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ISSUE DATE: AUGUST 18, 2003 OPTIONS
Success story: Satellite radio, Integrated development environments, Analog yield-optimization tool, Designing with resistor-programmable oscillators

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August 18, 2003 - In This Issue


New Products: More Communications
Cost Not An Issue With New JTAG/Boundary-Scan Device Testability is always a challenge in telecom/datacom systems, such as basestations, switchers, multiplexers, and other...  — Louis E. Frenzel


New Products: More Digital ICs /DSP
Motion-Compensation Chips Boost Flat-Panel Display Quality A next-generation motion-compensation/estimation chip for augmenting flat-panel displays (both LCD and plasma) improves...  — Dave Bursky


TechView: Analog & Power -- Microcontroller Expands DC-DC Converter Functionality
Besides providing multiple levels of overtemperature protection, the Datel MAPC-104 dc-dc converter’s on-board microcontroller implements protection features such as input undervoltage...  — David G. Morrison


New Products: More Components
Power Inductors Provide High-Current Capability The DXM series of lead-free low-voltage high-current power inductors can handle up to 30 A and boast inductance values ranging from...  — Roger Allan


New Products: More Analog & Power
Digitally Controlled Potentiometer Occupies Just 1 mm2 The X93154 32-tap nonvolatile digitally controlled potentiometer comes in an industry-standard MSOP and a...  — David G. Morrison


Technology Report: Plug-Ins For Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is one of the most successful IDEs around. It only runs on Microsoft Windows. The primary target for the latest version, Visual Studio.Net 2003, involves the many...  — William Wong


Technology Report -- Eclipse: IDE Or Application Platform?
Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE), but its modular construction can easily turn it into something that’s more or something less. Its microkernel architecture means that...  — William Wong


Success Story: Satellite Radio -- Terrestrial Digital Radio Is Also On The Way
While Sirius and XM battle each other for subscribers, they’re about to face another digital radio competitor, HD Radio. Formerly known as In Band On Channel (IBOC), this terrestrial digital...  — Louis E. Frenzel

[Success Story]
Satellite Radio Gets Serious
All electronic design engineers face design challenges, but few have to face the enormous undertaking that confronted the engineers who decided to build a next-generation satellite system to...  — Louis E. Frenzel

[Technology Report]
Integrated Development Environments: The Ties That Bind
Historically, development tools have been tied to a specific operating system. Yet, some vendors have seen success in building products that target multiplatforms. A new phenomenon, a modular...  — William Wong

[Leapfrog: First Look]
Pre-Layout Tool Boosts Yield For Analog Circuits
Greater amounts of RF and analog/mixed-signal circuitry are wending their way into SoC designs, often producing headaches for designers on a number of levels. First off, analog is just plain hard...  — David Maliniak

[Design View / Design Solution]
Rev Up Designs With Resistor-Programmable Oscillators
One, zero, one, zero, one, zero... repeat forever. Building a clock should be one of the simplest engineering design challenges. And it is, unless you need it to be small, stable, and tunable. Traditional approaches involve a 555-type timer...  — Erik Soule

[Ideas For Design]
C Program Magnifies Spectrum When An FFT Can't Hack It
Many science and engineering applications require an accurate frequency spectrum or Fourier transform of a signal. The Fourier transform of a sequence of samples of a signal is shown in Equation...  — Stefan Hollos , et al.

[Ideas For Design]
Tiny 1-MHz Buck-Boost Converter Minimizes Components
It goes without saying that rechargeable battery voltages change with charge status. This presents a problem for circuits that operate somewhere in the mid-battery voltage range. Such applications...  — Raymond Zheng

[Editorial]
Satellite Radio Arrives: Can We Turn Down The Volume?
My name is Mark David, and I'm a music-holic. This confession stems from the manic excitement I felt just reading about digital satellite radio in this issue's cover story. Talk about an...  — Mark David

[POV: Point Of View]
ATCA Poised To Take Over The Telecom Central Office
Traditionally, the telecom central-office computing market has been served by numerous providers with proprietary solutions. This has a few implications: System development is expensive, the...  — Melissa Heckman

[Pease Porridge]
Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: Just got around to seeing your June 9 column. The apparent shift in perceived pitch you asked about is due to the lack of compensation in the inner ear for changes in environment....  — Bob Pease

[Beyond Technology]
Job Seekers Finding It's Tougher To Keep Private Data Private
Unemployed EEs continue to use job Web sites to post their resumes, despite mounting concerns of growing identity theft resulting from the posting of personal information on these sites. Targeted...  — Ron Schneiderman

[TechView: The Industry]
Fast Serial Link Offers Low-Cost Scalability
As processors, supporting logic, and memory chips get faster, wide parallel buses consume too much power and area, especially in low-cost systems. To help cut chip pin counts and power, many...  — Dave Bursky

[TechView: The Industry]
Chip Maker Moves To Leadfree Packaging
With the European ban on lead in electronics looming, Fairchild Semiconductor has begun moving all of its products to packages with leadfree (Pb-free) finishes. This changeover is expected to be...  — David G. Morrison

[TechView: Analog & Power]
DC-DC Converter Powers Router Under Severe Conditions
Power MOSFETs built in Vishay Siliconix's TrenchFET process claim a 60% lower figure of merit (FOM) than existing devices. The WFET power MOSFETs feature R(DS)ON × Qgd...  — David G. Morrison

[TechView: Analog & Power]
Precise Voltage References Slash Current Consumption
By exploiting floating-gate-analog (FGA) technology, two 5.0-V voltage references can achieve high levels of accuracy despite their very low current consumption. Members of Xicor's X60008 family,...  — David G. Morrison

[TechView: Analog & Power]
Enhanced Trench Structure Yields Better MOSFETs
Datel teamed up with Cisco to develop a dc-dc converter to power the Cisco 3200 Mobile Access Router, which enables transmission of data, voice, and video over wireless networks. Compliant with...  — David G. Morrison

[TechView: Communications]
Sonet/SDH Framer Turns Into Line-Card-On-A-Chip
The Tethys family of Sonet/SDH Multi-Rate Framer ICs collapses the traditional line card into one chip, so it's easier and cheaper than ever to implement next-generation equipment like add/drop...  — Louis E. Frenzel

[TechView: Communications]
New Player In IEEE 802.16a Invigorates Fixed Wireless
Intel's recent announcement stating its intent to offer chips to support the IEEE 802.16a standard significantly advances the efforts of the fixed wireless access (FWA) industry. FWA has been...  — Louis E. Frenzel

[TechView: Embedded]
SCO Versus IBM: Tip Of An Old Iceberg?
It's really a case of contract law. Yet the SCO versus IBM case has raised the ire of many, along with the level of confusion, in an already noisy software market. Just in case you've...  — William Wong

[TechView: Embedded]
News Clips
Windows Devices Drivers Made Easy Jungo's WinDriver 6.02 adds MIPS support for Windows CE.Net and Server 2003. Development versions for PCI and USB along with...  — William Wong

[TechView: Components & Test]
6-GHz DSOs Up Real-Time Bandwidths To 20 Gsamples/s
The four-channel, 6-GHz 8620A digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) and the SDA 6020 four-channel, 6-GHz serial data analyzer DSO, both hailing from LeCroy, got a boost in real-time sampling rate to...  — Roger Allan

[TechView: Components & Test]
Five-Slot Backplane Meets PICMG Specifications
Designed for system management, a five-slot AdvancedTCA backplane developed by Bustronic complies with PICMG 3.0 specifications. Featuring dual star, mesh, or replicated mesh configurations, it...  — Roger Allan

[TechView: Components & Test]
Sampling Method Mainstreams Precision Logic Analysis
The innovative MagniVu signal-acquisition and sampling technique is featured in Tektronix's TLA5000 series logic analyzers: models TLA5201, TLA5202, TLA5203, and TLA5204, with 34 to 136 channels....  — Roger Allan

[TechView: Digital]
Chip Set Gives TV Sets JPEG-Image Display Ability
Thanks to a pair of controller chips, television manufacturers can cost-effectively integrate memory-card-based features like digital photo display into TV sets. The PUC 3030A 32-bit controller...  — Dave Bursky

[TechView: Digital]
Hot Product: The ZiVA-6 Media Processor Family
Targeting the next generation of DVD players, the ZiVA-6 family of media processors from LSI Logic Corp. can play back superaudio CDs (SACDs). These devices integrate a PCMCIA card interface for...  — Dave Bursky

[TechView: Digital]
Clock Generator Keeps The Pace For XDR Interface
To support the recently released Yellowstone high-speed memory interface, now renamed the extreme data rate (XDR) interface, designers at Rambus Inc. and Integrated Circuit Systems Inc. jointly...  — Dave Bursky

[TechView: EDA]
Formal Verification Expands To Full Systems-On-A-Chip
A crucial step in design flow is to ensure that the gate-level design representation of an ASIC or system-on-a-chip (SoC) matches the RTL description through formal equivalence checking....  — David Maliniak

[TechView: EDA]
Collaborative Tool Squashes PC-Board Design Cycle
All areas of design have seen an incredible rise in complexity, and pc-board design is no exception. Boards can often be too large or complex for a single person, or even a single team of...  — David Maliniak

[TechView: EDA]
Hot Product: ZeBu Hardware-Verification System
Earlier this year, EVE released its ZeBu (or Zero Bugs) hardware-verification system, chiefly designed for intellectual-property (IP) model providers and hardware designers. Its recent companion,...  — David Maliniak

[TechScope]
Shocking Jacket Shocks Attackers
Women who feel the need for physical protection can put on the No-Contact Jacket. Attackers who grab women wearing this defensive apparel will get hit...  — Richard Gawel

[TechScope]
Portable Device Joins Nuclear-Detection Arsenal
With homeland security and weapons of mass destruction in the headlines, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Ortec Products have teamed up to provide some protection and peace of mind....  — Richard Gawel

[TechScope]
Wireless Sensors Chat Together
Wireless technology is appearing everywhere, including sensor networks. The MiniTalker technology from MachineTalker Inc. can be used to establish a...  — Richard Gawel

[New Products]

• ICs Make Powering Digital Cameras A Snap  — David G. Morrison

• Difference Amplifier Steers Toward 42-V Automotive Systems  — David G. Morrison

• 85-W Switchers Offer Power Factor Correction  — David G. Morrison

• Low-Cost Wireless Modules Cut Power Requirements  — William Wong

• Quad Processor SBC Hits 16 GFLOPS  — William Wong

• USB Module Delivers Analog And Digital I/O Services  — William Wong

• PC/104 Board Takes On Range Of Motor Control Chores  — William Wong

• 6U CompactPCI Blades Hold Two Disk Drives  — William Wong

• 64-dB SNR, 78-dB SFDR Sets Board Family Apart From Others  — William Wong

• CompactPCI SBC Cuts Cost By Dropping PICMG 2.1  — William Wong

• Backplanes Bridge CompactPCI  — William Wong

• Transparent Five Nines Supports Failover  — William Wong

• Communications Can Get ARMed With A Soft Modem  — William Wong

• New Products: More Embedded  — William Wong

• Solid-State Relay For Military Uses Has Overload Protection  — Roger Allan

• SMT Chokes For Multilayer Circuits Lower DCR To 0.20 Ohm Up To 450 mA  — Roger Allan

• DC Sine/Cos.-To-Synchro Converters Drive Torque Receivers At Low Cost  — Roger Allan

• Fully Integrated VCXO IC Should Hit RF Devices In Waves  — Roger Allan

• Low-Power Logic Device Family Gains Four New Logic Functions  — Dave Bursky

• Multichip Memory Combines NAND Flash And DDR DRAM  — Dave Bursky

• Motherboard SouthBridge Chip Packs Serial ATA And RAID Support  — Dave Bursky

• Double-Ridged Guide Horn Antenna Useful To 18 GHz  — Louis E. Frenzel

• Reference Alleviates PVR-Tuner Design Difficulties  — Louis E. Frenzel

• PCI Serial/Parallel Add-In Cards Get One-Chip Solution  — Louis E. Frenzel

• Hybrid Coupler, Directional Coupler Set Sights On 450-MHz Applications  — Louis E. Frenzel





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