Electronic Design articles from June 2009

Electronic Design archives from June 2009

Industry view.(On the Web)(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... ED Online 21178 Take Five Steps To Increase Your Professional Value Jon Pearson, Cypress Semiconductor Daily news reports gush forth layoffs and corporate re-organizations and numerous other "efficiency measures." Yet these five...

Design solution.(On the Web)
June 11, 2009... ED Online 21166 Design Abstraction--A Practical View Rob Evans, Altium Ltd. The concept of applying a higher level of design abstraction to creative and engineering processes is so closely familiar that we probably take it for...

Editor's view.(On the Web)(Editorial)
June 11, 2009... ED Online 21180 Powerline Communication Standards Continue To Struggle Louis E. Frenzel, Communications Editor Powerline networking puts OFDM on the ac powerline for high-speed data transfers over the installed power wiring. There...

Embedded hotspot.(On the Web)
June 11, 2009... ED Online 21168 DSP Doubles Floating-Point Performance Bill Wong, Embedded/Systems/Software Editor In this video interview, Bill Wong talks with Charlie Ice, product marketing manager for Texas Instruments, about the 300-MHz...

New products.(On the Web)(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... ED Online 21077 Reference Design Meets Latest Energy Star Standby Power Spec Electronic Design News Staff The RDK-203 reference design kit from Power Integrations includes a dual-rail power supply with high loop bandwidth and peak...

Embedded systems conference.(On the Web)(Conference news)
June 11, 2009... Luminary Micro Cortex-M3 Microcontrollers Bill Wong, Embedded/Systems/Software Editor Jean Anne Booth, chief marketing officer of Luminary Micro, discusses and demonstrates Luminary's latest Cortex-M3 microcontrollers and development...

Engineering TV.(On the Web)(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... iDigi Instant Wireless M2M Solutions Optimized for green applications, iDigi development kits include the hardware, hosted software, and services necessary to easily develop sustainable applications. Digi International[2019]s senior vice...

Prototyping electronic circuits the EZ way.(Editorial)
June 11, 2009... SchmartBoard has announced that patent 7,511,228 has been granted for the company's "EZ" technology for hand-soldering surface-mount technology (SMT) electronic components (see the figure). This brought to mind a SchmartBoard demo I once...

Accelerometers shake up the old ways to play.(LabBench)(Product/service evaluation)
June 11, 2009... Is it time to think outside the box or just give it a shake? Movement-or gesture-oriented input isn't new. Try shaking a cell phone like Apple's iPhone. Matched with the right application, like a game, juggling the phone may produce the effect...

When one plus one has to be less than one.(FromSystemsToSilicon)
June 11, 2009... At a recent customer meeting, an observation really hit home. We were discussing verification at the block level and at the chip level, as well as using mixed levels of abstraction. Everybody seemed to agree on one specific obstacle that, if...

Storage technology begins to crystalize.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... It's not in stores yet, but Freescale Semiconductor hopes its silicon crystal approach to flash memory will address the scaling issues that can be found with current approaches. The continuing demand for nonvolatile storage will likely mean...

Quad 10BaseT Ethernet PHY transceiver consumes just 2 W/port.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... Companies have been trying for years to make a low-power 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) twisted-pair transceiver, especially in multiport versions to make 10GE 48-port switch platforms practical. Now, Aquantia has accomplished that goal with its...

Largest cross point switch has 25,600 switching paths at 6.5 Gbits/s.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... The 160-by-160 M21165 cross point switch from Mindspeed Technologies provides up to 25,600 unique switching paths, making it the largest cross point switch on a single die, according to the company (see the figure). Each of the paths is capable...

Lightning and surge protectors suit telecom equipment.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... L-com has added two lightning and surge protectors for telecommunications equipment to its line of products. The HGLN-CAT5J is fully compatible with industry-standard 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) devices as well as 10/100BaseT Ethernet...

Boost regulator provides cost-effective power solution for LCDs.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... The MAX17075 boost regulator from Maxim Integrated Products includes charge pumps, switch control, and a high-current operational amplifier. Developed using the company's proprietary high-voltage process technology, the device integrates all...

Software confronts new yield-management paradigm.(Techview)
June 11, 2009... Yield analysis, a science formerly left to process engineers in foundries, is not a luxury any longer. According to Collett International's research, at least 40% of designs face at least one respin with an associated delay of from four to six...

Standard GPU cluster provides high performance in the mid-range.(Techview)(graphics processing units )(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... Supercomputing continues to get faster, cheaper, and move available. Costs are dropping rapidly partially because of graphics processing units (GPUs) and their highly parallel architecture. NVidia continues to deliver high-performance Tesla GPU...

Design for manufacturing sheds the hype: prematurely touted as the "next big thing" some years ago, DFM has found its proper place--tightly integrated with physical implementation--and is ready for prime time at last.(Engineering Feature)
June 11, 2009... Four to five years ago, the hype surrounding design-for-manufacturing (DFM) technology for advanced system-on-a-chip (SoC) design was near insufferable. At that time, 90 nm was the state-of-the-art process node and most fabless houses were...

The mixed-signal angle on DFM.(Engineering Feature)
June 11, 2009... When most designers think of DFM, they think of deep-submicron SoCs and digital design. But more often, DFM is a factor in analog/mixed-signal flows for RFICs as well. "There's no such thing as a pure RFIC anymore," says Marc Peterson, director...

Latest test solutions measure up to wireless challenges: industry heavyweights deliver new technologies to satisfy the expanding and ever-changing arena of wireless testing.(Technology Report)
June 11, 2009... Demand for test solutions in the communications and wireless sector continues to soar. Not only has there been an explosion in the adoption rate of new wireless technologies, but couple that with tough standards, multiple radios per product,...

What was that noise? Learning the basics of noise in amplifiers against the backdrop of some new ideas on how to cope with it offers fresh perspectives on a plan of attack.(Engineering Essentials)
June 11, 2009... "Noise" can have different meanings. It could be the common phenomenon of, say, a buzz in an audio system. Other times it may refer to something less acoustic, perhaps a limit on the precision of measurements. As an example of the way the...

Are you using more than one software analysis tool?(EmbeddedinED)
June 11, 2009... Actually, a better question for many embedded developers is whether they're using even one code analysis tool. In many cases, the number of static or dynamic analysis tools used by a programmer is zero. At the same time, the goal that seems to...

The latest static and dynamic code analysis tools.(News)
June 11, 2009... Designers can take advantage of a host of new static and dynamic code analysis tools from different vendors. Coverity has a range of static and dynamic analysis tools, but its Coverity Build Analysis addresses an aspect that is key to the...

Flash storage device delivers 300k Ops/s using DDR2 RAM.(EmbeddedinED)
June 11, 2009... Looking for some really fast nonvolatile storage? DDRdrive delivers double-data-rate (DDR) performance with NAND nonvolatility. Its DDRdrive X1 adds an FPGA between a PCI Express Gen 1 interface, 4 Gbytes of DDR2 memory, and 4 Gbytes of NAND...

Chip links PCI Express and USB.(EmbeddedinED)
June 11, 2009... The OXPCIe200 PCI Express (PCIe) bridge links a 1x PCI Express host to a pair of USB host interfaces or one USB host interface and an SPI/SRAM interface (see the figure). The bridge also provides access to a serial port and eight...

Common-law Accelerator offloads DSP.(News)
June 11, 2009... Adding a Control Law Accelerator (CLA) to Texas Instruments' line of C28x DSPs can boost performance in applications such as motor control, LED lighting, and digital power by a factor of five. This allows the TMS-320F2803x chip to handle more...

NAND delivers capacity and NOR capabilities.(News)(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... Samsung's Flex One NAND has moved to 40 nm. It combines multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC) flash with an SRAM front end providing NOR functionality, including the ability to run applications directly. The Flex One uses a 2-kbyte...

Multifunction flash runs remote apps on smart phones.(EmbeddedinED News)
June 11, 2009... Citrix and Open Kernel Labs have joined forces to deliver remote application execution to smart phones and other devices running Open Kernel Labs OKL4. The secure, partitioned hyper-visor allows organizations to deliver enterprise applications...

Tiny Linux suits Renesas chips.(EmbeddedinED News)
June 11, 2009... RoweBots Research has delivered a pair of ultra-tiny, Linux-compatible real-time operating systems (RTOSs) for Renesas' R8C, M16C, and R32C/100 microcontroller families. The DSP-nano and Unison are also POSIX-compatible. Both work with Renesas'...

MCU sleeps using 20 nA.(EmbeddedinED News)(Brief article)
June 11, 2009... The nanoWatt XLP line of 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers from Microchip reduces power draw to 20 nA when sleeping in its lowest-power mode. The eXtreme Low Power (XLP) technology supports a range of sleep modes including a 400-nA watchdog and...

Reduce the small-memory-footprint requirements in wireless sensor networks: increased demands for small-memory footprints create challenges that can be addressed by strategizing memory conservation and through savvy topology and feature-set selection.(DesignSolution)
June 11, 2009... Products based on wireless technology have been steadily insinuating their way into our lives since the 1980s. Wireless devices such as Apple's iPhone and Amazon's Kindle have become common items in many of today's households. Similarly, within...

Measuring mains current doesn't have to be difficult: try this simple loop technique, which offers an inexpensive and reliable alternative to other current-sensing methods, when monitoring mains current.(DesignSolution)
June 11, 2009... Monitoring the current taken by a mains-powered appliance can be a challenge, particularly if the application demands an inexpensive solution that must provide galvanic isolation for user safety. Common solutions employ either a current-sense...

Spice model for an ideal transformer allows bi-directional operation.(IdeasForDesign)
June 11, 2009... This Idea For Design provides an alternative to an earlier IFD that noted that Spice does not have a device model for an ideal transformer ("A Spice Model For The Ideal Transformer," Electronic Design, June 28, 1999, ED Online 6204). The author...

Redundant power-supply diode features fanless passive cooling.(IdeasForDesign)
June 11, 2009... A Schottky diode is an excellent way to connect multiple batteries or dc power supplies to a load. With a forward-biased "or" diode between each supply and the load, faults are isolated. Weak, low, or shorted supplies can't sink current from...

Charge-pump VCO increases parts count but saves on cost.(IdeasForDesign)(voltage-controlled oscillator )
June 11, 2009... This charge-pump voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) has a number of neat features: single positive power-supply operation, positive VCO reference voltage, fast response, high linearity, temperature compensation, and open collector output....

What's all this bridge amplifier stuff, anyhow?(PeasePorridge)(Column)
June 11, 2009... I was helping some engineers working on a strain-gauge preamp not too long ago. We had it functioning, but there seemed to be some bad linearity problems. We even set up a little calibrator and tried to get it linear, yet we kept getting odd...