EDN articles from May 2009

EDN archives from May 2009

Thin air: ATSC Reception Isn't Always Easy.
May 14, 2009... By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor The looming transition from analog to digital television promises high-quality images and immersive audio, but reality can fall short of the hype, especially in environments with challenging...

Eliminate Sallen-Key stopband leakage with a voltage follower.
May 14, 2009... By Martin Cano, National Semiconductor novel design techniques help reduce stopband leakage in your filter designs. The Sallen-Key lowpass filter is a form of the VCVS (voltage-controlled voltage-source) topology. Unfortunately, the...

CMOS-NAND gates control sump pump.
May 14, 2009... V Gopalakrishnan, Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam, India Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville With just a few NAND gates, you can control sump pumps and other pumps that keep your basement from flooding and...

Use an LED to sense and emit light.
May 14, 2009... Rafael Camarota, Altera Corp, San Jose, CA Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville LEDs in portable devices often show power status, battery status, or Bluetooth-connection activity. LEDs can be major factors in determining battery...

Two instrumentation amps make accurate voltage-to-current source.
May 14, 2009... Frank Ciarlone, Analog Devices, Wilmington, MA Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Many designs require precise voltage-controlled current sources, especially in the presence of variable loads. Common approaches, which use a few...

Simple circuit indicates health of lithium-ion batteries.
May 14, 2009... Fritz Weld, Friedberg, Germany Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Lithium-ion batteries are sensitive to bad treatment. Fire, explosions, and other hazardous condition may occur when you charge the cell below the margin that the...

What are you doing?
May 14, 2009... By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News The question that people seem to be most often asking each other is, What are you doing? What are you doing in LEDs? What are you doing with your fabs? What are you doing to thwart the economy's...

Driving-point impedance.
May 14, 2009... By Howard Johnson, PhD In Figure 1 , cut the PCB (printed-circuit-board) trace at its left end, disconnecting it from resistor R 0 . Measure impedance Z 1 , the impedance looking from your cut to the left back toward the driver. If the...

Selecting the correct process geometry and options.
May 14, 2009... By Pallab Chatterjee, contributing technical editor Most of the custom chips today, including ASICs, ASSPs (application-specific standard products), and special-purpose custom chips, have function blocks that do not require leading-edge...

Tops in power.(Brief article)
May 14, 2009... Margery Conner, Technical Editor, Power systems and components, EDN This year's "Tops in power" special section focuses on the most popular power news, articles, and blog posts covering power technology for 2008. Power systems continue to...

Tops in power: ARTICLES AND NEWS.
May 14, 2009... Staff Don't limit your concept of alternative energy to solar and wind power: Batteries, a prosaic technology that's been around since slightly before the invention of dirt, have been undergoing a rebirth. Lithium ion is currently the...

Tops in power: BLOGS.
May 14, 2009... Staff As with EDN 's news articles and features, energy efficiency, especially discussion about the practicality of compact fluorescent lights, proved popular with readers. Other popular topics were EDN 's series on the power subsystem for...

Selecting heat sinks for heavily populated boards.
May 14, 2009... By Barry Dagan and Philip Raynham, Cool Innovations Inc Heat sinks are important in complex systems in which the sink's impact on airflow matters as much as its thermal resistance. When facing the task of cooling heavily populated PCBs...

PowerQUICC boosts performance, delivers flexibility and lower-power operation.(quad-integrated-communications-controller)
May 14, 2009... by Robert Cravotta Freescale's MPC8569E communications processor, which targets wireless-access-infrastructure applications, expands the integrated QUICC (quad-integrated-communications-controller)-engine family of devices to processing...

Module merges SUMIT interface with ISM form factor.(stackable-unified-module-interconnect-technology)(Brief article)
May 14, 2009... by Warren Webb Taking advantage of the latest small-form-factor announcements, Adlink Technology recently introduced the CoreModule 730 single-board computer combining the SUMIT (stackable-unified-module-interconnect-technology)-standard...

EUV prints critical layers for 22-nm SRAM.
May 14, 2009... Edited by Ron Wilson IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center) reports having used ASML's (www.asml.com ) EUV (extreme-ultraviolet) Alpha lithography tool to print the contact and metal patterns for a 22-nm-node SRAM cell--apparently,...

Wireless module claims five-year battery life.
May 14, 2009... by Warren Webb With the proliferation of Wi-Fi networks, embedded-system designers are turning to wireless interfaces to eliminate the expensive wiring and installation costs for commercial and industrial sensing applications. The major...

Highly integrated power converter combines efficiency, small footprint.
May 14, 2009... by Margery Conner The tiny, self-contained ENP53F8QI PwrSOC (power supply on chip) from Enpirion provides an ideal power source for electronic systems, especially in space- and power constrained systems, such as USB (universal-serial-bus)...

SchmartBoard offers prototype-PCB systems, modules, social networking, and more.
May 14, 2009... by Paul Rako SchmartBoard has developed a series of prototype PCBs (printed-circuit boards) that you can snap together into complete systems. To provide for prototyping using fine-line surface-mount components, the novel system uses a...

LED-metal substrates get sticky with thermally conductive adhesive.
May 14, 2009... by Margery Conner Bergquist has introduced its Bond Ply 450 thermal-interface material, which eases heat removal from LED assemblies when you combine it with the company's Thermal Clad metal substrate. The peel-and-stick aspect of mounting...

ROHS changes keep design engineers vigilant.
May 14, 2009... by Rob Spiegel New changes to the European Union's ROHS (restriction-of-hazardous-substances) directive will force design engineers to carefully watch their BOMs (bill-of-materials) costs, as the industry targets the phasing out and...

Filter-feedthrough-failure flash.
May 14, 2009... By Wayne Miller, Wayne Miller Associates LLC I had been working as a consultant for a number of years, and most of my clients were microwave companies. Each client had its own product specialties, so I had no problems with possible conflict...

The non-negotiable single-supply operational amplifier.
May 28, 2009... By Bonnie Baker Fundamental analog devices that serve applications such as high-resolution delta-sigma or SAR (successive-approximation-register) converter systems are feeling the crunch from amplifiers that have difficulty with achieving...

Stress out; strain gauges in.(Editorial)
May 28, 2009... By Paul Rako, Technical Editor The careful selection and application of strain gauges can Ensure good results from this difficult measurement. Strain gauges are the fundamental sensing elements for many types of sensors, including...

Leakage-power analysis enables attacks on cryptographic devices.
May 28, 2009... By Milena Jovanovic, University of Montenegro Leakage current may be the gate no one thought to lock that allows hackers to crack hardened systems. Security requirements are increasingly stringent in applications such as e-commerce and...

Current-sense monitor and MOSFET boost output current.
May 28, 2009... Gyula Dioszegi and János Nagy, Divelex Ltd, Budapest, Hungary Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville A previous Design Idea describes a programmable current source that used a three-terminal National Semiconductor...

Multiplexed, programmable-gain, track-and-hold amplifier has instrumentation inputs.(Editorial)
May 28, 2009... W Stephen Woodward, Chapel Hill, NC Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville ADCs need adequate signal-acquisition analog interfaces to perform at their best. The classic general-purpose ADC front end includes multiple channels of...

Simple circuit smoothly drives stepper motors.
May 28, 2009... Uwe Schuler, Institute of Physiology, Tubingen, Germany Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville The circuit in this Design Idea drives low-power, unipolar stepper motors using only a shift register, a few resistors, and low-power...

Excel spreadsheet yields RLC best-fit calculator.
May 28, 2009... Alexander Bell, PhD, Infosoft International Inc, New York, NY Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville Commercial off-the-shelf software such as Microsoft (www.microsoft.com ) Excel lets you automate engineering functions (references 1...

802.11n: Complicated and about to become even messier.
May 28, 2009... By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor In January 2007, I bemoaned the blizzard of "draft" 802.11n gear at that year's Consumer Electronics Show, whose presence constrained the continued evolution of the then-under-development...

Trolling for gold in the BlackBerry Bold.
May 28, 2009... By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor Research In Motion's first 3G-data-capable "world" phone, the BlackBerry 9000, or Bold, gets a tech inspection courtesy of an EDN partnership with phoneWreck. How did RIM squeeze triple- or...

Evolving to DDR3 technology.
May 28, 2009... By John Nieto, Inphi Corp The move from DDR2 to DDR3 requires new design techniques to improve signal integrity and gain the maximum benefit from the latest memory-interface technology. Applications demanding higher system bandwidth...

Free ac/dc digital-power reference design has universal input and PFC.
May 28, 2009... by Paul Rako Microchip Technology based its new ac/dc reference design on the dsPIC33F GS series of digital-power DSCs (digital-signal controllers). The unit works with a universal input-voltage range and produces three output voltages....

DSP combines fixed- and floating-point operation.
May 28, 2009... by Robert Cravotta Texas Instruments' TMS320C6743 low-power DSP features both high-precision, wide-dynamic-range, floating-point operations and higher-performance, lower-power, fixed-point operations. The C674x core uses a superset of the...

Single IC integrates both drivers and controllers for HB-LED lighting.
May 28, 2009... by Margery Conner Most solid-state lighting applications require more electronics than just a series of HB LEDs (high-brightness light-emitting diodes) and their associated power-control circuitry. Lighting features such as communication...

Agilent, Anite demonstrate LTE streaming video.
May 28, 2009... by Rick Nelson Agilent Technologies and Anite (www.anite.com ) have teamed up to demonstrate 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project, www.3gpp.org ) LTE (long-term-evolution) interoperability at the Mobile World Congress...

DSP-based instruments radically alter swept-spectrum analysis.(Tektronix Inc.)
May 28, 2009... by Dan Strassberg Tektronix has announced enhancements to its RSA6000 Series of DSP-based real-time spectrum analyzers. With the aid of new hardware and software, the enhanced instruments use advanced triggering technology and real-time...

VMEbus computer combats EOL issues.
May 28, 2009... by Warren Webb General Micro Systems recently announced the VS275 Maritime VMEbus (Versamodule-eurocard-bus) single-board computer. The device has five expansion modules to combat EOL (end-of-life) problems by enabling seamless upgrades...

Is multimedia abandoning DSPs? Analog Devices disagrees.(Excerpt)
May 28, 2009... Interview conducted and edited by Brian Dipert EDN recently interviewed Denis Labrecque, marketing-programs manager at Analog Devices. In the interview, Labrecque sounds off on DSPs' past, present, and future in audio, graphics, and...

Full speed ahead!
May 28, 2009... By Walter Lindenbach A gas plant was having a speed-control problem with 1800-hp Solar Saturn jet-turbine-driven gas compressors--the same engine that US Air Force jet fighters used in Vietnam. For some reason, the over-speed sensor was...