332 results found for Leapfrog: First Look, displaying items 1 - 20
November 18, 2009
It's A Multimedia CPU Feeding Frenzy!
The ARM Cortex-A5 and MIPS M14K and M14Kc lines are new architectures that the customers of these vendors will be using to build new chips. Meanwhile, ZiiLabs and VIA Technologies are offering new chips—the ZMS-08 multimedia processor and the Nano 300, respectively—using their own designs.
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William Wong
November 16, 2009 Low-Energy Microcontroller Takes It To The Limit
What do you get when you don’t run Energy Micro’s 32-bit Cortex-M3 processor (Fig. 1) at full speed (mode 0)? A very low energy bill. In most instances, this 32-bit microcontroller sips less power than ultra-low-power 8-bit microcontrollers, so why not take advantage of 32-bit performance? Extensive clock gating within the chip design is a major factor in reducing power requirements, but so is...
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William Wong
November 5, 2009 Hard Drive Delivers SATA-III 6-Gbit/s Transfer Rate
Peripheral transfer rate is the typical bottleneck for many applications, especially as processors split into multiple cores. SATA-III’s 6-Gbit/s transfer rate provides significantly more bandwidth, assuming the hard drives and motherboards can keep up. Seagate’s 2-Tbyte ST32000641AS Barracuda XT hard drive delivers on the peripheral side. This is enough space for up to 45 hours of 1080i HD DVCPRO-encoded video (see the...
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William Wong
October 22, 2009 STT Technology Puts A New Spin On MRAM
MRAM’s full potential has been one of the electronics industry’s holy grails—until now. Maybe. Its promise includes nonvolatility, fast read and write times, and unlimited endurance. Power requirements and density have been limitations in the past, though current MRAM technology has succeeded in a number of niche applications. MRAM is complementary with technologies it may replace, including SRAM, DRAM, and flash memory. Crocus...
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William Wong
October 8, 2009 Field-Programmable I/O Augments 8- And 32-Bit Microcontrollers
T hanks to its reconfigurable peripherals, the original programmable system-ona- chip (PSoC) from Cypress Semiconductor is one of the major microcontroller advances of the past decade. However, its proprietary 8-bit microcontroller limited its use in many higher-end applications. The release of the PSoC 3 (based on the 8051) and the PSoC 5 (based on the Cortex-M3), along with some major changes in the reconfigurable peripherals, revises the equation...
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William Wong
October 8, 2009 MEMS Digital Dual-Axis Gyro Improves Camera Stabilization
Addressing lower-cost opticalimage stabilization (OIS) as a major goal, InvenSense Inc. has unveiled the first digital dual-axis pitch and roll (X and Y) gyroscope for camera phones and digital still cameras. Its nextgeneration IDG-2000 family offers the smallest such devices on the market, housed in a 4- by 4- by 0.9-mm quad flat no-lead (QFN) package (Fig. 1). The chip is designed for OIS...
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Roger Allan
September 10, 2009 Back-Illuminated CMOS Imagers May Increase Cell-Phone Camera Sensitivity By Two F-Stops
Tessera Technologies reports a conflict (and resolution) between the need to reduce cell-phone imager chip cost and size by producing everhigher- resolution imagers on smaller die and the consumer demand for digital-camera image quality in cell phones. The most recent solutions separate image capture from image processing—in other words, moving that processing, which can be accomplished using relatively cheap CMOS, off the more expensive imager chip. The...
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Don Tuite
September 10, 2009 Haptic Feedback Chips Make Virtual-Button Applications On Handheld Devices A Snap
V irtual pushbutton switches on handheld screens may work well, but users also want haptic feedback telling them their button-push was effective. Haptic feedback enthusiasts fondly remember the “buckling spring” technology of the IBM Model M keyboard, but time moves on. Designers who want to include haptic feedback for virtual buttons on a flat piece of glass today should look at Maxim’s MAX11810 and MAX11811 (25-MHz SPI or 400-kHz I2C). These...
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Don Tuite
August 27, 2009 1-GHz Cortex A8 Uses 3/4 W
Start with a standard processor core design. Highlight performance and power bottlenecks. Replace key logic with advanced clock gated logic. Significantly cut power requirements. Incorporate into popular multimedia devices. Profit. That’s Intrinsity’s plan. The company started with ARM’s Cortex A8 architecture with a 13-stage, in-order, dual-issue, superscalar microprocessor core and a global history-based branch prediction system (...
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William Wong
August 13, 2009 Ray Tracing Poses A Database Problem
Ray tracing is the reason animated films look so good these days and why games still have a way to go when it comes to realism, even with powerful graphics processing units (GPUs). The problem for gamers is that GPUs are rasterization engines, and most games are tuned for that. Cinema-quality animated movies tend to be created using large “render farms” that are network clusters. Caustic Graphics is looking to literally change the landscape by replacing...
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William Wong
July 23, 2009 Smart-Grid Report Maps Opportunities For U.S. Engineers
In late June, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released its “Report to NIST on the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had engaged EPRI and other Smart Grid stakeholders to develop a draft interimstandards roadmap that NIST could use to begin developing standards. The document runs 291 pages, and the Smart Grid probably offers the potential for as much engineering work in the...
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Don Tuite
July 23, 2009 In Adding Control-Logic Support, A High-Level Synthesis Tool Goes Full Chip
High-level synthesis (HLS), or the notion of synthesizing a design into RTL from a higher level of abstraction, has been gaining currency among design teams. For some time now, there have been compelling reasons to explore HLS methodologies for certain kinds of designs, or certain blocks within a larger design, such as signal- processing blocks. Such a design flow can get you to RTL faster from languages like C++ or SystemC. And because simulation at the transaction...
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David Maliniak
July 9, 2009 Single-Chip TV Tuner Exceeds Performance Expectations
Semiconductor companies have been working for years to develop a fully integrated TV tuner, and some progress has been made. Yet even the most recent designs have their disadvantages. Many only just meet the various test standards, while others require more than a few external components to do the job. The Si2170 from Silicon Laboratories, though, is the first silicon TV tuner to exceed the performance of traditional discrete TV tuners. It ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
June 25, 2009 Tool Automates Power Optimization Of Embedded SoC Memories
System-on-a-chip (SoC) design teams have long labored to optimize their creations for power, but doing so in the memory portions of the devices has lagged behind. Today’s memory-IP (intellectual property) providers build complex power-management schemes into their products, yet the design of the control logic to take maximum advantage of these schemes is daunting. Attempts to get a handle on dynamic power consumption using sleep modes are...
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David Maliniak
June 25, 2009 Nonvolatile Storage Doesn't Require Transistors
The CMOx nonvolatile memory technology from Unity Semiconductor targets storage-class memory applications. CMOx is based on new materials in the semiconductor process called conductive metal oxides that use the movement of ionic charge carriers to store information. With 64-Gbit chip capacity on the horizon, it looks to be a challenger to NAND flash. The technology employs a multi-layer, multi-level cell (MLC) approach that gives...
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William Wong
June 11, 2009 Storage Technology Begins To Crystallize
It’s not in stores yet, but Freescale Semiconductor hopes its silicon crystal approach to flash memory will address the scaling issues that can be found with current approaches. The continuing demand for nonvolatile storage will likely mean this technology will be employed sooner than later. The floating-gate approach to NOR flash implementations is vulnerable to extrinsic reliability fallout as scaling increases. Likewise, the processing ...
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William Wong
May 21, 2009 Monolithic Programmable Constant Current Source Is A New Basic Building Block
Linear Technology’s LT3092 is a 0.5- to 200-mA, twoterminal, low-temperature-coefficient, constant-current- source IC. Conceptually, it’s simple, but there has never been an IC like it. You can build various circuits to provide the same functionality, yet never before could you have bought a standalone IC that does the job so simply and elegantly. Questions arise. What’s it good for? Why didn’t anybody make one before this? How did Linear come to develop...
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Don Tuite
May 7, 2009 Dual PowerPC Micro Delivers Secure Processing Platform
Start with a two-core PowerPC. Add a secure boot microcontroller. That’s what CPU Technology did with its Acalis CPU872 secure, multicore microcontroller designed for applications needing hardware-based security (Fig. 1). There’s nothing special about the PowerPC cores used in the chip, which is good. They are stock cores with 256 kbytes of L2 cache and 64-bit floating-point support designed to...
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William Wong
April 23, 2009 Supercool, Superconducting Digital Switches Extend DDR's Reach
Software-defined radio (SDR) replaces traditional radio circuitry like mixers, filters, and demodulators with software that runs on a DSP or with FPGAs. The secret to its success is its ability to sample the radio signal quickly enough so the DSP can do its job. However, the upper sampling speed of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) has inhibited its capabilities. Modern chips can easily sample in the hundreds of megahertz and lower gigahertz ranges, but...
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William Wong
April 9, 2009 Alliance Launches Open-Source In-Vehicle Infotainment Development Platform
Leading automobile manufacturers and hardware and software suppliers have formed the Genivi Alliance, a nonprofit organization committed to driving the development and broad adoption of an open-source in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) reference platform (see the figure). The group will unite automotive, consumer electronics, communications, and application development companies investing in the IVI market and...
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Roger Allan
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