EDN articles from January 2008

EDN archives from January 2008

Communications-centric test gear sharpens symbol recognition.
January 10, 2008... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director Designers pursue next-generation wireless developments with modulation-aware test tools, though evolving standards present problems from the PHY to the data layers. Designers working on wireless...

RFI: keeping noise out of your designs.
January 10, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Noise from cell phones, digital oscillators, and even fluorescent lights is assailing your electronic designs. Learn what causes this noise and what you can do to increase your system's immunity to...

Use the MCLR pin as an output with PIC microcontrollers.
January 10, 2008... Antonio Muñoz, Laboratorios Avanzados de Investigacion, Huesca, Spain, and Pilar Molina, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Although microcontroller manufacturers try to offer...

High-speed clamp functions as pulse-forming circuit.(integrated circuits used in linear amplifiers)
January 10, 2008... Marián A tofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Amplifiers with positive feedback are the bases of signal-grade pulse-forming circuits. This setup ensures a...

Depletion-mode MOSFET kick-starts power supply.
January 10, 2008... Gregory Mirsky, Milavia International, Buffalo Grove, IL Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Many switch-mode power supplies use 'kick-start' circuits to initialize their offline operation. These circuits may be simple...

Simple continuity tester fits into shirt pocket.
January 10, 2008... Tom Wason, Phoenixville, PA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea describes a handy continuity tester with two modes of operation: It may sound if it detects continuity between its two probes, or it may sound...

White LED shines from piezoelectric-oscillator supply.
January 10, 2008... TA Babu, Chennai, India Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville LED drivers that receive their power from a single cell are receiving a great deal of attention. To generate the high voltage for illuminating a white LED from a...

Open-cellular-network boasts lack substance.
January 10, 2008... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director It was really quite comical watching Verizon Wireless and AT&T argue in the mainstream media about the 'openness' of their cellular networks. The problem is that neither company's approach is really...

Initial condition.(Printed circuit boards )
January 10, 2008... by Howard Johnson, PhD The PCB (printed-circuit-board) transmission line in Figure 1a lacks an end termination. If you leave switch S1 closed for a long time, the line comes to rest in a state with precisely 0V at all points. The...

Novel measurement circuit eases battery-stack-cell design.
January 10, 2008... by Jim Williams and Mark Thoren, Linear Technology A transformer and diode on each cell allows isolated measurement. Automobiles, aircraft, marine vehicles, uninterruptible power supplies, and telecom hardware use series-connected...

USB-bridge controller supports multilevel-cell NAND flash.
January 10, 2008... by Maury Wright Last year, Cypress Semiconductor announced the West Bridge family of chips that primarily add high-speed-USB support to products such as mobile handsets. Full-speed transfers between handset memory and the USB interface,...

ICs address speedy Ethernet devices' need for EMI, ESD protection.
January 10, 2008... by Margery Conner The Ethernet communication standard is morphing into 10/100/1000-Mbps versions and gaining inherent power-delivery capability in POE (power-over-Ethernet) designs. System designers are responding with feature-packed...

Altera CPLD targets portable-system applications.
January 10, 2008... by Michael Santarini With an eye on winning more sockets in low-power-portable-system applications and a greater share in the FPGA market, Altera has announced the Max IIZ, the latest member of its low-power Max II nonvolatile-CPLD lineup....

National Instruments aims at high-volume applications.(National Instruments Corp. cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 CompactRIO systems )(Brief article)
January 10, 2008... by Warren Webb Integrating hardware that includes an embedded real-time processor and a reconfigurable FPGA, National Instruments' new cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 CompactRIO systems target high-volume industrial applications. The systems...

Integrated dc/dc regulators improve efficiency in server, embedded-system applications.
January 10, 2008... by Margery Conner Energy efficiency continues to be a major concern for server-farm operators, who can expect to pay three times the cost of the servers in operating costs over the life of the equipment. Further, the Environmental...

Silicon fatigue: not a myth.
January 10, 2008... by Matthew Miller In work with ramifications for MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) claim to have proved that, contrary to conventional wisdom, bulk silicon crystals...

IBM millimeter-wave wireless technology inches toward commercialization.
January 10, 2008... by Matthew Miller IBM and Taiwan-based fabless chip maker MediaTek recently announced an agreement to develop chip sets based on IBM Labs' 60-GHz mmWave wireless technology. Prototype mmWave chips that IBM unveiled in early 2006 achieved...

STMicroelectronics claims first 45-nm CMOS-RF chips.
January 10, 2008... by Matthew Miller STMicroelectronics has announced the production of its first fully functional ICs using a 45-nm CMOS-RF process. The prototype devices integrate a complete signal chain, from detection of an RF signal through digital...

Silicon nanocrystals show promise for solar cells.
January 10, 2008... by Matthew Miller Speaking of qualities of silicon that scientists once thought nonexistent (see 'Silicon fatigue: not a myth,' above), researchers at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have shown that...

Scope.(conference on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)(digital computer used to fly a jet aircraft)
January 10, 2008... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To APEC 2008 The 2008 Applied Power Electronics Conference will happen February 24 to 28 in Austin, TX. Take your pick of controversies, tutorials, and papers on advanced topics in...

2007: a less-than-memorable year for DRAM.
January 10, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree If there were ever proof that optimism doesn't necessarily lead to success, the 2007 DRAM market is such proof. Microsoft's Vista spurred hopes of increased demand for 1-Gbyte DRAM, but those hopes went...

Demand-driven downturn possible in 2008.
January 10, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree The new year could bring a demand-driven downturn, Gartner Inc (www.gartner.com ) cautions. Government economists and financial counselors have warned that the United States could experience a recession due to...

California vetoes ROHS-expansion bill.
January 10, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed an assembly bill that would have more closely aligned California's ROHS (restriction-of-hazardous-substances) law and regulations with the EU (European Union)...

Blown fuse has a meltdown.(electrical engineering)(Occupation overview)(Viewpoint essay)
January 24, 2008... by Jim Sylivant, Engineering Consultant In midcareer, I became a component engineer. Soon after I arrived in my new department, I faced a problem that had been ongoing for some time. It seems that a simple fuse in a CRT display had been...

Delta-sigma ADCs in a nutshell, part 2: the modulator.(Analog to digital converters)
January 24, 2008... by Bonnie Baker A delta-sigma converter uses many samples from the modulator to produce a stream of 1-bit codes. The delta-sigma ADC accomplishes this task by using an input-signal quantizer running at a high sample rate. Like all...

Choosing system-on-chip processes: a tough decision.
January 24, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor IC-process selection today is a complex, multivariable optimization problem with financial, technical, and emotional dimensions. An unwritten assumption of the chip-design profession is that it is always...

Digital video pushes the embedded-technology envelope.
January 24, 2008... by Warren Webb, Technical Editor The video revolution in consumer devices has produced lower hardware costs along with expectations for higher performance embedded designs. For years, video has been an integral part of specialized...

Flexible Hopfield neural-network ADCs quash noise.
January 24, 2008... Paul J Rose, PhD, Mental Automation, Renton, WA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville A Hopfield network can convert analog signals into digital format and can perform associative recalling, signal estimation, and combinatorial...

8-bit microcontroller implements digital lowpass filter.
January 24, 2008... Abel Raynus, Armatron International, Malden, MA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Filtering occurs frequently in the analog world. Unfortunately, in the digital world, engineers apply it mainly to the DSPs (digital-signal...

Automotive switching regulators get input-transient-voltage protection.
January 24, 2008... Kevin Daugherty, National Semiconductor, Novi, MI Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Engineers often face difficult trade-offs when voltage regulators can encounter high-voltage transients that are well above normal...

Overengineering: How much is too much?(United States. Army uses military communications equipment)
January 24, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Veterans Day 2007 brought to mind a story my father once told me. He was in the US Army's 8th Engineering Corps Division. His unit saw fierce fighting in Hurtgen Forest during World War II. He told me that...

The Dimage X50 digital camera.
January 24, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor The Dimage X50 digital camera is a recent model in Konica Minolta's Dimage X series. The X60 is identical except for the lack of a view finder and a larger LCD. The utility of a view finder became apparent in...

Using FPGAs for HDTV design.
January 24, 2008... by Tam Do, Altera Corp Designers have begun to apply dynamic image-processing algorithms in FPGAs to convert and map digital-video signals onto display panels. Multiple video-processing techniques and building blocks exist to handle,...

LCD controller serves multiple monitors.
January 24, 2008... by Warren Webb The new DVS-1600 interface controller from Digital View addresses a variety of TFT (thin-film-transistor)-LCD-monitor applications with support for multiple input connectors, video protocols, and LCD panels. The board's port...

ARM targets NFC smart cards with Cortex variant.
January 24, 2008... by Graham Prophet With its SC100 SecurCore processor IP (intellectual property), ARM believes that it has the largest share of the approximately 50 million-unit-per-year market for secure smart-card processors. ARM licenses the IP to 12...

Book delves into serial ports; they never were *obsolete*.
January 24, 2008... by Dan Strassberg A recently published book addresses the need for and popularity of serial ports. Serial Port Complete Second Edition (Lakeview Research, December 2007, ISBN 978-1931448-06-2) by Jan Axelson explores hardware and software;...

Processor and tool enhancements include real-time trace.
January 24, 2008... by Robert Cravotta All Tensilica configurable processor cores now support an optional nonintrusive real-time-trace block that includes the hardware and software necessary for tracing software-program execution. The Nexus 5001-compatible...

Maxwell/Lishen alliance could offer ideal energy/power profile for hybrid vehicles.
January 24, 2008... by Margery Conner One of the challenges of designing with conventional lithium-ion batteries for HEVs (hybrid-electric vehicles) is that the energy-centric-rather than power-centric-batteries store a lot of energy but are slow to charge...

8A step-down regulator comes in surface-mount module.(Linear Technology Corp.)
January 24, 2008... by Graham Prophet Linear Technology has released the latest in its series of dc/dc converters. The company's [micro]Modules are complete, packaged power-conversion devices, including inductors, capacitors, and compensation, in a...

Five years to commercialization for silicon-nano research into lithium-ion batteries?
January 24, 2008... by Margery Conner In general, you have two options with lithium-ion-battery technology. You can optimize the battery chemistry for high-energy storage in the kind of batteries you find in today's laptops and cell phones. These lithium-ion...

Green Hills Software's David Kleidermacher.(Excerpt)
January 24, 2008... by Robert Cravotta David Kleidermacher is the chief technology officer at Green Hills Software, a company that provides high-performance compilers, software-development tools, and real-time operating systems for developers of embedded...

Scope.(Design Automation and Test Europe 2008)(United States. Army uses air-transportable radio-communication terminal)(market forecast of semiconductor industry)
January 24, 2008... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To Design Automation and Test Europe 2008 The DATE (Design Automation and Test Europe) conference will run from March 10 through 14 in Munich, Germany. Although many still think of the conference...