EDN articles from April 2008

EDN archives from April 2008

Laying Seamless WiMax Fabric.
April 3, 2008... By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Chip Sets are Emerging that add WiMax Capability to Mobile PC and Cell-phone Applications, while Lab and Production-test Equipment Evolves to keep Pace. WiMax (worldwide...

Heads and tails Design RF Amplifiers for Linearity and Efficiency.
April 3, 2008... By Paul Rako, Technical Editor Base Stations and Handsets need RF Amplifiers with high Linearity and Efficiency. With some Clever Techniques, Designers can align these Mutually Exclusive Goals. Cell phones use modern modulation schemes...

Chop the noise gain to measure an op amp's real-time offset voltage.
April 3, 2008... Glen Brisebois, Linear Technology, San Jose, CA Edited By Charles H Small and Fran Granville One of the most important specifications of an op amp is its input-offset voltage. You can null out this voltage on many op amps, but the...

Simple analog circuit provides voltage clipping and dc shifting for flash ADC.
April 3, 2008... Alfredo del Rio, University of Vigo, Spain Edited By Charles H Small and Fran Granville Many flash ADCs, such as National Semiconductor's (www.national.com ) ADC1175, have a recommended operating input-voltage range of 0.6 to 2.6V...

Compact laser-diode driver provides protection for precision-instrument use.
April 3, 2008... Jiaqi Shen and Xiaoshu Cai, University of Shanghai for Science & Technology, Shanghai, China Edited By Charles H Small and Fran Granville Continuous-wave laser diodes in precision-instrument applications require constant-current...

Current source makes novel Class A buffer.
April 3, 2008... Horst Koelzow, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Edited By Charles H Small and Fran Granville The basis for this Design Idea is a classic two-transistor current source (Figure 1 ). Current through R1 depends only on the VBE (base-emitter voltage)...

Hello, EDN readers!(Editorial)
April 3, 2008... By Karen Field, Editorial Director As a former design engineer at Texas Instruments and, as a reader of this magazine, I can't tell you how excited and proud I am to join the team here at EDN as the new editorial director. From the...

Honest energy.
April 3, 2008... By Joshua Israelsohn, Contributing Technical Editor I had the honor and great pleasure of serving as a panelist at an APEC (Applied Power Electronics Conference, www.apec-conf.org ) rap session in February in Austin, TX. Although the...

Designing a split termination.
April 3, 2008... By Howard Johnson, PhD My last two articles dealt with the design of the end-terminating structure in Figure 1a (references 1 and 2 ). That structure terminates a transmission line with a single resistor value, RT (termination resistance),...

Boost efficiency for low-cost flyback converters.
April 3, 2008... By John Betten and Brian King, Texas Instruments Many Devices Employ Flyback Converters Because of their Simplicity and Low Cost-not their Stellar Efficiency. but don't too Quickly Eliminate Flybacks from your List of Options. With a Few...

Critical clock-domain-crossing bugs.
April 3, 2008... By Shaker Sarwary and Saurabh Verma, Atrenta Inc Awareness of CDC Issues, along with the use of Good Design Practices and Proven EDA Tools for CDC verification, can avoid costly Silicon re-spins and Significantly Improve Time to Market. ...

Intel launches 45-nm quad- and dual-core processors for embedded-system applications.
April 3, 2008... By Ann Steffora Mutschler Intel Corp is shipping quad- and dual-core processors that the company based on its high-k-metal-gate-transistor formula and manufactured on its 45-nm process. The new processors, which include the quad-core Xeon...

Georgia Tech Studies Off-chip-interconnect Issues.(Georgia Institute of Technology School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering )
April 3, 2008... Edited By Fran Granville As chips get faster, off-chip interconnect increasingly looks like a bottleneck to high-frequency signals. This scenario occurs when the signals must traverse not only relatively long distances across a board, but...

Analog-output module extends embedded I/O.
April 3, 2008... By Warren Webb Targeting applications such as process control, data monitoring and collection, security and medical-equipment design, VersaLogic's new VCM-DAS-3 PC/104 analog-output module offers a convenient and cost-effective method for...

Mixed-signal chip combines audio, power.
April 3, 2008... By Graham Prophet Wolfson Microelec-tronics has introduced the AudioPlus product line, which will combine the company's expertise in high-quality audio for portable products with a power-management subsystem. Wolfson has combined functions...

LCD Controller Tackles Harsh Environments.
April 3, 2008... By Warren Webb Digital View recently introduced the HE-1920 COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) LCD controller. The fully buffered, multisynchronous interface controller provides analog and digital connections for a range of TFT...

Processor combines Coretex-A8 core with graphics and digital-signal processing.
April 3, 2008... By Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' latest OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) processors integrate a superscalar, 600-MHz ARM (www.arm.com ) Coretex-A8 core with DSP functions, HD (high-definition)-video acceleration, and 2-...

MOSFETs get their 15 minutes of fame at APEC.
April 3, 2008... By Margery Conner One thing you can count on at the power-conversion industry's annual APEC (Applied Power Electronics Conference) is that MOSFETs will feature prominently. This year's conference, which took place last month in Austin, TX,...

1-?Hz to 240-MHz generator produces precision pulses, 14-bit arbitrary waveforms, and more.
April 3, 2008... By Dan Strassberg Design and test engineers are under increasing pressure to quickly bring high-quality products to market and differentiate those products from their competition. Achieving these objectives requires new test protocols and...

Fast SPICE Simulator Targets Digital, Mixed-Signal, and Analog Designs.
April 3, 2008... By Michael Santarini EDA start-up Nascentric Inc has introduced a Fast Spice simulation tool for analog, mixed-signal, and custom digital designs that claims true Spice accuracy and higher speeds than other commercial Fast Spice...

Stanford tries nanotubes for on-chip interconnect.
April 3, 2008... By Ron Wilson A recent paper in Nano Letters illustrates both why researchers are so interested in carbon nanotubes as an interconnect medium and why making the nanomaterials a useful reality is such a hurdle. Researchers at Stanford...

Apple sneezes, flash industry gets sick.
April 3, 2008... Edited By Suzanne Deffree Demand cuts for NAND-flash memory from Apple Inc (www.apple.com ) have driven down total NAND-market estimates for 2008. Reports from iSuppli Corp's (www.isuppli.com ) industry sources indicate that the...

EPA Releases Energy Star Guidelines for Servers.
April 3, 2008... Edited By Suzanne Deffree The US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov ) has released the first draft of its voluntary Energy Star (www.energystar.gov ) power-efficiency specifications for computer servers. In doing so, the...

Sunnier Prospects for Polysilicon Owth.
April 3, 2008... Edited By Suzanne Deffree Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com ) expects the severe shortages and allocations of polysilicon, a key component of most solar panels, to turn around in 2008. The market-research company believes that polysilicon...

Contamination: not your usual suspects.
April 3, 2008... By Martin DeLateur, Consultant While working in the 1980s for a major semiconductor manufacturer, we had a major yield problem that was baffling the production team. Yields were decreasing on a daily basis because of high leakage failures....

Does ENOB tell the whole story?(effective number of bits)
April 17, 2008... by Bonnie Baker Near the beginning and end of a total solar eclipse, the thin slice of the sun that's visible appears broken up into beads of light. These lights are called Baily's Beads, after the British astronomer Francis Baily, who...

Embedded technology: designers choose from the latest fabrics.
April 17, 2008... by Warren Webb, Technical Editor Embedded-system designers are using the latest switched-fabric technology to not only boost data rates, but also dynamically optimize performance, bypass failed subsystems, and coexist with legacy...

Integrating high-speed serial I/O: no snap for SOC designers.
April 17, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Examine the problems an SOC team faces in integrating what many see as an unfamiliar, particularly delicate mixed-signal-IP block into their already-challenging chip designs. High-speed-serial-data...

Use thermoelectric coolers with real-world heat sinks.
April 17, 2008... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel Hill, NC Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Peltier devices, also known as solid-state refrigerators, or TECs (thermoelectric coolers), actively cool temperature-sensitive electronic components,...

Interface MIDI instruments to a PC through a USB port.(Brief article)
April 17, 2008... Stefano Palazzolo, Senago, Milan, Italy Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea uses the FT232BM from Future Technology Devices International (www.ftdichip.com ), a USB-to-UART interface IC that you need not...

Transmission lines simulate digital filters in PSpice.
April 17, 2008... David Báez-Lopez, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Designers use PSpice mainly to simulate analog circuits. However, you can...

Dual flip-flop forms simple delayed-pulse generator.
April 17, 2008... Luca Bruno, ITIS Hensemberger Monza, Lissone, Italy Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Some applications require clock-timing adjustments, such as generating precision clocks for time-interleaved ADCs, or delay adjustments in...

Those devilish details.
April 17, 2008... By Warren Webb, Technical Editor Embedded-system designers are once again emerging from their cubicles and laboratories to saunter up and down the aisles of the Silicon Valley version of the Embedded Systems Conference in search of the...

You can punch out and manufacture this cell-phone reference design.(Brief article)
April 17, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Providing a reference design for ultra-low-cost handsets to OEMs in Asia means a lot more than sending them a development board and a data sheet. In many cases, these companies want a fully functioning end...

Blind prefetching improves PCI Express-to-PCI-bridge performance.
April 17, 2008... by Eugene Cabanban, PLX Technology Standard bridges allow designers to combine the high-performance PCI Express interconnect with legacy PCI-bus architecture. advanced bridge features, such as blind prefetching, boost data throughput. ...

How to maximize application payload with a minimal machine-code footprint.
April 17, 2008... by Vishwas Vaidya, Tata Motors Ltd Learn how to analyze a traditional algorithm to drastically reduce the memory footprint and generate processor-friendly machine code for a typical automotive application. Automotive designers of...

Quad data converter features dual FPGAs.
April 17, 2008... by Warren Webb Targeting teams working on wideband-radar and -communication systems, Pentek recently released the Model 7150 high-speed data converter, featuring four 200-MHz, 16-bit ADCs and a pair of high-performance Xilinx...

IMEC launches method of analyzing process variability.(Interuniversity Microelectronics Research Center)(Brief article)
April 17, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler To allow for optimization of system designs for timing, energy, and yield versus expected application load, the IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Research Center) recently demonstrated a...

Tiny nanophotonic switch provides optical routing between cores.
April 17, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler In another step toward sending information inside a computer chip using light pulses instead of electrons, researchers at IBM have created what they believe is the world's smallest nanophotonic switch, with a...

POE controller gears up for new physical layer.
April 17, 2008... by Margery Conner Anticipating the new 802.3at version of POE (power over Ethernet), Akros Silicon has introduced its AS1135 PD (powered-device)-controller IC, which the company claims is the first IC to implement the two-event PHY...

Low-power, low-noise analog-front-end IC targets ultrasound systems.
April 17, 2008... by Paul Rako Texas Instruments' new family of analog-front-end ICs has power consumption of only 122 mW, making the devices suitable for portable-system applications. With noise performance of 0.85 nV/aHz at 2 MHz, the ICs are also...

Multiprocessor system sports as many as four coherent, multithreaded cores.
April 17, 2008... by Robert Cravotta MIPS Technologies' multithreaded, multiprocessor, coherent-processing MIPS32 1004K licensable-IP (intellectual-property) platform supports as many as four single- or double-threaded processor cores that connect through a...

CompactPCI computer integrates multicore technology.
April 17, 2008... by Warren Webb A new 6U CompactPCI single-board computer from MEN Micro combines Intel's (www.intel.com ) multicore technology with a flexible mezzanine-card extension to deliver the needed performance for a range of applications,...

Freescale's Lisa Su: embedding future growth.(Freescale Semiconductor Israel Ltd.)(Interview)
April 17, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree Lisa Su, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Freescale Semiconductor (www.freescale.com ), discusses the future of embedded-system technologies, differentiation beyond Moore's Law, and the challenges...

Finding clock glitches.
April 17, 2008... By Glen Chenier, consultant It was a dark and stormy night. It was dark because we had turned off all the lights in the lab as we anxiously studied the bright-blue-green glow of the oscilloscope, and it was stormy because our prototypes...