[Engineering Feature] Getting To A Higher Level
When the topic of design languages comes up, most industry veterans think back to the "language wars" of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, VHDL and Verilog vied for dominance, with numerous other proprietary hardware description languages (HDLs) nipping at their heels. Verilog, created by Phil Moorby at Gateway Design Automation in the mid-1980s, saw its growth spurred by the availability of Gateway's simulator and by Synopsys' 1988 introduction of logic synthesis as...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Smarter Antennas Breed Success In Wireless Arena
The antenna is gettin' respect. More wireless designers now realize that the antenna holds the key to higher data rates, longer range, increased number of users per system, and greater reliability. Most antennas continue to be a passive collection of conductors optimized for the application. On the rise, though, are intelligent antennas using spatial diversity, multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, and adaptive arrays for cell-phone basestations, Wi-Fi access...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Build A Board In-House Without The Mess
When I built my first pc board, I taped up a copper-clad board and dropped it in a tub of etchant. While pc-board production hasn't changed much since then, dozens of companies now provide fast turnarounds for prototypes and small production runs. These new products provide an alternative to farming out this messy process. Now along come the ProtoMatS62 and Pro-Conduct, which represent a far cry from my earliest efforts. The solution, developed by LPKF Laser and Electronics,...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Roll Your Own Custom x86-Based Embedded Systems
There are many pros and cons in using an x86 architecture in an embedded system, but it may be required due to legacy code or other operating-system choices. Thanks to the wealth of x86-based applications and debug tools available, using a traditional x86 chip set and processor in an embedded system has advantages. Yet, designers need to watch out for certain aspects that are typically easier to implement in a traditional embedded system. Most embedded systems can't use an...
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Brian Melewski
[Ideas For Design] Precision Programmable Current Sources Use Digital Pots
The circuit shown in Figure 1 implements a programmable 0- to 20-mA precision current source. The REF192 low-headroom 2.5-V voltage reference (U1) can source up to 30 mA. An AD5280 digital potentiometer (U2) controls the voltage-divider ratio of the reference voltage. U3, an OP1177 op amp, closes the loop by forcing VL = VW...
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Peter Khairolomour
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[Ideas For Design] FET Supplies Low-Voltage Reverse-Polarity Protection
When a circuit requires reverse-voltage protection on the power input, the usual approach is a series diode (see the figure, a). But if the input voltage input is low—say, two or three AA batteries—the 0.5-V loss of a Schottky diode may represent a significant loss in useful battery life. An FET can serve as a series diode with significantly less voltage drop (see the figure, b). A dual IRF7342 FET was used (p-channel,...
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Jim Walker
[Editorial] M2M Communications: Data Capture Without Borders
With the meteoric rise of China as Earth's manufacturing zone, headlines about air pollution drifting from there to U.S. shores are no real surprise. A front-page USA Today story quotes National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research showing that 30% of U.S. ground-level ozone pollution wafts in from offshore. The article used new data collected by aerial and ground-based sensors to "erase doubts" among skeptical scientists as to the realities of wayfaring...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] ASI Vs. Ethernet: Evaluating Interconnect Choices
Next-generation communications system architectures present a number of difficult new challenges, especially when implementing internal intercard and interchassis interconnects for handling multiprotocol traffic. In the past, designers attempted to address these challenges by using either in-house or merchant-proprietary approaches. Yet they have been hampered by the higher cost, longer development cycles, and lack of flexibility of the solutions. It's clear that...
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Stephen Christo
[Pease Porridge] All What's Mailbox This Anyhow, Stuff?
Dear Bob: Regarding Jason Cook's question on eyelets.* I worked at Motorola in the '60s, when eyeleted pc boards were still being used. In the days before plated holes were common, eyelets did prevent foil from peeling when a board was repaired, and they were the only way to get vias on two-sided boards. The eyelets were specially designed "double funnel" and had to be inserted properly so the funnel would split on the top side to allow solder to wick up. But they...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Thanks For The Memories, But New Ones Are Necessary
It has been more than three decades since the invention of microchip-based memories like RAM, SRAM, DRAM, and EPROM, and these products have served the needs of the market quite well. Yet evolving requirements and technical challenges are demanding the development of entirely new memory technologies. Microprocessor advances are driving the need for these new technologies. To keep in step with microprocessor development, memory suppliers have used the dynamics of Moore's Law...
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Nam Hyung Kim
[TechView: The Industry] Happy Motoring: More Entertainment, Less "Are We There Yet?"
"Don't make me stop this car!" You won't hear that from so many frustrated parents anymore as the proliferating entertainment systems in today's light vehicles occupy their children's attention. Demand for OEM and aftermarket entertainment systems in light vehicles in North America grew to $6.97 billion in 2003 from $5.26 billion in 1998, a 5.8% annual growth rate. By 2008, the figure should reach $9.45 billion for a 6.3% annual growth rate. The numbers come from "Automotive...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Analog & Power] Out-Of-Phase Buck Controllers Trim Filtering Requirements For 3-In-1 Chips
By running their dual buck-converter pulse-width modulators (PWMs) 180° out of phase, the ISL6441 and ISL6443 high-performance, triple-output controllers from Intersil reduce input-current ripple. This in turn reduces noise induced by the power supply and allows designers to use smaller input capacitors. Dual PWMs typically operate in-phase and turn on both upper FETs at the same time. The input capacitor then has to support the instantaneous current requirements of...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Chips Support All-Digital Or Digital/Analog Control
A complementary family of PMBus-compliant digital power-control ICs for telecom and datacentric applications supports designs from the ac line to the point of load. Texas Instruments' Fusion Digital Power family comprises three product series. Two work together in a purely digital-control mode. The third can be used with more modest digital controllers, providing most of the benefits of digital power control while closing the control loop in the analog domain. The UCD9xxx...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 Garners Significant Support
Two companies have announced their support for Carrier Grade Linux 2.0, which targets telecom equipment manufacturers and network equipment providers. Wind River and TimeSys both are delivering products based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. The Platform for Network Equipment: Linux Edition from Wind River supports Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC). This matches recent support for TIPC in Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system, permitting interprocess...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] RAID Chip Combines PCI Express And SAS/SATA Drives
The single-chip BCM8603 RAID Controller Moves systems into the new world of PCI Express AND Serial drives. IDE and SCSI RAID chips are common these days, but most of them also interface to PCI/PCI-X as hard-drive technology moves to high-speed serial interfaces such as Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Developed by Broadcom, the BCM8603 incorporates a x4 PCI Express interface in addition to a PCI-X interface with a bridge...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Stick Gets A New Bus
Gumstix has opened its architecture to a horde of daughtercards with the addition of a 96-pin system bus header on its Intel XScale PXA255-based connex 200g (200 MHz) and connex 400g (400 MHz) processor boards. These small (80 by 20 by 6.3 mm) boards hold 64 Mbytes of RAM and 4 Mbytes of flash containing Linux. There also is a USB client interface, three serial ports, and JTAG support. The connex 200g costs $109, and the 400g is $139. With prices starting at less than $20,...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Off-The-Shelf ARM9 MCU Handles Java
The LPC3000 microcontroller (MCU) family from Philips Semiconductor is based on a 200-MHz ARM926EJ-S core with DSP and Java/Jazelle support. The chip has 64 kbytes of RAM but no flash. A boot ROM can load executable images from a variety of sources, including NAND flash. The MCU provides access to off-chip mobile SRAM and MMC/SD cards. The chip supports 3.3-V I/O, and it has an ultra-low-power 0.9-V operation mode. The standard E-ICE JTAG interface provides access to a 6-kbyte emulation...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Smalltalk Gets Embedded
What's old is what's new again. Smalltalk is an object-oriented programming language and development environment created by Alan Kay and company at the Learning Research Group in Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s. It was used in a host of academic and commercial applications, but it never made it to the embedded world until now. Esmertec's OSVM VM-based (virtual machine) implementation of Smalltalk runs on embedded systems. It offers the flexibility of the...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Megagate/Megabit Platform ASICs Add Fuel To Serial-Transfer Speeds
The Xtreme2 series RapidChip platform ASICs stack up the specs. These LSI Logic chips deliver up to 48 serializer/deserializer (SERDES) ports that achieve up to 4.25-Gbit/s data-transfer rates. They also provide a maximum of 5 million usable gates and 3.7 Mbits of configurable static RAM. Xtreme2 masterslices support popular external high-bandwidth memory interfaces like DDR2 and QDR. The chips' internal SRAM is based on the company's MatrixRAM architecture. As such,...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] H.264, MPEG-2, And MPEG-4 No Problem For Multistandard Video Processor
A 500-MHz+ superpipelined TriMedia CPU core, which allows for simultaneous encode and decode of full D1 resolution MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video, highlights the upgraded Nexperia processor. New instructions were added to Philips' CPU so it could handle H.264 encoding and decoding operations. Standard- to high-definition upconversion with advanced de-interlacing also was added to help deliver high-quality images. The chip supports decoding high-definition video formats, as well as Windows...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Smaller USB 2.0 On-The-Go Is A Go For PCs, Portables
Considered a third-generation implementation, the I-PHY USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) physical layer (PHY) is available as a block of intellectual property from Innovative Semiconductors. It targets low-power USB connections with PCs and portable electronics devices, including digital still cameras, digital video cameras, MP3 and personal media players, mass storage devices, and thumb drives. The ISI-210 I-PHY is about 30% smaller and consumes about 30% less power than the...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Test] Scope Option Looks At 32 Digital Channels
Designers often must look at both analog and digital signals when testing and debugging their projects. Now that many of these mixed-signal systems use 16- or even 32-bit microcontrollers, the more digital channels designers can view at the same time, the faster test and debug will go. The MS-32 Mixed-Signal Option from LeCroy meets this need by adding 32 channels of digital acquisition support to most four-channel WaveSurfer 400 and WaveRunner 6000A series oscilloscopes....
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Synthesized Clock Generator Boasts Less Than 1-ps Jitter
The development of digital circuitry can go more smoothly with the use of precise, low-jitter digital clock signals supplied by the CG635 synthesized clock generator. Developed by Stanford Research Systems, it generates single-ended and differential clocks from 1 mHz to 2.05 GHz with jitter below 1 ps rms. Frequency resolution is 0.001 Hz. Amplitude and offset are continuously adjustable. Standard CMOS, emitter-coupled logic (ECL), pseudo-ECL (PECL), and low-voltage...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Clock Extraction Module Boosts Comm Analysis Accuracy
For designers who must perform extremely accurate communications compliance testing, a plug-in module for Agilent's 86100C Infinium digital communications analyzer offers clock extraction for waveform analysis with very low residual jitter. The 83496A multirate optical/electrical clock recovery module features continuous, unbanded tuning from 50 Mbits/s to 13.5 Gbits/s. Less than 300 fs of rms jitter results in negligible residual jitter of the output clock and precise...
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John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] Noise Library Views Knock Down Crosstalk
To achieve signal-integrity design closure for low-power systems-on-a-chip, designers need library views that let them account for the many facets of multivoltage nanometer processes. Cadence Design Systems and Virage Logic have generated and qualified library views that includ Cadence's effective current-source model (ECSM) extensions for accurate supply-voltage delay predictions and noise library views (cdB) for signal-integrity analysis. When used with Cadence's Encounter...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Flow Implements Intelligent Energy Management
To address the need for low leakage and reduced dynamic power drain in portables, ARM and Synopsys have partnered on a reference design flow for the ARM11 family of processors, which implements ARM's Intelligent Energy Manager (IEM) technology. When used with ARM's Artisan low-power library, IEM technology can reduce an ARM11 processor's power consumption by up to 60%. IEM technology performs dynamic voltage scaling based on software-based analysis of the system's processor...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
A 70% Logic performance edge can result from the use of Xilinx's latest revision of its Integrated Software Environment (ISE) in progamming Virtex-4 and Spartan 3E FPGAs. ISE 7.1i incorporates ease-of-use features such as a new design-summary view and message filtering, both of which reduce the need for designers to search through detailed report files. A Technology Viewer displays post-synthesis results in a schematic view that's easy to navigate. Two new simulators are...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Mini GSM/GPRS Radio Shrinks Cell-Phone BOM
Projections for the cell-phone industry show 700 million units in 2005. Many of these new phones are replacements and upgrades. But there's also the onslaught of feature phones with cameras, color screens, MP3 or AAC compressed audio, video, and even hard drives. These phones have created a bevy of cost and space demands. In response, Analog Devices' Othello-G module measures 1.8 by 0.85 mm, or 1 cm2 (see the figure). It...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Implement Voice And Video Over IP That's DSP-Free
It's the year of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Manufacturers are building VoIP phones, analog terminal adapters, gateways, and Wi-Fi phones. Typically, these companies use a standard general-purpose processor with a DSP chip to implement the VoIP protocol. But now, a DSP-free software approach significantly reduces the cost, consumption, footprint, and design time in implementing IP voice—and video. Version 2.0 of Trinity Convergence's VeriCall Edge software...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Basics Of Design] Take The Right Steps To Achieve Accurate Measurements Sponsored by: NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
Current measurements are used in a variety of equipment for control or safety functions. Measuring the voltage drop across a low-value resistor is the most common method of measuring the current flowing in a circuit. The current flow through the load also flows through the RSENSE resistor, also known as a shunt resistor, which creates a voltage drop, VM, across the resistor. Figure 1 depicts two current-measurement approaches. Ammeters were...
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Don Tuite
[Design FAQs] FPGA Power Management Sponsored by: NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
What is an FPGA? A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an IC that can include thousands of identical, programmable logic cells. A matrix of wires and programmable switches interconnects individual logic cells. A typical design involves specifying the simple logic function for each cell and selectively closing the switches in the interconnect matrix. FPGAs are primarily used to prototype an IC-based system. When the design is finalized, designers can convert the logic...
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Sam Davis
