EDN articles from December 2006

EDN archives from December 2006

Creating the power subsystem in modern design.
December 1, 2006... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Power--from linear to digital--covers a range of design choices. This brief overview presents designers with some of the alternatives and problems that will arise. Power electronics range from the...

Proprietary architectures defend automotive segment.
December 1, 2006... by David Marsh, Contributing Technical Editor Although ARM architectures increasingly vie for automotive and industrial dominance, they face stiff competition from proprietary devices that regard these markets as their own. Recent devices...

Active-filter circuit and oscilloscope inspect a Class D amplifier"s output.
December 1, 2006... John Guy, Maxim Integrated Products Inc, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville The increasing acceptance of Class D amplifiers has helped them gain market share from their linear Class AB brethren. That acceptance...

Voltage-to-pulse-width converter spares microprocessor"s resources.
December 1, 2006... James Christensen, Kris Design Co, El Cajon, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Although not an ADC in the classic "stream-of-ones-and zeros" sense, this voltage-to-pulse-width converter produces a logic-level output pulse...

Precision voltage reference delivers 80 mA.
December 1, 2006... James Horste and Gary Staiman, Maxim Integrated Products Inc, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Large analog systems that present many loads to a voltage-reference source can often demand more current than a...

Two-channel audio amplifier drives stepper motor.
December 1, 2006... Phill Leyva and Bill Quach, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Although relatively expensive, monofilar-wound, bipolar stepper motors provide strong torque for a given physical size....

Get power from a telephone line without disturbing it.
December 1, 2006... Yongping Xia, Navcom Technology, Torrance, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville An idle telephone line tempts designers to use its 48V potential as a power source. However, Part 68 of the US Federal Communications...

CEOs spotlight chip-maker challenges to innovation.
December 1, 2006... By Maury Wright, Editor in Chief On opening day at Electronica 2006 (Munich, Germany), a CEO panel on innovation kicked off the festivities at the megaconference. Moderator Hermann Simon, chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners, quizzed the...

Eye of the probe.
December 1, 2006... By Howard Johnson, PhD My differential probe touches two surface-level signal traces, directly adjacent to the input balls of a 2.5-Gbps digital deserializer in a large BGA package (Reference 1 ). The signal arrives from an...

Your mileage may vary.
December 1, 2006... By Joshua Israelsohn, Contributing Technical Editor I've been enjoying relief from our high gasoline prices thanks to the HEV (hybrid-electric vehicle) I've been driving. Among the car's features is a display that provides the instantaneous...

Flash memory shines brightly as code and data store.
December 1, 2006... By Maury Wright, Editor in Chief Technology moved from low-density specialized applications to the mainstream. Toshiba invented the flash-memory concept in 1984. But when EDN first covered real products four years later, the "flash"...

Conventional EEPROMs and flash EEPROMs offer a spectrum of bit densities.(Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory)(Editorial)(Brief article)
December 1, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief Applications abound for nonvolatile-memory devices capable of occasional reprogramming. The storage of frequently used numbers in telephone equipment, password entry in security systems, patient-data...

Battling bugs.(evaluation of debugging software and embedded systems)
December 1, 2006... by Bertrand Deleris, Freescale Semiconductor Debugging embedded systems can represent more than half of an embedded-software-project workload. Understanding hardware-debugging functions and the issues they tackle is key to selecting the...

Embedded memory evolves.(Dynamic random access memory compared with Static random access memory)
December 1, 2006... by Raymond Ambrose, Randa Creative In the search for on-chip RAM, SOI technology offers a new answer. Ever since its invention in the 1970s, DRAM (dynamic RAM) has been the most popular form of semiconductor memory. Indeed, modern...

Power-delivery network analyzer measures 50-µΩ impedance.
December 1, 2006... by Dan Strassberg The Ultimetrix P4800 PDNA (power-delivery network analyzer) measures impedances as low as 50[micro]* from 10 Hz to 40 MHz as a stand-alone instrument or to 18 GHz when you interface it to an external vector-network...

Mixed-signal-SOC designs get flash for auto and industrial applications.
December 1, 2006... by Maury Wright The term "SOC" (system on chip) typically conjures thoughts of the incredibly dense digital IC that lies at the heart of a consumer-electronics product, but designers targeting auto, industrial, and similar applications...

Sequential-sampling scopes, TDR challenge VNAs.
December 1, 2006... by Dan Strassberg Tektronix has announced the DSA8200 digital-serial-analyzer sequential-sampling oscilloscope, new remote-sampling electrical modules, and enhanced IConnect software for serial-data-network analysis. According to the...

Microcontrollers build in support for off-chip SDRAM and flash.
December 1, 2006... by Robert Cravotta ARM7-core-based microcontrollers, smaller and consuming less power than ARM9-core devices, are workhorses for low-power embedded-system applications operating from batteries. However, to take advantage of built-in...

100-MHz to 1-GHz LXI scope modules provide two or four analog, 16 logic-timing channels.
December 1, 2006... by Dan Strassberg If you think that a scope with a huge display can't fit into 1¾ in. of rack space, think again. Scopes with external displays can accomplish this feat. The display can be part of a PC, but no PC is necessary if...

Multiflow USB controller optimizes handset data flow.
December 1, 2006... by Maury Wright Almost every mobile handset these days includes a target USB interface that users can employ to link a PC and the handset. For applications such as sporadically updating a handset's contacts, a relatively simple USB...

ZigBee transceiver offers protocol flexibility.
December 1, 2006... by Maury Wright Microchip has just introduced the new IEEE-802.15.4-compliant MRF24J40 wireless transceiver, which supports both ZigBee and lighter weight protocols. Designers can use the transceiver with Microchip's MiWi...

Communications processors support ZigBee 2006.(Freescale Semiconductor enhances PowerQuicc series with introduction of PowerQuicc III)
December 1, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe The PowerQuicc series of communications processors from Freescale Semiconductor has evolved over many years. The latest generation of devices, PowerQuicc III, meets the needs of...

Ferroelectric LCD enables holographic recording.
December 1, 2006... by Ron Wilson Holographic-data storage has been one of the continuing research quests that always seems to have great theoretical merit but even greater implementation problems. In principle, the technology allows you to store a pattern...

X-ray imaging concept may reveal single nanoscale structures.
December 1, 2006... by Ron Wilson A free-electron laser, which has emerged as a new kind of X-ray-photon source, may address the limitations of conventional X-ray-diffraction techniques, according to recent results from Stanford University. They get their...

Scope.
December 1, 2006... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking ahead Ron Wilson To DesignCon 2007 From its history as a Hewlett Packard proprietary show, to its stature today as a small but influential design conference, DesignCon, ( ...

Hit the ground running.
December 1, 2006... by Walter Lindenbach My workbench includes a Hewlett-Packard 8405A VVM (vector voltmeter) of 1960s vintage. The VVM can convert two inputs at frequencies of 1 MHz to 1 GHz to outputs of 20 kHz, complete with modulation and sideband...

What's a little glitch among friends?
December 15, 2006... by Bonnie Baker You can ignore the glitch-impulse area that occurs at the output of DACs during code transition in most systems. However, in a control loop, this DAC idiosyncrasy may have a negative effect. You would think that a...

Cutting the carbon-energy cord: Is the answer blowin' in the wind?
December 15, 2006... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor Low cost, plentiful, clean, and, in all other respects, "green." These words describe wind power in a nutshell. So, why is it so unpopular? The devil is in the details, along with our reluctance...

Harvesters gather energy from the ether, power lightweight systems.(Editorial)
December 15, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief Thermal, vibration, and RF sources show potential in supplying current to power-miserly applications There's no free lunch, right? Your mom and dad probably told you as much. So surely we can't extract...

The Hot 100 products of 2006.(websites)(Website list)
December 15, 2006... by Staff As the calendar nears January, popular culture inevitably begins to cough up countless "best-of" lists, covering frivolous topics from reality TV to celebrity hairstyles. In an effort to counteract this tide of inanity, we at...

Three microcontroller ports drive 12 LEDs.
December 15, 2006... Nedjeljko Lekic and Zoran Mijanovic, University of Montenegro, Department of Electrical Engineering, Podgorica, Montenegro Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Based on a previously published Design Idea (Reference 1 ), the...

Magnetic-field probe requires few components.
December 15, 2006... Rama Sarma, EMI-EMC Centre, RCI, Hyderabad, India Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Popularly known as "gauss meters," various makes and models of magnetic field meters are available on the market at prices that make them...

Dynamic siphon steals current from USB port.
December 15, 2006... Donald Schelle, Maxim Integrated Products Inc, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville A USB port offers a handy source of 5V power for auxiliary devices. A USB port not only supplies power to a microcontroller and...

A day isn't always a day, but a byte is a byte.(European internet service providers should improve internet access services)
December 15, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief I recently returned from a trip to Europe for the biannual Electronica trade show in Munich, Germany. I'm happy to report that high-speed Internet access is now broadly available across Western Europe....

5.8-GHz-bandwidth, 10-bit AWG claims honors as world's fastest.(Brief article)
December 15, 2006... by Dan Strassberg Tektronix has announced the AWG7000 Series of AWGs (arbitrary-waveform generators), which the company calls the fastest such signal sources. Design engineers will use the instruments, which can simultaneously produce as...

Digital-video processor breaks $10 barrier.
December 15, 2006... by Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' DaVinci line of digital-video processors pushes down the cost for digital-media processors to as low as $9.95 with the introduction of four new TMS320DM643x devices. The application-specific...

PXI line claims to support broad array of instrument-interconnect standards.
December 15, 2006... by Dan Strassberg Keithley Instruments has entered the large and rapidly growing PXI-modular-instrumentation market with a bang. The company's announcement of the KPXI line includes simultaneous-data-acquisition boards, multifunction and...

65-nm FPGAs consume less power.
December 15, 2006... by Michael Santarini Altera Corp has announced the high-end Stratix III FPGA, the company's first in 65-nm process technology, claiming advances in power, performance, productivity, and price over its 90-nm FPGAs. According to Dave...

Richard Tobias: The SOC's the thing.
December 15, 2006... by Michael Santarini Richard Tobias is chief technology officer at Pixelworks ( www.pixelworks.com ), a maker of SOCs (systems on chips) for the video and display markets. In his current role at Pixelworks and in his previous role as...

Sigma-delta ADC IP block offers programmable resolution.(Chipidea improves analog to digital sigma-delta cores )
December 15, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe IP (intellectual-property) provider Chipidea is expanding its ADC offerings to include a range of sigma-delta cores that provide programmabilty during operation for either high resolution or low power...

Mobile-phone use to rise in Africa, India.(wireless communications subscriber)
December 15, 2006... by Vinod Kataria, EDN Asia According to iSuppli Corp, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, even among low-income subscribers in the Third World. For mobile-phone makers, this phenomenon is posing both challenges and...

Scope.
December 15, 2006... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead Ron Wilson To Electronic Imaging 2007 If there is one must-see conference for the whole range of technologies from conceptualization of human-graphics systems to image acquisition,...