EDN articles from July 2007

EDN archives from July 2007

Transimpedance strikes again.(information about and it's use Multiplying Digital to analog converters)
July 5, 2007... by Bonnie Baker Multiplying DACs (MDACs) and their postamplifiers bridge the digital and analog worlds. MDACs generate a current proportional to an input digital code (Figure 1 ). The postamplifier converts the DAC's current-output signal...

Networking moves to home automation.
July 5, 2007... by Richard A Quinnell, Contributing Technical Editor After languishing for years, home automation is seeing a surge of activity as new technologies, emerging standards, and the networking of consumer devices converge to develop the...

Power with no strings attached.
July 5, 2007... By Margery Conner, Technical Editor Receiving electrical power without the use of wires has long been an ideal for electronic devices. How feasible is it, And what are some of the other options? Any technology that offers to free...

Build a complete industrial-ADC interface using a microcontroller and a sigma-delta modulator.
July 5, 2007... Patrick Weber and Craig Windish, Siemens Energy and Automation, Pittsburgh, PA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Designers commonly use 0- to 20-mA, 0 to 10V isolated inputs for industrial-application-control signals. A...

Circuit guards amplifier outputs against overvoltage.
July 5, 2007... John Guy, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville A universal requirement for automotive electronics is that any device with direct connections to the wiring harness must be able to...

Isolated circuit monitors ac line.
July 5, 2007... David Williams, Millington, MI Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The circuit in Figure 1 provides a low-cost, isolated ac-line monitor that measures ac-line-voltage level and has some other unique capabilities. The analysis...

I²C interface has galvanic isolation, wired-OR capability, improved noise margin.
July 5, 2007... Michele Costantino, Microsaic Systems Ltd, Woking, United Kingdom Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea describes a simple and effective way to provide optoisolation for devices connected on the I²C bus...

Homes still search for HD-capable video network.
July 5, 2007... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director I have obsessed over the need for a relatively low-cost-networking technology that can carry HDTV streams around a home. I continue to believe that the video-networking application will drive big dollars...

Running an FPGA at ASIC speed.
July 5, 2007... by Edwin C Park, Texas Instruments and Martin S Won, Altera Corp Take advantage of programmable hardware to maximize ASIC-prototype success. The hardware-emulation team at Texas Instruments (www.ti.com ) is getting word about its next...

Lithium-ion batteries power next generation of electric vehicles.
July 5, 2007... by Margery Conner This year's Advanced Automotive Battery Conference, which took place May 16 through 18 in Long Beach, CA, offered four days' worth of technical papers analyzing the challenges inherent in adapting lithium-ion batteries,...

Lattice offers 90-nm, flash-based FPGA.
July 5, 2007... by Michael Santarini Lattice Semiconductor has announced its 90-nm, third-generation XP2 family of nonvolatile FPGAs, featuring preimplemented DSP blocks, along with twice the logic capacity and 25% greater performance than the previous...

Energy-harvesting conference covers cutting-edge and established technologies.(discussion on power generation through Radio Frequency in NanoPower Forum)
July 5, 2007... by Margery Conner The NanoPower Forum, which took place last month in San Jose, CA, was the first industry conference to focus on energy harvesting, the ability of a device to acquire and use energy from its surroundings and to eke out...

DSC includes 32-bit floating-point integration.(Texas Instruments Inc has upgraded it's product TMS320F2833x DSCs)
July 5, 2007... by Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' new TMS320F2833x DSCs (digital-signal controllers) integrate a 32-bit floating-point unit that performs 300 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) with a 150-MHz clock rate. The...

Breker has a plan for better IC verification.
July 5, 2007... by Michael Santarini EDA start-up Breker Verification Systems wants to help you reduce the amount of testbench generation and overall verification you need to do. The company aims to help you create a comprehensive IC-verification plan...

Texas Instruments' Gene Frantz: bringing ideas to life.
July 5, 2007... by Robert Cravotta Gene Frantz is the principal fellow at Texas Instruments, a manufacturer of analog-, DSP-, and DLP (digital-light-processing)-chip technologies. Frantz identifies emerging opportunities that could benefit from...

Scope.
July 5, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To SIGGraph What better place to spend those hot August nights than in breezy San Diego-especially if you are involved in computer graphics? SIGGraph (Special Interest Group for Computer...

Eviscerating the Xbox 360 Elite.
July 19, 2007... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor In late April, Microsoft refreshed its nearly 1½-year-old Xbox 360 product line with the high-end Elite variant, touting an upgraded-capacity 120-Gbyte HDD and a Version 1.2 HDMI port. When...

Avalanche!(how to use process controllers )
July 19, 2007... by Walter Lindenbach Customers often returned process controllers to us for repair, because the field operators could not adjust them correctly. For example, consider a gas pipeline that is to operate at 3000 psi. When measured by a...

Is FPGA a simpler puzzle for ASIC designers?
July 19, 2007... by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor With rising mask costs, complexity, and tool expenses to develop ASICs and SoCs, many design groups today are opting to implement their production designs in FPGAs. but, before designers make the leap,...

Interface chips: between logic and a hard place.
July 19, 2007... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Interface chips must mediate between ever-lower logic voltages and real-world loads. Here are the circuits and techniques you need to know. Logic signals have fallen from the 15V of the old CMOS 4000...

Analyzer tests reverse-recovery behavior of diodes.
July 19, 2007... Louis Vlemincq, Belgacom, Evere, Belgium Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Testing the reverse-recovery behavior of diodes normally requires complex testing gear. You must be able to establish the forward-conduction...

High-power LED drivers require no external switches.
July 19, 2007... Alfredo H Saab and Steve Logan, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville As the latest generation of new LEDs achieves higher levels of power and efficiency, use of these devices extends to...

Perform PSRR testing with analyzers having no dc-bias ports.
July 19, 2007... David Karpaty, Analog Devices, Wilmington, MA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville An amplifier's PSRR (power-supply-rejection ratio) is among the most commonly characterized parameters when analyzing the performance of an op...

Qualcomm-IP quagmire launches supply-chain section.
July 19, 2007... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director This issue of EDN marks the debut of a supply-chain section (pg 91) that will initially appear in every other issue and, we hope, eventually in every issue. In the new section, we will cover breaking news...

From thin air.(energy conservation with usage of various devices)(Column)
July 19, 2007... by Joshua Israelsohn, Contributing Technical Editor After my last column, I expected to be done with the topic of professional conferences for a time (Reference 1 ). Since that column, however, the Darnell Group presented the first annual...

Uncertainty principle.(Heisenberg uncertainty principle)
July 19, 2007... by Howard Johnson, PhD The uncertainty principle that German physicist Werner Heisenberg made famous in 1927 asserts the improbability of knowing with complete precision the position and momentum of any subatomic particle. According to...

Autovectorization for GCC compiler.
July 19, 2007... by Markus Levy, EEMBC and Ron Olson, IBM Corp You can use industry-standard benchmarks to improve compiler performance. You can't go out in public these days without seeing someone talking on the phone, listening to music, taking a...

Where is the BOM in IC design?
July 19, 2007... by Pallab Chatterjee, Contributing Technical Editor As ICs have progressed to becoming full systems, such as SOCs (systems on chips), they have been mirroring historical development and design issues that occur in PCB...

Mezzanine card features dual cores.
July 19, 2007... by Warren Webb With low-power-embedded-telecom, network-centric-warfare, medical-imaging, surveillance, and industrial-automation applications in mind, Motorola recently announced the PrAMC-7210, an AMC (advanced mezzanine card) that the...

Oscillator offers one part/trillion drift/day.(Jackson Labs has introduced a new global-positioning-system-disciplined oscillator)(Brief article)
July 19, 2007... by Dan Strassberg Jackson Labs has announced the availability of Fury, a 10-MHz GPSDO (global-positioning-system-disciplined oscillator) that requires no calibration, delivers greater stability than typical rubidium-clock references, and...

Sierra releases IC-place-and-route tools for 45-nm era.(Sierra Design Automation HAS introduce it's new software)
July 19, 2007... by Michael Santarini Sierra Design Automation has released a new version of its Olympus physical-design suite for 45-nm-IC design with three new tools for layering and buffer swapping, multicorner-CTS (clock-tree synthesis), and...

MIPS introduces 1-GHz 74K processor core.
July 19, 2007... by Robert Cravotta At May's Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, CA, MIPS extended its family of 32-bit cores with the 74K. The company's highest-performance, single-threaded, fully synthesizable core, the 74K achieves an operating frequency...

COM Express adopts multicore architecture.
July 19, 2007... by Warren Webb Targeting embedded-system applications ranging from point-of-sale kiosks and mobile data-acquisition systems to medical 3-D-image scanners, automation systems, and other multidisplay applications, Kontron recently announced...

Small, 1-GHz-bandwidth, two-channel PCI digitizer offers low power consumption.
July 19, 2007... by Dan Strassberg The low-power, two-channel Acqiris DP1400 digitizer provides guaranteed 1-GHz-minimum -3-dB bandwidth on each channel and can capture 2G 8-bit samples/sec in the single-channel mode. You may notice that the panel bears...

Quad-core computer features five PCIe lanes.
July 19, 2007... by Warren Webb Although many embedded-system designers have for years relied on the standard desktop computer and its PCI bus as project starting points, rising performance expectations are changing the landscape. Parallel-bus-bandwidth...

Cadence offers low-power-methodology kit.
July 19, 2007... by Michael Santarini Building on its thrust into the low-power-design area and leveraging its CPF (Common Power Format), Cadence Design Systems is now announcing a low-power-methodology kit. Until recently, low-power design has been the...

Video DSPs double performance, reduce system-BOM cost.
July 19, 2007... by Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' new TMS320DM647 and 648 DaVinci technology-based DSPs deliver twice the processing performance of the previous-generation DSP and reduce system-BOM (bill-of-materials) cost for...

Dense nanotubes allow efficient interconnect.
July 19, 2007... by Ron Wilson Because of the physics of electron motion in their structures, carbon nanotubes look like the perfect conductors for replacing copper-damascene interconnections on ICs. The tubes bring with them several minor problems,...

Circuit-design technique could make carbon nanotubes useful.
July 19, 2007... by Ron Wilson To be of any use to designers, carbon nanotubes must align with circuit patterns, and an elegant approach to that necessity may now have emerged. Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA) assistant professor of...

Thermoacoustics speaks up at ASA convention.(Acoustical Society of America talks on Thermoacoustic devices used to convert heat into sound energy)(Brief article)
July 19, 2007... by Ron Wilson Thermoacoustic devices convert heat directly into intense sound waves with relatively high efficiency-reportedly 40% of Carnot-cycle efficiency. (A Carnot cycle employs the principles of the Carnot Theorem, which states that...

Scope.
July 19, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To hot chips The IEEE Technical Committee on Microprocessors and Microcomputers again hosts the pre-eminent technical forum on high-performance processing ICs at Stanford University (Palo Alto,...

How much will the Qualcomm chip ban impact the global mobile-phone market?(Industry overview)
July 19, 2007... Edited by Suzanne Deffree The ITC's (International Trade Commission's) recent decision to ban US imports of some mobile phones that include certain Qualcomm (www.qualcomm.com ) 3G chips will affect the industry beyond just the company...

ASPs down, but demand solid.
July 19, 2007... Edited by Suzanne Deffree As have many industry watchers, the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association, www.sia-online.org ) dramatically downgraded its 2007 global microchip-sales-growth forecast from its earlier 10% estimate to 1.8% in...

'PC' means 'power conscious' in new Energy Star requirements.
July 19, 2007... Edited by Suzanne Deffree Companies that use the EPA's (Environmental Protection Agency's) Energy Star logo on their products as marketing leverage will need to meet new, stricter design requirements. The first phase of Energy Star 4.0...