EDN articles from November 2006

EDN archives from November 2006

Embedded platforms: a second look.
November 9, 2006... by Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor Processing platforms and their software-development ecosystems are becoming more important for the success of designing increasingly complex applications. During the last quarter of 2002, I did a...

Consumer electronics: feeling the squeeze.
November 9, 2006... by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Designers in the consumer market work under enormous pressures. Have these circumstances changed the way they design chips and systems? The demands on consumer-electronics design teams are unquestionably...

LED senses and displays ambient-light intensity.
November 9, 2006... Dhananjay V Gadre and Sheetal Vashist, ECE Division, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville In addition to their customary roles as indicators and illuminators, modern LEDs...

AC line powers microcontroller-based fan-speed regulator.
November 9, 2006... Abel Raynus, Armatron International Inc, Malden, MA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville A microcontroller requires dc operating power in the 2 to 5.5V range, an amount that a battery or a secondary power source can easily...

Simple circuits sort out the highest voltage.
November 9, 2006... Ezio Rizzo, Nova SNC, Genoa, Italy, and Vincenzo Pronzato, Felmi SRL, Genoa, Italy Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville In a water-cooled power converter, analog-output sensors measure the cooling water temperature at three...

EDAC's statistics.
November 9, 2006... by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor Early this year, I wrote a column that raised a few hairs over at the EDAC (EDA Consortium, Reference 1 ). I addressed what I considered a low point for the EDA industry when, in the third quarter of...

Globalization and analog.
November 9, 2006... by Paul Rako, Technical Editor Analog is the real world, and needs differ from place to place. Accordingly, analog engineers face challenges in accounting for a multiplicity of standards, conventions, and consumer preferences, depending on...

IP plays cautiously in emerging markets.
November 9, 2006... by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor All the big IP vendors are offering IP to emerging countries, such as China, India, and, to some degree, Russia. but if you are designing ICs in those countries, don't be surprised if established IP...

Global Report 3: worldwide analog, power, system, and IC design.
November 9, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor In Chief In 2004, we conceived the Global Report as an annual project that would allow us to leverage our editorial resources worldwide and to address the global reader base with the results. Readers seemed to...

Linux masters the mobile market.
November 9, 2006... by Warren Webb, Technical Editor With a huge assortment of server, embedded, and consumer-electronics designs already in its portfolio, the Linux operating system dives into the exploding worldwide mobile-phone marketplace. Featuring...

Surfing for market share? Ride the efficiency wave.
November 9, 2006... by Arnold Alderman, Anagenesis Inc Government agencies are joining utility companies to reduce power consumption by targeting inefficient power supplies. Efficiency is a hot topic in today's power-supply market. Once relegated to a...

Eye don't like it.
November 9, 2006... by Howard Johnson, PhD My heart sank when I first saw the hideous jitter and loss of noise margin evident in the eye diagram of Figure 1 . The figure shows the received eye diagram for a simple serial connection operating at 2.5 Gbps....

Fixed-point-IIR-filter challenges.(infinite-impulse-response)
November 9, 2006... by Michael Christensen, University of Florida, and Fred J Taylor, University of Florida and the Athena Group Inc IIR filters can meet highly selective magnitude-frequency-response specifications with a low-order approach. As such, an IIR...

FPGAs entered at PLD density but became integration champ.(Field Programmable Gate Arrays)(programmable logic and design)(Brief article)
November 9, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief Today, FPGAs, along with memory chips, are the densest ICs in production. The regular structure of FPGA die makes the chips ideal for pushing the evolution of process technology, and designers seemingly...

Programmable logic devices.
November 9, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief From its humble origins, the programmable logic device has evolved into a complex part with the ability to implement sequential and combinatorial circuits. CMOS technology lets you reprogram PLDs and...

Priced from $995, dual-display benchtop DMMs resolve 6½ digits, make four-wire measurements with two leads.
November 9, 2006... by Dan Strassberg Fluke Corp has announced the 8845A and 8846A Precision DMMs (digital multimeters), which feature 612-digit resolution, dual displays that show data in graphic or numeric formats, and multifunction-measurement...

Palm-sized computer features network connectivity.
November 9, 2006... by Warren Webb Gumstix's latest miniature computer targets the customized-network-appliance market, and you can use it as a file and print server, a network server, a software-application server, a Web server, an IP (Internet...

Tools feed variability data to DFM products.(design-for-manufacturing)
November 9, 2006... by Michael Santarini Synopsys has released two new tools to help developers and users of leading-edge processes better predict how proximity variations and global variations will affect circuit performance as the industry moves into...

PIC18 processor includes full Ethernet support.
November 9, 2006... by Robert Cravotta Microchip's PIC18F97J60 family of processors reduces the board space and bill-of-materials costs for 8-bit embedded-system applications needing Ethernet connectivity by eliminating the need for extra chips for the...

Spice simulator offers speed, capacity increase over competitors.
November 9, 2006... by Michael Santarini Magma Design Automation is again tapping into its recent acquisition of ACAD to add the FineSim Spice analog tool to its largely digital-tool portfolio. Magma offers the stand-alone, Spice-level circuit simulator...

VOIP-phone reference design targets low cost, power.
November 9, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) based its Uni Vox VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)-phone reference design on the CSR UniFi single-chip Wi-Fi device. UniVox enables manufacturers to produce wireless phones...

COTS principles shape dc/dc converters.
November 9, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe XP Power's MTC series of dc/dc-converter modules targets military and avionics applications, following the principles of COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) and NDI (non-development-item) procurement. Spanning...

Researchers get a handle on carbon nanotubes.
November 9, 2006... by Matthew Miller Announcements about carbon nanotubes seem to be nearly as abundant as carbon itself these days, but most gloss over a fundamental challenge: These nanotubes--cylindrical carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a...

Codec compresses in-vehicle imagery.(Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. introduces SmartCodec)(Brief article)
November 9, 2006... by Matthew Miller Fujitsu Laboratories has announced SmartCodec, an image-compression technology targeting automotive applications, which would ease the transportation of video entertainment, navigation-system imagery, and real-time video...

Lab publicizes another Wi-Fi worry.
November 9, 2006... by Matthew Miller Hoping to head off a potential security threat, Sandia National Laboratories has demonstrated a passive technique that unsavory characters could use to identify the device driver in use by an 802.11 radio. The...

Scope.(electron devices )(Conference notes)
November 9, 2006... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking ahead Ron Wilson To the International Electron Devices Meeting Convening in San Francisco on Dec 11 through 13 and arguably the world's foremost conference on devices that modulate electron...

Where does the energy go?
November 9, 2006... by Ron Mancini In the early 1970s, I worked for Datapoint when it was the leader in distributed data processing. The company manufactured the first desktop computers, and the only reasonable method of program or data entry was a...

The difference between latency and settling time for ADCs.
November 23, 2006... by Bonnie Baker Among ADC users, the terms "latency" and "settling time" are sometimes interchangeable. ADC designers, on the other hand, are very clear on the difference between these terms and how these phenomena will affect your...

Low-cost kits: the new FPGA-designer trend.(field-programmable gate arrays)
November 23, 2006... by David Marsh, Contributing Technical Editor Dominating communications and complex industrial applications, FPGA makers are looking toward design wins in lower end automotive and consumer devices. With today's devices blurring the...

Display of power: Portable devices get bigger screens without bigger batteries.(Editorial)
November 23, 2006... by Nicholas Cravotta, Contributing Technical Editor Consumer-electronics Developers face a host of challenges when designing for small, portable-system applications. The ready availability of high-resolution color LCDs in high-end cell...

Chopper-stabilized amplifier cascade yields 160 to 10,240 programmable gain.
November 23, 2006... Jerome E Johnston, Cirrus Logic Corp, Austin, TX Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Certain medical and scientific instrumentation applications require amplification and measurement of microvolt-level signals. For example,...

Current-mode instrumentation amplifier enhances piezoelectric accelerometer.
November 23, 2006... Dave Wuchinich, Modal Mechanics, Yonkers, NY Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville A typical piezoelectric sensor comprises a disk of PZT-5A ceramic material with metallized electrodes on its surfaces. Applying electrically...

Low-cost RF sniffer finds 2.4-GHz sources.
November 23, 2006... Vladimir Dvorkin, Linear Technology Corp, Milpitas, CA Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville Whether you measure or use RF circuits that operate in the popular 2.4-GHz ISM (industrial/scientific/medical) band, cordless telephones,...

Triangle waves drive simple frequency doubler.
November 23, 2006... Jim McLucas, Longmont, CO Edited by Brad Thompson and Fran Granville If you use a function generator, you may occasionally require a sine-wave output at a higher frequency than the generator can provide. If your function generator...

Triple-play update: Telcos falter; cable companies soar.
November 23, 2006... by Maury Wright, Editor in Chief I recently railed against marketers trying to ride the popularity of the term "triple play" in the column "Triple-play trickery: Beware the buzzword bandwagon" (EDN , Oct 12, 2006, pg 12,...

Piecing together a Pocket PC.
November 23, 2006... by Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor A deeply cycled, defunct battery provided a good excuse to crack open a classic: Compaq/HP's popular late-2001 iPaq 3835, whose hardware design formed the foundation of five product-family...

Modeling gaps in state-of-the-art mixed-signal design.
November 23, 2006... By Shye Shapira and Boris Mishori, Tower Semiconductor Ltd With the emergence of SOC designs, the industry has moved away from the IDM model. To ensure that your designs will emerge from the foundry as your simulations predict, you must...

Designing antialias filters for ADCs.(analog to digital converters)
November 23, 2006... by Mark Holdaway, Xignal Technologies AG Continuous-time ADCs can benefit signal-chain design. An overview of discrete- and continuous-time systems details the differences. Nyquist-sampling theory lies at the heart of today's...

PC/104 Ethernet switch supports virtual networks.
November 23, 2006... by Warren Webb With high-reliability aviation, industrial, military, and transportation applications in mind, Parvus recently introduced the five-port PRV-1059 Fast Ethernet switch. The module features low power consumption, high shock...

Input board shrinks data-acquisition footprint.
November 23, 2006... by Warren Webb United Electronic Industries' new DNA-AI-225 analog-input board features 25 differential-input channels, each with 24-bit resolution and a maximum sampling rate of 1k sample/sec. With a separate ADC for each input, the...

Virtex-5 adds PCI Express, 10-Gbit-Ethernet cores.
November 23, 2006... by Michael Santarini Xilinx has released the second platform derivative of its Virtex-5 FGPA family targeting markets requiring serial connectivity. Xilinx this year also unveiled its top-of-the-line Virtex-5 FPGAs, the first FPGAs in...

Two suppliers' handheld DMMs offer differing features.
November 23, 2006... by Dan Strassberg Vendors have crowded the handheld-DMM (digital-multimeter) market for almost as long as it has existed. To many in the industry, Fluke is synonymous with handheld DMMs. Industry watchers, however, have never regarded...

Amir Majidimehr: a "window" to the world of telecom.
November 23, 2006... by Brian Dipert EDN interviewed Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group within the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division at Microsoft. His team delivers Microsoft digital-media technology to mobile...

Interface chip provides complete USB connectivity.
November 23, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe FTDI (Future Technology Devices International) has extended its series of USB-interface chips with the introduction of the Vinculum family of embedded USB-host controllers. FTDI has designed the ICs to be...

S-band mission payload to launch on W2A satellite.
November 23, 2006... by Vinod Kataria, EDN Asia Satellite operator Eutelsat Communications and telecommunications-technology vendor Alcatel announced that Eutelsat will launch an S-band payload on the W2A satellite. According to Alcatel, this decision marks...

Bipolar transistors achieve speed record.
November 23, 2006... by Graham Prophet, EDN Europe Researchers at the United Kingdom's University of Southampton have produced bipolar transistors that are twice as fast as current devices. Using a standard silicon-bipolar-fabrication technique with fluorine...

Scope.
November 23, 2006... Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead Ron Wilson To the Consumer Electronics Show Coming to a Las Vegas near you on Jan 8, the 40th-anniversary edition of the sprawling show of consumer products will unfold in all its,...