[Technology Report] Full Steam Ahead For The WLAN Juggernaut
During this past year, wireless local-area networking, specifically 802.11 Wi-Fi, experienced unprecedented growth during a crippling downturn. According to Mike Wagner, director of marketing at major WLAN hardware supplier Linksys, unit growth...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[POV: Point Of View] Interface Logic Will Never Die
The design community has a love/hate relationship with interface logic. Many designers would like to see it incorporated in ASICs or replaced by some type of programmable gate array at the start of every design. This desire to eliminate interface...
—
Jeff DeAngelis
[Pease Porridge] What's All This April Floobydust Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 12)
Since it's now June, you can consider this my April Fools' joke. And now on to the latest Floobydust items: There's a new educational facility on the Web, called Analog University, from National Semiconductor. It supplies good teaching materials on...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] MEMS Switch Puts SoC Radios On The Cusp
Slowly, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices have found homes, mostly in optical switching and processing. STMicroelectronics has now stretched their reach by demonstrating an RF MEMS switch for use as a band and circuit reconfiguration...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Sixteenth Bricks Hit The Market
Astec Power has introduced what may be the first sixteenth-brick dc-dc converter in the market, a 0.8- by 1.65- by 0.33-in. surface-mount unit with the same pin assignments as the company's eighth and quarter bricks. To develop the new format, Astec...
—
David G. Morrison
[TechView: Analog & Power] Breaking News
A chip-scale packaging technology for RF functions, Tessera's Pyxis promises to be a lower-cost, more compact alternative to ceramic and laminate approaches. Pyxis combines the company's µBGA technology with flip-chip assembly, integrated...
—
David G. Morrison
[TechView: Communications] Tiny T3/E3/DS3 Chips Trim Line-Card Costs
Although t1 lines dominate the networking world, the growing demand for higher data rates and greater subscriber capacity has created a run on faster T3 lines. Remember that T3 runs at a maximum rate of 44.736 Mbits/s, which is the equivalent of 28...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Data-Flow Control Memories Handle Many Data Streams
In networking and data-communications systems, data streams constantly move from subsystem to subsystem. To avoid data starvation or data overflow, most systems use large memory queues, multiplexers, and control logic to manage the data movement....
—
Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] 10-Gbit/s PHYs Tackle Sonet And XAUI Demands
Using standard 0.18-µm CMOS technology, Xilinx Inc. came up with a 10-Gbit/s implementation of the RocketPHY family of physical-layer (PHY) transceivers. In addition to offering standalone models, the company will also incorporate the PHYs into a...
—
Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] SystemVerilog's Promise Bears Verification Fruit
Hinging on a new hybrid formal register-transfer-level (RTL) verification product, a design-for-verification (DFV) methodology from Synopsys leverages SystemVerilog's capabilities to integrate verification throughout the design process. The...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Formal Tool Smashes Through Capacity Barrier
Formal-verification technology is steadily gaining credence as a way to ferret out well hidden bugs in designs. Yet formal technology suffers from the huge number of state spaces found in nanometer designs. They're simply becoming too large for even...
—
David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Debugger Stops Thread Groups
Green Hills Software's Multi debugger adds support for thread group breakpoints, along with a number of other new features. This comes in handy when dealing with multithreaded applications that interact with each other. The new run-mode JTAG debug...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] SATA Gets Flexible
With Palmchip's BK-3720 host controller core, it will be easier to include embedded Serial ATA interfaces in custom designs. The BK-3720 implements the Serial ATA 1.0A specification that runs at 150 Mbytes/s. It supports 48-bit addressing and has a...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Windows CE.Net Receives Facelift
The latest incarnation of this real-time operating system includes support for Internet Protocol Firewall and layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), and the Telephony User Interface. Internet Explorer 6 for Windows CE...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] SBC Does CE.Net
WinSystems' EBC-LP runs an air-cooled, 166-MHz Pentium with a 10/100-Mbit/s Ethernet controller, USB, four serial ports, and one parallel port. It supports up to 64 Mbytes of SDRAM and a 1-Gbyte Disk-on-Chip. The 2-Mbyte PCI video controller handles...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Little Linux
My daughter and I attended the Fire Fighting Robot Contest at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. It was great fun to see hundreds of high schoolers compete with autonomous robots based on a wide range of...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] USB 2 Hub Handles OTG
Standard Microsystems' USB20H4 hub chip supports the USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) Session Request Protocol (SRP) on the upstream port and can handle traffic up to 480 Mbits/s. It supports two downstream ports without local power and four with power. The...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ICE For Network MCU
Debugging apps for Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim's DS80C400 MCU (www.maxim-ic.com) got a bit easier with the release of the compact MetaICE-XF family of emulators from MetaLink Corp. It supports processor speeds up to 40 MHz with a 512-kbyte...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Compiler Suite Boosts Run-Time Performance
Getting better performance simply by recompiling is usually music to a developer's ears. Sun's Sun ONE Studio 8 addresses C, C++ on Solaris Sparc, x86 platforms, and Fortran applications. Observed run-time improvements include 17% for SPECfp and 5.2%...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Mobile Pentium Consumes 20 W
Attaining x86 compatibility is often a power-to-performance tradeoff, one that Intel addressed with a new Pentium M line of processors and support chips that targets an array of embedded applications. Intel...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tiny Linux Is A Big Secret
Fitting Linux into a couple megs of memory is a tough task, especially if a secondary storage device isn't available. At the low end is where uClinux really shines, making it ideal for small, 32-bit embedded applications. This tiny...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Residential Gateway Supports SIP
Building a sophisticated residential gateway product should get easier with Arcturus Networks' S3C2500 Residential Gateway Platform. Options include an HDLC Extension Module for T1/E1 support, four-port DSP voice codecs, Smartcard authentication,...
—
William Wong
[Letters] How The War In Iraq Affected Engineers
Dear Editor: "War is hell for our troops..." At Fort Benning, Georgia, there was a time when young infantry officers were shown how to use anti-tank and anti-personnel mines as defensive weapons. After the mines were deployed, a detailed...
—
Various
