285 results found for Leapfrog: First Look, displaying items 1 - 20
December 11, 2008 Processors Automatically Shut Down To Save Power
The multicore Opteron processors in AMD’s “Shanghai” line are designed for performance, but their new Smart Fetch technology can also save power. A core can detect when a thread becomes idle. After a programmable delay, the core flushes its L1 and L2 cache to the chip’s L3 cache before shutting down. In addition to a faster startup, this gives other cores access to the core’s working set. Power savings up to 21% are possible when cores aren’t running...
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William Wong
December 1, 2008 MEMS Inclinometer Spawns Wide Application Range
When Analog Devices introduced its ADIS16209 dual-axis MEMS inclinometer and accelerometer as part of its iMEMS family late last year for industrial applications (â??Tiny Dual-Axis MEMS Inclinometer Simplifies Industrial Measurements,â?? Nov. 15, 2007, p. 34; ED Online 17442), it became an instant hit. In fact, our readers called it the Best Leapfrog of the year....
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Roger Allan
November 17, 2008 Stack Monitor Chips Without Isolation Concerns To Give Your Electric Car Some Zip
Okay, you want to design an electric car. Whatever kind of motor you decide on, you’re going to want to run it at a pretty high voltage. That means stacking many batteries in series to get to that voltage, which introduces interesting challenges in monitoring and charging circuits as potentials at the negative electrodes rise above system ground. This is not a new problem. But as long as it’s been confined to products like golf carts and nuclear submarines, ...
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Don Tuite
November 7, 2008 1.5-GHz FPGA Takes Clock Gating To The Max
Flexibility is key to FPGA success, but speed is equally important. Achronix almost triples the throughput of the system by taking clock gating to the extreme. The Achronix Speedster FPGAs use a unique pipeline architecture but completely hide it from developers. Designers can use the devices with unaltered Verilog, VHDL, or RTL. Developers also can continue to use development tools like Synplicity’s Synplify-Pro and Mentor Grahpics’ Precision. ...
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William Wong
November 7, 2008 DigRF FAQs
Q: What is DigRF? A: DigRF is a digital interface standard defined and supported by the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance (www.mipi.org). MIPI also has interface standards for both LCDs and cameras used in cell phones. Q: Where is this interface used? A: It is used primarily in between the RF transceiver IC and the baseband (BB)...
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Louis E. Frenzel
November 7, 2008 Test The DigRF Interface On Mobile Internet Devices
Cell phones and other mobile Internet devices (MIDs) typically use two primary chips—the RF section or radio transceiver and the baseband (BB) section, which handles the digital processing associated with modulation and demodulation and other physical-layer functions. Since the radio generates and receives analog RF signals and the baseband chip performs digital operations, some data conversion between the two is involved. The big question has been where...
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Louis E. Frenzel
October 30, 2008
Scrappy IC Startup Challenges Big Guns With Lossy-Compression ADC For Ultrasound
With TI and Analog Devices duking it out for dominance in the front ends of the world’s ultrasound medical devices, it would take some audacity for a fabless startup to design its first product for the same market. But Samplify Systems has announced chips based on a lossy data-compression algorithm.
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Don Tuite
October 23, 2008 Improved Nano Materials Extend Li-ion Battery Life Five-Fold
Imagine using your laptop, non-stop, flying from New York to Los Angeles and back on a single battery charge. Or, picture using your digital camera or mobile phone for days on end without recharging. QuantumSphere has just filed a patent for a nanotechnology that extends the capacity of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries up to five times. “We’re working on the anode side of the battery and will then begin work on the cathode side soon, with the production...
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Roger Allan
October 9, 2008 Ultrasound AFEs Get More Specialized, Easier To Design With
An emerging business philosophy in semiconductor design says that the way to prosper in the new global marketplace is to use your engineering skills to design your customers’ products for them—or at least the “hard parts.” One corollary of this is that you have to keep beating your own previous personal-best benchmarks over and over again at the same old 18-month cycles, not just at some component level, but at the subsystem level. The reward is that...
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Don Tuite
September 25, 2008 USB 3.0 Protocol Analyzer Jumpstarts 4.8-Gbit/s I/O Projects
The USB 3.0 standard is almost upon us, and some of you are waiting to begin your new, faster I/O designs around it. Full ratification isn’t expected until later this year. When that happens, you’ll want to be the first in what appears to be some new markets for this ubiquitous I/O protocol. Online Poll Thanks to new processors, digital video is appearing...
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Louis E. Frenzel
September 11, 2008 P25 Handhelds Incorporate High-Velocity Human Factors Design
I don’t often write about OEM products. But since I covered the challenges of designing radios for cops and firefighters in the April 30 issue (see “Radio Interoperability—It’s Harder Than It Looks” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 18657), I wanted to follow up because of a new announcement from Motorola. Vastly...
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Don Tuite
August 28, 2008 45-nm Via-Programmable ASICs Add High-Speed I/O Transceivers To Feature Mix
ASIC design starts have plummeted in recent years, and there are many good reasons why. Designs at ultra-deep-submicron process nodes are awfully expensive and getting more so daily as mask costs rise, software content proliferates, and verification takes longer. Meanwhile, the steady rise of application-specific standard products (ASSPs) has also contributed heavily to the ASIC’s marketshare slide. Thus, many designers have turned to alternative...
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David Maliniak
August 14, 2008 Big, Black, And Bold Oscilloscope Breaks Performance Barriers
The WavePro 7 Zi series from LeCroy revolutionizes oscilloscope design and functionality (Fig. 1). While the 15.3-in. WXGA LCD touchscreen can display all sorts of useful data at the same time, the real breakthrough is what’s inside, as its hardware and software make it one of the best scopes on the market. The series includes five basic models with maximum bandwidths of 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4, and 6...
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Louis E. Frenzel
August 14, 2008 RF/IF VGA Chip Does It All
According to Maxim Integrated Products, the MAX2065 fully programmable, multistate, analog and digital IF/RF variable-gain amplifier (VGA) aims to solve a number of automatic gain control (AGC) design problems in GSM/EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE, and WiMAX receiver applications (see the figure). But what does that mean? In explaining the thinking that went into the design of the...
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Don Tuite
July 24, 2008 Smart As A Brick—A New Approach Rejuvenates IBA
By moving digital feedback and PMBus control upstream from point-of-load (POL) dc-dc converters in intermediate-bus-architecture (IBA) power-distribution schemes, Ericsson Power Modules may have sidestepped a patent problem that has all but dried up new IBA developments. The brains are now in the formerly “dumb” bricks that step down 48 V dc to whatever the POLs need. In addition to jumpstarting a stalled digital IBA, Ericsson’s engineers have improved system...
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Don Tuite
July 10, 2008 SIMT Architecture Delivers Double-Precision Teraflops
NVidia’s T10 architecture brings double-precision floating point to the company’s massively parallel computing platform. This graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture also is used in NVidia’s consumer graphics boards. Both are supported by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The Tesla S1070 1U rack-mount system incorporates four of the Tesla T10 boards, each with a single chip containing 240 cores ...
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William Wong
June 26, 2008 Copper Energy Saves Plenty Of Energy—And Pennies
Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. That saying has been around since pennies were actually made mostly of copper, not just copper-coated like they are today. Copper can also be found in our bloodstream. It has been used to carry water and transfer heat. Most recently, it has been used for interconnects in semiconductors. But what about putting the metal to work as part of a nonvolatile memory technology? Researchers from...
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Daniel Harris
June 12, 2008 Charger Chip Supports Datacenter Memory System Backup Apps
How does a chip company maximize return on its non-recurring engineering investment? It could duplicate its intellectual property (IP) in a range of ICs aimed at similar applications, but with different feature sets tailored to those apps. Or, it can put the same IP into a narrower range of more versatile ICs. Linear Technology saw that a certain class of its customers had intrinsically similar needs, but a wide variety of what were essentially I/O...
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Don Tuite
June 12, 2008 Drive Straight To The EEPROM On A Single Bus
With the cost of materials and labor rising, wouldn’t it be nice to find out the amount of pavement needed for a new road has been minimized? Microchip has taken that concept and applied it to its latest line of EEPROM devices. The company’s UNI/O family only requires a single trace be paved from the microcontroller EEPROM—and even a fresh engineering graduate could be trusted to handle the routing of a single trace (...
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Daniel Harris
May 22, 2008 Sensor Detects Light And Proximity For Unique Mobile Applications
Suppose you were designing a digital camera, and you wanted to extend its battery life by turning off its big power-hungry display screen whenever its users have their eye up to the optical viewfinder. Or suppose you were designing a notebook and you wanted a feature that would turn the keyboard backlight on only when the user’s hands were near the keyboard. Or suppose you were designing a touchscreen phone and you wanted to deactivate the on-screen buttons when...
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Don Tuite
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