March 6, 2000 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: MARCH 6, 2000

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Scalable A/V processor, Internet-based design tools, Serial EEPROMs, Arbitrary generators, ISSCC

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Browse Archived Articles By: Issue | Author | Department | Topic

March 6, 2000 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
Internet-Enabled Tools Open Doors To New Design Strategies
When did you last log onto the Internet to accomplish a design-related task? Perhaps you browsed company web sites for data sheets, or researched new design-automation tools. Maybe you even downloaded a software patch or models for some new... — Cheryl Ajluni

[Technology Report]
Serial EEPROMs Answer Designers' Needs For More Point Storage
Traditional NOR- and NAND-type flash memories dominate most designer's minds when it comes to adding megabytes of nonvolatile storage to a system. But many cost-sensitive applications exist that don't need the high capacity or short access times... — Dave Bursky

[Product Innovation]
Audio/Video Processor Fits Applications From Palmtops To Home Theaters
More system resources currently concentrate on the man-machine interface that's implemented by graphics, audio, and video signal processing. At the same time, these signal processors demand additional computing performance. A number of media... — Dave Bursky

[Design Application]
Take The Fear Out Of Creating Real-World Signals With Arbitrary Generators
Arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) are flexible, powerful tools for creating any kind of waveform imaginable. Their broad range of capabilities, however, can make these instruments intimidating to learn and time consuming to use. Today's advanced... — David Fink

[Design Application]
Inverted-Mesa Crystals Carry Oscillators Into The Internet Age
Communications applications, fueled by the Internet and e-commerce expansion, are emerging as the driving force in oscillator development. The need for ever-wider data "pipelines" brings along the demand for ever-higher reference frequencies.... — Martin Finkelstein

[Ideas For Design]
Multiplexer Restores Analog Inputs To Flash Microcontroller
The Microchip PIC16F877 microcontroller provides data acquisition, digital I/O, and parallel port communication in an easy-to-use package. However, by design, if the parallel slave port is used, the analog input channels 5 through 7 aren't... — Roger Fischer

[Ideas For Design]
Comparator Features Symmetrical Thresholds
The comparator often is the simplest bridge between analog and digital worlds, but crossing this bridge isn't as simple as might be thought. Keep in mind, we are leaving the analog world with an indefinite number of states and entering into a vastly... — Samuel Kerem

[Ideas For Design]
87C751 MCU Programmer Has Serial-Bus Interface
The Philips 87C751 is an 8-bit 8051-compatible microcontroller with a small footprint (the 24-pin "skinny DIP" package is discussed here) and special enhanced capabilities. It has 2 kbytes of EPROM program memory and 64 bytes of RAM. The most useful... — G.Y. Xu

[Ideas For Design]
Eliminate RTD Self-Heating Errors
Synchronous detection, long used in telecommunications because of performance potential, can now be effectively applied to sensor interface circuitry due to advances in low-cost ICs. This circuit (see... — Moshe Gerstenhaber , et al.

[Editorial]
A Special Supplement Devoted To ISSCC
As a long-time attendee of the highly respected IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, I've developed a great admiration for the researchers who present their work every February. After all, they have to submit that work to stringent... — Dave Bursky

[Pease Porridge]
What's All This Address Stuff, Anyhow?
For over 40 years, I've kept a pretty good "Christmas Card List." It's a list of addresses and phone numbers of my friends and our family's friends. For a long time, we kept them on 3- by 5-in. cards. That was pretty good. But the cards got all... — Bob Pease

[Viewpoint]
Pervasive Computing/Smart Spaces Pose A Host Of Challenges
Over the years, the computing arena has seen three major trends: the decreasing size of computers, the increasing number of computers per person, and the enormous growth of the Internet. Those trends also will lead to the next major phase. People... — Martin Herman

[Editor's Notebook]
From Garages To The Universe, Your Possibilities Are Endless!
I recently met Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist best known for his discovery that black holes emit radiation. Many consider him to be the Einstein of our day. The opportunity came at an event co-sponsored by Mentor Graphics,... — Cheryl Ajluni

[Letters]
Letters
Sallen-Key Filters Find More Limits Another limitation not mentioned in the article [on Sallen-Key filters] is that the filter possesses a frequency response for amplifier-generated noise which is different from the... — Various

[The Design Factory]
Projects Can Slip By More Than One Day At A Time
Mr. Big looked angrily at the latest status report from his engineering team. The MegaBurp project just reported that it was four weeks behind schedule. "How could this be?" he thought. He pulled out the status report from the previous week, and... — Don Reinertsen

[40 Years Ago]
LF Multivibrator Uses UJTs
A source of repeating contact closures in the range of 1/10 pulse per second to 10 pulses per second was required for life testing of arc suppressors for relays. It was desirable to vary the on-to-off ratio, and to manually actuate a single shot. An... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
Wide Application of Esaki Diode Near
Engineers from all over the world heard specialists at the 1960 Solid-State Circuits Conference report that wide application of the Esaki (tunnel) diode is imminent. Only a little more design work and quantity production are needed, the experts... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
Company Wire
Protel International Limited has acquired ACCEL Technologies. This move is expected to help establish Protel's current position as an independent vendor of Windows-based, desktop EDA systems in both the middle range and high end of the... — Staff

[Forefront]
Ballistic Nanotransistor Should Yield Smaller And Faster Silicon Chips
Researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J., have developed a method to significantly improve the flow of current in nanoscale transistors. This characteristic may help the semiconductor industry continue making smaller and... — Joseph Desposito

[Forefront]
Joint Research Promises A New Class Of Tuned-Band IR Transmitters
Ion Optics of Waltham, Mass., and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have some good news for tuned-band IR emitter research. Their joint efforts have demonstrated that lithographically defined surface structures on silicon can... — Richard Gawel

[Forefront]
Mixed-Signal 16-Bit μcontroller Supports 40-V I/Os for Auto Use
While digital circuits are obvious beneficiaries of deep-submicron technologies, analog and mixed-signal circuits also have benefited tremendously from these advances. Analog circuit techniques have been developed to tap the advantages of scaled... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Vendor Acts To Cut Time To Market
In a move intended to shorten time-to-market for integrated discrete devices, Philips Semiconductors, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has transferred its integrated passive component (IPC) product line from its Components division to its Semiconductors... — David G. Morrison

[Forefront]
Cellular Industry Challenges FCC Privacy Ruling On Surveillance
Backed by a diverse range of group interests, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) filed briefs in a court case challenging an FCC order that requires telecom providers to adapt their systems to support extensive police... — Patrick Mannion

[Forefront]
Large-Area Dual-Junction Solar Cells Achieve Record 25.3% Efficiency
Employing its metal-oxide chemical-vapor-deposition (MOCVD) process, EMCORE Corp., Somerset, N.J., has manufactured and shipped what it says is the world's highest-efficiency dual-junction solar cell for satellite applications. Based on customary... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
Lead-Free Solder Leads To "Greener" IC Packaging
In an ongoing effort to replace toxic metals used in semiconductor manufacturing, STMicroelectronics, Lexington, Mass., has developed ball-grid-array (BGA) and microBGA packages that are lead-free. These packages incorporate solder balls formed from... — David G. Morrison

[Forefront]
Advanced Analog Solution Addresses High-Speed Signal Integrity In Processors
As processors approach gigahertz clock rates and 100-A current drain, interfacing them to the analog world is becoming a monumental task. Primarion, a startup founded by former Intel executives and headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., has taken that... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
cdmaOne Beats GSM In Wireless Market Growth
Wireless investors should take notice. According to the recent Wireless2000 survey by Micrologic Research, the cdmaOne market is growing more rapidly than the GSM market. About 125.6 million GSM cellular telephones were shipped in 1999. That's a 42%... — Richard Gawel

[Forefront]
Crosspoint Switch IC Boosts I/O Capacity For Telecom Designs
Designers who want to increase I/O capacity and add other features to telecommunications systems can do it with a new IC, the MSX532. This device features 532 configurable ports, individually configurable I/O buffers, and double-buffered... — Joseph Desposito

[Forefront]
Network Processor Core Employs Programmable State Machine
The STAR (Scalable Tile Architecture) packet and protocol processor core is a compact programmable networking processor. Based on a programmable state machine (PSM), the core contains a simple instruction set for packet and protocol processing.... — Joseph Desposito

[Forefront]
New DSP Cores Boost As Well As Save Power
Determined to maintain its lead in the DSP world, Texas Instruments continues to expand its product portfolio with a new generation of digital signal processors. These devices promise to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in processing power... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Continuously Programmable Spread-Spectrum Clock Minimizes EMI Problems
As computer and digital systems migrate toward higher frequencies, reducing undesired electromagnetic emissions to meet FCC standards becomes a challenge. Consequently, the pressure on clock generator chips and other ICs is tremendous. One company... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Smart Dual-Input Regulator Includes Auxiliary Switch
PC systems today are being designed with several modes of operation for conserving power. That means that the semiconductor devices and PC cards in these systems must switch efficiently from one state to another without degrading performance. To... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
CDMA Power Meters Suited For Digital Mobile Radio Standards
The ML2407A (single channel) and ML2408A (dual channel) are a pair of power meters that measure signals used in both CDMA radio systems and by pulsed RF carriers. When used with Anritsu's MA2469A power sensor, which sports 1.25-MHz video bandwidth,... — Richard Gawel

[Real-World Engineering]
Engineers Vs. Bean Counters: The Struggle Continues
Here's an observation I've made about the corporate engineering environment: Accountants make noise in our signals and we make noise in theirs. Check out how: 1. Everyone who travels comes back and spends half a morning filling out an... — Lawrence J. Kamm

[Heads Up]
Is A 20-Something LCD In Your Future?
To improve visual performance, active-matrix liquid-crystal displays keep a thin-film transistor at each pixel. Such displays have proven to be big hits for notebook computer screens and, more recently, as desktop PC monitors. But for the most part,... — Chris Chinnock

[New Products]

• High-Speed Laser-Driver BiCMOS IC Suits 2.5-Gbit/s Applications — Richard Gawel

• 3.3-V Optical Transceivers Fit Several Protocols And Form Factors — Richard Gawel

• 25-W Insertion Filter Boasts High Efficiency And Low Insertion Loss — Richard Gawel

• Broadband Linear Amplifier Targets CDMA And TDMA PCS Systems — Richard Gawel

• Four-Resistor Arrays Save Space And Cut Costs — Richard Gawel

• Remote-Head Camera Features Progressive-Scan Technology — Richard Gawel

• Enhanced-Performance SCSI Cables Based On 0.8-mm Standard — Richard Gawel

• RF Test Socket Has Built-In Spring-Loaded Heatsink — Richard Gawel

• Standard Telecom Connector Stands Up To 1600 V rms — Richard Gawel

• Power MOSFETs Suited For Automotive Applications — Richard Gawel

• SMPS IGBT Family Features Unclamped Inductive Switching — Richard Gawel

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