EDN articles from April 2007

EDN archives from April 2007

Real-world power tests model FPGA's thermal characteristics.
April 12, 2007... Jeremy Willden, Ad Hoc Electronics, Pleasant Grove, UT Edited by Charles H Small and Brad Thompson Given ever-increasing clock frequencies and higher gate counts, many systems that include high-performance FPGAs (field-programmable...

CPLD autonomously powers battery-powered system.
April 12, 2007... Rafael Camarota, Altera Corp, San Jose, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Brad Thompson A common industrial and consumer application is a system that samples an environmental condition, such as GPS (global-positioning-system) location,...

Find hex-code values for microcontroller's ADC voltages.
April 12, 2007... Harry Gibbens Jr, Deafworks, Provo, UT Edited by Charles H Small and Brad Thompson This Design Idea is for low-end, eight-pin, flash-memory, 8-bit microcontrollers, such as the MC68HC908QT4A from Freescale (www.freescale.com ), but it...

Cheap and easy inductance tester uses few components.
April 12, 2007... Al Dutcher, Consulting Engineer, Paulsboro, NJ Edited by Charles H Small and Brad Thompson In the absence of expensive test equipment, the circuit in Figure 1 offers a simple and rapid alternative method of measuring inductance. Its...

Add a manual reset to a standard three-pin-reset supervisor.
April 12, 2007... Derek Vanditmars, Delta Controls, Surrey, BC, Canada Edited by Charles H Small and Brad Thompson Adding a manual reset to a design usually involves designing in a new part with a manual-reset input. But, by adding a couple of low-value...

2007 EDN DSP Directory: The best of both worlds.(Directory)
April 12, 2007... by Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor Are you trying to keep track of the constant changes in the world of digital-signal-processing offerings? The 2007 directory can help. Welcome to the 2007 EDN DSP Directory, which again groups an...

Innovation winners span analog ICs to EDA.
April 12, 2007... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief On Monday, April 2, in San Jose, CA, EDN again honored the most innovative products and engineers at the 17th rendition of the EDN Innovation Awards. As always, we had an outstanding set of nominees. I...

Exploring the foundation under smartphones.
April 12, 2007... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor The next generation of smartphones and PDAs will rely on unprecedented integration to deliver their features at the lowest possible bill-of-materials cost. But that doesn't mean they will be single-chip...

Choose capacitor types to optimize PC sound quality.
April 12, 2007... By Kymberly Schmidt, Maxim Integrated Products A key challenge to designers of audio subsystems that must conform to Windows Vista requirements may be choosing coupling capacitors. These devices' capacitance varies with the voltage across...

How Matlab simplifies top-down design of closed-loop systems.
April 12, 2007... By William Bowhers, Merrimack College A top-down view of a closed-loop system's capabilities and performance limitations simplifies the task of system design. Readily available software can help you to obtain the needed view and construct...

Module mixes GPS, cellular functions.
April 12, 2007... by Warren Webb Transportable embedded systems, such as those in the railway industry, must be able to pinpoint their location and communicate from diverse locations, including areas with very low signal strengths. MEN Micro Inc targets...

Board computer expands I/O.
April 12, 2007... by Warren Webb As the 3U CompactPCI form factor gains popularity for space-constrained, high-performance applications, designers are looking for off-the-shelf components that they can adapt to a range of system configurations. The new...

MSOs: Tektronix re-enters the field; deeper memory becomes de rigueur.
April 12, 2007... by Dan Strassberg If Tektronix wanted to, it could make the case that it was the first major oscilloscope manufacturer to offer an MSO (mixed-signal oscilloscope). More than a decade ago, Tek offered an instrument, the TLS216, that you...

APEC highlights what's hot in power.
April 12, 2007... by Margery Conner A strong electronics market coupled with the public's recognition that power efficiency is in everyone's best interest resulted in high traffic at the power-conversion industry's annual APEC (Applied Power Electronics...

Xilinx goes nonvolatile with Spartan-3AN FPGA.
April 12, 2007... by Michael Santarini Xilinx is jumping into the nonvolatile-FPGA market with the Spartan-3AN device. The SIP (system-in-package) device incorporates a 90-nm, SRAM-based Spartan-3A FPGA die atop a NOR-flash die. The Spartan-3A communicates...

Analyst Gary Smith: Semiconductors need a parallel-processing language.
April 12, 2007... by Michael Santarini For nearly two decades, analyst Gary Smith has been a fixture in the EDA industry--advocating new tool flows and methodologies as the silicon times have changed. Late last year, Gartner Dataquest closed Smith's...

Scope.
April 12, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To SID 2007 The Society for Information Display 2007 Symposium, Conference, and Exhibition, (www.sid.org/conf/sid2007/sid2007.html ), the grandfather of display conferences, opens May 20 in Long...

Fooled by a thermocouple.
April 12, 2007... by Ken Whiteleather, Sparton Corp During the development of a medical product requiring noninvasive temperature sensing of fluid passing through 3/8-in. medical plastic tubing, the design team I was working with selected a miniature...

EDN's 2006 Innovator/Innovation winners: To the victor go the statuettes.
April 12, 2007... by Staff The competition for EDN 's 17th Annual Innovation Awards was fierce again this year. The contest drew contenders that ran the electronics-industry gamut--from digital technologies, to mixed-signal products, to processors and...

Wringing out thermistor nonlinearities.
April 12, 2007... by Bonnie Baker Thermistor-temperature-sensing devices present a design challenge if you intend to use such a device over its entire temperature range. Typically, the thermistor is a high-impedance, resistive device that eases one of the...

Squeezing a low-cost multiprocessor platform out of 130 nm.
April 26, 2007... by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor LSI's Zevio project shows that success in consumer electronics does not always mean implementing the fastest SOC in the latest and greatest process technology. Sometimes designing an SOC (system on...

Use a CFL ballast to drive LEDs.
April 26, 2007... Christian Rausch, Unterhaching, Germany Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Designers use ballast ICs, such as International Rectifier's (www.irf.com ) IR53HD420, in CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) for heating the filaments,...

Photodiode amplifier exhibits one-third the output noise of conventional transimpedance amp.
April 26, 2007... Glen Brisebois, Linear Technology Corp, Milpitas, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville A conventional 1-MI[c] transimpedance amplifier has at least 130 nV/aHz of output-noise density at room temperature (Figure 1 ). You can...

Microcontroller programmer taps power from PC's serial port.
April 26, 2007... GY Xu, XuMicro, Houston, TX Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Just like a PC's USB port, the serial port on a PC can also in some cases serve as a power supply. A USB port can provide as much as 500 mA at 5V, but a serial...

Circuit charges supercapacitors to 7V from USB power.
April 26, 2007... Fran Hoffart, Linear Technology, Santa Clara, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Charging a supercapacitor from a 5V USB port may seem simple at first, but to charge three supercapacitors to 7V and to limit the input...

10 reasons to visit EDN.com.
April 26, 2007... by Matthew Miller, Editor in Chief, EDN.com Please allow me to give you 10 reasons to visit the new EDN.com. I know you're busy, so unlike David Letterman, I'll start with No. 1. 1 Design Centers: Many sites choose to organize...

Diagnostic testing (and tasting?).(personal opinion)(Personal account)
April 26, 2007... by Howard Johnson, PhD In 1971, I enjoyed one blissful summer away from school working in a TV-repair shop. The first day on the job, my boss, Paul, explained how to work with customers at the repair counter: 'Mainly, use your sense of...

HD-video encoding with DSP and FPGA partitioning.
April 26, 2007... By Cheng Peng, PhD, and Thanh Tran, PhD, Texas Instruments Implementing a scalable video-encoding architecture that includes DSPs and, when necessary, FPGAs as coprocessors to offload certain tasks satisfies even the most demanding video...

Measuring nanoamperes.
April 26, 2007... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Measuring low currents can be tricky. clever analog-design techniques and the right parts and equipment can help. Thousands of applications require a circuit to measure a small current. One of the most...

Popularly priced DSOs aim to outsell market leader.
April 26, 2007... by Dan Strassberg According to Agilent Technologies, Tektronix's (www.tektronix.com ) lunchbox-sized TDS3000 series remains the largest-selling oscilloscope family based on the number of units sold. Because of the TDS3000s' low prices,...

Synopsys tools tackle verification progress.(integrated circuit verfication)
April 26, 2007... by Michael Santarini When have you done enough verification? That's the age-old question Synopsys is attempting to answer with three new additions to its IC-verification lineup. In 2005, Synopsys and ARM (www.arm.com ) introduced...

Sigrity introduces cost-savvy power-decoupling-capacitor tool for PCB and package design.(printed-circuit-board)
April 26, 2007... by Michael Santarini One of the longest running problems in PCB (printed-circuit-board) design has been trying to figure how much decoupling capacitance you need for your design. PCB engineers often use too much decoupling capacitance to...

ARM updates RealView tools.
April 26, 2007... by Robert Cravotta At this month's ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) in San Jose, CA, ARM announced Version 3.1 upgrades to its RealView Development Suite for the full line of ARM processors. The update provides performance improvements...

Hi-Tech Software introduces call- and pointer-graph-based compilation.
April 26, 2007... by Robert Cravotta At ESC, Hi-Tech Software, a supplier of compilers for Microchip (www.microchip.com ) and Cypress (www.cypress.com ) microcontrollers, announced the OCG (Omniscient Code Generation) compilation technology that generates...

Big advances come to tiny optical components.(Optical Fiber Conference talked about optical cheap products)(Brief article)
April 26, 2007... by Matthew Miller Last month's 2007 Optical Fiber Conference shed light on the industry's ongoing war against bulky, costly components. Two of the most notable advances involved efforts to move the production of optical components into the...

Nanoelectronic switch harnesses silver whiskers.
April 26, 2007... by Matthew Miller Researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have demonstrated a prototype nanoscale electronic switch that exploits a troublesome characteristic of silver as "a feature, not a bug." With its high...

Scope.
April 26, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To IITC 2007 The 10th annual IEEE IITC (International Interconnect Technology Conference) kicks off on June 4 in Burlingame, CA. The premier technical conference for engineers developing on-chip...

Answers can be anywhere.(journey of career)(Occupation overview)
April 26, 2007... by Clark Robbins, GS Engineering When I was a young engineer, my boss asked me to design a discrete-logic controller for a mechanical/hydraulic apparatus. After weeks of work using CMOS logic and power transistors, I reanalyzed the design,...