Analog Hotspot

It's next to impossible to encapsulate the concept of "high-performance" analog in a few simple datasheet specs like bandwidth or conversion rate or resolution. Dimensions of performance, to borrow a term from Analog Devices, expand and contract according to the application, and they include less obvious factors like power consumption, package size, and even price. FOLLOWING THE APPS One way to sort out performance issues is to...

AKM Semiconductor www.akm.com Analog Devices www.analog.com Cirrus Logic www.cirrus.com Fairchild Semiconductor www.fairchildsemi.com Linear Technology www.linear.com Maxim Integrated Products www.maxim-ic.com National Semiconductor www.national.com STMicroelectronics ...

Jesse Remignanti Interview Continued One thought for improving the controller: it seems natural the ring should be wireless. Indeed, Remignanti says, wireless is in the works and will be offered as a plug-in module for the effects unit with an accompanying rechargeable ring. "We wanted to get to market with the product as quickly as possible, and getting the wireless interface right was going to take some time. We wanted to get the company out there and be recognized," he...

As an electric guitarist and rock aficionado, I was excited to see the recent announcement of a new company developing motion-controlled guitar effects—Source Audio, with its debut product, the Hot Hand controller. Hot Hand embeds an accelerometer into a ring you wear on your picking hand. A control box allows you to dial in various "wah" filters and frequencies, and a sensitivity control determines the effects via picking, strumming, or "flailing." (Flailing would be the...

Analog/mixed-signal IC designers are feeling the heat these days, and it's not just from their ever-shrinking design cycles. It's from their designs themselves. Now more than ever, from the start to the finish of the design flow, designers need to accurately assess the temperature variations in their designs and how those variations affect circuit performance and reliability. Into the breach comes CircuitFire, a tool that provides detailed 3D temperature analysis (...

The MB91470 is ideal for applications that require high-performance analog monitoring. This 80-MHz MCU is based on the company's FR60 32-bit RISC microcontroller core with 32-bit multiplication and addition calculator (MAC) support that has a 72-bit accumulator. The chip has 512 kbytes of flash and 32 kbytes of SRAM. The MCU handles a pair of 12-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and a 10-bit ADC. Any of the 20 input channels can drive these ADCs, which are integrated with the on-chip...

From a silicon design perspective, the industry has long held the notion that power consumption can be reduced simply by porting chips forward to the next process technology node. Yet as more consumer electronics move from 130-to 90-nm mixed-signal ICs, power reductions no longer scale with technology advances and finer geometry. To select the most power-efficient chips, systems developers must look beyond process shrink capabilities and rely upon their semiconductor provider's intellectual...

Blame it on RF power amplifiers. Large and costly, they comprise roughly 40% of a basestation's cost. And since these amplifiers must transmit wide bandwidth signals of various modulation types, linearity is critical. But linear amplifiers (usually class AB) are very inefficient, leading to considerable power consumption and high heat output. Furthermore, required linearization techniques like feedforward and predistortion are costly and power-hungry, and they add to the...

Spurred on by advances in MEMS CMOS processing, a low-cost, tiny single-chip microphone with high acoustic quality has moved from fantasy to reality. According to developer Akustica, it's the industry's first single-chip CMOS MEMS microphone. The chip replaces common electretcondensermicrophone (ECM) units, a technology that's remained fundamentally unchanged for 50 years. ECMs are mechanical devices with size, manufacturability, and uniformity limitations. "We're not...

Clock-distribution devices create multiple copies of a master clock and distribute them to a variety of integrated circuits. They accept single-ended or differential clock inputs and supply multiple single-ended or differential outputs that are divided or delayed versions of the input clock. A low-phase-noise crystal oscillator (XO) is commonly used to drive clock-distribution devices. Their sinusoidal outputs are then converted to square waves or pulse trains. Clock jitter is...

For a long time, there was little activity in the universe of nonoptical digital isolators. But the past two months have seen three developments (See ED Online 11998 and 12231 at www.electronicdesign.com). The most recent is a 2500-V digitalisolator family that probably represents the shortest-range sub-light RF-transmission path in history. In fact, Silicon Laboratories' Si844x is quite similar to an optocoupler, except 2.1-GHz transceiver pairs replace the optical...

Linear Technology has pushed sampling rates for its 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) family for high-IF applications to 250 Msamples/s while holding the chip's power consumption to a modest 740 mW at 2.5 V. Analog input bandwidth for the LTC2242-12 is 1.2 GHz. By running the part at 2.5 V, it can be driven with either a full 2-V or a 1-V p-p signal (see the figure). Yet even with 2.5 V running the analog side, the...

How did the constant ontime (COT) buck regulator IC evolve? The COT regulator is a modified version of the basic hysteretic regulator shown in Figure 1. The basic hysteretic regulator IC consists of a comparator with input hysteresis that compares the output feedback voltage with a reference volt turning off the buck switch MOSFET. When the feedback voltage exceeds the reference voltage, the comparator output ...

What is a precision analog microcontroller? A precision analog microcontroller combines high-performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with a single-chip processor and peripherals that often are designed to augment the analog support. Precision analog microcontrollers are used extensively in applications such as industrial, instrumentation, automotive, and communications infrastructure. For example, particular...

Two separate announcements from Analog Devices illustrate the importance of little things in how a company creates its products. One is a small-footprint instrumentation amplifier that makes an unusual boast about its datasheet. The other is an isolator that isolates the signal path as well as sensor power. The AD8222 is a dual version of ADI's AD8221 buffer for high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The chip was re-engineered so the die would fit into a 4- ...

Dear Bob: The letter from Dave Miller* reminded me of a recent tire episode and questions. The front tires of my Camry needed replacing. The dealer insisted that the new pair go on the rear (and rotated the rear tires to the front). He claimed that was now the recommendation of the tire manufacturers. I recall that new tires used to be put in the front. When did this change, and why? (What about the recommendation of the car manufacturer? Does its owner's manual give any...

In many cases, GUI-based design tools make closing the analog loop almost as easy as closing the loop in the digital domain. One recent example is National Semiconductor's 75-V, 2.5-A LM5005 buck regulator. In the figure, a screen capture from National's Webench tool shows recommended component values for a particular set of design parameters. A bill of materials and simulation results are a few mouse-clicks away. Texas Instruments' TPS65010 is another...

The gossip: Analog and digital will soon battle for control of power-supply regulation. The reality: When it comes to feedback-loop control, both approaches seem to happily coexist. (See "True Digital," p. 46, and "Looks Like Analog, Designs Like Digital," p. 48.) Indeed, many vendors offer a choice. Some of digital control's initial programmability advantages are now available even in controllers and regulators that use analog feedback. Still, digital...

For high-availability server and communications applications, Linear Technology's LTC2970 enables precise voltage control and I2C power-system monitoring in systems that use simple voltage-regulator chips. The LTC2970 uses a seven-channel, 14-bit delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to measure supply voltages, load currents, or internal die temperature. The ADC output is available via I2C for system monitoring. A "dash-1" version of the...