creative excitement and drive in the electronics industry. This imaginative energy also has brought amazing wealth to many individuals. I applaud the courage and perseverance of readers who have succeeded as... — Dave Bursky

[Pease Porridge]
What's All This Knot Stuff, Anyhow? (Part I)
Let's get the ball rolling with square knots and half-hitches. When I was a lad, a mere tenderfoot, I was learning the lore of the Boy Scouts. I still have a lot of respect for them, even though I don't happen to agree with 100% of their ideas.... — Bob Pease

[Viewpoint]
New Display Technologies Expand Possibilities As They Challenge CRTs
Product designers, with an eye toward the coming information explosion, are designing flat-panel displays with a multitude of applications. These include full-color automotive center-console displays, navigation and passenger entertainment units,... — Contributing Author

[Editor's Notebook]
Analog CMOS Races To Narrow Technology Gap With Digital ICs
Amid the fervor to move the next generation of microprocessors, memories, and other digital circuits to 0.13-µm CMOS production lines this year, analog and mixed-signal IC suppliers are racing to adopt 0.25-µm design features. They're... — Ashok Bindra

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Debugging As Art
But even today, some designs don't require top-down methodology or bottom-up verification. Examples include simple analog designs or designs with no feedback between the analog and digital sections. In either case, traditional analog design and... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Hardware Products
1-GHz Pentium III Drives VME SBC VMIC (800) 322-3616, www.vmic.com Pentium-class processors have built a large base in embedded servers, even in VME. Today, these servers run with the latest... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Advanced Microprocessor Bus Architecture (AMBA) Bus System
Silicon densities, both for ASICs and FPGAs, can now support true systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). This level of design requires busing systems to connect various components, including 1 or more microprocessors, memory, peripherals, and special logic.... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Network-Based Debugging: Internet Appliances In The Wild
Whether local or over the Internet, network-based debugging has changed the way applications are developed and tested. Changes were first necessary to accommodate PC-based network applications. Now they're needed to address the plethora of embedded... — William Wong

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Software Directory
HTML 4.01 The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) specification is the basis for the Internet revolution and the lingua franca of all major Web browsers. It may eventually be superceded by other specifications, like... — William Wong

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Software Products
Embedix SDK For Windows Ships Embedix SDK for Windows allows the cross development of Linux applications on NT and 2000 platforms. Targets include x86 and PowerPC. SDK includes a copy of the Metrowerks CodeWarrior... — William Wong

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Nexus 5001 Forum Global Embedded Processor Debug Interface Standard
Few debugging standards exist, which makes the Nexus 5001 Forum's Global Embedded Processor Debug Interface standard stand out. Based on the IEEE-1149.1 JTAG bus, the Nexus 5001 standard provides a way to integrate general debugging tools with... — William Wong

[The Design Factory]
Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It
Years ago, the television show Mission Impossible always began with a scene in which the team leader, Mr. Phelps, would receive a tape describing his next mission. The tape invariably began, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..."... — Don Reinertsen

[Letters]
Letters
Rich Nations Beat Poor Ones Your stated opinion in "Electronic Missile Guidance Changes Tactics And Strategy" [Dec. 4, 2000, p. 179] lacks the dimension of military reality . During the... — Various

[40 Years Ago]
High-Speed Parallel-Access Disk File
With an access time of no more than 167 msec (including 100 msec for positioning), a new magnetic disk file can store from more than 30 to almost 620 million bits. The file can include from one to 20 storage disks, each 39 in. in... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
Designers Scrutinize Solid-State Circuits, Devices
Designers took a hard look at many recent and brand new developments in solid-state technology at the 1961 International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Such components as tunnel diodes, epitaxial transistors, and microwave devices, and concepts,... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
Existing In-Home Coax Can Support Data Comm
Even though it exists in almost every home, the coax communication channel is underused. Coax ties the cable head or satellite antenna to one or more TV sets. Now, astute designers can use it to make broadband communication within the home as near... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Embedded OS Beta Version Boasts New Development Tools
The wraps are off Microsoft's Windows 2000 embedded operating system (OS). Whistler Embedded's modular design lets developers use Windows 2000's advanced features in embedded designs that now rely on Embedded Windows NT. This beta release's limited... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Conexant, TSMC Sign Long-Term SiGe Pact
Taiwan's major foundry service provider, TSMC, has signed a long-term semiconductor cross-licensing deal with RF IC supplier Conexant Systems Inc. of Newport Beach, Calif. TSMC will license Conexant's proprietary RF silicon-germanium (SiGe) biCMOS... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Design Lab Integrates Factory Elements To Speed Power-Supply Prototyping, Production
Power-supply manufacturers are feeling the heat from OEMs that need custom units delivered quickly. First, they're pressured to rapidly deliver prototype supplies so customers can complete the design and verification work on their products. Once the... — David G. Morrison

[Forefront]
DSP Developer's Kit Expedites Imaging And Video System Prototyping
To accelerate the development of advanced imaging and video applications, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas, Texas, has readied a developer's kit that includes a complete reference design and all of the necessary hardware components and applications... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
PC-Connectivity Solution Simplifies T&M Equipment Use
Research and development engineers involved with product development often encounter instrument connectivity problems. Test-system developers in manufacturing run into such difficulties as well. Beyond pressure to shrink product cycles and speed... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
From The Labs
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has set up a research center devoted to distributed power. While the trend toward distributed power designs has been growing steadily in electronic equipment and... — Staff

[Forefront]
Researchers Stop Light Dead In Its Tracks—And Start It Again
Photons are the fastest and most robust carriers of information, but they are difficult to localize and store. Yet experimenters have successfully brought a light pulse to a full stop, trapping it in a vapor of rubidium (Rb) atoms. The researchers... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Company Wire
Semiconductor maker Mitsubishi Electric has agreed to pay royalties to Rambus, becoming the seventh such company to sign a patent license agreement with the chip designer. Mitsubishi will pay royalties for memory chip designs and chip... — Staff

[Forefront]
Second-Generation FPGA Delivers Platform-Level Capabilities
FPGAs are now system components. They can serve as a logic subsystem or as a processor platform. Not only have densities risen to the 6- to 10-Mgate range, but functionality has also shifted from pure logic to a full spectrum of implementation... — Ray Weiss

[Forefront]
Off-Line Linear Regulator Offers Adjustable Output Voltages
Designed for off-line power-supply applications, the LR8 three-terminal 450-V linear regulator has adjustable output voltages. This high-voltage, low-output current regulator suits telecom power supplies that encounter wide input-voltage variations... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Chip Set Adds Audio To Video Transfer In The Digital Visual Interface Link
Early digital visual interface (DVI) implementations only handled video, making no provision for carrying companion audio (see "Two-Chip Set Safeguards Digital Video Content," Electronic Design, June 12, 2000, p. 68). But a new chip... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Stereo Codec Includes Integrated Headphone Driver
Designed for portable MP3 players and recorders, the WM8731 is Wolfson Microelectronics' new-est low-power stereo codec. It comes with an integrated headphone driver and provides programmable sample rates from a single clock source. Also, it... — Ashok Bindra

[Real-World Engineering]
Good Designs Flow From The Art, As Well As The Science, Of Engineering
The SCIENCE of engineering is the mathematics, physics, and scientific experimentation used to size the parameters and predict the performance of circuits, fields, mechanisms, and structures. Much of design engineering is the application of... — Lawrence J. Kamm

[Heads Up]
Microdisplay Innovation Driving Optical Switch Development
One of the hottest technology sectors right now is the all-optical switch for fiber-optic communications and data networks. Interestingly, its developers are leveraging technologies produced for microdisplays in a quest to supply components to drive... — Chris Chinnock

[New Products]

• Capacitors And Potentiometers — Staff

• Discrete Semiconductors — Staff

• Interconnects — Staff

• Packaging — Staff

• Test And Measurement — Staff

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