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3540 results found, displaying items 441 - 460
Upgrade To High-Speed USB Handsets Without A Complete Redesign
Cellular-service providers continually strive to make more features available to their subscribers, features that will increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) in a market reaching saturation. Over the last few years, handsets have integrated digital-still-camera (DSC) functionality. Now, most of the handsets found at your local store have cameras equipped as standard. The idea behind this is that subscribers will take pictures and share them with their friends using airtime in...
High-Speed Memory Drives Visualization
Untitled Document Everywhere you look, stunning digital imagery is evoking a great deal of adrenaline-surging excitement. It also helps to sell products, whether they’re thin-film-transistor LCDs, new...
Medical-Imaging Modalities
Medical imaging includes a broad spectrum of devices and technologies, using a variety of modalities. For example, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses three kinds of electromagnetic radiation to generate the desired images. First, a main powerful magnet (normally 0.5 to 3.0 tesla) can be used to polarize hydrogen atoms in the tissues of interest (brain, muscle, etc.) because hydrogen has a large magnetic moment. Second, gradient magnets located within the main magnet...
Architecting New Dimensions Of Medical Imaging
Several technologies—like 4D (3D over time) ultrasound imaging (Fig. 1)—have taken the medical-imaging market by storm. The medical field will continue to benefit from Moore's Law as speed and resolution continue to improve. Take for example the joint effort...
The Explosion Of Multicores: Use Software To Level The Playing Field
As CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs) evolve, many of their design features are beginning to look remarkably similar. As a result, many of today's most common workloads will soon have a choice about where to execute. All the major hardware providers have told users to expect processors that feature increasingly non-uniform and complex memory hierarchies, rapidly increasing core (and thread) counts, and the integration of specialized acceleration units. These new processor...
My Little RTOS
Still rolling your own small-footprint real-time operating system (RTOS) for low-end micros? You're in a minority that's shrinking fast. Even if you're moving to 32-bit platforms, getting an RTOS is easier than ever. So why build your own? Reasons like size, optimization, and owning the RTOS make no sense these days. There's a plethora of options when looking at any variable, from licensing to targets. Open-source has had a major impact, as has royalty-free licensing. Even...
RTOS Targets FPGA Soft Cores
LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux Micro Edition (ME) targets the Xilinx MicroBlaze soft core, which can be used with the Virtex and Spartan FPGAs. BlueCat ME supports MicroBlaze's MMU-less (memory management unit) environment. It also automatically configures a board support package based on the parameters set by a designer via Xilinx's MicroBlaze EDK (embedded developers kit). BlueCat Linux supports Xilinx's PowerPC-based FPGAs. ...
Suite Combines RTOS And Development Tools
IAR's YellowSuite brings together the company's small-footprint (3 kbytes) PowerPac real-time operating system (RTOS) with its IAR Workbench integrated development environment and visualState, IAR's UML-compliant graphical state machine design tool (see "IAR's STR730 Kit Delivers Solid ARM7 Development Platform"). YellowSuite works with any ARM-based platform, like Luminary Micro's...
RTOS Takes Advantage Of Intel's Latest Virtualization Technology
Green Hills Software's secure and safety-certified Integrity Workstation real-time operating system brings its "Padded Cell" technology to Intel's latest 64-bit platforms that support Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT). Integrity Workstation incorporates the high-assurance Human Interface Device Manager, which handles the display of information at multiple security levels. The operating system is designed to meet DO-178B Level A and Evaluated Assurance Level (EAL) 7 of...
Microformats: People First, Machines Second
It's amazing what you can find bouncing around the Internet. I stumbled across microformats while looking for something else. Microformats are a way of embedding semantic information on a Web page. They're designed to augment human-readable versions so software can easily and accurately extract the same information. Also, they're based on a small set of open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Microformats are an implementation of the REST...
Go Multicore With Sieve
Programming multicore systems can be tough on the developer, who potentially needs to understand a zoo of unfamiliar architectural designs, porting and optimizing application code for each one. The problems of multicore (or, increasingly, many-core) development are particularly apparent on emerging non-uniform memory architectures (NUMAs). These are truly multicore, in the sense that individual cores have separate memory spaces. Such is the nature of the IBM Cell processor (at the heart of...
Games Flourish In A Parallel Universe
Gaming platforms like Microsoft's Xbox 360 (see figure) and Sony's PlayStation 3 (see...
Technologies Keep Your Cycles On Time And Accurate
Imagine that the earth's rotation became unpredictable and varied between one and 100 hours. What effects would this have on life as we know it? Utter chaos would ensue, and many species would cease to exist. With ICs, chaos leading to failure is guaranteed if you try to use a replacement IP block or core that isn't "cycle accurate" to improve speed, reduce power usage, and decrease area. In fact, if you try to use such a block or core, you probably will have to redesign...
Yes, You Can Easily Shift From 8-Bit To 32-Bit MCUs
Designers and programmers face several obstacles when an 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) no longer meets the performance needs of their application and a change in architecture is required. At the top of the list of problems are power consumption, pin compatibility, tools migration, and additional programming complexity. Today, system designers run into the limits of 8-bit MCUs much more frequently as applications expand and customers demand more features. "Historically, this...
Software Probes Monitor And Repair Applications
A program that never needs changing or fixing is a rare one. That's why debugging, monitoring, and patching tools are in every programmer's toolbox. While some of these tools are akin to rope and stone knives, more advanced development environments provide dynamic insight into applications. This is where Wind River's SensorPoint technology fits. SensorPoints are part of Wind River's Lab Diagnostics and Device Management programs, which address the entire development and...
Rise Of Multiprocessing/Multithreading Sharpens Focus On Interrupts
Potentially substantial performance gains from the use of multithreading and multiprocessing architectures have captured the attention of designers of consumer devices and other electronic products. Multithreading uses cycles when the processor would otherwise sit idle to process instructions from other threads. Multiprocessing, on the other hand, introduces additional independent processing elements in order to execute threads or applications concurrently. Embedded applications running...
FPGAs Boot In A Flash
According to Lattice Semiconductor, the company's LatticeXP2 family represents the industry's first line of single-die, 90-nm, nonvolatile FPGAs. Based on the previous generation, these devices offer up to 40k lookup tables, up to 885k of embedded dual-port memory, up to 12 DSP blocks, and up to four phase-locked loops (PLLs). The 1.2-V devices also boost performance by 25% and use up to 33% less static power compared to their predecessors in a package as small as 8 by 8 mm....
Small Mixed-Signal Memory Chip Packs A Large Punch
Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim brings the memory shopping mall to you. With a 2-kbit (256 by 8) EEPROM, 12 user-programmable I/O channels, a real-time clock/calendar/alarm, CPU reset monitor, 64-bit factory-programmed ROM ID, battery monitor, and watchdog timer, the DS28DG02 (see figure) offers...
Following Engineering Passions Earns Admission To The Lunatic Fringe
At a Texas Instruments media and analyst event last month, I found myself sitting in a suburban Dallas movie theater wearing 3D glasses and eating tortillas with TI's Principal Fellow Gene Frantz, the "father of the DSP." As you may recall, the first DSP was inside TI's 1970s educational toy, the Speak & Spell. Frantz says that the Speak & Spell originated as an "under the table" project, getting the official go-ahead at TI only after Frantz and his peers had worked...
Fingerprint Authentication
Sponsored by Fujitsu How does fingerprint sensor (authentication) technology work? Fingerprint authentication is one of many biometric forms of human identification. A fingerprint sensor captures a digital image of a fingerprint pattern, normally at 500dpi (dots per inch) resolution in gray-scale using 8 bits per dot. First, one fingerprint image (or more) is registered on the device used...
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