2114 results found for Technology Report, displaying items 1 - 20
June 25, 2009 Match Multicore With Multiprogramming
Across the embedded landscape, the design credo has become “more cores.” However, challenges remain when it comes to the software side. Some hardware architectures can deliver dozens of cores, while others hit thousands of cores. Unfortunately, applications don’t always port easily across different architectures. For the low end of the embedded space, single-core solutions will remain. It’s still possible to move up the power and performance curve by moving to...
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William Wong
June 18, 2009 Hot Cellular Market Can't Escape Icy Economic Winds
While nothing seems to be totally immune to the economic downturn, except perhaps government growth, the wireless industry is still performing better than most. Revenue is down, but the subscriber rate is up. U.S. carriers added 15 million new subscribers in 2008, boosting the total to more than 270 million by the end of the year. Just over 2.2 trillion minutes were used for voice calls alone in 2008. Total cellular revenue topped $148...
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Louis E. Frenzel
June 18, 2009 Beyond The "Great Recession"
If one looks at the last 50 years of engineering boom-and-bust cycles and correlates them with the “stealth” technologies that emerged during those periods, one can see an encouraging pattern: breakthrough technologies take root during the crises and eventually transform the industry. Often, few people initially grasp these technologies or their potential. It’s also regrettably demonstrable that the actual pioneers have rarely been the ones to reap the big...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009 Motor Control: More Than Just Switching MOSFETs
Enter “motion control” or “motor control” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll be rewarded with links to an ad-hoc encyclopedia of solid design information. Freescale’s site (www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=02M0zpbnQXGM0zpqCKS2&tid=tMCdr) is broad, deep, and far more than a product selection guide—which it...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009 Laptops, Netbooks, And E-books, Oh My!
You don’t need to wave a magic wand to capitalize on the hordes of mobile devices that are on the market these days. They’ve become bright spots in a wobbly consumer electronics industry as buyers look for new bargains. In many instances, the cutting edge, such as the iPhone and Kindle, still carries a premium price. But the potential of lower-cost alternatives as well as the functionality provided by these new platforms is driving interest. ...
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William Wong
June 18, 2009 Putting Robots In Harm's Way
Aremote-controlled landing craft approaches a beach and deploys its robotic cohorts, including a helicopter. The helicopter flies inland and deposits a set of tracked robots that split up to reconnoiter. They use laser designators to highlight targets for incoming robot fighter planes that will launch missiles as part of a coordinated attack. This futuristic scenario is years away, not decades. Odds are good that if you step on a battlefield, a...
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William Wong
June 18, 2009 White Goods See Significant Motor-Control Innovations
Cars are exciting, and appliances are boring, right? That depends. While you can’t take an air conditioner for test drives on a frozen lake to evaluate its dynamic response to regenerative braking in slippery conditions, as Greg Solberg did with the Tesla Roadster, there can still be challenges. For example, cultural and economic differences in regional markets for white goods influence motor-control design. On the cultural side, to cite one case, China and Japan present a...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009 Test Instruments Stay Ahead Of The Curve
Maintaining one’s competitive edge in this economic downturn often comes down to the tools used to get the job done. In terms of test instruments, this is especially true. Without oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and other instruments with the speed and bandwidth to capture today’s high-speed serial bus traffic, it’s virtually impossible to verify the performance of many systems. On top of that, the same instruments are essential to...
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David Maliniak
June 18, 2009 Electronics Helps Foster Decentralized Healthcare
Rising healthcare costs, a stretched-thin number of medical providers, longer life expectancies, and a growing number of elderly and disabled patients are transforming the face of medical care. Decentralization—moving healthcare away from medical facilities and into the patient’s home—is fast becoming the new model. In 2008, Medicaid spending for long-term care cost $99.5 billion, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...
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Roger Allan
June 18, 2009 Auto Electronics Revs Up For "Greener" Pastures
The automobile and electronics industries are struggling mightily through this economic tumult. Straddling these two giants, however, is a shining beacon—auto electronics. At last year’s Convergence Conference, a panel of experts from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, and BMW suggested that the cost of electronics in a car will increase beyond the oft-quoted 20% figure and climb to 40% to 50%. Getting more extreme, Honda senior...
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Roger Allan
June 18, 2009 EDA Remains The Enabler Of Much-Needed Innovation
Some years ago, the electronic design Automation consortium (edAc) adopted the phrase â??where electronics Beginsâ?? as a tagline. coined by richard Goering during his EE Times days, the phrase remains more than apt for edA. As silicon integration grew more complex over the past three decades, the automation of otherwise manual and labor-intensive phases of the design cycle became ever more critical. one could scarcely imagine todayâ??s ...
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David Maliniak
June 11, 2009 Latest Test Solutions Measure Up To Wireless Challenges
Demand for test solutions in the communications and wireless sector continues to soar. Not only has there been an explosion in the adoption rate of new wireless technologies, but couple that with tough standards, multiple radios per product, and millions of devices to test, and it quickly becomes evident that testing capability is critical to the success of any wireless device today. Not to fret, though. Test and measurement companies are on top of the situation. A...
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Louis E. Frenzel
May 21, 2009 Thanks For The Memory
Every processor needs storage. A few systems may get by with a single type, but more often a hierarchy of technologies is employed, such as a server with a redundant array of disks (RAID) storage system (Fig. 1). Each component brings something to the system, be it high capacity, fast access, or nonvolatility. The mix is changing, too, as new technologies come online and existing technologies change...
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William Wong
May 7, 2009 Mapping Mars In Infrared
The Mars Odyssey mission may not be the latest or most glamorous Martian explorer, but it’s the longest-running, and it does boast an impressive thermal imaging system. Orbiting the planet as it does, Odyssey’s scientific packages continue to provide a very rich picture of the fourth planet’s aerology (see the figure). Last September 30, Odyssey was directed to alter its orbit to gain even better...
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Don Tuite
May 7, 2009 Infrared Sensors—The All-Purpose Detection Devices
To identify compounds or investigate sample composition, engineers often turn to infrared (IR) spectroscopy. Correlation tables can be found in various resources. One is available online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy_correlation_table. IR spectrometry works because molecules can absorb energy at specific frequencies determined by the shape of the...
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Don Tuite
April 23, 2009 Wireless-Enabled Systems Challenge Analog/Mixed-Signal Flows
FFrom its inception, the holy grail for the design automation industry has been in the analog realm. Digital logic, with its relatively straightforward structures and topologies, has long been the chief beneficiary of the EDA industry’s efforts. Yet compared to the digital domain, automation of analog and mixed-signal design remains lacking. There are some obvious factors at work. Chief among them is the painstakingly hands-on, custom nature of analog design work. ...
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David Maliniak
April 23, 2009 The MEMS Wrinkle
One RFIC maker with an interesting set of EDA challenges is WiSpry, which relies on RF-MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology to create its chips, components, and modules. The issues a design house faces in incorporating MEMS technology is one that more companies will face as MEMS make their way into a growing array of consumer electronics. There would be no Nintendo Wii game system without them. “We have the classic problem of having two separate tool chains to...
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David Maliniak
April 9, 2009 OLED Displays Bring Much-Needed Light To The End Of The Economic Tunnel
oOrganic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology continues to buck the industry’s current economic struggles, carving out lucrative applications in numerous display and lighting applications. And indications show that active-matrix (AM) OLEDs rather than passive-matrix (PM) OLEDs will eventually dominate this space. DisplaySearch forecasts that OLED display revenues will reach $6 billion by 2015, up from $591 million in 2008, with a compound annual growth rate...
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Roger Allan
March 26, 2009 Smaller, Power-Packed Hi-Def Designs Rule This Year's ESC
It's tough to be optimistic these days. But based on some of the new products appearing at next week’s Embedded Systems Conference, it should be a good year for developers. The latest tools, chips, and platforms will roll out at the San Jose Convention Center, including Texas Instruments’ newest DaVinci microcontroller, which targets mobile hi-def presentation. A few companies showed us their releases early, though a few surprises will likely pop up at the...
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William Wong
March 12, 2009 Optimized Power Supplies Beget Superior Data-Center Efficiency
LLarge data centers devour huge amounts of electrical power (see “Energy-Hungry IT Centers See Hope In Digital Power”). At the heart of efforts to reduce wasted energy, power-supply makers offer a host of ways to minimize their contributions to the problem. In broad terms, the challenge is to deliver power to hundreds of servers’ processors at very low voltage levels...
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Don Tuite
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