EDN articles from April 2009

EDN archives from April 2009

Online tools home in on analog design.
April 9, 2009... By Paul Rako, Technical Editor Analog design gets easier and more convenient, thanks to free web applications and downloadable tools. Since the advent of circuits, electronics engineers have used various implementations of simulation...

Diagnose LEDs by monitoring the switch-mode duty cycle.
April 9, 2009... Fons Janssen, Maxim Integrated Products Inc, Bilthoven, the Netherlands Edited By Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Engineers often monitor the forward voltage, VF , of HB LEDs (high-brightness light-emitting diodes) to assess the LEDs'...

Single pin controls relay, intermittent buzzer, and status LED.
April 9, 2009... Kartik Joshi and Manik Chugh, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Delhi, India Edited By Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Switching applications involving controlling devices or appliances using digital-I/O lines through a relay often...

Simple two-transistor circuit lights LEDs.
April 9, 2009... Barry A Tigner, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI Edited By Martin Rowe and Fran Granville A previous Design Idea describes a circuit that uses an astable multivibrator to drive an LED (Reference 1 ). The circuit in Figure 1...

Enlightenment on LEDs.
April 9, 2009... Margery Conner, Technical Editor Practical, inexpensive HB LEDs (high-brightness light-emitting diodes) are here. Now, what can we do with them, and what will be their impact on electronics and consumers? With their promise of high...

Solid-state lighting and efficiency from a global perspective.
April 9, 2009... Margery Conner, Technical Editor What is the world's appetite for light? What if an increase in lighting efficiency does not result in less energy consumption but in more lighting for the same amount of energy? Jeff Tsao, a researcher at...

A fail-safe approach to LEDs.
April 9, 2009... By Jeff Perry, National Semiconductor Choose the right high-brightness LED and protect it from overtemperature conditions. Spurred by the increasing cost of energy and concerns about climate change, governments and industry are pushing...

Inverting buck-boost converter regulates LED current.
April 9, 2009... By John Betten, Texas Instruments When input- and output-voltage ranges overlap and are 'dirty' to boot, consider biasing on LEDs with a negative voltage. Controlling the brightness of LEDs requires a driver that provides a constant,...

Solving the LED-driver challenge for light-bulb replacement.
April 9, 2009... By Silvestro Fimiani, Power Integrations The Department of Energy is offering a prize of as much as $10 million to create the first solid-state replacement for the 60W incandescent light bulb, so you know it's a problem. Here are some...

Managing high-voltage lithium-ion batteries in HEVs.
April 9, 2009... By Michael Kultgen, Linear Technology Corp Skyrocketing energy prices and the growing concern over carbon emissions have focused attention on electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. New lithium-battery designs will be key technologies for...

Power-supply modulation steps up handset-power-amp efficiency.
April 9, 2009... by Graham Prophet RF-engineering company Nujira has extended the reach of its efficiency-boosting technology for power amplifiers into the handset. The company has until now focused on the infrastructure side of communications, selling its...

Rugged computer runs virtual partitions.
April 9, 2009... by Warren Webb Aitech Defense Systems recently released a 6U VME single-board computer targeting applications in radar and sonar communications, vehicle-protection subsystems, mission-management computers, and heads-up display controllers....

Graphene's edge structure affects electronic properties.
April 9, 2009... by Suzanne Deffree Engineering-department researchers at the University of Illinois-Urbana say they have experimentally proven that the crystallographic orientation of graphene edges affects the material's electronic properties. The...

Microrobots swim through blood vessels.
April 9, 2009... by Margery Conner Just a few years ago, the popular Uncle Kracker song Follow Me included the lyrics 'I - swim through your veins like a fish in the sea.' Though that image was figurative, researchers at Monash University in Australia have...

Prototyping kit shortens embedded-system-development schedules.
April 9, 2009... by Warren Webb To cope with constantly shrinking design schedules and to simplify the inevitable product updates, a growing number of embedded-system designers are incorporating reconfigurable-FPGA technology. Lending support to this...

Power systems get transient-load analysis.
April 9, 2009... by Margery Conner The Sentinel RingDown EPU (electronic-prognostic unit) from the Ridgetop Group predicts power-supply-system failures by externally monitoring transient response to source or load changes. Transients on a power supply's...

Simulator speeds eye measurements.
April 9, 2009... by Rick Nelson Agilent Technologies has introduced a 1 million-bit-per-minute signal-integrity channel simulator for multigigabit chip-to-chip data-link design. The channel simulator allows you to perform an interactive eye-diagram...

FPGA serial I/O hits 11.3 Gbps.
April 9, 2009... by Graham Prophet In the latest additions to its Stratix range of FPGAs, Altera has incorporated serial-data transceivers that support signal rates as high as 11.3 Gbps. The company envisages the Stratix IV GT's parts finding applications...

PC industry in 2009 to see sharpest unit decline ever.
April 9, 2009... By Suzanne Deffree PC OEMs need to be ready for a double-digit decline in shipments this year, according to the research from Gartner Inc (www.gartner.com ). The company reports that the PC industry will ship 257 million units in 2009, an...

Flip-flop flap.
April 9, 2009... By Holger Steffens, Ident Technology I recently was a product engineer in a DRAM company and usually spent my time hunting bugs in other people's designs. Two years ago, however, I got an additional task: I had to design a measurement...

Where did all that racket come from?
April 23, 2009... By Bonnie Baker Since arriving in the market, CMOS single-supply amplifiers have been beneficial to single-supply-system designers worldwide. Key players affecting the THD+N (total-harmonic-distortion-plus-noise) characteristics of...

Power fortunes: Estimating power in FPGA designs.
April 23, 2009... By Ron Wilson Executive Editor As FPGAs enter new applications, designers Must estimate power consumption early, closely watch it, and then attempt to measure the results. In simpler times, FPGA power consumption was a simpler issue....

40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet brings new test challenges.(Conference notes)
April 23, 2009... By Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor, Test & Measurement World IEEE P802.3ba will define an architecture for 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet, giving rise to new test equipment and test techniques. Internet and data-center users always...

EDN's 2008 Innovator and Innovations of the Year: And the Winner Is ….
April 23, 2009... Staff A challenging economic environment in 2008 brought out the best in several members of the electronics industry. And EDN 's annual Innovation Awards program has once again honored the most innovative technological advances as well as...

Simple method uses PSpice for Thevenin-equivalent circuits.
April 23, 2009... David Karpaty, Analog Devices Inc, Wilmington, MA Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Thevenin- and Norton-equivalent circuits, among the most fundamental circuit-analysis theorems, can be useful for determining a load resistance...

DAC and flip-flops form constant-current source.(Analog Devices Inc.)(digital to analog converters)
April 23, 2009... Marián Eatofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville The Analog Devices (www.analog.com ) AD5422 16-bit serial-input DAC lets you program for a voltage output or a...

Convert negative inputs to positive outputs.
April 23, 2009... Shane Chang and Budge Ing, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville You can obtain a precise, positive-output voltage from a negative-voltage supply with a boost converter and a linear regulator....

Canceling Sirius: so frustrating, it made me furious.
April 23, 2009... By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor Tough economic times understandably encourage subscription-service companies to do their utmost to hold onto customers. Sometimes, they achieve this goal by making the service too tempting to...

Use alternative approaches to evaluate dc/dc synchronous buck converters.
April 23, 2009... By David Divins, International Rectifier Linear systems, online tools, and full simulations help you analyze your designs. A number of methods exist for dc/dc-converter analysis. The one you choose depends on your proficiency as an...

IC monitors input power.
April 23, 2009... By Paul Rako International Rectifier has introduced the IR3725 input-power-monitoring IC. The device communicates with a host system over the I2 C (inter-integrated-circuit) bus to monitor input power, voltage, and current for power...

Floating-point microcontroller doubles performance.
April 23, 2009... By Robert Cravotta Targeting the needs of high-performance applications, Texas Instruments' TMS320C2834x Delfino controllers offer twice the floating-point performance of previous TMS320C2000 devices. The C28x core operates at 300 MHz;...

Rugged system on module supports fabric interconnects.
April 23, 2009... By Warren Webb As embedded-system designers confront the latest transportation, avionics, industrial-automation, and medical-instrumentation applications, the main challenges are to deliver a system that meets high-performance and...

Clock generator reflects complexity of Intel Calpella motherboards.
April 23, 2009... By Ron Wilson SpectraLinear built its new SL28748 clock-generator IC to work on the Intel (www.intel.com ) Calpella mobile platform. In doing so, SpectraLinear opens a window on an interesting comparison between the problem of generating...

Signal-integrity experts speak out.
April 23, 2009... Interview conducted and edited by Paul Rako At DesignCon 2009, which took place in Santa Clara in February, EDN got a chance to talk about signal integrity with Greg Edlund and Larry Lerner, who presented a panel at the conference...

Mismating mix-up makes for monstrous military mission.
April 23, 2009... By Bob Mason, Schneider Electric My first job out of college was for a military-electronics company. We built rectangular metal boxes full of electronics that go into aircraft and space vehicles. Both plug and socket types of keyed...