[Engineering Feature] White LEDs Promise Green Illumination Domination
The lighting is on the wall: Solid state is threatening to dismantle the dominion of incandescent and compact fluorescent light (CFL) sources. Illumination applications based on solid-state lighting are slowly replacing those previously ruled by the older technologies. Though very expensive to use, solid-state lighting has proven more efficient and in sync in a world where government initiatives are calling for a greener environment and less energy consumption. ...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Li-ion Suppliers Try To Find The Right Chemistry With Car Buyers
Since Sony introduced them in 1991, lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have transformed portable electronic products. Now, carmakers and would-be automotive battery suppliers are looking for a similar transformation to redefine automotive propulsion. Currently, well over 2 billion Li-ion battery cells are sold annually for consumer electronic applications, most notably cell phones and laptop computers. If cars become a significant market for Li-ion batteries, this...
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Randy Frank
[Leapfrog: First Look] Hard Drive Delivers SATA-III 6-Gbit/s Transfer Rate
Peripheral transfer rate is the typical bottleneck for many applications, especially as processors split into multiple cores. SATA-III’s 6-Gbit/s transfer rate provides significantly more bandwidth, assuming the hard drives and motherboards can keep up. Seagate’s 2-Tbyte ST32000641AS Barracuda XT hard drive delivers on the peripheral side. This is enough space for up to 45 hours of 1080i HD DVCPRO-encoded video (see the...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Take Simple Steps Toward Extreme Low-Power Design
Practicing engineers are always learning and perfecting their craft. With the demand for more portable, battery-powered devices and energy harvesting on the horizon, the requirements for even lower-power designs have gotten more challenging. At first, designers wrestled with saving milliamps, then microamps. Today, it is all about saving nanoamps. As a result, designers have to elevate their thinking to another level. Extreme low-power embedded design...
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Steven Bible
[Ideas For Design] Garage Door Opener Parts Form IR Intrusion Detector
While creating an infrared beam intrusion detector system, the need for a beam-focusing method became evident. Parts from a modified Genie garage door Safe-T-Beam system, purchased at the local home improvement store, proved to be perfectly suited to the application. The main reason for choosing the Genie unit is that the IR transmitter and receiver housings each contain a plastic lens inside a short plastic tube molded into the housing. The tube and lens...
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Bert Henscheid
[Ideas For Design] Achieve MPPT Control Without Power Calculation
A maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller circuit is extremely useful in solar photovoltaic systems for boosting power usage efficiency. The traditional MPPT design, though, requires the use of a multiplier to calculate power from source voltage and current measurements. However, it’s possible to build an MPPT controller without this multiplication stage by measuring power on the load rather than using source parameters. If we aren’t in the presence of a...
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Giovanni Romeo
[Pease Porridge] What's All This 2401BG Stuff, Anyhow?
Back about 1965, when I was at Philbrick, we were doing some business with Amelco Semiconductor. I had designed a good hybrid op amp (the Q85AH) and Amelco was trying to build it, but they had some test problems, and some yield problems... so I flew out to help find and solve their problems. The first morning, I put in an hour looking at their test setup. Nothing showed up right away. So we went over to their cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Several engineers ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: EDA] Parasitic Extraction Tool Targets Next-Generation Custom ICs
Achieving design closure in a system-on-a-chip (SoC) development project generally requires a great deal of patience. SoCs tend to include more and more custom circuitry, which means long simulation runs and some stabs in the dark at something resembling signoff. The combination of more transistors and the need to model more complex parasitic effects can double, if not quadruple, the runtimes of circuit-level simulation. One way to get...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tracing The Almost Perfect Program
Those of you who write perfect programs the first time around may leave the room. Now for the rest of us, what debug tools do you use? The crude but effective printf (for C and C++) is probably at the top of everyone’s list. Variations include watch variables in debuggers and control panels for graphical environments like National Instruments’ LabVIEW, but the idea is the same—see what the program is doing and then figure out what’s going...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DSF Targets Complex Debugging Chores
The open-source Eclipse project has turned into one of the primary software development platforms for Web services, embedded systems, and other applications. Embedded developers typically take advantage of the Java-based Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) using the C/ C++ Development Tool (CDT). Embedded tool vendors quickly adopted the CDT because it enabled incorporation of the GNU toolchain as well as proprietary toolchains including...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Non-Isolated Point-Of-Load Regulator Modules
Analog & Power Editor Don Tuite answers some frequently asked questions about non-isolated point-of-load regulator modules, including: What is the Intermediate Bus Architecture? Functionally, what does a POL regulator comprise? How do newer packages deal with the switching inductor? Are there disadvantages to an integrated inductor? And more! Fill out this brief form to download the FAQ: ...
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Don Tuite
[Design FAQs] Clocking Data Converters Sponsored by: ANALOG DEVICES
What is the most critical performance characteristic for clock chips used with high-performance data converters? The clock signal’s phase noise (or jitter— the time-domain representation of phase noise) is the most critical spec. But also, pay attention to the band over which the jitter has been integrated. Phase noise limits signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For converter applications, broadband RMS additive jitter is a good...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] A Multi-Level Approach Makes Understanding Motor Control Easier
Regardless of their primary field, sooner or later, most designers have to deal with motor controls. Broadly speaking, there are two methods to incorporating these components in your design. First, designers can start with one of the many choices of microcontrollers that are available and then address the challenges of making the control do what they want. Or second, designers can start at the other end and examine the interaction between motors and...
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Don Tuite
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[Lab Bench] Rambus And SPMT Offer A Memory Of Things To Come
Memory is more than double data rate (DDR), as any embedded designer will attest. Memory technology is also one of the arenas where there is an ongoing conflict between standards and innovation. Volume keeps memory costs down, but it also means standards need to exist so parts are interchangeable. Plenty of memory technologies are out now, with more on the drawing board. Two new possibilities, multithreaded DDR RAM from Rambus and serial port memory from the...
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William Wong
