[Engineering Feature] Smaller Sensors Usher In New Year's Resolution
Whether it's the latest cell phone or a large space telescope, solid-state imaging devices now fill nearly every image-capture need. Smaller pixel sizes enable existing VGA and multimegapixel sensors to shrink, while still larger sensors with tens of millions of pixels are readily manufacturable. Over the last few years, CMOS-based image sensors became the technology of choice for consumer products. They've won the economic and performance battle over...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Working Within The Framework
Writing an application completely from scratch is a royal pain. So, most developers turn to libraries and more sophisticated software frameworks to provide services that would otherwise gobble up precious time to develop and integrate. Frameworks can be narrowly focused, such as a graphical interface like the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+). Or they can encompass a wide variety of services, like Microsoft's .NET Framework or Sun Microsystem's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). ...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Open-Source Platform Dials Into VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) continues to entrench itself throughout the communications sector, especially in mixed private branch exchange (PBX) implementations. Cracking this market often is a challenge for the embedded arena, though, because the telephone industry differs substantially from many other embedded endeavors. The open-source Asterisk VoIP PBX software hopes to change that by giving developers a leg up on the competition. Mark Spencer, one of the...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Rail-Signoff Analysis Ensures SoC Power Integrity
More than ever, power integrity is vital in the successful creation of today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. That's because e xcessive rail voltage drop ( IR drop) and ground bounce can create timing problems. Also, excessive current can cause electromigration and related thermal effects, leading to chip failures. The first steps designers must take to prevent these problems are solid power-network planning and implementation. The next step is a good rail-signoff analysis flow to...
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David Stringfellow
[Ideas For Design] Adaptive-Gain Charge-Pump Technique Drives White LEDs
For white LEDs to maintain constant luminosity, they're typically driven with a constant dc current source. In portable applications with a single-cell lithium-ion (Li-ion) source, the sum of the voltage drop across the white LED and the current source can be lower or higher than the battery voltage. This means that whereas a single-cell Li-ion battery can directly power a red LED, a white LED sometimes requires a boosted battery voltage. The easiest way to boost the voltage is via a...
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Dario Nurzad
[Ideas For Design] One Transistor Gives Clean HDTV And NTSC Video Sync Separation
The growing popularity and availability of high-definition television (HDTV) is creating a small revolution in the video industry. New video systems must be capable of handling the standard National Television System Committee (NTSC) composite signal as well as high-definition signals. Also, low-cost and low-power concerns drive system designers to find the simplest solutions. Here's a one-transistor network that lets a single video sync separator operate for both HDTV...
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Raymond Ho
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Design A Differential Voltage-Controlled Current Source
Demand for voltage-controlled current sources (VCCSs) and multipliers in a wide spectrum of electronics and communication devices always seems to exist. The multipliers employed in circuits like the Gilbert Cell, however, produce outputs proportional to the product of two voltages. Research, as well as commercial applications, perpetually confronts the problem of implementing a single-ended multiplier with an output that's produced from the differences of two pairs ...
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Jivesh Govil
[POV: Point Of View] Meeting The Due Diligence Challenges Of RoHS
Due diligence has become a major factor in the electronics industry as we near the July 1, 2006 deadline to comply with the European Union's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS). One difficulty the industry faces is the lack of standard formats for communicating compliance through the supply chain (from component manufacturer to distributor to the producer of finished goods), and a variety of approaches has been adopted. Ultimately, the producers of finished ...
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Steven Webb
[Editorial] Looking For The True Innovations Behind CES's Tech For The Masses
It's a given that a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will be a safari—the shoulder-to-shoulder convention center halls, the snaking lines for cabs, the amped-up cacophony aiming to outshine even the lights of Las Vegas. My odyssey this year began before I'd even left the Newark airport, thanks to weather delays. One thought for a new " consumer electronic service" came to me while canvassing the waiting area and competing to plug in to one of the "free"...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: Back in the early '70s, I was an EE major at Lowell Tech in Lowell, Mass. Within easy walking distance of the dorms, there was an electronics surplus store in one of the old textile mill buildings. One day I found some Philbrick P65AU op-amp modules there. I bought several of them, for maybe $5.00 total. (A bargain. /rap) I decided to build a stereo hi-fi amp around them. It took the better part of the semester to build it, and I nearly flunked...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Digital Power-Management ICs Will Hit $1.5 Billion By 2015
For many years, power supplies in electronic equipment (including ac-to-dc and dc-to-dc converters) have been designed primarily using switch-mode topologies. These topologies usually use power MOSFETs as the main switching element. Traditionally, they have employed various analog circuits to sense the input and output conditions of the supply and to adjust accordingly the operation of the pulse-width modulator (PWM) that drives the power MOSFETs. As one of...
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Christopher Ambarian
[TechView: The Industry] Connectivity And Multimedia—Two Key Themes For the 2006 ISSCC
With today's emphasis on mobile communications and entertainment, it's no surprise that next month's IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Franscisco (Feb. 5-9) will focus on wireless connectivity, portability, and multimedia. Researchers will detail trends and developments in low-power design, communications, and multimedia technologies in more than 250 papers. Three plenary presentations will open the conference. Tze-Chiang Chen, VP...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Analog & Power] Capacitance-To-Digital Converter Simplifies Touchpad Design
When it comes to touchpads, most OEMs buy complete subassemblies from outside vendors, essentially subcontracting the electronic design as well as the assembly. The AD7142 capacitance-to-digital converter from Analog Devices may change that, allowing OEMs to reduce bill-of-materials costs while absorbing a small increase in nonrecurring-engineering costs. Housed in a 5- by 5-mm lead-frame chip-scale package, this 14-channel, 16-bit chip fits touch-pad input...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Utility Metering Gets Easy
Worldwide, electrical utility metering is undergoing dramatic changes. To deal this variety of applications, Microchip has introduced two chips and an online design center to help engineers create metering products. The company's standalone analog front-end/data-converter MCP3905 and MCP3906 energy-measurement ICs output average and instantaneous real power data. These devices can be paired with Microchip's PIC microcontroller in products for single-phase energy...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Industry's First 1310-nm VCSEL Targets 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel
Most vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) operate at 850 nm in Ethernet and other shorter-range fiber-optic applications. With their small size and low cost, they have captured a large share of the laser market. In fact, they have replaced many of the more expensive and complex distributed-feedback (DFB) and Fabry-Perot (F-P) lasers. But they haven't succeeded in longer-wavelength, longer-haul fiber applications where 1310- and 1550-nm lasers...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] InfiniBand Transceiver Set Achieves 30-Gbit/s Data Rate
The InfiniFlame 12X transceiver brings new life to the popular Infini-Band optical standard. XLoom Communications developed this short-range serial transmission technology, which connects servers and other networking equipment in a data center. While InfiniBand's 1X (2.5 Gbits/s) and 4X (10 Gbits/s) solutions have been available for a while, XLoom's 12X (30 Gbits/s) gives users an affordable, faster option. The InfiniFlame 12X uses XLoom's proprietary...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] Celebrating 25 Years Of VME And More
This week's Bus&Board show in Long Beach, Calif., kicked off a celebration of VME's 25-year run. It has been the longest-lasting bus standard, and it continues to evolve and grow with new high-speed serial fabric standards like VITA 41 (VXS) and VITA 46. VME retains the features that have made it great, including a rugged design with more expensive but more reliable connectors. These features have made the standard ideal for rugged applications like military...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Development Kits In USB Dongles
Development kits get smaller and cheaper with offerings like Silicon Laboratories' MCU ToolStik demo kit and USB Radio (see the figure). Both are based on Silicon Labs' 8051 USB chip, which provides a USB-based debugging interface to other chips on the same board. These include other Silicon Labs 8051-based chips like the F300. The USB Radio incorporates the company's radio tuner chip. The ToolStik costs around...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] New Products
RAIDing SAS Adaptec has attacked the SAS market with a range of products, from the $369 48300 SAS host bus adapter (HBA) to the $5995 SANbloc 5000f RAID Subsystem. The 335SAS Storage Enclosure targets small servers needing four hot-swap SAS/SATA drive bays. Adaptec brings more than hardware to the table, too. Its Storage Manager software provides central management, monitoring, and configuration. The Advanced Data Protection Suite...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Statistics Engine Tracks Events, Improves Host Performance
Statistics engines keep track of the types of data and other events that move across a network. That way, designers can develop new value-added services and functions for edge routers, broadband access equipment, mulitservice provisioning platforms, and other systems. Developed by Integrated Device Technology, the Statistics Engine (SE) chip improves system efficiency by offloading the data-collection function from the host CPU, network processor, or ASIC. It uses the...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Application Processor Subsystem Eases SoC Designs
A low-power processor architecture subsystem developed by LSI Logic-Corp. takes aim at GPS navigation systems, electronic toys, personal media players, and many other low-power handheld applications. The Zevio architecture provides a baseline set of integrated support functions and bus interconnects that enable designers to easily craft system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions. Such SoCs could include one or more CPU and DSP cores, video support functions, 2D or 3D...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] Microlithography Simulator Takes Broad View Of ICs
As early adopters of 90- and 65-nm processes have learned, there's a big difference between what you design at these nodes and what gets printed on the wafer. The fact that these microscopic structures are being patterned on silicon with, at best, a 193-nm stepper has led to what's called the "lithography gap." And that gap grows wider with each new process generation. It behooves designers, then, to arm themselves with as much information about the process they plan ...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Methodology Kit Demystifies Wireless Design
Many challenges are inherent in designing RF transceiver chips. Some of these challenges can cause long, sleepless nights for designers insufficiently versed in analog black magic. These include, but aren't limited to, system-level considerations, verification issues, dealing with parasitic extraction, and synthesis of inductors as well as modeling of passives. Cadence's RF Design Methodology Kit represents an effort to help designers of wireless ICs shorten their...
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David Maliniak
