Analog Hotspot

Back when I was an executive of two major technology corporations, I was always fascinated by the strategic planning process. That's where we attempted to predict which future technologies would make an impact on us and what our new products would be two, five, and 10 years out. In the two-year timeframe, our predictions were pretty good—most big trends are relatively easy to spot. The tough part was reacting fast enough to get a piece of the action before the...

In 1965, Gordon E. Moore published an article later coined "Moore's Law." Among other predictions, he hinted that digital devices could be used for automatic control in future automobiles. Originally categorized as science fiction, the prediction has come to pass. The automotive industry has made significant strides toward enabling digital technologies in automotive applications, and it's aiming for the ultimate goal of the all-digital car. Today, we have...

As more biomedical equipment devices exploit ultra-low-power mixed-signal design innovations, the variety of medical semiconductor applications continues to expand. The ability to combine analog and digital signals in very close proximity alongside wireless communications has led to the development of new implantable medical devices. Implantable devices have a number of fundamental design requirements. They must feature a long and relatively maintenance-free life due to the cost...

Already playing a leading role, MEMS, nanotechnology, and robotics are rapidly marching toward more effective medical diagnostics, drug delivery, organ replacements, patient monitoring, and prosthetics. There's no question that science is destined to improve and extend the human life experience. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidics, nanotechnology, lab-on-a-chip devices, DSPs, implantable genetic chips, and robotics are all combining to ensure our health. The...

Hi Bob: Does anyone breadboard circuits anymore? In the good old days, just a few years ago, you used to draw circuit diagrams in your articles that looked like something a college professor would put up on a white board. We design engineers would all run out to the lab and try it out in a couple of hours. I always seemed to get more out of actually trying out my more complex circuits than from simulating them. However, today a lot of the newer, exciting ICs come...

There are audio codec ICs that comprise an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) around some processing hardware, but they are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. These days, most engineers think of audio codecs in terms of compression and decompression algorithms that run on DSP platforms. In the range of audio frequencies, "voice" codecs suit digital telephony, while "audio" codecs (as the term is generally understood) fit entertainment audio....

The more sophisticated the effect, the more likely it is to be limited to big-ticket systems, at least for some months after product introduction. OEMs need to differentiate among their product lines and preserve margins at the high end. In the home-theater and the AV-receiver markets, products that sell for less than $400 to $500 represent 80% of the volume. So to bring ASPs up and preserve margins, OEMs try to leverage their common platforms across the product range by introducing...

Audio codecs don't evolve in a vacuum. Take the changing interface for digital audio data, for instance. To date, the most popular standard for digital audio has been the Sony/Philips Digital Interface (S/PDIF), or IEC 60958-3. But Dolby Digital Plus will need the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), a new standard that streams audio and video together. Meanwhile, the number of audio channels for the surroundsound experience continues to inflate. The lowest-level...

The following is a link to a white paper from Dolby Digital, Introduction to Dolby Digital Plus, an Enhancement to the Dolby Digital Coding System. ...

What can designers do with a small-signal FET device that doesn't require input-signal biasing? In other words, what can they do with a device in which the gate-source threshold voltage is zero, rather than around 0.7 V? (Zero is the typical value at IDS = 1 mA, VDS = 0.1 V. The guaranteed maximum and minimum threshold values are ±10 mV in the "A" version of the devices and ±20 mV in the standard version.) The ALD110800 and ALD110900 from Advanced Linear...

The eight-channel DS3988 and four-channel DS3984 cold-cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) controllers use a new push-pull architecture that reduces total bill-of-materials (BOM) cost by 20%. Developed by Maxim, this nonresonant architecture halves the number of components required by alternative designs. Each channel on these controllers can drive a single CCFL using only seven low-cost external components. In turn, each channel can be employed to drive multiple lamps. The...

There was a time when you developed your product from scratch. You designed the packaging and circuits, developed the board using off-the-shelf components, and programmed it in-house—and you were still competitive. Today, whether you're building a board for a cordless phone or an embedded controller for a packaging machine, design complexities and short product lifecycles are probably taxing your engineering department beyond its capabilities. If you've...

The first three products based on Analog Devices' 36-V iPolar trench-isolation process technology are now available. The iPolar process replaces the diffusion layers of traditional bipolar processes with trench isolation, improving performance and shrinking die size. The rail-to-rail AD8675 precision amplifier has a voltage noise density less than 3nV/(check)Hz. It uses 30% less power, has 75% lower input bias current, and exhibits 65% less drift over temperature. And,...

Dear Bob: I have an odd problem. Early British cars used an electromechanical vibrating regulator to supply -10 V to the gas gauge from the 12- to 14-V battery ("positive ground"). The current demand is low, probably 1 A would do. I have been, so far, unsuccessfully searching for a -10-V regulator in a TO220 package. A positive regulator would be trivial to find. I did find an MSK part, but they wanted $100. New mechanical devices are so poor that many are DOA and...

What can you do with a chip that mixes three audio inputs, filters that audio into three frequency bands, and uses each frequency band to pulse-width modulate an output capable of driving up to 42 mA? Obviously, you can run the jukebox lighting effects on cellular telephones and personal audio players. That's what National Semiconductor had in mind with its LM4970 audio-synchronized LED driver. This IC can pulse-modulate three outputs in response to the frequency content of...

Fewer applications are more critical and demanding than a cell-phone basestation receiver that gets bombarded with lots of signals, from the weak to the overwhelming. Coming to the rescue is Linear Technology's LT5527 RF mixer, an active downconverting mixer designed for cellular basestations. Built for current designs as well as future 3G designs using WCDMA, the LT5527 operates from 400 MHz to 3.7 GHz. This covers the 850-MHz cellular band, the 1.9-GHz and 2.1-GHz W-CDMA...

Continuous-wave (CW) Doppler ultrasound diagnostic systems involve many pairs of transducers. One member of each pair transmits a continuous sinewave. The other receives echoes. A CW ultrasound diagnostic device works by performing spectral analysis on the signals from the receive transducers. In addition to medical imaging, applications that require similar measurements of phase shifts include weather radar, adaptive antenna arrays, and automotive collision avoidance...

The multicarrier, multimode receivers in next-generation cellular infrastructure equipment will need analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with higher spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is to help deal with the basestation near-far problem (capture of weak signals in the presence of stronger signals in the same frequency band). Fortunately, equipment designers can look to Analog Devices' 14-bit AD9455 ADC. With input frequencies of up to 300 MHz, its...

Hi Bob: I see more and more uses of LEDs in place of incandescent lamps every day. However, many of our engineering brethren are not looking at the big picture with these. It would appear that they are not considering the devastating interference that some of these replacement LED (power-supply) units are creating on the AM radio broadcast bands. For example: traffic signals. While I was waiting under a red traffic signal, I had a barrage of repetitive static wiping out...

"Smaller, faster, cheaper" has been the traditional IC market refrain. But recently, the tune has changed. Today's chips are adequately small and fast for many electronic systems, even though they may never be cheap enough for purchasing managers or consumers. Yet as a direct and indirect factor impacting system cost, performance, and usability, power consumption has emerged as one of the major challenges surrounding the design and use of core...