259 results found for Design View / Design Solution, displaying items 1 - 20
May 8, 2008 Designing For High Speed In Current-To-Voltage Conversion
Communications channels used to be a challenging exercise in pure analog design. Today, modulation occurs in the digital domain in many systems. But the transmitted signal is analog, so there’s always a conversion. For any communications system, choices for the digital- to-analog converter (DAC) and its current-to-voltageconverting op amp depend on the required bandwidth. As DACs and op amps get faster, they move closer to the transmitting...
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John Ardizzoni
April 24, 2008 Bridge Architecture Solves Performance, Design, Cost Problems In New Portables
Interconnecting peripherals and mass storage to embedded processors has always been a challenge, but now it’s an even more critical part of designing portable devices. Designers must solve numerous problems, such as power consumption, data speed, and configuration flexibility, while minimizing parts count and cost. One solution that bears consideration is the West Bridge, a fast interface solution that can simplify many embedded portable designs. The...
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Danny Tseng
April 10, 2008 Mixed-Signal Processors Can Aid Visual Robotic Development
A recent project for one of the exhibitors at the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo 2007, held last October in San Jose, Calif., required our company to quickly develop a motion-control system for a tracked robot. This isn’t complicated by any means, using many development tools currently available. In this case, though, the design was implemented using a visual design tool that required no manual coding at all. The goal was simple, and only three...
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Oliver H. Bailey
March 26, 2008
Analog Multiplier Improves the Accuracy of High-Side Current-Sense Measurements
High-side current-sense amplifiers are used in a wide variety of applications where reliability and accuracy are paramount concerns. In computer notebooks, these devices monitor the battery’s charge and discharge currents, as well as currents in USB ports and many other supply rails that may need to be powered down to control heating and power dissipation.
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Maurizio Gavardoni
March 27, 2008 Implement A Complete ARV Controller In A Single SoC
From toys to mobile home appliances, there has been a proliferation of simple robotic vehicles— and they all rely on some form of a processor. Some use 8-bit microcontrollers, while others use custom silicon or combinations of discrete components. With today’s technology, you can use a single off-theshelf semiconductor device to create a complete autonomous robotic vehicle (ARV) controller, regardless of vehicle size. This article will show how to build such a...
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William Lovell
, et al.
March 13, 2008 Customize Power Supplies Freely With A Digital Feedback Loop
Tighter power regulations and safety issues are demanding efficient and intelligent power supplies that can be monitored externally and manufactured cost-effectively, with minimal hardware changes. Power-supply engineering advances have shown that digital control of the power-conversion feedback loop enables designers to create more accurate and reliable power supplies with increased power density, at lower costs and with faster...
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Keith Curtis
March 5, 2008
Verify SoCs Faster And More Predictably With SystemVerilog And Constrained-Random Stimuli
Verifying the integration and operation of new IP in a legacy system-on-a-chip (SoC) becomes challenging. This is true particularly when the legacy SoC environment was built using a directed test methodology and validation of new IP requires corner case stimulus to achieve required functional coverage.
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Henry Angulo
, et al.
February 28, 2008 Zero-Drift IA Takes The Strain Out Of Sensor Measurements
Sensor measurements typically translate physical phenomena of interest into electronic-circuit parameters such as resistance and capacitance, which can then be read with a bridge circuit. Bridge circuits produce an output voltage or current signal that is ratiometric with respect to temperature and powersupply voltages, thereby enabling the measurement system to be immune to these variables. Sensor examples can include: Thermistors for temperature...
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Prashanth Holenarsipur
February 14, 2008 Networking Processor Peripherals With I2C
As microcontrollers drop in price and offer more capabilities, designers have found it more costeffective to utilize multiple small controllers in both single-board and multiboard systems. Such auxiliary processors can relieve the main processor of timeconsuming tasks such as scanning keyboards, display controllers, and motor control. These controllers can also be configured as a wide range of application-specific peripherals. Recently, I was given the task...
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Mark Hastings
January 31, 2008 New Synthetic Instrumentation Methods Solve Tough System-Level Test Problems
Today’s electronic components and products are evolving faster than ever, with design- to- production life cycles shrinking to just six months in most commercial applications. In addition, device content and topologies are migrating from single to multi functional components, and then to entire subsystems and systems, often as a single assembly solution (such as for smart phones and iPhone-type devices). Furthermore, d irect software control and device configuration is...
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Francesco Lupinetti
December 18, 2007
Harmonic Distortion And Board Layout
Given that printed-circuit boards (PCBs) are made from material that is practically speaking electrically linear (i.e. constant impedance), then why can it introduce nonlinearities into a signal? The answer is that the board layout is “spatially non-linear” with respect to where currents flow.
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Edited by Bill Boldt
December 13, 2007 Designing A Multi-Gbps Memory Interface Requires Scrutiny
Popular consumer electronics products like gaming consoles, digital TVs (DTVs), and PCs offer more features and greater performance with each successive product generation. The data-intensive nature of these products tightly links the capability of their DRAM memory interfaces with the ability of the product to support larger feature sets and greater performance. Multi-gigabit-per-second (multi-Gbps) memory-interface architectures enable these...
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Scott Best
November 15, 2007 A Low-Power Solution For GPON Burst-Mode Receivers
The move to bring broadband services capable of supporting the triple-play applications of voice, video, and data to first-mile customers (small businesses and the home) continues to evolve. A key player in this FTTx movement is GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network), a fiber-based network that provides a higher bandwidth alternative to existing solutions such as DSL and cable. FTTx refers to the family of first-mile applications, such as Fiber to the Home (FTTH), Fiber to the Building...
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Ron Warner
November 5, 2007 Move Over Iso Amp—Make The Switch To Digital Isolation
Isolation is a means of preventing current from flowing between two communicating points. Typically, isolation is used in two situations. The first is where there's the potential for current surges that may damage equipment or harm humans. The second is where interconnections involve different ground potentials and disruptive ground loops must be avoided. In both cases, isolation is used to prevent current flow, yet allow for data or power flow between the two points. ...
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Thomas Kugelstadt
October 25, 2007 Practical Ways To Estimate, Implement, And Verify SoC Decoupling Capacitance
Deep-submicron systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) require a power-grid voltage drop of much less than 10% of VDD. Decoupling capacitors, or decaps, help achieve this goal by minimizing switching noise. Determining the amount of decap required for an SoC involves many considerations, but the task needn't be a chore. The approach described in this article allows you to allocate decap accurately and with minimal area overhead for deep-submicron (DSM) SoCs. This...
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John Pedicone
, et al.
October 11, 2007 Go Green With 100-W And Higher Audio Power Amplifiers
We know Class D audio amplification offers advantages in efficiency and size for battery-powered devices. What you may not know, however, is that these advantages can now extend to amplifiers up to 500 W thanks to solid-state driver ICs designed specifically for Class D. Systems based on these new ICs outperform Class AB when it comes to THD+N measurements and simplify the designer's job by accepting ground-based analog audio inputs. Other attractive features include overcurrent...
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Alex Mihalka
September 26, 2007
Bringing Physical Predictability To Logic Design
Historically, wireload models have been inadequate for accurate modeling of wire delays. Furthermore, the inaccuracy worsens with each new process generation. Logic designers see one timing representation of their design, and physical designers see something entirely different. This discontinuity impacts the success of the project in several ways.
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Jack Erickson
September 26, 2007
Going Green – A Light in the Dark
The European Union’s RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) Directive came into force a year ago. This directive bans new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants.
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Jim Toal
September 27, 2007 Enhance Signal-Quality Analysis On High-Speed Serial Channels
Getting error-free data across a high-speed serial interface can be a challenge, whether that interface is a Gigabit Ethernet physical layer connecting a client to a router, or a low-voltage differential signaling port sending high-definition video content to a monitor. However, by determining the quality of the serial channel through bit-error-rate (BER) testing to establish the error rate, and using eye patterns to provide a visual representation of the stability and margins of the...
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Zeeshawn Shameem
September 13, 2007 Simplify Video De-interlacing And Reformatting
Most common video signals require preprocessing before encoding by video-compression codecs, which requires data to be in 420 planar format to achieve higher processing performance. For example, broadcast standards such as NTSC and PAL may need to be converted from an interlaced format to progressive scan, and they frequently require the chrominance and luminance information to be reformatted as well. In particular, video from CCD cameras is captured in an...
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Zhengting He
, et al.
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