[Success Story] The New Breed Of Universal Remote
Combine sophistication and simplicity to achieve elegance. Such is the primary goal for today's developers of home-entertainment/ automation control devices. How come? Simply put, the high end is driving the market for such devices, and consumers willing to spend tens of thousands on gear and setup have neither the time nor the inclination to abide anything clunky or overly complex. The trend today is to store electronic equipment out of sight, but the remote control must remain...
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John H. Day
[Technology Report] Low-Cost FPGAs: The ASIC Alternative
Now nothing will impede the field-programmable gate array's (FPGA) march into scores of volume applications. New architectures both lower the cost and improve functionality, enabling them to cost-effectively compete with ASICs— even when volumes hit several hundred thousand units and more. Smaller process geometries that shrink chip size go a long way toward reducing cost. But size isn't the only factor in the cost equation. The chips also must contain enough logic...
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Dave Bursky
[Leapfrog: First Look] PLD Family Bridges FPGA And CPLD Needs
Applications traditionally supported by high-density complex programmable-logic devices (CPLDs) and low-capacity FPGAs now have another option—the MachXO series of logic devices. Developed by Lattice Semiconductor, the family brings lower cost and more features to the table. Lattice harnessed the efficiency of a logic architecture based on a lookup table and combined it with high-density, nonvolatile flash storage and distributed blocks of static memory. As a result, the...
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Dave Bursky
[Design View / Design Solution] Migrate Your Serial Application To USB The Easy Way
The once tried-and-true COM port is missing in action. In its place, most new laptop computers carry a couple of USB ports. In fact, the USB bus was specifically designed to replace most, if not all, of the legacy ports once common to PCs. Yet with so many USB-capable microcontrollers and interface devices available, the loss of a COM port needn't be a roadblock for embedded designers. Choosing the right tools and software solutions makes the migration path to USB simple. A...
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Lucio Di Jasio
[Ideas For Design] Instrument Measures Wire Tension
This instrument measures tension on the wires fixed inside the tubes of the proportional wire chambers used to detect charged particles in high-energy physics research. The material is gold-plated tungsten. The wires measure between 3 and 30 cm long, with a diameter of 50 mm. The nominal value of tension, 200 gmf (grams-force), was to be measured as a quality-control procedure. The two crimped ends of every wire were available for making electrical contacts. A wire was...
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Sanjay R. Chendvankar
[Ideas For Design] Micropower Power Supply Beats Off-The-Shelf Solutions
Designers of high-sensitivity, low-noise preamplifiers recognize the benefits of galvanic isolation to reduce noise. Besides the noise benefits of isolation, some preamps have further requirements, such as the ability to float at a large dc offset voltage. Accommodating this requirement with off-the-shelf solutions may result in high cost and the addition of large components. Designers can craft a high-isolation micropower dc-dc converter using a telecom transformer. The design...
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Steve Kendig
[POV: Point Of View] ASICs Aren't Merely Surviving, They're Thriving
Paraphrasing Mark Twain, reports of the death of ASICs are greatly exaggerated. Despite the popularity of "ASIC bashing," within some sectors of the microelectronics community, there are still many applications where, due to volume and performance demands, an ASIC is still the best silicon platform for implementing a design. "Typical" ASICs, with modest performance and complexity, comprise the sweet spot for a new ASIC business model. ...
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Naveed Sherwani
[Editorial] Imaging Advances Bring New Eyes To Space Missions
Congratulations to those of you readers who played a role in NASA's major missions this summer. Between the Deep Impact comet exploration, the dramatic return of the shuttle program via the Discovery mission, Cassini's continued exploration of Saturn's moons, and the successful launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), there's been a real renaissance of extraplanetary exploration. One unifying theme from an electronicsengineering viewpoint is the role played by...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Toaster Stuff, Anyhow?
Well, I never owned a toaster, but I have owned several kinds of toaster ovens. A long time ago, I had a good GE one. But then Black & Decker took over GE, and while the toaster ovens performed okay, they showed me poor reliability after a while. They would fail shortly after the warranty ran out, and I'd buy another. I soon got tired of this. They would either quit open-circuit, or the heating element would go gablooey. (That's a technical term.) Either way, they were...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Embedded System Conference Plays Home To Boston Revolution
Boston is again home to the Embedded System Conference, with all its historical flair. A host of positive developments marks this year's event, slated for Sept. 12-15 at the Hynes Convention Center. These advances include a major shift in compact embedded design standards with the announcement of EPIC Express (see "An EPIC Tale: PC/104 Hitches On To PCI Express," p. 58). Embedded Platform for Industrial Computing (EPIC) is the PC/104-compatible board standard. EPIC Express brings PCI...
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William Wong
[TechView: Communications] 16/24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switches Deliver QoS For Less
Gigabit Ethernet switches seem so last year. Yet Vitesse Semiconductor's SparX-G16 and SparX-G24 system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions reduce the number of required passive components in switch designs while adding security, quality of service (QoS), and cost savings. Targets include small office/home-office (SOHO), small-medium business (SMB), and small-medium enterprise (SME) desktop switches as well as consumer wireless and DSL broadband routers. The SparX-G16 (VSC7389) and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Speech-Recognition Module Eases System Implementation Challenges
The RSC-4128 mixed-signal speechrecognition processor from Sensory has been available for a while. Yet designing a system around it has required a mix of analog and digital components and a significant amount of time. By preassembling all the components, from the microphone input to the control and speaker outputs, the VR Stamp module is a full subsystem in about the area of a large postage stamp (see the figure). The RSC-4128...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Higher-Speed Front-Side Bus Boosts Server Throughput
By raising the front-side bus (FSB) speed to 667 MHz, two Intel Itanium 2 processors deliver more than a 65% system bandwidth improvement over servers with processors that use a 400-MHz FSB. The FSB connects and transfers data between the microprocessor, the chip set, and the system's main memory. The higher-speed version will help set the stage for the forthcoming dual-core Montecito Itanium processors, which also will use a 667-MHz FSB. The improved front-side bus bandwidth...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Southbridge Chip Sets Vaidated For PCI Express Operation
The SiS965, SiS965L, SiS966, and SiS966L Southbridge chip sets have passed recent PCI Express compatibility validation. Performed by Silicon Integrated Systems in conjunction with fabless IC company JMicron, the validation tests yielded fully satisfactory results. The four SiS Southbridge chip sets are compatible with Intel-based and AMD-based platforms. They operate with front-side bus speeds of up to 533 MHz. All of the sets include X1/2 PCI Express lanes. Also, they support...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Transaction-Level Models Are Becoming Easier To Use
Transaction-level modeling (TLM) verification methodologies are propagating down from power users, such as large systems houses and integrated device manufacturers, to the broader design community. As they do so, standards organizations such as the Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) are helping to make TLM methodologies easier to use and ever more powerful. OCP-IP has released Version 2.1.1 of its TLM Channel specification, as well as a comprehensive...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] High-Frequency Design Tool Gains In Efficiency
With version 10 of Ansoft's HFSS high-frequency/high-speed electromagnetic design tool, designers can share CAD models and results across existing CAD/CAE design environments. Also, its dynamic-link technology lets HFSS cosimulate with other Ansoft tools and extends HFSS applications to include RF/analog IC co-design, EMI/EMC, and microwave heating. The ability to reuse third-party CAD models and EDA layouts saves HFSS users engineering time and gives them more time to optimize...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] EDA Roundup
> BY AUTOMATING THE GENERATION OF CONTROL REGISTERS, Denali's Blueprint tool eliminates the tedious and errorprone processes of manually managing registers. It also enables design, verification, and firmware teams to work more efficiently from consistent and synchronized views of a system-on-a-chip design. For design, Blueprint produces synthesizable Verilog, SystemVerilog, or VHDL code for control registers. It generates Open Verification Library (OVL) assertions as...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] An EPIC Tale: PC/104 Hitches On To PCI Express
Express is apropos for the EPIC Express standard's name, because it puts PC/104 on the fast track to the next level. Efforts put forth by Ampro Computer, Micro/sys, Octagon Systems, Versalogic, and WinSystems resulted in the standard. The main board format is the same size and general layout as the Embedded Platform for Industrial Computing (EPIC) standard. Its expansion modules are the same size as PC/104 modules. EPIC Express modules also incorporate the ISA (Industry Standard...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] I'm Just "Left" To Rewind
It showed up one day, and my wife quickly snarfed it up. She immediately recognized it as a left-hander's timepiece. As you might guess, we have a few left-handed devices around here, including scissors, pencils, and measuring cups. The clock was a trinket from Texas Instruments (TI) to highlight its latest version of Code Composer Studio with Rewind Debugging (see "IDE Goes Multicore" at www.elecdesign.com, ED Online 10807). Rewind Debugging is actually a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PCI Express Chips Eye Embedded Applications
PLX Technology has released a pair of fiveport PCI Express switch chips designed for embedded applications. The PEX 8508 has eight PCI Express lanes, while the PEX 8518 features 18 lanes. These can be configured in a variety of combinations. For example, a typical PEX 8508 configuration would be an x4 connection to a host and four x1 PCI Express lanes. Outof-band configuration can be handled via I2C. All ports support hot-plugging and have a port-to-port latency of 150 ns....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit Gets ARM Developers Up And Running Quickly
ARM microcontrollers are extremely popular with developers, but evaluating a chip can be tedious. Oki Semiconductor attacks the problem with its AME-51 ( Advantage Microcontroller Evaluation) Kit. It's based on the ML67Q4051 with 128-kbyte flash from Oki's 4050/4060 series ARM7TDMI-based microcontrollers. The $249 kit includes a fully functional Kick Start toolchain from IAR with the USB-based J-Link JTAG adapter. The toolchain includes the C-Spy debugger. Kick Start's only...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ARM Kit Equipped With Ready-To-Use USB Projects
The MCB2140 development board is home to Philips' LPC2148 ARM power microcontroller with USB 2.0 Full Speed support. Keil's kit includes projects to implement a USB mass storage device or a USB Human Interface Device (HID) that works with standard operating-system device drivers. The kit comes with Keil's development tools, including the uVision integrated development environment, debugger, C/C++ compiler, and assembler. An optional ULink JTAG adapter is available. Cost is $149....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Environment Is A Bridge Between UML And RTOS Technology
With FSMLabs' UML Bridge, i-Logix Rhapsody developers can home in on FSMLabs' hard real-time platforms, including RTLinuxPro and RTCoreBSD, as well as the standard Linux and BSD platforms. Rhapsody is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) development environment that targets a number of different programming languages, such as C and Java, when compiling UML applications. It already has been used to create applications that run on a wide range of conventional operating systems. Support is...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Real-Time Operating System Reels In Real-Time DBMS
Green Hills Software's real-time operating system (RTOS), the royalty-free Integrity, received a boost from Enea AB with release 6.1 of the Polyhedra memory-resident search and query language (SQL) relational database management system (DBMS). The RTOS and DBMS are ROMable and scalable. Integrity features DO-178B certification. The smallfootprint package supports journaling, fault-tolerance, and flash memory. www.enea.com www.ghs.com...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] System Welcomes Ada 2005
The new Ada 2005 language standard has a supporter in the GNAT Pro 5.03a. The academic and the GNAT GPL 2005 edition from Adacore are also available as a free download from the Libre site. Ada 2005 adds a wide range of new features, including nested-type extensions, limited aggregates, and multiple interface inheritance. The interface support is modeled after Java's interface approach. Use of Object.operation notation provides an object-oriented environment more familiar to C++ and Java...
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William Wong
[Basics Of Design] Pushing Processor Limits With Real-Time Operating Systems Sponsored by: NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS
Hard RTOSs tend to run close to the hardware limits and provide very predictable priority and scheduling mechanisms. This lets developers fit an application into the constraints imposed by the operating system and hardware. It does not necessarily mean that the system runs as fast as possible. Rather, the system operates as predictably as possible. Typically, the operating system must then prevent an arbitrary application from using operations, such as disabling interrupts, that...
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William Wong
