EDN articles from December 2008

EDN archives from December 2008

Prototyping techniques: things to know before pulling the trigger.
December 5, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Tiny components and high-frequency circuits demand rigorous prototyping methods. Prototyping has become far more difficult than it was in the old days. For one thing, electronic components have gotten...

Verification metrics: When is enough enough?
December 5, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Collecting verification-coverage metrics and fusing them into a clear picture of where you stand is no easy matter. Today, most design managers depend on some sort of verification-coverage metrics to...

Solar-array controller needs no multiplier to maximize power.
December 5, 2008... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel Hill, NC Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Solar-photovoltaic arrays are among the most efficient, cost-effective, and scalable 'green' alternatives to fossil fuels, and researchers are almost daily...

Simple microcontroller-temperature measurement uses only a diode and a capacitor.
December 5, 2008... Andreas Grun, Wedemark, Germany Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Using a PN-junction diode for temperature measurement usually depends on its 2amV/K temperature coefficient. Conventionally, you must amplify and digitize this...

Current mirror drives multiple LEDs from a low supply voltage.
December 5, 2008... Rex Niven, Forty Trout Electronics, Eltham, Victoria, Australia Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Driving LEDs at a regulated current from low supply voltages can be difficult because minimal overhead voltage is available for...

Bias and opinion in tech and in life.(Column)
December 5, 2008... By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor I recently received a fairly critical e-mail that began with an eye-catching and eyebrow-raising subject line: 'Bait and switch?' The reader who sent the e-mail appeared to be quite disappointed...

Visualizing differential crosstalk.
December 5, 2008... by Howard Johnson, PhD Figure 1 depicts two 100I[c] differential pairs of PCB (printed-circuit-board) traces. A solid-plane layer appears at the bottom of the figure . An upper solid plane exists somewhere above the figure . This plot...

Measure power-supply-loop transfer.
December 5, 2008... by Frederik Dostal, National Semiconductor Using a function generator and an oscilloscope, you can measure gain and phase shift versus frequency in a power supply's control loop. Power supplies use control-loop circuits to produce...

Designing protective circuitry for DSL loops: Beware of pitfalls.(digital-subscriber-line)
December 5, 2008... by Phillip Havens, Littelfuse LP DSL equipment requires protection from a variety of overvoltage conditions, but the need to avoid unduly degrading circuit operation complicates circuit design. The appropriate protective-circuit design...

Mentor's new DRC tool targets 32-nm node.(Mentor Graphics Corp.)(design-rule checking)
December 5, 2008... by Pallab Chatterjee, Contributing Technical Editor Mentor Graphics is enhancing its market-leading Calibre physical-verification environment for subwavelength-semiconductor processes with Calibre EQDRC (equation-based design-rule...

Power-stingy digital accelerometers yield benefits in gesture-driven consumer devices.
December 5, 2008... by Margery Conner Features involving a device's motion, such as a tap-to-mute capability on a cell phone or a user-input feature on a gaming controller, can serve as communication tools. Motion sensors can also serve as safety devices,...

Scalable instrument ups speed, accuracy of MIMO-receiver lab tests.
December 5, 2008... by Dan Strassberg Agilent Technologies has announced a scalable laboratory instrument that enables quicker, more accurate testing of MIMO (multiple-input/multiple-output) receivers earlier in the design cycle. Providing what the company...

Tiny module delivers Pico-ITXe expansion.(WinSystems Inc.)(Brief article)
December 5, 2008... by Warren Webb As standard off-the-shelf board architectures shrink, designers need simple and low-cost techniques to tack on custom I/O. Toward that end, WinSystems recently introduced the first Pico-I/O module for expanding Pico-ITXe...

Intel's SLC SSDs: the rest of the story.
December 5, 2008... by Brian Dipert Oh, how I detest multiphase product introductions.... Ahem. Back in mid-August, Intel unveiled its MLC (multilevel-cell) and SLC (single-level-cell) flash-memory-based, 1.8- and 2.5-in.-solid-state-drive plans, and,...

Flexible charge pump offers another means of producing electricity.
December 5, 2008... by Fran Granville Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of small-scale electric-power generator that produces ac current through the cyclical stretching and releasing of zinc-oxide wires encapsulated...

Coating provides near-perfect absorption of sunlight from all angles.
December 5, 2008... by Fran Granville Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight that solar panels can capture and allows the panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from...

Engineers develop atomic-scale compositional images of fuel-cell nanoparticles.
December 5, 2008... by Fran Granville Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas-Austin (www.utexas.edu ), and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (www.ornl.gov ) have taken the first images of individual atoms on and near...

'Long, dark season' for OEMs, Gartner predicts.(original equipment manufacturers)
December 5, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree The holiday season is shaping up to be less than jolly for many members of the electronics supply chain. Bucking the usual trends, several OEMs (original-equipment manufacturers) in the late third and early fourth...

NAND oversupply could affect other industries.
December 5, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree NAND sales , which consumer products mainly drive, now face crumbling consumer confidence arising from poor global economic conditions. With the challenging retail situation and the inventory overhang among OEM...

IPC fired up about possible TBBPA ROHS inclusion.(European Union restriction-of-hazardous-substances)(tetrabromobisphenol A)(Brief article)
December 5, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree The IPC (www.ipc.org ) has voiced concern over the possible inclusion of TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A) in the coming revised EU ROHS (European Union restriction-of-hazardous-substances) regulations. As of...

All analog, all the time.
December 5, 2008... by Jim Delmonico, General Electric I was a rookie engineer fresh out of college in the late '80s. I had enjoyed long hours building analog-electronic projects as a hobby and thought that the digital world would be so much easier than analog...

What's in your SAR-ADC application?
December 15, 2008... by Bonnie Baker "Finding an amplifier that doesn't tarnish an ADC's performance is hard enough. But now you also have to deal with single-supply voltages and the quirky switched-capacitor input structure" (Reference 1 ). Engineers have...

Solar's bright future.
December 15, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler, Contributing Editor Will solar technology remain a hot issue even with a global economic crisis at hand? Photovoltaic experts weigh in on the technology, opportunities, and future of solar technologies. ...

Hardware and software approaches implement multiple radios.
December 15, 2008... by Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief Miniaturization and emerging flexible software architectures will enable compact, low-power wireless devices to support communications standards ranging from Bluetooth to WiMax. Today's on-the-go...

The Hot 100 Products of 2008.
December 15, 2008... Staff It's time once again for EDN 's annual Hot 100 Products list. Each year, manufacturers announce thousands of new products and technologies. EDN 's editors spend countless hours narrowing that massive list to the hundreds of items...

Program *excelerates* microcomputer-I/O allocation.
December 15, 2008... Aubrey Kagan, Emphatec, Markham, ON, Canada Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville When I designed a system employing the LPC2138 ARM (www.arm.com )-based microcontroller, I quickly abandoned a pencil-and-paper approach to allocating...

Microcontroller measures resistance without an ADC.
December 15, 2008... Ashish Aggarwal, Netaji Subash Institute of Technology, Dwarka, India Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Sensors automate most of the processes in industry. Most of these sensors, such as those for ammonia gas, temperature, and...

Five- to 10-LED flashlight circuit runs at 3V.
December 15, 2008... GY Xu, XuMicro, Houston, TX Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Almost all inexpensive commercial LED flashlights use a 4.5V power supply--three AA or AAA batteries--because white LEDs require 3.3 to 3.5V to fully turn on. Thus,...

Signs of optimism in economic crisis.
December 15, 2008... by Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief As 2008 draws to a close amid economic turmoil, our industry is looking toward an uncertain 2009. Despite the worldwide economic crisis, year-end events that I attended provided reason for optimism. ...

When is a microcontroller an SOC?
December 15, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a microcontroller and an SOC (system on chip). Consider, for example, the SH7263 portable-media-player reference design from Renesas. It offers...

Automotive embedded development and testing.
December 15, 2008... By Jon M Quigley, Volvo 3P, Kim H Pries, Stoneridge Electronics Automotive-embedded-system designers follow industry-standard guidelines to guarantee product quality and address production implications. The automotive world, which...

LXI digitizers offer floating inputs, 128M-sample/channel memory.
December 15, 2008... by Dan Strassberg Agilent Technologies has introduced what it calls the first stand-alone high-resolution digitizers with LXI (local-area-network-extensions-for-instrumentation) connectivity. The company says that R&D and manufacturing...

Built-up PCB structure embeds components.
December 15, 2008... by Graham Prophet Imbera recently announced the IMB (integrated-module-board) packaging technology, which uses conventional PCB (printed-circuit-board) materials, such as FR4, but embeds within the board many of the components that...

Control ICs simplify dimming circuits for energy-efficient CFLs.
December 15, 2008... by Margery Conner Energy-efficient CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) continue to gain in popularity for home and office lighting. However, dimmer switches, which control many incandescent lights, can cause a standard CFL to break down....

6-GHz SERDES chip charts its own eye diagram.(Vitesse Semiconductor Corp.)(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... by Graham Prophet Vitesse Semiconductor has introduced the VSC3441 SERDES (serializer/deserializer) chip. It combines a 6.375-Gbps, multirate SERDES transceiver, CDR (clock-and-data-recovery) circuitry, and Vitesse's active-equalization...

IMEC demonstrates 3-D stacked ICs.
December 15, 2008... by Rick Nelson IMEC has announced that it has made significant progress with its 3D-SIC (3-D-stacked-IC) technology, having demonstrated its first functional 3-D ICs, which it achieved by using die-to-die stacking on 5-micron copper TSVs...

Processor sports event system.
December 15, 2008... by Robert Cravotta Atmel's 8/16-bit ATXMega A3B microcontroller combines an eight-channel event system with a four-channel DMA controller that simultaneously manages eight interperipheral signals and as many as four 64-Mbps data...

Microchip's Ganesh Moorthy.(Interview)
December 15, 2008... by Robert Cravotta Ganesh Moorthy is the executive vice president at Microchip Technology, which manufactures microcontroller, memory, and analog semiconductors. The company's products include the PICmicro and dsPIC/PIC24 microcontrollers;...

Mysterious data errors.
December 15, 2008... by Ron Tipton, TDL Technology Inc In the early 1990s, I was working as an engineer at White Sands Missile Range, NM. A contractor delivered a digital data-collection system that mostly worked correctly but put out garbled data at seemingly...