311 results found for Leapfrog: First Look, displaying items 1 - 20
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
March 26, 2009 Fujitsu Takes Digital Approach To Capacitive Touch Sensing
Capacitive touch systems typically operate using analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to indirectly measure changes via voltage. Fujitsu’s FMA1127 touch sensor controller uses a more digital approach to detecting fingers, measuring the difference of the change of state of the RC portion of a pair of monostable, multivibrator flip-flops (see the figure). The chip uses a common counter/timer mechanism...
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William Wong
March 12, 2009 32-Bit Architecture Changes The Power Game For Micros
Arm and its partners are looking to give 8- and 16-bit microcontroller vendors fits with its Cortex M0 architecture. This optimized implementation of the Cortex M1 is designed to run on FPGAs. Its small size and lower power will allow it to be coupled with mixed-signal peripherals. The Cortex M0 is one-third the size of the popular ARM7TDMI- S. The base Cortex M0 configuration requires only 12k gates, which is on the same order as many 8- and 16-bit ...
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William Wong
March 12, 2009 Software Takes Guesswork Out Of PCB Power Integrity
It’s never been more important than in the current economic climate to get products to market with development costs held as low as possible. One of the ways that systems manufacturers can achieve that goal is through power analysis. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when all ICs ran on 5 V. But since then, we’ve seen voltage requirements spiral down to as low as 0.9 V. Complicating these matters even further, many ICs have multiple voltage ...
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David Maliniak
February 26, 2009 Universal Broadcast TV Is Heading For A Notebook Near You
People who watch broadcast TV on notebook computers typically do so via a USB stick or PC Card connected to an external antenna. Reception usually consists of a TV standard or two, such as ATSC. If this sounds cumbersome and limiting, it is. But this will change if a company called CrestaTech succeeds in convincing notebook manufacturers to include its mobile TV solution right on the motherboard. CrestaTech has created a combination of silicon...
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Joseph Desposito
February 12, 2009 3M Film For Viewing 3D Films
Auto-stereoscopic displays forego the need for special viewing glasses to present true 3D. Now, 3M and Toshiba Matsushita Display have teamed up to deliver handheld, 3D, auto-stereoscopic LCDs for cell phones, mobile Internet devices, and other consumer products. 3M provides the film that is used in the construction of these backlit LCDs. The display can deliver 2D, 3D, or a mix of 2D and 3D images. The display’s construction doesn’t require any...
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William Wong
January 29, 2009 Chip Drives Liquid Lenses To Stretch Battery Life In Cell-Phone Cams
Maxim Integrated Products has teamed up with Varioptic to pioneer a complete package for digital still and video camera and cell-phone makers that want to replace powerhungry, noisy hard lenses with liquid lenses. The problem with hard lenses? Focusing them involves physically moving the lens elements with motors— most recently voice-coil affairs that drain batteries and tend to leave distracting noises on video soundtracks. What’s a liquid...
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Don Tuite
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
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