[Engineering Feature] Distributors Evolve Beyond The "Component Store" Tag
Designers know where to turn when they need parts. Distributors have provided the nuts and bolts of OEM designs for decades. But now, it's not just about supplying parts. Today's distributors also offer value-added services that smooth the path from concept to manufacturing. In the past, distributors mainly provided simple fulfillment services, delivering components to customers when needed. But new challenges and requirements have altered the playing field: shrinking...
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Lisa Maliniak
[Technology Report] DAC Unleashes A Torrent Of Tools And Methodologies
As it assembles for this year's 42nd Design Automation Conference in Anaheim (June 13-17, www.dac.com), the EDA industry finds itself at a crossroads. Disparaged by some as out of touch with designers' needs and falling down in attempts to lead the design community deeper into the submicron realm, the EDA industry sorely needs a "home run," a technological coup that will shore up its image. DAC is the likeliest place for such a coup to emerge. Over 10,000...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] Scalable Processors Add Fuel To Network Data Rates
By providing intelligent packet processing and rapidly processing more network threads, two network processor families reduce the cost and complexity of line cards and other network infrastructure systems. Raza Microelectronics' Orion and XLR lines integrate functions that previously required multiple chips. Processing packets to provide value-added services is a key issue for network systems. Orion takes that challenge head on with its TR30xx family (...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] Chip Gets To The Heart Of Ultrasound Designs
Continuous-wave (CW) Doppler ultrasound diagnostic systems involve many pairs of transducers. One member of each pair transmits a continuous sinewave. The other receives echoes. A CW ultrasound diagnostic device works by performing spectral analysis on the signals from the receive transducers. In addition to medical imaging, applications that require similar measurements of phase shifts include weather radar, adaptive antenna arrays, and automotive collision avoidance...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Robustly Recover Data Across Multiple Data-Comm Standards
A system engineer's worst nightmare: transmitting a misinterpretation of data in a large block of serial data. If it doesn't corrupt the entire data stream, it forces the transmitting system to resend that entire block of data just to rectify the situation, as well as continue to transmit other data. This can result in latency in the network, or at worst, entirely incorrect data. So how does a network designer come up with a robust method for framing and interpreting data across multiple...
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Cory Getty
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[Ideas For Design] Measure Current On Positive-Grounded Systems
In telecom power systems, the positive rail is usually grounded. This forces designers to place a shunt resistor on the system's negative rail to measure current. Yet there are other ways to sense the system's current. Some methods even use a transducer, like Hall-effect or magnetic inductance current transducers, instead of a shunt resistor. These transducers are made for only certain current values (50, 100, or even 200 A). Although effective, such solutions are more...
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Jorge M. Briseno
[Ideas For Design] LED Indicates Current Magnitude
The LED in this circuit glows in proportion to the load current (see the figure). It was designed as a very compact substitute for an ammeter in the 12-V supply line of some astronomy equipment. The equipment includes low-power heating elements (dew preventers) whose operation is not visible. However, the LED brightens visibly when the heaters are switched on, giving a positive indication that they're connected and working. Circuit...
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Michael Covington
[POV: Point Of View] Java Sounds The Death Knell For C++
Since its release in 1983, C++ has gained a large following. In its time, C++ represented a natural upgrade path for projects that started with C but needed to migrate to a more disciplined language with improved abstraction and better scalability. However, Moore's law has foiled C++'s usefulness. As Anthony Scott, GM's Information Systems and Services CTO, recently explained, "More than one-third of the cost of GM's automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the...
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Kelvin Nilsen
[Editorial] Engineers Help Raise The Bar For Homeland Security
The U.S. government is spending billions to replace or alter much of the antiterrorism technology installed since Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times has reported. A review of agency documents and interviews with government officials and independent experts revealed that despite a price tag of $4.5 billion spent so far on homeland security, "many devices currently in use have done little to improve the nation's security," said the Times. Problems...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: I have an odd problem. Early British cars used an electromechanical vibrating regulator to supply -10 V to the gas gauge from the 12- to 14-V battery ("positive ground"). The current demand is low, probably 1 A would do. I have been, so far, unsuccessfully searching for a -10-V regulator in a TO220 package. A positive regulator would be trivial to find. I did find an MSK part, but they wanted $100. New mechanical devices are so poor that many are DOA and...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] IEEE Salutes The Hard-Disk Drive With A Milestone Award
Consider the tiny hard-disk drive in your portable music player--not bad for a technology that's about to turn forty. The Magnetic Disk Heritage Center and the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section agrees, and they're saluting the technology with a look back at its roots. On May 26, the groups will honor IBM's RAMAC 305 with an IEEE Milestone award. IBM introduced the RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting System) 305 in 1956 (Fig. 1). Its IBM 350...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: The Industry] Density Breakthrough Makes Hard Drives More Suitable For Consumer Applications
Today's hard-disk drives (HDDs) face a technical chasm known as the superparamagnetic limit, tying them to maximum densities of 130 to 160 Gbits/in.2 Beyond that, the magnetic energy holding the bits in place becomes equal to the disk drive's ambient thermal energy, and data gets scrambled. Yet the traditional longitudinal recording technique is rapidly approaching this limit, and fast-growing consumer products demand more and more storage. That's why HDD makers are...
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Krishna Chander
[TechView: Analog & Power] Custom Lithium Battery Packs Ease OEMs’ Safety Anxieties
Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries are nearly ubiquitous in portable applications. While catastrophic failures are rare, they can hurt people, grab headlines, and even put OEMs who use the batteries out of business. The SecuraPack line from Micro Power shields OEMs from these dangers by combining custom battery-pack technology and specialized manufacturing processes. Battery-pack design can be daunting. One battery supplier's caution document includes limiting...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] No-Memory Jukebox-LED Driver Begs For Creative Applications
What can you do with a chip that mixes three audio inputs, filters that audio into three frequency bands, and uses each frequency band to pulse-width modulate an output capable of driving up to 42 mA? Obviously, you can run the jukebox lighting effects on cellular telephones and personal audio players. That's what National Semiconductor had in mind with its LM4970 audio-synchronized LED driver. This IC can pulse-modulate three outputs in response to the frequency content of...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Electronic Circuit Breaker Senses On-Resistance Voltage Drops, Eliminating Sense Resistor
Electronic circuit breakers typically rely on the drop across an external resistor to sense overcurrents. Instead, Linear Technology's LTC4213 senses the drop across the on-resistance (RDS(ON)) in the external MOSFET that provides power to the load. It's less precise than the resistor method, but it's simpler and cheaper, and it wastes less power in low-voltage applications. The LTC4213 operates over a bias supply range from 2.3 to 6 V. When bias supply voltage...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Multiprocessing Keeps Compact Motherboard Cool
There are many ways to keep a system cool. Adding a water-cooled refrigeration unit is one way. Another method is to reduce the amount of heat, but this can be difficult without sacrificing performance. Via Technologies attacks the latter problem with a pair of 1-GHz Eden-N NanaBGA processors. The company figures that dual processors provide almost the same performance as one processor running at twice the speed but consuming more than twice the power, hence generating much...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Hard-Drive Family Goes Low (Cost) Or High (Performance)
The Momentus Line of 2.5-in. hard disks from Seagate delivers a range of options. At the high end, the Momentus 7200.1 is a 7200-rpm disk with up to 100-Mbyte capacities. It targets small-form-factor PCs, laptops, and non-mission-critical blade servers. The 5400-rpm Momentus 5400.2 offers the power efficiency of a 4500-rpm drive with capacities up to 120 Gbytes. The 4200-rpm Momentus 4200.2 also is available in capacities up to 120 Gbytes. The disk's low price suits it for...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Product Pair Tackles System Virtualization
Accenia's DoubleWide Design and Virtio's Virtual Platform bring a software implementation to developers when hardware is un-available due to a new system design or a limited supply of hardware. DoubleWide Design software targets high-end environments consisting of a single system or a network of systems. The latest version, which is significantly faster, can handle devices such as servers and routers running real operating systems on virtual hardware. Its new user interface...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] USB DSP Board Simplifies Data Acquisition
The DT9841E board contains a USB 2.0 interface, a Texas Instruments TMS320-C6713 DSP, and a pair of 24-bit delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters with built-in anti-aliasing filters. Developed by Data Trans-lation, the system can sustain a 100-kHz sample rate. The PC-based DT Dynamic Signal Analyzer application's graphical interface enables the creation of data applications without programming. The DT9841E costs $1495. A front panel is...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Dual-Core CPUs Raise The System-Throughput Bar
High-performance servers and other high-throughput systems (such as those used by high-end gamers) can look forward to Advanced Micro Devices' and Intel's performance-boosting, dual-core processor families. In addition to their throughput capabilities, each family keeps a lid on power dissipation--95 W max for AMD's chips and 130 W for the Pentium Extreme products. AMD will release dual-core processors in both its server-class Opteron series and its desktop-oriented Athlon...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Enhanced Core Plus New Features Equals Video-Optimized DSP
Improved execution efficiency and code storage density--thanks to an enhanced instruction-set architecture--catapults the TMS320C6455 DSP to a 20% average throughput upgrade over its predecessor, the C6415 DSP. The greater performance ushers in more bandwidth to handle HDTV or standard video signals. The enhanced instruction set includes 16-bit operations to reduce code size by 20% to 30%. In addition, TI claims the C6455 is the first DSP chip to pack both Serial RapidIO...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Incremental Compilation Comes To FPGA Design
Today's FPGAs are large--really large. The largest are closing in on 200,000 logic elements and include features like memories, analog phase-locked loops, transceivers, and more. Yet that complexity cuts two ways. It lets FPGAs compete with ASICs for design starts, but it also makes for long runtimes for FPGA design tools. That "but" is a thumb in the eye of FPGAs' main attraction for designers, their reprogrammability. The sheer size and complexity of FPGAs is beginning to...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Predictive Verification Finds Bugs Earlier
Assertion-based verification has arrived, and tool flows are emerging to take more advantage of assertions early in the design process. An apt example is Atrenta's 1Team:Verify, which brings the benefits of assertion-based verification to RTL designers. The tool leverages assertions early in the game, identifying critical bugs at a stage when they're relatively easy and inexpensive to correct. 1Team:Verify catches many corner-case bugs that traditional simulation can miss....
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
A CIRCUIT-EXTRACTION PROCESS developed by Taeus International aids in reverse-engineering ICs to investigate potential patent infringements. The technique involves using a microscope and camera to photograph sections of an IC die. in the past, this has been followed with manual processing to correct distortion. Taeus has developed software that stitches the photos into a corrected, full-chip image that's as close as possible to the circuit's original geometry. Visit...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Wireless UART Chip Set Goes Frequency Hopping In The ISM Bands
Most engineers aren't wireless wizards. But with virtually every electronic product going wireless, engineers need faster, easier ways to meet the challenge. To help solve the problem, Texas Instruments came up with the Dolphin chip set. The company says that Dolphin gives designers a simpler method for making designs wireless. The set uses frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) in the 902- to 928-MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) bands, designated by Part 15 of...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Single-Chip Tuner Puts FM Broadcast Radio Just About Anywhere
Despite its age, low-tech image, and mounting competition with satellite systems, FM radio still has an enormous following. It remains a major purveyor of music for car and home stereos. With Silicon Laboratories' one-IC radio tuners, engineers can now put FM radio in an array of applications, like cell phones, PDAs, MP3/AAC players, portable radios, notebook PCs, and car radios. The Si4700 and Si4701 are complete one-chip FM radios implemented fully in CMOS. They work with...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Linear Mixer Blends High Performance And Speedy Basestation Design
Fewer applications are more critical and demanding than a cell-phone basestation receiver that gets bombarded with lots of signals, from the weak to the overwhelming. Coming to the rescue is Linear Technology's LT5527 RF mixer, an active downconverting mixer designed for cellular basestations. Built for current designs as well as future 3G designs using WCDMA, the LT5527 operates from 400 MHz to 3.7 GHz. This covers the 850-MHz cellular band, the 1.9-GHz and 2.1-GHz W-CDMA...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechScope] Robots Roll In Indianapolis
The droids came out to play at Star Wars Celebration 3, as the R2-D2 Builders Club showed off working models of R2-D2 from the Star Wars films at the Indianapolis Convention Center in April. While building a working R2-D2 isn't easy, the members bring a wide range of backgrounds to the club and work together via the Web. "When people accomplish something, they share it," said Craig Smith, a service technician. Learning from his own experience and taking...
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Richard Gawel
[Basics Of Design] Connecting Instruments To Your EDA Tools Sponsored by: NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS
After many lengthy Spice simulations and some design tweaking, you're finally comfortable enough with your pc-board (PCB) design to build a prototype. Once it's built, you'll want to put the prototype on the lab bench and get it up and running. You'll typically use standalone or modular test instrumentation to take some measurements of operating characteristics to compare them to the simulation results. And this is where things can get very interesting. Very often, those...
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David Maliniak
[Design FAQs] Dual-Output, Non-Isolated DC-DC Converter ICs Sponsored by: NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
What are the available dual-output converter topologies? Dual-output, nonisolated dc-dc converter ICs include switch-mode, lowdropout (LDO), LDO plus switch-mode, and charge pump types. These ICs are non-isolated converters because there is no dc voltage isolation between the input and output. In contrast, isolated converters employ a transformer to provide I/O isolation. What types of dual switch-mode converter ICs are available? In a...
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Sam Davis
[Quick Facts] Planning Is The Key To Verification Sponsored by: VERISITY
Plan Ahead Project management is a matter of planning and execution. In verification quality problems as well as schedule slips can be avoided through application of the old adage, "begin with the end in mind." Good verification plans include detailed goals formulated with measurable metrics, optimal resource usage, and realistic scheduling. Verification managers and their teams certainly try to plan their processes. However, these plans tend to focus on...
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David Maliniak
