EDN articles from June 2008

EDN archives from June 2008

Analog filter eases delta-sigma-converter design.
June 12, 2008... by Bonnie Baker Delta-sigma converters with sinc (sinx/x) digital filters change the signal chain's complex antialiasing-filter requirements to a simple, first-order, passive filter. With this 'easy-to-design' circuit, you can tackle the...

RF: Will it ever be plug-in IP?
June 12, 2008... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor As SOCs for mobile devices integrate radio circuits, they will need to reuse RF IP. But will they be able to? For the next generation of smart phones, mobile video players, and roaming Web accessories,...

Use analog switches to multiplex your signals.
June 12, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Pay careful attention to analog switches and multiplexers, which are critical components of the signal path. Designers should understand the applications and specifications of these important analog parts. ...

Precision temperature controller has thermal-gradient compensation.
June 12, 2008... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel Hill, NC Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Accurate and stable temperature control is necessary for effectively using many thermally sensitive components and sensors, such as semiconductor lasers...

Programmable current source requires no power supply.
June 12, 2008... John Guy, National Semiconductor, Santa Clara, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Engineering labs are usually equipped with various power supplies, voltmeters, function generators, and oscilloscopes. One piece of...

Pulse-width modulator has digital control.(Brief article)
June 12, 2008... S Vinay Kumar, Mysore, India Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville In this Design Idea, the total time period of an output pulse's width is 16 times the pulse width of the input clock. The input clock connects to a binary...

Microcontroller controls analog phase shifter.
June 12, 2008... Nick Ierfino, IGS Technologies, Montreal, PQ, Canada Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Phase shifters find use in a variety of circuits, but variation in amplifier and capacitance tolerances usually makes it difficult to...

Composite instrumentation amplifier challenges single-chip device for bandwidth, offset, and noise.(Brief article)
June 12, 2008... Marián A tofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Although the prevailing number set in electronics is binary, human-machine interaction uses a decimal-number set....

Fear of feature-itis.
June 12, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor I recently bought an Olympus DS-30 digital-voice recorder that comes with an 86-page manual, a typical example of 'feature-itis'-a bewildering array of too many useless features. Consumer-electronics...

Low-cost snapshots: dismembering a diminutive digicam.
June 12, 2008... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor Prying Eyes queries the contents of a sub-$10 keychain camera Prompted by a tempting ink-jet-printer-rebate promotion, I this year purchased Argus' bundled $9.99 DCM-099 0.3M-pixel digital...

The megapixel race: a chip designer's point of view.
June 12, 2008... by Assaf Lahav and Amos Fenigstein, Tower Semiconductor As CMOS image sensors have migrated from low-end applications to multimegapixel cameras, emphasis has shifted from integrating digital circuits to the fundamental design of the pixel...

Achieving first-time success at 40 nm.
June 12, 2008... by Mojy Chian, Richard Cliff, and Jeff Watt, Altera Corp An early adopter at the 40-nm node tells what it took to get results from this leading-edge process. Every process generation brings new design challenges, but, for the 40-nm...

Chip provides both signal isolation and 500 mW of regulated, isolated power.(Brief article)
June 12, 2008... by Margery Conner The first members of Analog Devices' isoPower family, ADuM524x, were novel in that they combined signal and power isolation on the same chip. However, the 524x products addressed only those applications needing 10 mW or...

AMD revamps server road map.
June 12, 2008... by Ann Stefora Mutschler Following feedback from OEMs, microprocessor maker AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) recently updated its server road map to 'strengthen its alignment with end-customer priorities' by addressing platform longevity,...

University working to create nanostructures to raise thin-film-solar-cell efficiency.
June 12, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler Researchers at UCSD (University of California-San Diego) are working to create thin-film, single-junction solar cells with 45% sunlight-to-electricity-conversion efficiencies by using nanostructures that scatter...

NASA super-computer to get boost from Intel, SGI.
June 12, 2008... by Matthew Miller Intel, SGI, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have announced a project that aims to produce a dramatic increase in the space agency's supercomputing capacity. The Pleiades project, using SGI systems...

PIC architecture supports USB across 8-, 16-, and 32-bit devices.
June 12, 2008... by Robert Cravotta Microchip's USB-microcontroller support now spans 8-, 16-, and 32-bit PIC devices. New USB-device families include the 8-bit PIC18F13K50 and PIC18F14K50, the 16-bit PIC24F, and the 32-bit PIC32. The free MPlab integrated...

TI addresses power-supply knowledge gap with purchase of reference-design company.(Brief article)
June 12, 2008... by Margery Conner The need to incorporate sophisticated power supplies into electronic systems has in recent years challenged designers. Just five years ago, digital-electronics-application designers could concentrate on their...

Power-management IC integrates seven programmable regulators.
June 12, 2008... by Paul Rako Summit Microelectronics' new SMB119 power-management IC provides all the power rails needed for a modern handheld product. The part integrates three synchronous buck regulators, two boost converters, one configurable...

Low-power environment targets chip design.(Brief article)
June 12, 2008... by Graham Prophet Further backing its support for the UPF (Unified Power Format) for ex-change of power-related design data between EDA-chip-design tools, Synopsys has assembled a comprehensive array of tools for achieving power-related...

Synopsys' Aart de Geus on investing to win.(Interview)
June 12, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler Aart de Geus, PhD, is chairman and chief executive officer of semiconductor-design and -manufacturing-software supplier Synopsys. He helped invent the Design Complier software tool and is a fellow at the IEEE. ...

One giant leap for *enhanced* hybrid.
June 12, 2008... by Stephen Tomporowski, Kaman Measuring Systems In August 2002, I started a new job in an engineering department with 35-year-old products. I became the lead engineer on the flagship product, most of whose circuitry resided in a hybrid. The...

Processor innovation brings performance boost.
June 12, 2008... by Brian Dipert Ambarella's Les Kohn discusses CPU trends and compelling video applications, such as cameras and security. Les Kohn, co-founder and chief technology officer of Ambarella, has a lengthy history of processor innovation....

Shouldering the burden to stay on track with Moore's Law.
June 12, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler Applied Materials' Mark R Pinto sets the technological direction for the market-leading capital-equipment company. Mark R Pinto, PhD, senior vice president, chief technology officer, and general manager of...

Lithium-ion batteries prepare to take a giant leap forward.
June 12, 2008... by Margery Conner Boston-Power's Christina Lampe-Onnerud discusses lithium-ion batteries, their life cycles, and their role in the environment. Since the introduction in 1991 of the first lithium-ion battery, battery-energy density has...

Wi-Fi 802.11n standardization remains elusive.
June 12, 2008... by Brian Dipert Broadcom's Stephen Palm discusses Wi-Fi and alternative networking technologies. Work on IEEE 802.11n wireless-LAN technology began in 2004, but a finalized standard continues to elude the industry. However, the lack of...

Innovator in blue adapts LEDs for consumers.
June 12, 2008... by Margery Conner As the government phases out incandescent bulbs, John Edmond is betting mercury concerns will steer people toward HB LEDs. Goodbye, incandescent light bulbs; hello, CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps). The US Congress...

Innovating the engineering profession.
June 12, 2008... by Rick Nelson Innovation is hard to teach and hard to predict, but the 15 technologists highlighted in this issue provide insights into the process. Innovation drives our industry. Your ability to innovate attracts customers to your...

Substance and style: restrictions on design materials continue.
June 12, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree Restrictions continue to mount, but, says IPC's Fern Abrams, it's not just the EU's regulatory arm forcing green measures. The continuing proliferation of substance restrictions will persist as the major issue for...

Big opportunities in minimizing manufacturing variability.
June 12, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler Walden C Rhines, chief executive officer and chairman of Mentor Graphics, talks about changes in the industry and technology issues. Today, 85% of all GSM (global-system-for-mobile)-communication phones...

Network of systems builds on parallelism.
June 12, 2008... by Robert Cravotta As systems emerge and evolve, they are increasingly becoming networks working together in coordination. Microsoft's technologies have strong associations with PCs and servers. The technology behind the Microsoft...

Pursuing the Holy Grail of design and test integration.(Company overview)
June 12, 2008... by Rick Nelson National Instruments applies off-the-shelf technology to serve test, control, data-acquisition, and even design applications. Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at National Instruments, has been with the...

How DFT conquers growing chip complexity.
June 12, 2008... by Lawrence D Maloney Synopsys' Antun Domic talks about the role of design for test in curbing costs and ensuring reliability. Joining Synopsys in 1997, Antun Domic, PhD, now manages the Implementation Group, which is responsible for...

Analog maestro plays to medical and other emerging markets.
June 12, 2008... by Paul Rako By mixing its marketing expertise with engineering talent, Texas Instruments has become an analog powerhouse. Texas Instruments senior vice president Gregg Lowe presides over the high-performance-analog- and...

Helping chip design and process development move forward.
June 12, 2008... by Ron Wilson TSMC's vice president of research and development, Jack Sun, looks at the future of foundry/design-team relationships. As the pivotal player in the CMOS-foundry industry, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co)...

New directions in embedded technology.(Interview)
June 12, 2008... by Warren Webb As processor performance and data rates escalate, embedded-system designers are facing a crisis in power management. Serving a wide range of industrial, medical, military, and consumer applications, standardized computer...

Driving meta-innovation worldwide.
June 12, 2008... by Rick Nelson The 14 vignettes that this special issue presents provide valuable insights into how you can develop innovative products, and they touch on the changing nature of engineering in today's world. But what of the future of...

The FPGA industry strives to keep on scaling.
June 12, 2008... by Ron Wilson Count Xilinx's chief technology officer among the pioneers forging a path toward the next process node. Senior technology leaders in FPGA companies occupy a unique role in the engineering community. As developers of a...

Automobile electronics seek to plug power leaks.
June 26, 2008... by Margery Conner, Technical Editor Automobile accessories and control electronics benefit from power-management schemes to prevent dead batteries and gas guzzling. Low-power electronic subsystems are especially important for the next...

Shrinking standards squeeze embedded designs.
June 26, 2008... by Warren Webb, Technical Editor As new embedded designs combine highly integrated silicon, portable platforms, and soaring data rates, the industry is adopting smaller form factors that emphasize cooling, reliability, and performance. ...

Simple fixture statically tests programmable-gain amplifiers.
June 26, 2008... Marián Eatofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville The advent of instrumentation amplifiers with digital gain switching offers obvious advantages, such as board-space...

Control system uses LabView and a PC's parallel port.
June 26, 2008... Carlos Alberto Aguilar Sández, Centro de Estudios Superiores del Estado de Sonora, Unidad sede San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville The circuit in this Design Idea controls the inbound...

General-purpose components implement USB-based data-acquisition system.(universal serial bus)
June 26, 2008... V Gopalakrishnan, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam, India Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Figure 1 presents a Design Idea for a USB-based data-acquisition system that uses a serial ADC employing...

Small, simple, high-voltage supply features single IC.
June 26, 2008... Alfredo H Saab and Tina Alikahi, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Sensors, electrostatic traps, and other applications require regulated, high-voltage power supplies that deliver modest...

CMOS DACs act as digitally controlled voltage dividers.
June 26, 2008... John Wynne and Liam Riordan, Analog Devices, Limerick, Ireland Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Digital potentiometers, such as Analog Devices' (www.analog.com ) AD5160, make excellent digitally controlled voltage dividers in...

The design-and-test merger.
June 26, 2008... by Rick Nelson, editor-in-chief Are the design and test disciplines merging? You might get that impression from reading some recent items in the news. I addressed the design-and-test relationship with an earlier commentary (Reference 1 )....

EM-simulation software.
June 26, 2008... by Howard Johnson, PhD Bruce Archambeault, PhD, distinguished engineer at IBM, IEEE fellow, and the author of the EMI/EMC Computational Modeling Handbook , responds to my questions about EM (electromagnetic)-simulation software. I've...

Selecting video op amps.
June 26, 2008... by Barry Harvey, Intersil Semiconductor Video amplifiers have unique and demanding specifications. Understanding them will help you select an amplifier that can do the job. Video op amps have improved significantly since their debut in...

Bluetooth: sufficient fidelity even for average listeners?
June 26, 2008... by Stephen Wray, Audio Processing Technology Applications require video support and additional audio channels to cope with stereo, driving the need for low-latency codecs. Using a Bluetooth chip set simplifies development and enables the...

Third-party-IP providers: physical-design questions, part two.(intellectual property)
June 26, 2008... by Pallab Chatterjee, Contributing Technical Editor Engineers often overlook one physical-design issue for qualifying IP (intellectual-property) blocks: handling routing blockages and overlayer-routing conditions. Traditionally, IP...

Tiny module unites industrial applications.
June 26, 2008... by Warren Webb Following the small-form-factor trend in embedded devices, Connect One has just introduced the Mini Socket iWiFi serial-to-Wi-Fi module for connecting industrial devices running machine-to-machine applications to 802.11b/g...

60V output buck, boost, or buck-boost LED controller.
June 26, 2008... by Paul Rako Linear Technology Corp's new LT3755 LED controller has a 4.5 to 40V input-voltage range. It drives external FETs to illuminate as many as 14 1A white LEDs from a nominal 12V input, delivering in excess of 50W. The part uses a...

Units underscore importance of USB-based modular instruments.
June 26, 2008... by Dan Strassberg Agilent has underscored USB's importance as an instrumentation platform with the addition of digital-oscilloscope and waveform-generator modules to an already-broad, but little-publicized, line of USB-based plug-in...

Light sensor integrates photodiode, transimpedance amp, and linear-voltage-output stage.
June 26, 2008... by Paul Rako Melexis has introduced the MLX75305 light-to-voltage sensor for high-volume automotive, industrial, and consumer applications. By integrating the photodiode, transimpedance amplifier, and voltage-output stage into one chip,...

Microcontroller family extends performance of ultralow-power devices.
June 26, 2008... by Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' MSP430F5xx family of 16-bit microcontrollers improves peak processing performance over previous-generation MSP430 devices by more than 50%. With a maximum operating frequency of 25 MHz, the processors...

CMOS-clock chip replaces crystal, PLL circuit.
June 26, 2008... by Margery Conner Stable, accurate reference frequencies are basic to almost all digital electronics. The most common references combine quartz crystals with clock-generator circuits, often employing a PLL (phase-locked loop). However,...

Primary-side control boosts efficiency of ac/dc-switching ICs.
June 26, 2008... by Margery Conner Most consumer-targeted power adapters for devices such as cell phones and MP3-player chargers use optocoupler circuits to feed back voltage information from the secondary side to the regulator circuitry. Designers use...

Student develops attention-getting gallium-nitride MOSFET.
June 26, 2008... by Matthew Miller A student researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has developed a gallium-nitride MOSFET that, thanks to its ability to operate in extreme power and temperature conditions, captured the attention of top automakers...

Nanoimprint lithography stamps out encouraging results.(Brief article)
June 26, 2008... by Matthew Miller Researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have put NIL (nanoimprint lithography)--a potential next-generation IC-fabrication technology--through its paces and pronounced the technique capable of...

Robotic grasshopper leaps as high as 27 times its height.(Brief article)
June 26, 2008... by Matthew Miller Researchers at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL (École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) in Switzerland have built a 5-cm-tall robot that takes its design cues from grasshoppers and locusts and can...

Distributors look to shine with HB-LED opportunity.
June 26, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree HB LEDs (high-brightness light-emitting diodes) hold great opportunity for the electronics supply chain and are particularly attractive to distributors, as the technology will require full-system approaches from...

EMS growth continues at double-digit rate.(electronic manufacturing services)(Brief article)
June 26, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree While the ODM (original-design-manufacturer) sector continued to grow at the higher rate of 23% in 2007, the EMS (electronic-manufacturing-services) sector still accounted for more than 60% of the industry, growing at an...

ROHS DecaBDE exemption ending.(restriction-of-hazardous-substances)(decabromodiphenyl ether)(Brief article)
June 26, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree After a challenge from Denmark and the European Parliament, the European Commission-granted EU ROHS (European Union restriction-of-hazardous-substances) exemption for DecaBDE (decabromodiphenyl ether) will end on July 1....

Theory of relativity visits *real-time* clock.(Column)
June 26, 2008... By Vadim Demidov, Giesecke & Devrient I wanted to test some signals in my design using a logic analyzer. After walking around the laboratory, I found a good, old Tektronix instrument and its bag with data pods. But when I turned it on, two...