EDN articles from September 2000

EDN archives from September 2000

The spy who came into the living room.
September 1, 2000... "The new technology from Tivo and Replay provides the ultimate in television convenience. It will also spy on you, destroy prime time, and shatter the power of the mass market." --Michael Lewis, New York Times Magazine, Aug 13, 2000

Dual-Pentium Stingray screams.(I-Bus/Phoenix's I-Bus/Phoenix Stingray II+ single board computer)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 1, 2000... HIGH-PERFORMANCE APPLICATIONS in voice recognition, videoconferencing, and image processing have just received a boost from the dual-processor Stingray II+ single-board computer from I-Bus/Phoenix. The company based the ISA-bus board on the...

Co-developer of FFT algorithm dies.(James Cooley)(Obituary)
September 1, 2000... STATISTICIAN JOHN TUKEY, who along with James Cooley developed the Cooley-Tukey algorithm for FFTs, died on July 26. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he also coined the term "software" in 1958 for the programs that execute on...

INTEL ACQUIRES ZIATECH.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2000... Intel, the world's largest chip maker, has entered an agreement to acquire privately held, 24-year-old Ziatech Corp in a cash transaction valued at approximately $240 million. Ziatech designs and markets Intel Architecture-based pc boards,...

Dial-up modems get a V.92/V.44 boost.(Industry Trend or Event)
September 1, 2000... THE ITU's RECENTLY PROPOSED V. 92 modem standard, due to be approved in September, has already received strong support from several major players, including Cisco, Conexant, Hughes Network Systems, Lucent, PCTel, and US Robotics. The...

TECHNICAL REFERENCE ENHANCES YOUR AUDIO PERCEPTION.(Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models manual by Professors Eberhard Zwicker and Hugo Fasti)(Review)
September 1, 2000... I recently received an e-mail from an irate reader who accused me of lifting portions of Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models, Second Edition and using them in an article without appropriate acknowledgment (see "Now hear this," EDN, Feb 3, 2000,...

FACTOID.(News Briefs)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2000... Last year, more than 100 million people worldwide attended Tupperware parties and bought $1 billion worth of Tupperware. More than 4.4 million girls ages 12 to 17 were online in May 2000, a 126% increase from about 2 million a year earlier,...

Chip set boosts memory bandwidth without double trouble.(from Acer Laboratories)(Company Business and Marketing)
September 1, 2000... AFTER YEARS OF HYPE and months of memory sampling, production-ready companion PC-core-logic chip sets supporting Direct Rambus DRAM competitor DDR (double-data-rate) SDRAM are finally emerging. The chip-set vendors can only pray that they don't...

OPTIMIZE YOUR BROADBAND CONNECTIONS.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2000... By now, I hope at least some of you are enjoying high-speed, always-on ADSL or cable-modem Internet connections (see "ADSL fulfills the need for speed," EDIV, April 29, 1999, pg 30). If so, check out the new Navas Cable Modem/DSI Tuning Guide...

Competition heats up while fast 8-bit ADCs cool down.(Silicon Processing Technologies' Silicon Processing Technologies SPT7721)(Product Announcement)
September 1, 2000... IF YOU THOUGHT THAT THE RACE was over and won in the 8-bit ADC circuit, think again; if anything, it's heating up. The latest contestant, a racy little 250M-sample/sec number, comes from Signal Processing Technologies. Sprightly and...

SPREAD-SPECTRUM CLOCK CHIP CUTS EMI IN PCs, PDAs, AND PERIPHERALS.(International Microcircuits' International Microcircuits SM561)
September 1, 2000... Designers can reduce EMI emissions for a wide range of digital electronic systems with the SM561 spread-spectrum clock generator from International Microcircuits Inc. The chip connects to either a local crystal or, for clock regeneration, to...

Software delivers the sound of savings.(Sound Forge XP and Cool Edit 2000 sound/audio software)(Product Information)
September 1, 2000... FOR ACCURATE DATA EXTRACTION, or "ripping," and WAV-file creation from audio CDs, turn to Exact Audio Copy's "postcardware"--that is, free; just send the author a postcard (see "Digital audio breaks the sound-barrier," EDN, July 20, 2000, pg...

Web site lets you prototype sans hardware.(Company Business and Marketing)
September 1, 2000... VIRTIO CORP'S NEW WEB SITE lets you perform online virtual prototyping of embedded systems and SOC (system-on-chip) products. Virtual prototyping allows designers to quickly create a prototype of a complete system without hardware. It addresses...

Wireless DSL?(Industry Trend or Event)
September 1, 2000... A DC, CONEXANT SYSTEMS, Gigabit Wireless, Intel, Nortel Networks, and Vyyo have founded the Wireless DSL Consortium to accelerate the deployment of broadband wireless access. The consortium hopes to provide a forum leading the definition,...

Keep that substrate noise down.(Simplex Solutions' SubstrateStorm 3.1 CAE software for subsrate noisemodeling and analysis)(Product Announcement)
September 1, 2000... VERSION 3.1 OF SIMPLEX SOLUTIONS' SubstrateStorm substrate-noise-modeling and -analysis tool models the substrate of complex chips fabricated in any advanced technology and then produces a graphical output that designers can use interactively...

Logic core blends benefits of FPGAs, ASICs.(Eaic's Easice ASICore)(Product Announcement)
September 1, 2000... START-UP EASIC HAS INTRODUCED eASICore, a high-performance configurable-logic core for platform-based design, which accelerates the design cycle and the development of derivatives for system-on-chip (SOC) design. The eASICore allows initial...

Differential U-turn.(Questions and Answers)
September 1, 2000... Q. What is the effect of a split in a solid plane on the impedance of a coplanar differential pair? The differential pair passes over a solid plane (logic return) and then crosses a 50-mil void into an I/O area that has a solid plane of its own...

Let me be perfectly average with you.(Industry Trend or Event)
September 1, 2000... I CAN ALWAYS TELL IT'S A SLOW NEWS PERIOD when newspaper or TV reports lead with stories that are statistically based. By this, I mean a story that is not about events that actually happened but is based on some superficial analysis of a few...

DWDM: feeding our insatiable appetite for bandwidth.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... ONCE UPON A TIME, ENGINEERS FEARED THE DAY WHEN THEY WOULD TAP OUT THE BANDWIDTH POTENTIAL OF FIBER. DWDM PUTS THOSE FEARS TO REST FOR NOW. BACK IN THE EARLY DAYS of fiber, engineers feared "fiber exhaust," the possibility that the...

"Essential" electronics for weekend warriors.(Product Information)
September 1, 2000... IF YOU'VE VISITED MY home page (http:// members.aol.com/bdipert) or checked out my picture on EDN's Web site (www.ednmag. com/ednmag/market/dipert.asp), you've already figured out that after a long week of work, my wife and I like to head to...

The quest for high efficiency in LOW-VOLTAGE SUPPLIES.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... A NEW GENERATION OF SYNCHRONOUS-RECTIFIER MOSFETs AND DC/DC-CONVERTER ICs MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO ACHIEVE HIGH EFFICIENCY IN LOW-VOLTAGE POWER SUPPLIES. AS LOGIC-IC AND CPU VOLTAGES DROP from 5 to 3.3V and ultimately to 1V, it becomes...

A digital picture is worth ...(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... WITH THE PRICES OF SPECIALIZED COMPONENTS AND HIGH-POWERED PROCESSORS PLUNGING, DIGITAL IMAGING MAY BE DESTINED FOR YOUR NEXT PROJECT. MASTER THE TECHNIQUES YOU NEED TO CAPTURE, COMPRESS, AND STORE ELECTRONIC PICTURES. DIGITAL IMAGING...

EDA vendors: getting serious about signal integrity.(Industry Trend or Event)
September 1, 2000... PARTS DO NOT FLOAT, AND FAST PARTS MIGHT SINK IN YOUR PC BOARD. "THE SAME THRILL, THE SAME AWE AND MYSTERY, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one...

Voice quality in converging telephony and IP networks.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... THE EMERGENCE OF VOP TECHNOLOGIES COMPLICATES THE ISSUE OF VOICE QUALITY. A USER'S PERCEPTION OF QUALITY DEPENDS ON THREE FACTORS THAT SHARE A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP AND HAVE THEIR OWN UNIQUE TESTING METHODS: CLARITY, END-TO-END DELAY, AND ECHO....

Two-switch topology benefits forward and flyback power converters.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... ADDING A HIGH-SIDE SWITCH TO SOME OF THE MOST POPULAR AND FAMILIAR TOPOLOGIES CAN HAVE BENEFITS--ESPECIALLY IN HIGHER INPUT VOLTAGE APPLICATIONS. DESIGNERS TEND TO FAVOR forward- and flyback-converter topologies for loads less than 200W...

Power-supply sequencing for low-voltage processors.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... TODAY'S MOST ADVANCED LOW-VOLTAGE MICROPROCESSORS, DSPs, AND PLDs USE TWO POWER SUPPLIES OF DIFFERENT VOLTAGES TO SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE POWER REQUIREMENTS. PROPER SEQUENCING CAN MEAN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DUAL SUPPLIES AND DUELING SUPPLIES,...

EMI and circuit components: where the rubber meets the road.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW COMPONENTS BEHAVE IN THE REAL WORLD AND WHAT THEIR LIMITATIONS MEAN IN TERMS OF EMI. SOME GUIDELINES IN PROPER COMPONENT SELECTION FOR EMI AND IN DESIGNING SIMPLE EMI FILTERS WILL HELP IN THE BATTLE. SOMEONE ONCE SAID,...

Current source has high compliance.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... CURRENT SOURCES ARE useful in many areas of electronics, such as voltage and current division, current transmitters, excitation of thermistors, RTDs, bridges, potentiometers, and circuit biasing. Current sources are either fixed- or...

Modification improves VCA's Spice simulation.(Product Information)
September 1, 2000... THE BURR-BROWN VCA610 is a good wideband voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA) that you can use successfully for your application. The Spice model from Burr-Brown simulates normally when the VCA uses dual power supplies (Figure 1). However, when...

BIOS INT1Ch measures frequency.(Technology Tutorial)
September 1, 2000... THE DESIGN IN Figure 1 shows how you can exploit BIOS INT1Ch of a PC, which occurs 18.2 times/sec, along with a few inexpensive components and LPT1--to measure frequencies from 1 Hz to into the megahertz range. The design requires no expensive...

Circuit variations produce negative voltages.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... BASIC SWITCHED-Capacitor converters generally provide one simple conversion. They commonly double, usually invert, and sometimes halve a positive input voltage. Because they are not regulated converters and do not have stability problems, you...

[micro]C takes control of comparator.(Technology Information)
September 1, 2000... IN MANY [micro]C applications, a signal conditioner modifies an analog input signal from a sensor and passes it to the [micro]C for processing. The last stage of the signal conditioner is always a device that transforms the signal level to a...

Integrated Circuits.(News Briefs)
September 1, 2000... DDR SDRAMs * Offer stacked densities of 256 Mbits, 512 Mbits, and 1 Gbit * 66-pin TSOP II footprints are compatible with industry-standard interfaces * As many as four memory devices are packaged in x4-, x8-, and x 16-bit...

Embedded Systems.(News Briefs)
September 1, 2000... Modeling/simulation software * Now handles temporal logic conditions, such as "before" and "at" in complex reactive embedded systems * Lets you define functions using flow graphs * Automatically generates highly structured,...

Electronic Design Automation.
September 1, 2000... Time-domain-reflectometry software * Computes frequency domain S-parameters from TDR (time-domain-reflectometer) measurements * Generates and validates interconnect circuit models * Works with Agilent and Tektronix TDR...

Test & Measurement.(News Briefs)
September 1, 2000... * Provides 16 optically isolated inputs and 16 reed-relay outputs * Occupies one PCI slot * Works with Visual C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi development environments * DIO-32.PCI, $399 Sealevel Systems Inc, 1-864-843-4343,...

Power Sources.(News Briefs)
September 1, 2000... 3W dc/dc converters * Accept input voltages of 4.5 to 9V dc * Employs an internal [Pi] filter * Output voltage accuracy is-0.5% * A300ERW series, from $9.90 (1000) MicroPower Direct, 1-781-344-8226,...

Literature.(News Briefs)
September 1, 2000... RF- and microwave-components catalog * Four-color, 40-pg catalog * Features specifications and applications for adapters, attentuators, terminations, and connections * Highlights measurement components and accessories, such as...

tech toys.(Company Business and Marketing)
September 1, 2000... Who says engineers can't have fun? Thumbs up Move over palm-sized technology! Now you can store your data on a device smaller than your thumb. The ThumbDrive measures only 55x17x10 mm and stores as much as 256 Mbytes of data. The USB...

Dot-com death dance.(Brief Article)
September 14, 2000... "The collapse of hundreds of dot-coms in recent months has unleashed a loud and significant backlash. Envy has given way to a dark glee that the dot-coms, once so boorishly confident... have been brought back to earth." --Ashley Dunn, Los...

A chip is worth 240 voices.(VxTel's VxTel VX-SP1000 voice-signal processor)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... THE VX-SP1000 VOICE-SIGNAL processor from VxTel targets carrier-class switches in next-generation packet networks. The device can process as many as 240 G.711 uncompressed channels or 120 G.729A compressed channels, each with...

Triscend tries ARM-based chip.(Triscend TA7S20)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... FOLLOWING ON THE HEELS of Altera, Triscend has announced an ARM-based product, the A7 family, its version of a configurable system on chip. The A7 family devices incorporate the ARM7TDMI core, cache memory, a four-channel DMA controller, an...

10-Gibabit Ethernet switchers target optical networks.(Allayer Communications'Allayer Communications Allayer Communications AL1032)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... THE AL1032, A 10-GIGABIT ETHERNET (GE) switching processor from Allayer Communications, integrates one 10-GE port with 12 1-GE ports operating at full-duplex wire speed for an aggregate throughput of 44 Gbps. Flow-control circuitry increases...

DRAM DATA: JUST A FEW CLICKS AWAY.(Advanced Memory International's Web site)(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
September 14, 2000... Curious to find out more info about the new DDR (doubledata-rate) SDRAM that everyone's been talking about lately? Head to the Web site of AMI (Advanced Memory International), an industrywide consortium led by long-time JEDEC participant Desi...

FACTOID.
September 14, 2000... * According to the American Institute for Cancer Research, the average American's caloric intake has risen by 148 calories a day in the past 20 years.--Walking Magazine, July/August 2000 * According to a phone poll by Image Data LLC in...

Semiformal-verification tool lets you zero in.(from 0-In Search)(Company Business and Marketing)
September 14, 2000... AN EDA-TOOL SUITE from 0-In Design Automation combines the most attractive aspects of simulation and formal verification and is a viable method to verify SOC (system-on-chip) designs. The suite includes the CheckerWare library, a collection of...

Optical grating may increase multiplexer densities.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
September 14, 2000... MOST MULTIPLEXER/DEMULTIPLEXER devices use thin-film filters, Bragg Gratings, and freespace gratings, which generally multiplexer or demultiplexer as many as 16 sixteen channels. An alternative technology, arrayed-waveguide gratings, targets...

USB 2.0 goes silicon.(NetChip Technology's NetChip Technology NET2290 microcontroller)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... NETCHIP TECHNOLOGY, which has been demonstrating USB 2.0 rates for several months, has announced the availability of the NET2290 USB 2.0 general-purpose device controller targeting CPU-based peripherals. The NET2290 includes an integrated...

Visualize this.(InformationVisualization: Perception for Design by ColinKaufman)(Review)
September 14, 2000... BOOKS THAT BROADLY cover a topic are often either too long--and thus forbidding to any casual reading for general self-education--or too short, shallow, and unsatisfying. Information Visualization: Perception for Design (Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN...

EEMBC benchmarks help you choose compilers.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... THE EEMBC (EDN Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium) continues to announce certified benchmark scores, and the processors themselves have garnered most of the attention. However, modern RISC and VLIW (very-long-instruction-word)...

"Scatter gather" speeds image transfers.(Imaging Technology's Imaging Technology PCIVisionplus)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... HIGH-SPEED-INSPECTION applications just got a boost from Imaging Technology's new PCIVisionplus, a half-slot PCI frame-grabber board that features 4 Mbytes of onboard memory and a hardware "scattergather" feature that frees the host computer...

Image sensors yield extreme resolution and more.(Product Information)
September 14, 2000... REINFORCING ITS RECENT move to be an open-market supplier of imaging sensors and not just a source for its in-house needs, Eastman Kodak's Image Sensor Solutions Division has unveiled a variety of high-end imaging sensors. Most of these devices...

802.3-compliant Gigabit Ethernet transceivers run on 2.5V.(Texas Instruments' transceivers)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... DESIGNERS HAVE NEW choices of low-power serial transceivers for Gigabit Ethernet links with three new families of devices from Texas Instruments. The new parts range from the TLK2201, a single-channel device running at 1.25 Gbps, to the TLK3104...

Good DAC gets better for high-end and pro audio.(AKM Semiconductor's AKM Semiconductor AK4393, AKM Semiconductor AK4394 and AKM Semiconductor AK4395 sound board/audio device)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... AKM SEMICONDUCTOR has released the third in a line of pin-for-pin-compatible stereo DACs for high-end DVD, DVD-audio, and professional-audio devices, including digital mixers and effects processors. The AK4395 in a 28-pin VSOP serves as an easy...

Why 50[Omega]?(Questions and Answers)
September 14, 2000... Q: Why do most engineers use 5[Omega] pc-board transmission lines (sometimes to the extent of this value becoming a default for pc-board layout)? Why not 60 or 70[Omega]--Tim Canales A: Given a fixed trace width, three factors heavily...

Are you really thinking of the end user?(upgrading your PC)(Industry Trend or Event)
September 14, 2000... I RECENTLY THOUGHT AGAIN about replacing my five-year-old home PC (actually, it's a Macintosh, but that's another story) with a newer and faster unit that would cost me less than the one it replaces. I hesitated for several reasons. Generally,...

2000 embedded systemspreview.(Buyers Guide)
September 14, 2000... The 2000 Embedded Systems conference takes place September 24 to 28 in San Jose, CA. The conference covers Internet-application design, open-source programming, wireless technologies, Internet-appliance-control software, embedded Internet,...

EDN's 27th annual MICROPROCESSOR/MICROCONTROLLER DIRECTORY.(Buyers Guide)
September 14, 2000... The party's at the high end WELCOME TO THE YEAR 2000 version of the EDN Microprocessor/Microcontroller Directory: It's the 27th consecutive year of this directory, and we certainly have something to celebrate. The entire processor industry...

Low-cost bias circuits serve HF and VHF bands.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... BIAS CIRCUITS ARE passive networks that you use to apply dc excitation to various active circuits. The monitor tee, which is also known as the bias tee, has been commercially available for more than 40 years at microwave frequencies. The...

ADC controls multiple stepper motors.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... TYPICAL STEPPER-MOTOR control circuits use either logic gates and flip-flops or shift registers to generate the proper sequences of binary codes that produce bidirectional stepper-motor movement. A conventional stepper-motor-control circuit...

PC's BIOS interrupt drives twin stepper motors.(Technology Tutorial)
September 14, 2000... A SIMPLE AND LOW-COST design achieves a twin stepper drive using a PC's special BIOS interrupt, INT1Ch, through the PC's parallel port (Figure 1). Turbo C control software programs the parallel port for the task of independently running two...

Low-error platinum RTD circuit has shutdown capability.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... RESISTOR-TEMPERATURE detectors (RTDs), are the most stable and popular temperature sensors. Platinum RTDs allow for a much wider range of temperatures than silicon-based sensors. In many cases, platinum RTDs sit far from the measurement...

Software provides three-priority-level interrupt for 8051.(Technology Tutorial)
September 14, 2000... By USING A PSEUDO-RETI instruction, the program in Listing 1 provides an 8051 [micro]C with a three-level-priority interrupt system. Among the three interrupt sources in the listing, External Request 0 (INT0) has the highest priority, and...

Circuit samples derivative of a waveform.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... BASIC DERIVATIVE (differentiating) circuits use a lowpass filter or an active operational-amplifier implementation. These circuits need a large-value capacitor when differentiating a slowly varying signal. Moreover, the circuits are not useful...

Integrated Circuits.(Buyers Guide)
September 14, 2000... Low-dropout regulator * Provides as much as 300 mA with only 300 mV of dropout * Supply current is 30 [Mu]A and less than 0.5 [micro]A in shutdown mode * Output voltages are fixed at 2.5, 3.3, and 5V or adjustable from 1.22 to 20V...

Embedded Systems.(Product Information)
September 14, 2000... DSP design software * Now supports Texas Instruments' DSK 6211 and DSK6711 DSP-based hardware * Offers an efficient means of real-time DSP programming without having to write any code * Block components and parameters are selected...

Electronic Design Automation.(Exemplar Logic's LeonardoSpectrum 2000 CAE software and SpinCircuit's SpinCircuit Publisher supply chain management software)(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... Logic-synthesis tool * Now supports the Xilinx Virtex-II architecture * Includes device-specific optimizations and a bidirectional place-and-route interface * Compatible with Windows, Solaris, and HP-UX * LeonardoSpectrum...

Computers & Peripherals.(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... 500-MHz Celeron CPU * Shares the same 15-in. LCD and touchscreens as the PPC-150T but replaces the motherboard, adds a 500-MHz Celeron processor, and doubles the maximum memory and video RAM * Provides one parallel port, four serial...

welcome to the future present!
September 14, 2000... When I attended engineering school in the mid-1970s, I was educated in the proper use of slide rules and keypunch cards. A quarter century of technological evolution has passed, and now I can use a handheld computer to monitor and control an...

visualizethis.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... Computation and imagery merge Visualization software Lets engineers convert massive data streams into easily discernable shapes and colors to organize and structure information that may be hidden among the numbers. The generated images...

THE INCREDIBLE, SHRINKING ENGINEER.(virtual relaity)(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... Electrical and electronic design is largely a two-dimensional task. Electrons follow a path. Gates either block or sustain the electron flow. Resistance and inductance modulate the flow. An engineer may also consider the impact of heat...

nothingbut net.(Product Announcement)
September 14, 2000... Distribute designs for flexibility and integration As the web filters its way Into every aspect of the business world, designers are heading online to find the freshest specs, share the latest data, and preview the coolest software....

a perfect fit.(Technology Information)
September 14, 2000... Maximize productivity with customized code When off-the-shelf software doesn't suit the task one may want to consider the host of packages available offering the flexibility to create custom applications--without starting from scratch. ...

real-timespeed.(Product Information)
September 14, 2000... How real does it get? An engineer's need for speed never seems to be satisfied. With today's high-speed, multi-channel, plug-in I/O cards being capable of transferring hundreds of thousands of samples each second, eliminating performance...

easydoes it.(Industry Trend or Event)
September 14, 2000... Ease of use simplifies difficult designs Ease of use is a very subjective thing," declares Eric Starkloff, a marketing manager at National Instruments (www.ni.com). "Most of the people using our products are not software engineers; they...

Face the music.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
September 28, 2000... "The potential for huge profits in the rapidly expanding world of the Internet is the lure that tempted an otherwise generally responsible company like MP3.com to break the law." --US District Judge, Jed S Rakoff, The Boston Globe, Sept 12,...

Notebook-PC upgrades eliminate midlife crisis.(Product Announcement)
September 28, 2000... DO YOU FIND YOURSELF unable to use the latest generation computer peripherals because your notebook computer provides no USB or 1394 connections? PC Card technology comes to the rescue, delivering a lower cost upgrade alternative to a brand-new...

NEW TECHNICAL EDITOR JOINS EDN.(Company Operations)
September 28, 2000... We're pleased to announce that Greg Vrana has joined EDN as technical editor covering PC hardware and software; peripherals, such as display and storage devices; and related topics. He'll provide you with insight into design issues, technical...

Get CMOS 802.11a for the price of 802.11b.(Product Announcement)
September 28, 2000... RADIATA, WORKING ON developing wireless engines for the home and enterprise environments, has announced the R-M11a baseband modem and R-RF5 5-GHz radio transceiver based on the IEEE 802.11a standard. The chip set supports data rates as high as...

FACTOID.(Industry Trend or Event)
September 28, 2000... About 83% of full-time US workers who had more than seven days vacation since April 2000 remained in contact with their offices during vacation, according to survey by Andersen Consulting. According to the Yankee Group, 25% of US teens...

PUSH COMES TO SHOVE WITH PC-BOARD-LAYOUT TOOL.(Product Announcement)
September 28, 2000... Version 6 of Electronics Workbench's Ultiboard pc-board-layout tool maintains the personality of previous versions but frees developers from the architectural limitations of older code. The tool features "push-and-shove" trace editing, a...

Graphics benchmarking: "fintastic" software.(Product Announcement)
September 28, 2000... NEWSGROUP TRAFFIC and downloading statistics are both accurate measures of what software's hot and what's not, and they've both lately been touting the wonders of a new 3-D graphics benchmarking program--the aptly named Fish-Mark from Sachs...

Audio integration giveth and taketh away.(Product Announcement)
September 28, 2000... THE EMERGENCE OF AC '97 in PCs means that digital-signal-processing functions that the audio subsystem once performed--and still performs in high-end configurations--in silicon now instead reside minimally in hardware on the core-logic chip set...

VIDEO ENCODER HAS A HIGH-DEFINITION VISION.
September 28, 2000... Conexant Systems' CX25870 and CX25871 video encoders are upgrades of and pinout- and software-compatible with the company's popular Bt868 and Bt869.The new encoders broaden the range of supported VGA resolutions all the way up to 1024x768...