EDN articles from May 2007

EDN archives from May 2007

Analog versus digital: riding the fence.
May 10, 2007... by Bonnie Baker As an analog-world descendant, I always hear comments in the hallway about how digital designers don't really understand analog issues. Digital designers will go so far as to unsympathetically say the same about analog-IC...

Interface overkill? Is eSATA necessary for your next system design?
May 10, 2007... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor The external-SATA interface is blazingly fast, at least on paper, but its performance comes at a bill-of-materials and development price. Should you shoulder the incremental expense in your next...

PCI Express prompts quiet evolution.
May 10, 2007... by Richard A Quinnell, Contributing Technical Editor The PC's next-generation internal peripheral bus has been quietly overturning both the PC and the embedded-computing industries with its performance and expansion potential. Largely...

Microcontroller functions as voltmeter.
May 10, 2007... Noureddine Benabadji, University of Sciences and Technology, Oran, Algeria Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The circuit in Figure 1 is an extension of a previous Design Idea on how to use an analog input in a...

Simple test setup performs functional testing of linear, single-cell lithium chargers.
May 10, 2007... Marián A tofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Most currently available battery chargers are switched-mode types. Yet, a niche application exists for modern...

Microcontroller provides low-cost analog-to-digital conversion, drives seven-segment displays.
May 10, 2007... Name withheld by author's request Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville A previous Design Idea demonstrated how to use shift registers to increase a microcontroller's output capabilities (Reference 1 ). This expanded Design Idea...

Amplifier cancels common-mode voltage.
May 10, 2007... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel HIll, NC Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Since the dawn of time-or at least since the dawn of precision electronics-a major headache for analog designers has been CMV...

Draft 802.11n Wi-Fi networks move to mainstream.
May 10, 2007... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director The tumultuous IEEE 802.11n wireless-LAN-standards pro-cess is still months from completion, and the infighting among major players has been worse than in most standards bodies. More than two years ago,...

Extreme low-power design.(techniques to reduce power use in pacemakers.)
May 10, 2007... by Dean Andersen, St Jude Medical Modern implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators, use aggressive power-management techniques to reduce SOC power. A typical modern pacemaker may consume on average...

Power and ground design.
May 10, 2007... by Pallab Chatterjee, Contributing Technical Editor System-level power-supply design has always been challenging. The continual shrinking of IC-process geometries has generated a major increase in mixed-voltage and -mode SOCs (systems on...

Hybrids mark the end of the stinky city bus.
May 10, 2007... by Margery Conner, Technical Editor Hybrid-electric designs are well-suited for industrial and commercial vehicles that make frequent starts and stops. The average speed of a city bus is 12 mph, and in New York, it's just 6 mph. Anyone...

Fanless PC/104-Plus computer runs cool and quiet.(WinSystems Inc. launched PPM-GX a new single board computer)(Brief article)
May 10, 2007... by Warren Webb Targeting space- and power-limited embedded designs in the industrial, security, transportation, communications, military, and information-appliance markets, WinSystems recently introduced the PPM-GX single-board computer in...

National Instruments extends embedded controller.(Brief article)
May 10, 2007... by Warren Webb National Instruments' latest CompactRIO platform combines a Freescale (www.freescale.com ) processor and a Wind River (www.windriver.com ) real-time operating system with the built-in Xilinx (www.xilinx.com ) FPGA to deliver...

Mentor pumps up ICE-logic emulation.
May 10, 2007... by Michael Santarini Mentor Graphics has announced its fifth-generation family of logic emulators, Veloce, which features a new architecture that boasts simulation acceleration and ICE (in-circuit-emulation) performance as fast as 1.5 MHz...

SST introduces hybrid NAND/NOR All-In-OneMemory.(Silicon Storage Technology launches new storage device)
May 10, 2007... by Michael Santarini Known primarily for its NOR-memory technology, SST (Silicon Storage Technology) is now adding to its portfolio the All-In-OneMemory device, which mixes NAND, NOR, RAM, and a memory controller in one system-in-package...

Direct-drive linear actuator makes fast, precise movements.
May 10, 2007... by Margery Conner Traditional lead-screw and belt-drive positioners have relatively large moving parts, making fine repetitive motion difficult. They also suffer from high wear and tear due to friction, making them wear out more quickly....

Xilinx adds power supply, thermal monitor to Virtex-5 FPGAs.
May 10, 2007... by Michael Santarini To help users of its 65-nm Virtex-5 FGPAs get a better handle on on-chip thermal- and power-management issues, Xilinx recently released its System Monitor tool. The tool will allow users to obtain power and thermal...

TotalView offers multicore-debugging framework.(TotalView Technologies)(Brief article)
May 10, 2007... by Robert Cravotta Etnus changed its name to TotalView Technologies last month at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA, as it announced a multicore-debugging framework. The framework comprises components addressing the source...

Marvell's Nikhil Balram: a "visual-pipeline" view.(Marvell Semiconductor Inc)(Nikhil Balram)(Interview)
May 10, 2007... by Brian Dipert Nikhil Balram is vice president and general manager of the digital-entertainment business unit of the communications-and-consumer-business group at Marvell (www.marvell.com ). Previously the chief technology officer for...

Scope.
May 10, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To DAC 2007 The 44th annual DAC (Design Automation Conference) begins on June 3 in San Diego. This year's special theme and Monday keynote concern automotive electronics. In the keynote, Lawrence...

Beware of what you think you know!
May 10, 2007... by Kenneth Ciszewski, Tech Electronics I once helped design a digital-guitar amplifier that models the sound of various analog-guitar amplifiers. This amplifier was the first major digital-audio product in what had been an analog-only...

Taking a bite out of power: techniques for low-power-ASIC design.
May 24, 2007... by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor Even if you are designing an ASIC or SOC that doesn't target a low-power application, you need to become familiar with low-power-design techniques, because the newest generation of silicon-process...

Compact imaging systems face partitioning issues.
May 24, 2007... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor CMOS imagers enable many choices, from cameras on chips to distributed-processing architectures, but the wild card may be autofocus technology. The triumph of CMOS-image-sensor technology over CCD...

Comparator detects position of peaks and valleys in a waveform.
May 24, 2007... Marián A tofka, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The recent advent of Analog Devices' (www.analog.com ) ADCMP60x family of comparators has filled a gap between...

Precision integrator sparks current-ratio-to-frequency converter.
May 24, 2007... Stefano Salvatori and Gennaro Conte, Universita degli Studi di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The Design Idea in Figure 1 uses the S1 switch of the Texas Instruments (www.ti.com ) IVC102 precision...

Accurate USB 2.0 temperature sensor needs only a handful of parts.
May 24, 2007... Silvio Lauckner, Ismaning, Germany Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea presents a simple, accurate, and reliable design to measure temperature using the USB. Figure 1 shows the complete circuit of the...

Integrator enables simple ohmmeter with gigohm range.
May 24, 2007... Stefano Salvatori and Gennaro Conte, Universita degli Studi di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The Texas Instruments (www.ti.com ) IVC102 precision integrator has high-quality internal capacitors. The...

Unique IP addresses will prove main IPv6 benefit.
May 24, 2007... by Maury Wright, Editorial Director Starting in late 1999, I was editor of CommVerge , a short-lived sister publication to EDN that focused on the convergence trend. We launched just as the Internet went mainstream and folded with the...

In-between spaces.(measuring inductance)(Column)
May 24, 2007... by Howard Johnson, PhD I measured the inductance of four loops of wire. Each loop comprises the same length of insulated #10 AWG solid-copper wire (Figure 1 ). During testing, I probe the wires at their endpoints (bottom of figure ),...

Designing medical devices for isolation and safety.
May 24, 2007... by Yeo Siok Been, Jamshed Namdar Khan, and Derek Chng Peng Hui, Avago Technologies Optocouplers, along with sound design practices, provide effective isolation for medical equipment and protect patients from potentially dangerous leakage...

Reducing power consumption in battery-powered applications.
May 24, 2007... by Matt Ruff, Freescale Semiconductor Using the lower power modes of advanced microcontrollers means less battery drain in parked automobiles and longer battery life in portable consumer products. Automotive-electronics content is...

Estimating the ZigBee transmission-range ISM band.
May 24, 2007... by Shreharsha Rao, Texas Instruments Designers of short-range wireless devices in the 900-MHz and 2.4-GHz band need to understand what and how parameters affect the transmission range based on formulas and be able to apply them in formulas...

Confer for continuing education.
May 24, 2007... by Joshua Israelsohn, Contributing Technical Editor Early in this decade, popular wisdom had it that professional conferences in the electronics industry were going the way of the dodo bird. Internet Web sites, videoconferencing, and e-mail...

Small, high-performance ICs require wafer-level-RF measurements.
May 24, 2007... by Larry Dangremond, Cascade Microtech Although accurate and repeatable results require different instrumentation and techniques, don't be intimidated. Here are the basics and some finer points of wafer-level-RF measurements. ...

Synchronizable POL converters beat the noise.
May 24, 2007... by Margery Conner Power subsystems that use a DPA (distributed-power architecture) usually have several independent power modules throughout the system, providing different voltages and currents and probably switching at different...

Blade computer sports four cores.
May 24, 2007... By Warren Webb Aiming to boost the performance of applications in the telecommunications, medical-engineering, and transportation industries, MEN Micro recently released a new 6U, CompactPCI single-board computer featuring either one or...

100M-sample/sec, 14-bit digitizer and 25- and 50-MHz digital-I/O modules are first to support PXIe.
May 24, 2007... by Dan Strassberg National Instruments has announced what it calls the industry's first PXIe (PXI Express) high-speed instruments as well as the industry's first 18-slot PXIe chassis. The modular instruments include the 100-MHz,...

AC/DC supply achieves 11.2W/in.³.
May 24, 2007... by Margery Conner The MFA350 ac/dc-power supply from XP Power provides 350W in its 3.2x6.8x1.5-in. (81x173x38-mm), U-bracket package. The base product delivers 364W across the entire input range of 90 to 264V ac and is available in 12, 24,...

Calypto fields RTL-clock-gating tool.
May 24, 2007... by Michael Santarini EDA start-up Calypto Inc has broadened its product portfolio beyond system-to-RTL (register-transfer-level) functional-verification tools with the introduction of an automated clock-gating tool for low-power-IC design....

Atmel's AVR32 UC3 processor boasts low power.
May 24, 2007... by Robert Cravotta At last month's Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA, Atmel announced the AVR32 UC3 core and the UC3 Series A microcontrollers. Atmel is aiming the devices at designers considering ARM's (www.arm.com ) ARM7, ARM9,...

Nanocomposites promise advance in thin-film electronic components.
May 24, 2007... by Ron Wilson Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology Institute for Organic Photonics and Electronics has demonstrated a technique for using nanofabrication principles to employ a powerful, but hitherto intractable, dielectric...

NEC plastic cools the palm and the earth.(NEC Research)(Brief article)
May 24, 2007... by Ron Wilson A new carbon-fiber-enhanced plastic material from NEC Research has the potential to both more evenly spread heat in the enclosures on electronic devices, such as cell phones, and to help global warming. The material is made...

Energy harvester generates continuous nanoampere current.(Brief article)
May 24, 2007... by Matt Miller Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a tiny device that produces a direct current by harnessing the piezoelectric output of hundreds of swaying zinc-oxide nanowires. Buffeted by ultrasonic waves or...

Scope.
May 24, 2007... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To the Electronic Materials Conference Think nanotubes are just carbon? Time was, materials for electronics were pretty well settled. But today, with plastics and other organic materials,...

The power of the hot seat.
May 24, 2007... by Reed P Tidwell, Xilinx In the mid-1980s, I was designing visual systems for flight simulators for computer-graphics company Evans & Sutherland. These systems were huge-dozens of 19-in. racks full of cards working together to produce the...