EDN articles from May 2008

EDN archives from May 2008

10-GbE in the mainstream.
May 1, 2008... by Ann R Thryft, Contributing Technical Editor 10-GbE edges closer to major product rollouts as silicon prices and power consumption fall. But it may be two years or more before widespread deployments start meeting demand. For several...

Buck-boost converters change with the times.
May 1, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Buck-boost converters provide voltages both above and below the input voltage. This feature is useful if your design's input voltage changes drastically or if its load voltage varies. Buck-boost converter...

Circuit and software provide accurate recalibration for baseline PIC microcontroller's internal oscillator.
May 1, 2008... Noureddine Benabadji, University of Sciences and Technology, Oran, Algeria Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville All of Microchip's (www.microchip.com ) baseline PIC microcontrollers have internal 4-MHz oscillators, which are...

Microcontroller moving-dot display interface uses three I/O lines.
May 1, 2008... Abel Raynus, Armatron International, Malden, MA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The moving-dot display has some benefits over the bar-graph display: It better indicates the location of a detected object in sonar and radar...

Microcontroller displays multiple chart or oscilloscope timing ticks.
May 1, 2008... William Grill, Honeywell, Lenexa, KS Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville While working with a 10-bit DI-184 module from Dataq to monitor and display vibration-sensor data, I found that, although the chart displays a time...

Fast-settling synchronous-PWM-DAC filter has almost no ripple.
May 1, 2008... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel Hill, NC Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville An inexpensive way to implement high-resolution digital-to-analog conversion is to combine microcontroller-PWM (pulse-width-modulated) outputs with...

Switched-gain op amp serves as phase detector or mixer.
May 1, 2008... W Bruce Warren, Marietta, GA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Some op amps, such as the AD8041 from Analog Devices (www.analog.com ) and the EL5100 from Intersil (www.intersil.com ), provide a disable pin, which allows you...

Be careful what you promise.(Editorial)
May 1, 2008... by Rick Nelson, editor-in-chief In the current cartoon series on my Dilbert calendar, Dilbert is trying to mount a marketing campaign with limited resources. He had hoped to exploit the laziness of hapless engineer Wally, which would seem...

Scrape it.(Viewpoint essay)
May 1, 2008... by Howard Johnson, PhD To probe a microstrip trace with no accessible test points or vias, you have to remove some of the solder mask. I know of only six ways to do it: scraping, milling, grinding, microblasting, chemical stripping, and UV...

Small footprint value-priced scopes offer bigger displays, deeper memory, bus debugging, and more.(Tektronix DPO3000 from Tektronix Inc.)
May 1, 2008... by Dan Strassberg Tektronix's new DPO-3000-series of lunchbox-sized, two- and four-channel, 100-, 300-, and 500-MHz-bandwidth scopes provides more than three times the screen area and 500 times the waveform-memory depth of Tek's largest...

Receivers reinforce digital-display-interface ecosystem.
May 1, 2008... by Brian Dipert I'm admittedly a bit more bullish about DisplayPort (www.displayport.org ) than I was at the beginning of last year (see 'Connecting systems to displays with DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort: What we got here is failure to...

RF screen coating saves space.
May 1, 2008... by Graham Prophet MicroShield screening technology from RF Micro Devices integrates RF screening on the surface of a molded package. The protected device might contain a single chip or a multichip module. The company developed the process...

Rugged, high-voltage RF transistor uses vertical process, yielding better gain.
May 1, 2008... by Paul Rako Start-up HVVi recently introduced the three-member HVVFET (high-voltage-vertical-field-effect transistor) family of RF-transistor products. Targeting pulsed-radar and avionics applications, the devices employ a process from...

Processor supports capacitive touch sensing for button and slider replacement.
May 1, 2008... by Robert Cravotta Cypress Semiconductor's CapSense Express devices, working with the PSoC (programmable-system-on-chip) Express visual embedded-system-design tool and the CapSense Express configuration tool, enable designers to monitor...

Process makes silicon circuits that can fold, bend, and stretch.
May 1, 2008... by Matthew Miller A new process creates ICs that not only can bend to conform to various surfaces, but also can operate while stretching, compressing, and folding. Scientists at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, working with...

Solid-state cooling device harnesses corona discharge.(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... by Matthew Miller Thorrn Micro Technologies has demonstrated a small, silent, no-moving-parts cooling device that generates more airflow than mechanical fans four times its size while consuming less power and space. The 15x15x 2-mm RSD5...

Active-matrix display employs nanowire transistors.
May 1, 2008... by Matthew Miller A research group including members from Purdue University, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California claims it has developed the first active-matrix display based on nanowire transistors, which...

Counterfeiting still a top concern for distributors.
May 1, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree It may not be the No. 1 issue for distributors, but counterfeit goods remain a top concern within the electronics supply chain, according to Robin Gray Jr (photo ), executive vice president of NEDA (National...

Analog demand holds strong.
May 1, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree Recent interest from distributors, including Avnet Inc (www.avnet.com ) and Arrow Electronics Inc (www.arrow.com ), in the analog segment of the electronic supply chain should prove to be opportune as this year...

Greenpeace raises bar with energy criteria.
May 1, 2008... Edited by Suzanne Deffree Greenpeace wants to see electronics companies clean up their acts and will soon be ranking OEMs such as Apple, Philips, and Nokia by stricter criteria. The environmental organization currently ranks...

Watch those power leads!(Viewpoint essay)
May 1, 2008... by Doug Marsh, Consultant In the Western Electric IC-manufacturing line of the early '70s, bipolar chips used 'beam-lead' technology, which entailed a few back-end-wafer steps to add metallic beams onto each chip. Placing the die and then...

EDN's 2007 innovator and innovations of the year: the winners.
May 1, 2008... By Staff 2007: yet another vintage year for engineering genius. EDN 's 18th Annual Innovation Awards ceremony has once again recognized outstanding individuals, team efforts, and great ideas from the year past. We would like to take...

RMS and peak-to-peak noise trade-off.(root mean square)
May 15, 2008... by Bonnie Baker Have you ever noticed that random noise has a predictable pattern? Nature duplicates this pattern in many ways-the gene pool, gambling, and even my driving 'habits.' There are two ways to describe random analog noise....

Flexible silicon.
May 15, 2008... by Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor Evolving approaches to software development are providing designers with more flexibility in choosing and moving among processing choices. Semiconductor companies are integrating more software...

Always on: embedding high availability.
May 15, 2008... by Warren Webb, Technical Editor Designers are tuning high-availability architectures to meet customer demands for a persistent data interface for the next generation of ultrareliable embedded-system applications. As we approach the...

Small capacitor supports telecom power supply during brownouts.
May 15, 2008... Samuel Kerem, Rockville, MD Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea shows how to keep telecom equipment operational during a short brownout. You must first understand a few details regarding the power supply for...

Tiny microcontroller hosts dual dc/dc-boost converters.
May 15, 2008... Dhananjay V Gadre, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Batteries are the typical power sources for portable-system applications, and it is not unusual these days to find...

Cross-coupled gates prevent push-pull-driver overlap.
May 15, 2008... Richard Rice, Oconomowoc, WI Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Overlap-the short period during which a push-pull drive's two transistors are both simultaneously on-is a common problem with these drives in a center-tapped...

Save valuable picoseconds using ECL-wired OR.
May 15, 2008... Glen Chenier, TeeterTotterTreeStuff, Allen, TX Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Often, when you are designing with high-speed ECL (emitter-coupled logic), you have too little time between clock cycles to implement logic...

When Web sites go bad.(Website overview)
May 15, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor One of the most frustrating aspects of bad Web sites is that the contact links on the site all go to the Web team that screwed things up in the first place. Complaining to a Web team about its Web site is like...

The Tesla Roadster: sporty and electric.
May 15, 2008... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor A modern electric sports car presents a unique design challenge. The enabling technology for the Tesla Roadster is the lithium-ion battery. The RC-modeling community years ago discovered that...

Overcoming USB measurement-test-setup issues.(Cypress Semiconductor Corp.)(universal serial bus)
May 15, 2008... by Keith Klepin, Cypress Semiconductor Designers must meet stringent constraints to comply with the USB-IF spec. clever techniques can help you design your system to meet these specs. Measuring the signal quality of USB (Universal...

Testing your notebook design for audio fidelity.
May 15, 2008... Kymberly Christman (Schmidt), Maxim Integrated Products The Windows Logo Program for the Vista operating system has introduced new audio-fidelity requirements for notebook PCs. Critical troubleshooting techniques can help you achieve...

Third-party-IP providers: physical-design questions, part one.(intellectual property)
May 15, 2008... by Pallab Chatterjee, contributing technical editor As this column has discussed previously, selecting an IP (intellectual-property) provider involves several technical and business issues. On the technical front, the additional levels of...

Stackable receiver enables position tracking.(Micro-Sys Inc.)(Brief article)
May 15, 2008... by Warren Webb As transportable embedded systems become commonplace, designers are looking for economical ways to integrate global-positioning equipment to track movements and deter theft. To target these applications, Micro/sys recently...

AMD releases dual- and triple-core desktop processors.
May 15, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler To bring multicore technology to desktop processors that handle multithreaded-digital-entertainment workloads, microprocessor challenger AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) recently introduced three Phenom X3 triple-core...

Multiprocessor system sports as many as four coherent, multithreaded cores.
May 15, 2008... by Robert Cravotta MIPS Technologies' multithreaded, multiprocessor, coherent-processing MIPS32 1004K licensable-IP (intellectual-property) platform supports as many as four single- or double-threaded processor cores that connect through a...

Intellon's Mark Hazen on the HomePlug AV powerline-networking alternative.
May 15, 2008... by Brian Dipert Last fall, powerline-networking provider DS2 weighed in with its thoughts on the technology's strengths, shortcomings, and future directions (see 'Voices: Chano Gomez on powerline networking's 'universal' hope,' EDN , Dec...

Atomic-sized graphene has use in nanoelectronics.
May 15, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler IBM researchers recently discovered that graphite may find use as a material for building nanoelectronic circuits smaller than those in today's silicon-based computer chips. The researchers have found a way to...

Smart RFID chip automates data-logging, -tracking systems.
May 15, 2008... by Margery Conner The passive/semipassive IDS-SL13A tag chip from IDS Microchip AG finds use in single-cell, battery-powered smart-RFID (radio-frequency-identification) labels. An external 1.5 or 3V battery powers the chip's integrated...

Lossless coding comes to portables.
May 15, 2008... by Graham Prophet With more widespread use of MP3-player docking stations, consumers are increasingly finding that the sound quality from portable devices does not match that of CD sound, according to austriamicrosystems. Consequently, the...

CSR hits $6 parts cost for DSP-Bluetooth headset.(Brief article)
May 15, 2008... by Graham Prophet In the world of Bluetooth-headset design, every cent of the BOM (bill of materials) counts. With that fact in mind, CSR has introduced single-chip devices with BOM figures of $5 and $6. The BlueVox2 headset costs $5, and...

Laser goes to (trim) pot.
May 15, 2008... by Glen Chenier, Teeter Totter Tree Stuff We had finished final tests on a transponder whose function was to take in a SONET (synchronous-optical-network) data stream at a 1310-nm wavelength and retransmit the data at 1550 nm for use in...

Letter from the editor.(Editorial)
May 29, 2008... By Margery Conner, Technical Editor, Power Systems and Components, EDN Power electronics continues to be a topic of vital interest to EDN readers, who include the most influential members of the power-design industry, so it's helpful to...

EDN's Best of Power...Products.(Brief article)
May 29, 2008... By Staff Power systems include a wide-ranging group of products. Based on reader interest, EDN's "Best of Power" breaks these products into six categories, including batteries and charging ICs, switching semiconductors, control ICs and...

Batteries and Charging ICs.
May 29, 2008... By Staff Popular features that caught readers' eyes: the trend to speed up battery-recharge time through either supercapacitor usage or sophisticated charging algorithms, the move toward accurate fuel gauges for portable devices, and the...

Switching Semiconductors.
May 29, 2008... By Staff These switching semiconductors, which are mostly MOSFETs, boast two major sets of features: High switching speeds and low forward resistances. It used to be enough for a switching FET to switch large amounts of power at a fairly...

Power-Control ICs and Modules.
May 29, 2008... By Staff As with power supplies, readers' attention focused on highly efficient power regulators. In addition, regulators that take the work out of conditioning power for targeted portable systems-consumer, military, and automotive-are...

LED Drivers.
May 29, 2008... By Staff As LEDs increase in brightness and power, they are making their way into applications that no one thought of just a year or two ago. They are now commonplace in lighting areas, rather than just finding use as simple indicators....

Components.
May 29, 2008... By Staff Switching devices and power-control ICs and architectures are the glamour parts for power-supply subsystems, but components, including passives, switches, and isolators, are vital parts, and EDN readers know that they can make or...

Power Supplies.
May 29, 2008... By Staff As usual, the broad field of power supplies features a variety of products. Some standout features in this product list are supplies that work with alternative energy sources; small, high-density, and energy-efficient sources; and...

EDN's Best of Power...Feature Articles.
May 29, 2008... By Staff These articles are in-depth looks at a targeted area of power-system design from both EDN technical editors and contributing experts in the field. "Wireless power transmission: no strings attached" Receiving electrical...

EDN's Best of Power...Power Design Ideas.
May 29, 2008... By Staff Long before anyone invented social Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, EDN's Design Ideas provided a true community for exchanging circuit designs with other electronic-design engineers. Design Ideas are an early and valuable...

EDN's Best of Power...Community/Blog Posts.(Website list)
May 29, 2008... By Staff These posts speak for themselves: Design engineers are an outspoken bunch, with strong opinions on topics within their community. " 'Green' marketing hype turning off consumers" ...

Embedded x86: keystone of your non-PC design?
May 29, 2008... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor x86 microprocessors may not have the absolute lowest power per megahertz, absolute highest performance per clock tick, or optimum code efficiency when you evaluate them against all possible...

Protocol-stack testing for LTE technology.(universal mobile-telecommunications system)
May 29, 2008... by Christina Gessner, Rohde & Schwarz Effective test strategies can help transform UMTS into a cellular-wideband system. Producers of mobile phones and mobile infrastructure are working on the next big step in the development of the...

Capacitive touch switch uses CPLD.(Editorial)
May 29, 2008... Rafael Camarota, Altera, San Jose, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Capacitive touch switches work by measuring the change in capacitance of a PCB (printed-circuit-board) pattern depending on the placement of a user's...

Bit-shifting method performs fast integer multiplying by fractions in C.(Editorial)
May 29, 2008... Aaron Lager, Panamax Furman, Santa Rosa, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville This Design Idea presents a method for fast integer multiplying and multiplying by fractions. What can you do when you lack access to a hardware...

RS-232-to-TTL converter tests UARTs with a PC.
May 29, 2008... Matthieu Bienvenue, Malissard, France Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville You often need an RS-232-to-TTL adapter for debugging or testing UARTs using a computer. But most of these adapters require an external power-supply...

Hot-swap circuit allows two computers to monitor an RS-232 channel.
May 29, 2008... Jeff Patterson, All Weather Inc, Sacramento, CA Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville The hot-swap serial-interface circuit in Figure 1 allows two computers to see all of the communication between each computer and each device...

Improved laser-diode-clamp circuit protects against overvoltages.
May 29, 2008... James Zannis, Baulne-en-Brie, France Edited by Charles H Small and Fran Granville Expensive semiconductor laser diodes have no tolerance for fast voltage or current transients. To minimize the risk of damage, a standard JFET-clamp...

Consumer electronics: too daunting for our addled brains?
May 29, 2008... by Rick Nelson, editor-in-chief It's no secret that consumer spending has been driving the economy, and high-tech company Credence Systems has retooled its businesses to focus on consumer electronics (Reference 1 ). But it's now...

Pointy tips.
May 29, 2008... by Howard Johnson, PhD Some high-speed oscilloscope probes come with tips so pointy and sharp that you can set them down onto a PCB (printed-circuit-board) trace just as gently as a phonograph needle and still pick up a great signal. The...

Honest energy, part two: Readers respond.(Editorial)
May 29, 2008... by Joshua Israelsohn, contributing technical editor Reader response to the last installment of Analog Domain (Reference 1 ) has been both strong and informative-so much so that I'd like to share some of the feedback with you. One reader...

Multicore-programming frameworks for embedded-multimedia applications.
May 29, 2008... by Kaushal Sanghai, Rick Gentile, and David Katz, Analog Devices Understanding the data-access pattern of an application can help you effectively use the memory and system resources of the underlying architecture to develop a scalable...

Unraveling the dynamic-range specification in modern spectrum analyzers.
May 29, 2008... By Satish Dhanasekaran and Darrin Russell, Agilent Technologies Using a relatively simple chart to calculate dynamic range, along with speed and accuracy specifications, ensures that you choose the right spectrum analyzer and make...

Pentek shrinks software-radio module.
May 29, 2008... by Warren Webb At the recent Critical Embedded Systems conference in Scottsdale, AZ, Pentek introduced its latest high-performance, high-resolution software-radio module. The Model 7151 PMC (peripheral-component-interconnect-mezzanine...

NXP opts for soft encryption.
May 29, 2008... by Graham Prophet NXP has announced that it will incorporate NTRU's software-based encryption in NXP's ARM7 (www.arm.com )-based microcontrollers. The software-based product will allow you to upgrade a microcontroller in an installed...

16-bit, 105M-sample/sec serial-output ADC has two-wire data stream.
May 29, 2008... by Paul Rako Linear Technology Corp's new, 16-bit, 105M-sample/sec LTC2274 ADC has a two-wire serial interface, which greatly reduces the number of data lines between the ADC and the FPGA. The data interface is a single self-clocking,...

IMEMS sensor detects irregularities.
May 29, 2008... by Margery Conner Analog Devices' ADXL001 vibration and shock sensor allows designers of industrial equipment or instrumentation to cost-effectively incorporate continuous, high-performance, high-bandwidth vibration monitoring into their...

Cougar computer attacks rugged applications.
May 29, 2008... by Warren Webb With an eye toward demanding military, aerospace, medical, and industrial applications, VersaLogic announced the Cougar single-board computer at the April Embedded Systems Conference. The new PC/104-plus board offers...

Microcontroller drains batteries down to 0.9V.
May 29, 2008... by Graham Prophet Silicon Laboratories based its new C8051F9xx line of 8-bit microcontrollers on a new version of the Intel (www.intel.com ) 8051 core, which its designers recast as a pipelined, 100-MIPS CPU. The company adds mixed-signal...

IMEC, Renesas research reconfigurable RF transceivers.
May 29, 2008... by Ann Steffora Mutschler To perform research on 45-nm RF transceivers targeting 1-Gbps cognitive radios, semiconductor supplier Renesas Technology Corp has entered a strategic research collaboration with the IMEC (Interuniversity...

FPGAs target power-constrained designs.
May 29, 2008... by Graham Prophet Actel has extended its Igloo series of low-power FPGAs with Igloo Plus. Whereas the company designed the original devices for maximum density, it optimized the new parts for I/O count. The core-logic structures remain the...

Motor-drive microcontroller has twin inverter outputs.(Renesas designed the SH7137F microcontroller )(Brief article)
May 29, 2008... by Graham Prophet Renesas designed the SH7137F microcontroller family to meet the needs of designers working on 1- to 100-kW industrial inverters and motor drives. The chip has 256 kbytes of Renesas' MONOS...

Melting reduces edge roughness, defects in IC features.
May 29, 2008... by Ron Wilson A project at Princeton University shows that surface heating of small features on an IC can reduce edge roughness and, in some situations, repair defects in metal and semiconductor structures. Project leader Stephen Chou, the...

Novel transistor architectures boost polysilicon substrates, thick-oxide gates.
May 29, 2008... by Ron Wilson Two research projects into novel transistor structures at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey have extended the range of processes that might be able to produce high-performance transistors. Both...

Auction-style site aims to thwart gray market.
May 29, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree Looking to counter the gray market's counterfeit-component issues, an online electronics-supply-chain service is aiming to bring together chip manufacturers, OEMs (original-equipment manufacturers), CEMs...

LED shipments to climb on notebook usage.
May 29, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree LEDs will light the notebook-PC-display-backlighting market ablaze during the next few years, with iSuppli Corp (www.iSuppli.com ) predicting that nine out of 10 large mobile-PC LCD panels will use the technology by...

EPA works with The Green Grid on energy efficiency.
May 29, 2008... by Suzanne Deffree The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov ) has turned the microscope on itself, last month announcing that it will begin to evaluate its computer rooms for ways to optimize energy efficiency and then will...

Temperature: your worst enemy?
May 29, 2008... Clark Robbins, GS Engineering Many years ago, I was involved in an electromechanical project that included hydraulics, a microprocessor, custom chips, power circuits, software, dc motors, solenoids, and the like. I was responsible for...