October 30, 2000 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: OCTOBER 30, 2000

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Optical links, Power-management chips, SoC co-design, DSOs, Riser-card standards

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Browse Archived Articles By: Issue | Author | Department | Topic

October 30, 2000 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
SoC Co-Design Is Pushing The Limits Of Software And Hardware Simulation
System-on-a-chip (SoC) design is a hot topic, and one answer to quickly developing an SoC is to use co-design and co-verification tools. With fast time-to-market as a goal, the ability to design and test on both hardware and software sides is... — William Wong

[Technology Report]
Digital Storage Oscilloscopes Are Becoming PC Friendly
What seems inescapable, the never-ending rise in signal speeds, coupled with the never-ending rise in accelerating time-to-market pressure, is challenging designers and quality-assurance (QA) engineers to do more in less time. In this vein, some... — Stephen Grossman

[Product Innovation]
Optical Links Eliminate Bulky Box-To-Box Cables
As data-bandwidth requirements continue to escalate in data-communications switches and routers as well as high-performance multiprocessor systems, moving data between systems and even within racks depends on ever-faster interfaces. Even hardwired... — Dave Bursky

[Product Innovation]
Power-Management Chip Set Builds Smarter Motor-Control Systems
Motor-control systems contain a complex combination of functions that must be carefully pieced together to obtain the desired performance. In a given system, designers have to combine a microcontroller or DSP with sensors, analog-to-digital... — David G. Morrison

[Design Application]
Take Advantage Of Rider-Card Standards To Shrink PC Connectivity Costs
What's the fastest, easiest, and least expensive way to implement connectivity with the outside world on a PC? Just take advantage of recent riser-card standards that let manufacturers decouple and redeploy the various functions that make up modems... — Contributing Author

[Design Application]
Noise Reduction Is Crucial To Mixed-Signal ASIC Design Success
This article is the first of a two-part series. It covers internal circuits and systems. Part II will deal with floorplaning, I/O-placement, pinout, and power-stability issues.—ED Mixed-signal IC design frequently leads to... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Microcontroller Makes Linear Temperature Measurement Simple
Many microcontroller units include an internal analog-to-digital converter (ADC). For instance, most of Motorola's M68HC11 family members have an analog-to-digital subsystem, including an 8-bit ADC, an analog multiplexer, and an analog port (port E)... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
"Ping-Pong" Configuration Increases System's Conversion Throughput
Traditionally, "ping-pong" configurations have been used with sample-and-hold circuits to increase throughput rates in data-acquisition systems. To increase throughput, this same technique can be implemented with standard analog-to-digital... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Solid-State Circuit Converts Temperature To Voltage
This circuit is a solid-state thermometer suitable for measuring temperatures from −40°C to 125°C (Fig. 1). By adjusting RZERO and RSCALE, the offset of the... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Single Diode Increases Bandpass Filter's Q
When implementing filters, the design goal is often to achieve maximum Q while using a minimum number of components. In certain applications, the Q of the filter is more important than the need for high signal fidelity in the pass-band. Such designs... — Contributing Author

[Editorial]
Expanded Embedded Systems Section Delivers More
Today, when we talk about "em-bedded" systems, we are actually covering over 70% of all the systems that designers build. Even desktop computers are a kind of embedded system. There are at least three to five additional CPUs/microcontrollers in the... — Dave Bursky

[Pease Porridge]
Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: I realize that you work in the analog realm, but you may have heard of the latest fad in digital circuit design—spread-spectrum clock generators. ( No, I hadn't. Wild! /rap) These are phase-locked-loop circuits that... — Bob Pease

[Viewpoint]
A Power Supply Must Be Treated As Part Of A Broadband Solution
The variety of broadband communications delivery standards, like G.DMT, G.lite, VDSL, IDSL, voice-over Ethernet, VoIP, derived voice, and so on, continues to proliferate, and these are just the beginning of a long and growing list. While existing... — Contributing Author

[Editor's Notebook]
The Triumphs Of Siring A Standard Are Worth The Tribulations
Admit it. You want to standardize something. Perhaps you envision large, untapped frontiers of virgin product territory, totally overlooked by other OEMs. And your products, as you anticipate them, don't fit into any existing standards: the PCIs,... — Stephen Grossman

[The Design Factory]
Is It Always A Bad Idea To Add Resources To A Late Project?
If you have never read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, I would recommend doing so. First published in 1975, it contains some timeless wisdom distilled from Brooks' experience managing the design of the IBM System 360's operating system... — Don Reinertsen

[Letters]
Letters
Re-Read Reveals Growth I particularly enjoyed [Steve Scrupski's] contributions in the Sept. 5 issue ["Firms Seek Ultrareliability For Minuteman Missile Program," p. 82]. They brought back a flood of... — Various

[40 Years Ago]
Estimating External Surface Case Temperature Rise
In military equipment packaging, it is often desirable to house electronic devices in closed cases for protection against dust, humidity, and low pressure. The initial analysis of anticipated case heat dissipation, required during the packaging... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
Three Companies Offer Epitaxial Transistors
The major advantages of epitaxial transistors are the virtual elimination of the collector series resistance and a large decrease in storage and turn-off times. The basic process consists of depositing a thin (about 1/2-mil) layer of high... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
JPEG 2000 To Arrive In December With Tantalizing Array Of Features
As if to trumpet its arrival, JPEG 2000 was the topic of an extraordinary number of the 800 papers presented at month's IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in Vancouver, Canada. Like JPEG and several of its upgrades, JPEG 2000... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Java Core Permits Direct Java Byte-Code Execution
Direct execution of Java byte code is possible thanks to a Java extension to the ARM processor core by ARM Ltd., Cambridge, England. Known as Jazelle, the new Java acceleration feature initially will appear in an ARM9-class product. It's also... — Alfred Vollmer

[Forefront]
Task-Optimized Architecture Lets Network Processor Handle 10-Gbit/s Wire-Speed Applications
As network speeds move from 1-Gbit/s transmission rates to 10 Gbits/s, software-controlled RISC processors run out of the performance needed to manage packet handling at wire speed. But by developing a task-optimized processing (TOP) approach,... — Dave Bursky

[Forefront]
Electronic Cameras Have Some Serious Catching Up To Do
Millions of years of evolution have given the human visual system a jump on the electronics industry. Sean Adkins, vice president of Advanced Technology at Imax Corp. in Vancouver, believes digital motion-picture cameras have to overcome many... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Company Wire
• With a six-year contract from an automotive steering product manufacturer, Motorola's Automotive and Industrial Electronics Group (AIEG) will develop and produce torque sensors for electric power-steering systems. Sensor... — Staff

[Forefront]
Off-The-Shelf Composite Supercomputer Speeds Its Way Into The Top 20
The computational cluster at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., is set to be the 20th fastest supercomputer in the world. Composed of 1300 off-the-shelf computers, the Computational Plant (Cplant) Antarctica doubles the number of its... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Integrated AFE And Line Driver Eases Board-Level Signal Routing
Say you're designing line-driver chip sets for asynchronous digital-subscriber-line (ADSL) applications. It's not unusual to route the analog signals from the multiport analog front end (AFE) to the individual line drivers. But this creates complex... — Bill Arnold

[Forefront]
8051 Emulator Breaks On Stack Overflows
The MetaICE 8051 emulator from MetaLink is the first device of its kind, the company claims, capable of breaking on an overflow of a user-defined stack size. Since the 8051 limits on-chip space for the stack, it's pertinent that designers maintain... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
Network Simulator Enhances ADSL CPE Equipment Use
The Liberator ADSL network simulator has been created as a tool for the development, testing, and demonstration of ADSL CPE equipment. Simulating an ADSL access multiplexer (DSLAM) to mimic the appearance of a live Internet connection, it lets ADSL... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
Top UNIX Server Employs 64-Way Processor And Prepares For The IA-64 Itanium CPU
Superdome is the latest edition in Hewlett-Packard's (HP) high-end UNIX server line. Currently shipping with HP's PA-8600 processors, this server also will support Intel's IA-64 Itanium processor when that CPU be-comes available. Initially, the... — William Wong

[Careers]
Managing Conflict In The Workplace
Most people don't enjoy facing the difficult situations that sometimes occur with co-workers in the workplace. Such situations may arise from honest disagreements over design or engineering issues, personnel or benefits matters, management decisions... — Peter Varhol

[New Products]

• Communications — Staff

• Embedded — Staff

• Interconnects — Staff

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