The China Earthquake Administration has selected a structural health monitoring (SHM) system from CGM Engineering Inc. to help engineers conduct research on seven recently constructed megastructures. CGM, a National Instruments Alliance Partner, based the system on the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform and NI CompactRIO programmable automation controllers.

The first USB device certified by the WiMAX Forum, the MiMAX Q-Series USB dongle from Airspan Networks Inc., incorporates the SkyCross Isolated Mode Antenna Technology (iMAT). Introduced by SkyCross in late January, iMAT allowed the MiMAX to be certified for the 2.5-GHz band, operating at nearly every applicable WiMAX and Wi-Fi frequency from 2 GHz to 5 GHz.

Mitel has chosen Octasic Inc.’s media processing technology to provide echo cancellation for the Mitel 5000 Network Communications Solution and the Axxess Converged Communication System. The Axxess product line uses open architecture interfaces and standard protocols to transparently combine IP, wireless, digital, and analog into a single platform to unify communications into one interoperable enterprise.

Texas Instruments has revealed a low-power processor roadmap for 2009 that includes more than 15 new multi-architecture devices across four product lines. A breakthrough, the company says, will be the industry’s lowest power floating-point DSPs, the TMS320C674x family. For the first time, designers will be able to bring portability to applications requiring the high-precision and fast time-to-market provided by floating-point processors.

Today, most companies target the needs of their prospective customers by creating a product line rather than a single product. Yet due to multiple intertwined products with different features and production deadlines, developing software for a product line is extremely complex. These challenges can hinder your company’s ability to capture the window of opportunity, maximize quality, and expand the scope of your product-line portfolio, making it difficult to obtain a competitive edge.

Don’t look now, but you may have a supercomputer on your desk. It’s hiding in your video card. While it won’t make your word processor faster, it may improve the transcoding speed when you’re moving movies to your mobile Internet device. Intel and AMD have been pushing multicore in the 64-bit x86 realm with only four-core chips at this point. Intel’s 80-core Polaris is designed to push the envelope, but AMD and NVidia have other ideas, at least when it ...

Make it low-power. Buying off-the-shelf parts to meet these criteria is still a challenge, but the latest crop of modules makes the job easier. Modules let designers develop custom configurations with minimum moving the design of the critical aspects of the system to the module vendors. This includes the processor and memory subsystem and usually most, if not all, of the peripheral interface. A carrier board typically contains connectors and...

Men Micro’s ESMexpress-based XM50 targets the pending VITA 59, RSE Rugged System-On-Module Express standard. The 1.5-GHz PowerQUICC III MPC8548 processor has access to 2 Gbytes of ECC DDR2 SDRAM memory in addition to nonvolatile SRAM and FRAM. The 12-W board has three Gigabit Ethernet ports, five USB ports, three SATA ports, and an 8x PCI Express port. The XM50 also plugs into a carrier board and is enclosed in a metal case...

Take one SpaceSaver-II. Attach one GMS P70x. Start developing on one slick platform with Mini-PCI Express and a 2.16-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The 4- by 4-in. SpaceSaver-II provides these connectors: three video (NTSC, RGB, DVI), audio with 2.5-W amp, two SATA, IDE, two serial, eight GPIO, five USB, LVDS LCD, Mini-PCI Express, Express- Card, Compact Flash, two Gigabit Ethernet, plus support for a 1.8-in. solidstate hard drive. The...

Marvell took its ARM license and cranked out the 32-bit Shiva core, which hits 2 GHz and delivers PCI Express connectivity. It’s compatible with ARM’s 16- and 32-bit instruction sets even though it isn’t part of ARM’s Cortex push. This lets designers tailor the core to its requirements. The initial crop of Shiva chips targets multimedia applications, including portable units such as mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The 2-GHz 88F6281 ...

With my new role as Group Editorial Director, I’m going to miss doing my column in each issue of Electronic Design. So here I am joining the “blogosphere.”

The Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit (UART) interface is found on a variety of peripheral devices. Consider, for instance, a microcontrollerbased system with four such peripherals. Ideally, in low-cost embedded applications, you would like to connect multiple peripherals to a single UART. However, a lack of chip-select signals in UARTs complicates such a task. This is a common design problem, and there are a few conventional ways of...

The best way to make midrange, low- to medium-accuracy temperature measurements (considering size, cost, performance, and ease of use) is to use an IC temperature sensor. But most IC temperature sensors are designed for applications where the circuits to which they connect are nearby. Therefore, the inclusion of sensing, digitizing, and signal- processing functions in one IC greatly simplifies the design of such sensors and the data-acquisition interface. ...

Voltage-to-current converters that feed grounded loads are common in industrial measurement and control applications. The conventional "textbook" circuit uses both positive and negative supply rails. An earlier article by this author titled "Voltage-To-Current Converter Works From A Single Supply Rail" (Electronic Design, Feb. 17, 2003, ED Online 2985) described a circuit that could power grounded loads and needed only a positive ...

Many small microcontrollers require so little power that often they can draw what they need through their loads. This can simplify a system, reduce its cost, increase its reliability, and provide unexpected benefits. One example is an automotive check system that monitors a car's brake lights and indicates any faults through an incandescent bulb in the instrument cluster, LMP1 (Fig. 1)....

LEDs are often used on manmachine interfaces (MMIs) or device front panels to illuminate switches or backlight text information so that the user knows what the device is supposed to be doing at the time. Occasionally, the designer wants these LEDs to start blinking at a particular rate to alert the user to a condition needing attention, such as a low battery. Many devices use embedded microprocessors or microcontrollers to handle the MMI, along...