July 10, 2000 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: JULY 10, 2000

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Fast USB chip, Physical-layer management, Network processors, SiGe HBTs, Circuit aging

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July 10, 2000 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
Network Processors Take The High Road... And The Low Road
When it comes to processing wire-speed packets with a time-to-market that ASIC system designers will envy, network processors promise to beat the pants off of conventional processors. Envelope-pushing network-hardware designers simply have to decide... — William Wong

[Technology Report]
Silicon-Germanium HBTs Merge With Mainstream CMOS Process
Only a few years ago, there was tremendous uncertainty about the commercial feasibility of transforming homojunction silicon bipolar transistors into silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), for higher-switching... — Ashok Bindra

[Product Innovation]
Integrated USB 2.0 Chip Extends Its Reach To High-Speed Peripherals
For most of its young life, the Universal Serial Bus, commonly known as USB, has been relegated to the slow lane. While designers have developed USB keyboards, mice, and 56k modems, high-speed peripherals have overpowered the current USB 1.1 bus.... — Joseph Desposito

[Product Innovation]
Physical-Layer Management Simplified By Enterprise Networking System
Most of today's networking equipment—such as switches, routers, and file servers—can be managed remotely by a variety of methods. The most basic networking aspect of this is the physical-layer interface that connects all network devices... — Roger Allan

[Design Application]
Circuit Aging: A New Phenomenon For SoC Designs
The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry continues to face new challenges as it targets ever shrinking deep-submicron geometries. Each successive advancement of semiconductor technology has brought about a new very-deep-submicron (VDSM)... — Contributing Author

[Design Application]
Use Shielded Electronic Enclosures To Meet EMC Standards
Knowledge of shielding options and how to implement them into initial product designs is vital to producing an electronic packaging product that satisfies several important design objectives. A properly applied shielding solution will meet standards... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Improved Photodiode Pre-Amp Uses Current-Feedback Amplifier
Asignificant problem with using photodiodes in fast applications like barcode scanners, CD-ROMs, and DVDs is that the diode has a high output capacitance. Combined with the input impedance of the pre-amp stage, this capacitance generally limits the... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Cascaded Common-Gate FET IC Provides Flexible Level Translation
Today’s complex systems often feature a multitude of devices incorporating several different logic power families. In order for these mixed-mode systems to operate properly, some type of voltage translation and voltage clamping is needed. This... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Differential Receiver/Driver Overcomes Noisy Grounds
The line-driver circuit is used to provide a precise voltage from a source with a noisy ground reference to a remote load that also has a noisy ground reference (see the figure). In this application, the... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Positive Feedback Terminates Cables
This Idea For Design was originally published March 6, 1995. Positive feedback along with a series output resistor can provide a controlled output impedance from an op-amp circuit, with lower losses than would result from using an... — Jerry Steele

[Editorial]
If Music Cravings Topple Networks, What Will Video Do?
Over the last few months, many stories in the consumer press have detailed the popularity of MP3 music files and the avid downloading of such files by both office workers and college students. The popularity of these music downloads is slowing down... — Dave Bursky

[Pease Porridge]
What's All This Compensation Stuff, Anyhow? (Part III)
I got an e-mail from a reader: "I sat down hoping to read about compensation of op amps and feedback loops. What I got was your 'Compensation Part II'—a bummer." Hey, I'm sorry. I think I will soon be able to write>"Part IV" on the compensation... — Bob Pease

[Viewpoint]
Why Should Electronics Designers Move Away From RTL?
Today, design verification is the single largest activity in the majority of project schedules. Because of the interaction between the growing number of functional units within an IC design, functional-verification complexity grows faster than... — Contributing Author

[Editor's Notebook]
Silicon-Germanium Technology Is Ready For Prime Time
Silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) have come a long way. Only a few years ago, there was a lot of skepticism about the commercial viability of implanting silicon with germanium, and then deriving transistors from this... — Ashok Bindra

[The Design Factory]
Garbage In Does Not Always Mean Garbage Out
For decades I had heard the expression "garbage in, garbage out" and nodded my head reverently. Of course, I thought, no answer could be more accurate than the accuracy of its input assumptions. Only recently have I realized that this isn't always... — Don Reinertsen

[Letters]
Letters
A Contrasting View On Universities I ran into Lawrence J. Kamm's article "How To Improve Our Universities: Or, The Tale Of Two Frauds" [May 1, p. 154]. I was wondering how you could state that American... — Various

[40 Years Ago]
Electronic Design's Eighth Annual Transistor Data Chart
Electronic Design's Eighth Annual Transistor Data Chart, following last year's pattern, has been specially tailored to meet the specific needs of the design engineer. Contrary to existing lists which group transistors by manufacturer or in numerical... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
RCA Computer Memory Uses Superconductivity
A computer memory made from a continuous sheet of superconductive material is under development at the Princeton, N.J., research center of Radio Corporation of America. In the device, persistent currents store digital data and coincident current is... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
New Architectures Drive Projection
My column "Microdisplay Industry Close To Igniting" (April 3, p. 62) explained how liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) microdisplays are finally reaching the point of initial mass production. This technology will open up new product categories... — Chris Chinnock

[Forefront]
Embedded Processors Leverage Parallelism To Deliver Supercomputer Performance
The latest crop of high-performance RISC processor cores can perform many operations in parallel to deliver a major surge forward in performance. With no less than six new implementations of the popular MIPS instruction-set architecture (ISA)... — Dave Bursky

[Forefront]
Double-Spreading Modulation Scheme Picks Up Where CDMA And TDMA Leave Off
Multiple-access wireless systems are under constant pressure from customers demanding higher data rates and increased service quality. Unfortunately, regulatory requirements limit the bandwidth and output-power levels available. In turn, this... — Patrick Mannion

[Forefront]
Self-Aligned Split-Gate Process Cuts Flash-Memory Cell Size By 40%
A self-aligned process technology that cuts the size of flash-memory cells by 40% has been developed by Silicon Storage Technology (SST) Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. According to the company, this split-gate architecture designed for flash-memory cells... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Automated Testing Of Handheld Information Devices Speeds Up Time-To-Market
Many companies are hustling to use their applications on the newest handheld information devices. Unfortunately for them, many manual testing bottlenecks hinder them from meeting time-to-market windows of opportunity. That's the opinion of Martin... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
From The Labs
• Scientists at Georgia Tech have come up with a technique that uses acoustic waves with radar to detect buried land mines. In this method, sound waves create tiny soil disturbances while precision radar measures the resulting... — Staff

[Forefront]
Company Wire
• Intel Corp. has selected VenturCom Inc. to join the Intel• Applied Computing Platform Provider program. Together, they will work to develop software solutions optimized for the latest embedded Intel architectures and enable... — Staff

[Forefront]
Multilevel Signalling Scheme Doubles Data-Transfer Capability
The adage "divide and conquer" has as much validity in the high-speed data communications market as it does in combat. Today's electronic battlefields substitute buses for warriors and backplanes for territory in the quest to move more data faster.... — Dave Bursky

[Forefront]
Development Tools Expand Support For MEMS Designs
Designers of MEMS-enabled systems now have more system-level tools to use. Microcosm Technologies Inc., Cary, N.C., has expanded its software-development environment to expedite the design of MEMS and non-MEMS devices, mixed-signal circuits, and... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Real-Time Embedded Linux Runs When Needed On PowerPC
With Linux OnDemand embedded systems, designers are given the flexibility to run applications on a standard version of Linux as needed. This copy of Linux runs in its own MMU-protected partition while the rest of the system continues to operate in... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Motherboard Simplifies Design Of Kiosk Or Point-Of-Sale System
Pick an LCD, an ELO resistive touch screen, and a motherboard. Have them delivered in a compact chassis. Add any necessary PCI or ISA adapters and a standard 3.5-in. IDE hard disk. Install software. The system is now ready to be mounted in... — William Wong

[Forefront]
128-Channel Analog Multiplexers Feature Radiation-Hardening Packaging
Replacing up to eight industry-standard 16:1 analog multiplexers, the Rad-Pak 64- and 128-channel analog multiplexers feature a packaging technology that enhances radiation tolerance for space-orbit applications. According to their... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
GPIB-USB Controller Increases Instrument-Control Performance
Connecting GPIB instruments to a standard PC through the USB serial port has gotten easier and better, thanks to the GPIB-USB-A instrument controller. This next-generation device offers data-transfer rates that exceed 650 kbytes/s. It turns any... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Serial Legacy UART Provides Single-Chip USB Solution
Engineers can upgrade older RS232 designs to USB applications with a single-chip, cost-effective UART IC. This chip, the FT8U232AM, requires minimal development time and cost. The FT8U232AM has data-transfer rates up to 920 (RS-232) and... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Free CD Software Bundle Supports Data-Acquisition Boards
The Data Acquisition Omni CD is a robust software bundle available at no charge with Data Translation's data-acquisition boards. The CD features 32-bit WDM device drivers for all of the company's PCI and USB data-acquisition boards. It also boasts a... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Faster Pentium IIIs And Celerons Target Applied Computing
The latest crop of Intel's Pentium III and Celeron processor chips was designed for the applied computing space. This line of chips provides an upgraded path comparable to that found on desktop PCs. At the high end, Intel has announced the... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Driver Software Synchronizes Data Between CAN And DAQ
Engineers and scientists seeking to synchronize data between controller area network (CAN) in-vehicle data frames and analog/digital signals from any National Instruments' DAQ interface can now use NI-CAN 1.4 driver software. It lets National... — Roger Allan

[Real-World Engineering]
A Contrarian View Of The Internet: Newer Tech Is Not Always Better
First, two small corrections: The "information superhighway" has actually been with us for almost a century. Thousands of telephone and telegraph circuits have shared wide bandwidths on coaxial cables, microwave links, and now satellite radios.... — Lawrence J. Kamm

[Heads Up]
Multichannel Temperature Measurement System
This circuit is a new implementation of a brilliant idea that’s been published before1,2,3,4. It extends the original concept to a multichannel design while using standard components to minimize costs. The concept is based on the... — Contributing Author

[Careers]
Get To Know Yourself, As Well As The Company, Before You Accept That Job Offer
In today's fiercely competitive job market, engineers and other specialists with experience in computers, information technology, the Internet, and telecommunications are in demand. "Techies" are courted and wooed by companies with offers of rich... — Contributing Author

[New Products]

• Analog — Staff

• Passive Components — Staff

• Power — Staff

• Test And Measurement — Staff

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