[Engineering Feature] Portable Craze Redefines The Dashboard
TText, blog, or twitter hands-free while driving. Access your car’s iPod media player to change tracks and adjust the volume without lifting a finger. Even host a three-way telephone call via a Bluetooth device without your hands leaving the steering wheel. No longer content with standard features for low-end and mid-range cars, drivers expect satellite navigation, multizone climate control, satellite radio, and even beverage refrigeration as standard items. ...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Dev Kits Help Alleviate Those FPGA Design Woes
Design at the logic level for board-level products is rare. If it can’t be done with a microcontroller or two, then what’s a designer to do? FPGAs have been the answer for years, but FPGA tools required a steep learning curve. Likewise, FPGAs had a price premium and high power requirements, and external support requirements often proved challenging. All of that has changed, though. Inexpensive FPGAs are now the norm. High-performance products remain...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] 45-nm Via-Programmable ASICs Add High-Speed I/O Transceivers To Feature Mix
ASIC design starts have plummeted in recent years, and there are many good reasons why. Designs at ultra-deep-submicron process nodes are awfully expensive and getting more so daily as mask costs rise, software content proliferates, and verification takes longer. Meanwhile, the steady rise of application-specific standard products (ASSPs) has also contributed heavily to the ASIC’s marketshare slide. Thus, many designers have turned to alternative...
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David Maliniak
[Design View / Design Solution] Eye-Diagram Analysis Speeds DDR SDRAM Validation
Double-data-rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM) physical-layer testing is a crucial step in making sure devices comply with the JEDEC specification. The ultimate goal is to guarantee interoperability when different memory devices are used together and that they work when powered up. Fundamentally, interoperability begins at the physical layer. For a DDR memory interface, the responsibility of good physical-layer performance falls at...
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Min Jie Chong
[Ideas For Design] Simple PWM Modulator Allows DC Control Signal To Drive LEDs
LED-driver circuits can be dimmed by applying a variable duty cycle (pulse-width modulation, or PWM) to the LED. PWM exploits LED behavior: At higher current levels, the LED’s light output is higher for a given level of power dissipation (temperature). Thus, applying PWM current to the LED yields an average power comparable to that of dc control, but with higher operating current and greater light output. Even if the...
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Ahmad Ayar
[Ideas For Design] Narrow-Shift Digital Discriminator Detects Differential GPS Corrections
The U.S. Coast Guard transmits differential corrections to GPS signals (DGPS) via low-frequency (285- to 325-kHz) beacons. Transmission data rates are 100 or 200 bits/s. The modulation is minimum-shift keying (MSK), resulting in a pseudo frequency-shift keying (FSK) with a carrier shift of half the bit rate. For a 100-bits/s signal, the carrier shift is only ±25 Hz. With a receiver IF frequency of 1 kHz, the IF signal shifts between 975 and 1025 Hz. The...
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John M. Franke
[Ideas For Design] Use Inexpensive Components To Create An Infrared Close-Object Alert Circuit
Many robotic applications require a sensor to detect close or very close obstacles. Typically, reflective-type infrared sensors are used for this task. But the circuit in the figure shows an infrared close-object alert system built around two popular and less expensive integrated circuits: the LM555 timer and CD4060 CMOS, 14-stage, ripplecarrying binary counter/divider and oscillator. At the heart of the circuit lies a CNY70 reflective opto...
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T.K. Hareendran
[Editorial] For Consumer Electronics, The Holidays Start In July
As an editor with a major electronics magazine, I’m invited to industry events all the time. Come July, though, I start receiving invitations from public relations folks for events that are really outside the magazine’s coverage—events that show the hottest consumer electronics items for the coming holiday season. I can’t resist the temptation. Could you? SAMSUNG HOLIDAY IN JULY Samsung Electronics recently held its...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Output Impedance Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 2)
When I present seminars, I often ask the members of the audience to hold up their hands if they think bipolar op amps have better gain and linearity than CMOS. I get a good majority of hands. But neither is bad! The good-old LM301A (well over 30 years old) has a good gain of 260,000 at no load, with just 75 µV p-p of gain error while its output is swinging 20 V p-p (Fig. 1). What happens ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Analog & Power] Chips Help Supercaps Flash White LEDs Brighter For Higher-Res Photos
As digital-camera and phone-camera resolution increases, high-resolution image sensors require more light. Firstgeneration low-res camera phones provided barely adequate flash intensity for taking closeups of friends at parties. Even second-generation camera-phone flash is still unsuitable for image sensors with greater than 3-Mpixel resolution. And that’s just talking about still photography. Video requires in-phone camera lighting to provide...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] IC Power Amp Targets Mobile WiMAX Apps
The mobile version of the WiMAX broadband wireless technology is beginning to roll out as laptop manufacturers add it to their PCs and as other companies make wireless access points for the home and office. Now, all of these designers have access to a WiMAX power amplifier (PA) thanks to SiGe Semiconductor. The SE7262L is a 2.5-GHz PA for batterypowered devices. It delivers 28.5 dBm of output power (708 mW) with an efficiency of 20%—not bad...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Cold, Dense, And Gratis MCU Core Targets FPGAs
Did you know that at 5515 kg/m3, Earth is the densest planet in our solar system? Most of that density is made up in the Earth’s core, which became so dense during the early stages of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year life in a process called planetary differentiation. During this process, and while the Earth was still a ball of molten elements, denser substances such as iron sank toward the center, and the dense core as we know it today was formed. Not to be...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Wireless] ZigBee Wireless Module Sports 32-Bit ARM Processor
Lots of companies make IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee wireless modules, but only California Eastern Laboratories (CEL) offers one with an internal 32-bit ARM processor. The FreeStar Pro is a complete radio module that’s ready to go as a node in wireless network (see the figure). Based on Freescale Semiconductor’s MC13224V Platform-in-Package (PiP), the FreeStar Pro features the ARM 32-bit ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Engineering Essentials] Modern DSP Chips Serve Up Variations On A Theme
Digital signal processors (DSPs) earn their living by doing certain analog jobs better than analog circuitry. In some cases, where analog circuits can’t even be considered for a task due to cost or complexity reasons, DSPs are still a viable choice and in many cases perform those tasks effortlessly. That’s because DSPs are very good and very fast at arithmetic operations such as addition and multiplication. Clever mathematicians and engineers exploit this...
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Joseph Desposito
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Create Stable, Reliable, And Efficient Tantalum Capacitors
Ceramic capacitors are rapidly increasing in capacitance and volumetric efficiency (CV/cc) due to higher dielectric constants and smaller dielectric thickness as well as higher layer counts. To compete with ceramic capacitors and meet demands for miniaturization, tantalum (Ta) capacitors also need to increase their volumetric efficiency. Traditionally, the only way to increase CV/cc in Ta capacitors was to reduce particle size in the Ta powder, thereby...
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Yuri Freeman
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[EEPN In Electronic Design] Engineer Seeks Cure For Common Wall Warts
With the mass proliferation of mobile devices and various computer and homeentertainment peripherals, most of us suffer from a bad case of wall warts. Doug Palmer, a principal development engineer at the San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), uses the phrase “wall warts” to describe the plethora of external power supplies that vie for position in his and our wall sockets and power strips...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] White LEDs Clear Another Brightness Bar
Ceramic capacitors are rapidly increasing in capacitance and volumetric efficiency (CV/cc) due to higher dielectric constants and smaller dielectric thickness as well as higher layer counts. To compete with ceramic capacitors and meet demands for miniaturization, tantalum (Ta) capacitors also need to increase their volumetric efficiency. Traditionally, the only way to increase CV/cc in Ta capacitors was to reduce particle size in the Ta powder, thereby...
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Mat Dirjish
[Lab Bench] MILS, MSL, MLS: Figuring Out All Those Secure Acronyms
Few embedded designs are isolated these days. Still, most users and quite a few developers only think of names and passwords when it comes to security. Yet there’s much more, and it really needs to be incorporated throughout the design process. It also means you need to grok security. I thought I did until I had to complete a more complex installation of multiple Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) systems running as virtual machines (VMs) on a Xen server. I ...
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William Wong
[Analog/Mixed-Signal Design] Using Delta-Sigma Can Be As Easy As ADC (Part 2)
In my previous column, I took a historical approach to delta-sigma modulation with the single-slope converter (May 8, p. 18, ED Online 18747). Jim Williams of Linear Tech responded, and he sent me a copy of a 1949 article by D.H. Wilkinson on single-slope analogto- digital converters (ADCs). “I’m aware of their obvious weaknesses, but the simplistic elegance of the...
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Dave Van Ess
