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1124 results found, displaying items 41 - 60
Going Green, Or Just Using Old-Fashioned Design Practices?
Going green is all about cost, value, and tradeoffs. The big difference in designs from a decade ago is that more of the real costs are starting to surface. This ranges from the cost of recycling devices to how much power a system consumes. Power consumption has become the focus for hardware designers for a range of reasons, from portability where batteries are required to cooling limitations. Designing a green system is really a matter of checking out...
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 ...
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 ...
Optimized Power Supplies Beget Superior Data-Center Efficiency
LLarge data centers devour huge amounts of electrical power (see “Energy-Hungry IT Centers See Hope In Digital Power”). At the heart of efforts to reduce wasted energy, power-supply makers offer a host of ways to minimize their contributions to the problem. In broad terms, the challenge is to deliver power to hundreds of servers’ processors at very low voltage levels...
Battery Basics
A battery consists of one or more voltaic cells. Each voltaic cell consists of two half cells. Negatively charged anions migrate to the anode (negative electrode) in one half-cell, while positively charged cations migrate to the cathode (positive electrode) in the other. The electrodes are separated by an electrolyte that is ionized to create the anions and cations and permits movement of those ions. Sometimes, the half-cells have different...
Keep Current With New Battery Technologies
A stunning array of battery types provides portable power for a sea of applications —from traction motors in interurban buses to flea-power transmitters in wireless mesh networks that harvest microscopic amounts of energy from small photovoltaic cells or piezo beams (Fig. 1). Despite a history that traces back at least to 1800, engineers continue to be presented with new chemistries and novel ways of exploiting the...
Power Companies Show Progress On Less Travelled Paths
Power is key to any design, so it’s not surprising that I often meet with companies involved in the power industry. What does surprise me is that many of these companies are working with power in novel ways. And from what I can tell, they are making good progress, too. You can find videos of some of my most recent meetings, which I describe below, including interviews and demonstrations, at ...
Rechargeable-Battery Power Management Demands Multiple ICs
Virtually all battery-based powermanagement designs depend on the associated battery, so design starts by picking the specific battery type. The battery may be the non-rechargeable primary type or the rechargeable secondary type. (For more, see “Batteries 101: From Nickel To Lithium And Beyond” at www.electronicdesign.com, ...
Digital PWM Controllers Augment System Reliability
Multiple methods are available to monitor the health of a power supply, ultimately leading to improved reliability of the power subsystem and, subsequently, the total system. These improvements can come from adjusting system operating parameters based on these real-time diagnostics or by alerting the host system that the power subsystem performance is degraded, allowing the system to adjust or schedule maintenance. Because discrete values of the...
Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB, We know that the noise power generated in a resistor is proportional to temperature. If we have a resistor with a zero thermal coefficient so that the resistance is constant with the temperature, does the temperature of the resistor increase due to the thermal noise? (No, not even sub-infinitesimally! / rap) In other words, does the resistor noise create noise voltage or current in the resistor, which in turn heats the resistor to a ...
Worldwide Projects Push Forward In Networking, Security, And VoIP
Europe is experiencing a flurry of technology developments as companies address the growing communications demands of the 21st century—networking technology, fiber-optic security, and power consumption in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications. NETWORK TECHNOLOGY Belgium-based nanoelectronics research center IMEC and Panasonic Corp. have agreed to work together on advanced technologies in the semiconductor,...
Though Attendance Was Down, 2009 International CES Still Shines
Early reports from the 2009 International CES this month in Las Vegas placed the number of attendees at more than 110,000, down from last year’s 141,150 total. But I didn’t notice that much of a difference. I was solidly booked with appointments for three full days, and announcements at the show were stellar. Plus, it was tough to get from one place to another with crowds of people everywhere. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which runs CES,...
Key Conformance Marks In Electronic Design
All products have to meet various regulatory compliance requirements for safety, emissions, and other criteria before they can be sold globally. All industrial nations require specific marks on products before they can be sold there. Testing and certifying compliance are the keys to getting those marks. For electronic products, safety and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are key certification issues. In the U.S., the...
A Brief Safety Lexicon: Selected Definitions From EN 60950
• Basic insulation: Insulation to provide basic protection against electric shock. • Bounding surface: The outer surface of the electrical enclosure. • Class I: Equipment where protection against electric shock is achieved by using basic insulation, also providing a means of connecting to the protective earthing conductor in the building wiring if the basic insulation fails. • Class II: Equipment in which protection against electric shock does not rely solely on basic...
Conforming With Worldwide Safety And EMC/EMI Standards
Many designers think meeting the worldwide safety standards for power supplies in mains-powered products involves following a simple checklist to ensure their designs don’t run into distribution problems in some countries due to a lack of dotted i’s or crossed t’s. But that’s a naive perspective. The truth is that most designers need some serious hand-holding during their first several designs. This task can’t be addressed with a checklist and a positive...
Ever-Shrinking ICs Turn To Exotic Packaging Methods
The dizzying pace of semiconductor IC miniaturization and performance advances keeps changing the face of IC packaging. Demands for lower-cost packaging that must also deal with greater amounts of heat emanating from these tinier packages have designers scrambling. Many packaging efforts are being devoted to materials innovations that optimize the existing manufacturing infrastructure. Variations of the popular package-on-package (PoP) and package-in-package (PiP) approaches...
Power Sources Generate Green By Going Greener
From ever-shrinking dc-dc converters to brute-force industrial and benchtop power supplies, one of the top priorities for power designers has always been efficiency—eliminating the power losses when converting power from one form or level to another. For instance, not so long ago, we saw the shift from linear regulators and 50/60-Hz power transformers to high-frequency switching power supplies. Today, the buzzword for efficiency is “green.” Emerging power sources flying under...
Exciting New Directions In Power Brighten Economic Gloom
It never ceases to amaze how much mindbogglingly fascinating technology is associated with the supposedly staid discipline of power technology. Take gamma correction in TV receivers. The gist of it is simple. Once you replace your compact fluorescent LCD screen backlighting with an array of LEDs, you can dynamically control the brightness across the screen to match the relative brightness of blocks of the video signal in real time. The effect improves the...
Ultra-Portables Bank On Power-Frugal Components
Anew breed of components is emerging, significantly reducing power and in turn paving the way for ultra-portable—and ultra-low-power—systems. Needless to say, manufacturers will now look at other products in this vein. Power consumption is the most important design challenge for ultra-portable devices that operate from a limited energy source, such as a lithium-ion battery, according to Ken Marasco, system applications manager at Analog Devices. This...
Fluorescent Ballast ICs Demonstrate Clever Dimming Design
International Rectifier has two new control ICs for dimming compact and tube-type fluorescents. Most designers won’t ever see them, though, because they go into the bases of compact bulbs or into lighting fixtures. Still, they’re interesting to study as examples of energy-efficient design and for the elegant way they provide dimming, including dimming in legacy systems that use triac controls. The IRS2530D DIM8 squeezes a complete dimming...
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