[Engineering Feature] Digital Versus Analog Power Control—A Fight To The... Draw?
The gossip: Analog and digital will soon battle for control of power-supply regulation. The reality: When it comes to feedback-loop control, both approaches seem to happily coexist. (See "True Digital," p. 46, and "Looks Like Analog, Designs Like Digital," p. 48.) Indeed, many vendors offer a choice. Some of digital control's initial programmability advantages are now available even in controllers and regulators that use analog feedback. Still, digital...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Power-Management ICs Fuel Smarter Battery-Based Designs
Cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, handheld video games... the list goes on and on. Battery-powered systems are everywhere. One reason for such growth is the availability of batteries and power-management ICs that can support increasingly complex electronic systems. Figure 1 shows a typical power-management subsystem employed in a battery-based system. To be effective, these power-management subsystems must:...
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Sam Davis
[Leapfrog: First Look] Vector-Processing MCU Skimps On Power
Rule number one for designers of portables: Optimize the power usage in embedded applications for long battery life and efficient cooling. A number of options exists to reach this goal, whether it's powering down idle components within a system or creating a more efficient hardware design. Following in that mold is Philips' LPC3180 (Fig. 1). Based on the 32-bit ARM926EJ architecture, it's designed for battery operation...
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William Wong
[Ideas For Design] FET-OR Circuit Switches Between Main And Backup Supplies
The circuit of Figure 1 provides a "diode-OR" function for applications that must switch automatically between the main and backup supply voltages. Such applications include battery-backed memory supplies and any battery-operated device with a wall-adapter connection. For example, a battery-backed SRAM circuit (nonvolatile memory module) requires at least two power sources: a high-current active path for the SRAM memory...
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Bich Pham
[Ideas For Design] Battery Stack Drives Seven White LEDs
Illuminating more than one very bright white LED requires a choice of configuration, either series or parallel. Of course, each configuration has design tradeoffs. A parallel connection requires a lower voltage across each LED, yet ballast resistors or current sources are needed to accomplish matched light uniformity. Different levels of bias current, and thus light coming from each LED, create a disrupting light source. However, light matching with ballast resistors or current sources...
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Clayton B. Grantham
[Editorial] Will Moore's Law Run Into A Power Roadblock?
Welcome to One Powerful Issue, with a special focus on power—the unifying force in the designs you're working on, from the most compact in-ear Bluetooth headset to the fastest Global Hawk UAV. Power-integrity issues often are the most daunting challenge in staying on the roadmap for semiconductor scaling, the exponential downsizing anchored by Moore's Law. Indeed, the growing impact of power on system-on-a-chip design was one of the hot topics at last...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] New Power Technologies Will Reduce IT Operating Costs Significantly
Server power densities have increased dramatically over the last five years, from 800 W/ft2 to 1600 W/ft2. Also noteworthy is the fraction of data-center energy consumption by non-IT loads, which has grown to more than 50% of the center's energy budget. These significant increases in power density and energy use are pushing the energy component of cost-of-ownership to more than $5 million for a 500-kW data center over a 10-year life. This provides an opportunity to ...
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Gene Sheridan
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Autosave Stuff, Anyhow?
When I first began to type on a computerized word-processing system, I realized that a power outage was potentially disastrous. You could type a carefully crafted four-page memo, nicely polished, and it all would go away if the power went out—even for a second, or if somebody kicked the cord a little too hard. When I used the Coleco Adam, the process of saving was quite a big deal. Copying onto Adam's audiotape took well over two minutes, and you could prepare...
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Bob Pease
[Editor's Notebook] Protocols, PoE, And The Less-Is-More Objective
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Ericsson Power Modules has joined the Power Management Bus (PMBus) Implementers Forum. The company now can contribute to the development of a future, standardized digital power-management platform that it believes will benefit its customers in the short and long terms. The PMBus open-standard digital power-management protocol facilitates communication with a power converter or other device by defining the...
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Paul Whytock
[TechView: The Industry] Power-Management ICs Meet Application Needs With Higher Levels Of Integration
Power-management ICs continue to evolve to meet specific application requirements. For example, some multifunction power-manager ICs focus on portable power systems. These ICs answer the portable system manufacturers' need to develop small-size, high-performance, feature-packed products that permit shorter system development cycles. Occupying anywhere from 50% to 70% less board space than discrete solutions, these ICs combine voltage regulation,...
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Sam Davis
[TechView: Analog & Power] Fractional-Turn Transformer Helps Switcher Handle Any Output Range
Need a custom ac-dc switching supply for small production runs? Look at XP Power's RCL175 (see the figure). Designers can specify any voltage level up to the maximum rating of each output while maintaining full agency approvals for industrial, IT, and medical applications. It also suits Class I and Class II use (i.e., with or without a ground connection). Supplies come with one to four outputs: 3 to 60 V on output one, 5 to 60 V on...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] IC Provides Precise Digital Control Of Analog Supplies
For high-availability server and communications applications, Linear Technology's LTC2970 enables precise voltage control and I2C power-system monitoring in systems that use simple voltage-regulator chips. The LTC2970 uses a seven-channel, 14-bit delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to measure supply voltages, load currents, or internal die temperature. The ADC output is available via I2C for system monitoring. A "dash-1" version of the...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] System-On-A-Chip FPGAs Mix ASIC And Programmable Approaches
The LatticeSC family of system chips from Lattice Semiconductor melds some of the best features of ASIC technology and the flexibility of FPGA-based logic. This combination has yielded higher performance and more integration than previous FPGA solutions. These field-programmable system chips (FPSCs) include high-speed serializer-deserializer (SERDES) channels. In turn, these channels support data rates up to 3.4 Gbits/s. Also on the chips are high-speed parallel I/O...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Next-Generation Processor Delivers More On A Tight Power Budget
Users want more multimedia on their cell phones. That means more processing without increasing the power requirements. While that sounds like a tough task, Texas Instruments' next-generation OMAP3 processor fits the bill. This chip uses the ARM Cortex-A8 superscalar processor core along with an enhanced imaging video/audio accelerator (IVA 2+) subsystem. This subsystem handles streaming audio, video, video conferencing, and still-image capture and display. It...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Test] RF Vector Generator Targets Speed, Flexibility
Jumping into a new arena after 60 years in the test and measurement business, Keithley Instruments is introducing a line of RF instruments boasting speed and flexibility among its chief attributes. The company, whose forte for decades has been precision dc measurements, has introduced the Model 2910 RF vector signal generator. An RF signal analyzer and a power meter will follow. The generator employs a software-defined radio architecture, patent-pending synthesizer technology,...
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John Novellino
[TechView: Test] Software Options Automate Serial Jitter Test, PCI Express Multilane Receiver Test
When it comes to designing their products, electronics OEMs rely on standards now more than ever. This makes the availability of fast, accurate test systems critical in ensuring compliance with these standards. Two software suites for Agilent biterror-ratio testers (BERTs) seek to fill this need. A package for the N4903A serial BERT handles jitter-tolerance compliance testing for serial gigabit receivers. The second, the N5991A software option for the ...
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John Novellino
[TechView: EDA] Full-Chip Optimization Tool Boosts ICs' Yield And Performance
Two pressing issues loom for chip designers—the length of time it takes to achieve design closure and the difficulties in attaining acceptable fab yields. With what Cadence terms "manufacturing-aware" chip optimization, Chip Optimizer addresses both issues with a tool that eliminates oversimplified interconnect and process models. Chip Optimizer models, analyzes, and optimizes the true shapes represented in the physical design as well as the spaces between them. By doing...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] FPGA Design Analyzer Delivers A Two-Speed Grade Advantage
As FPGAs grow larger, incorporate more on-chip resources, and become more like ASICs in many ways, FPGA design flows must evolve with them. The latest iteration of the PlanAhead design analyzer follows on the heels of a revision of Xilinx's ISE design suite to forge a flow that brings performance and design advantages to users of the company's silicon. Version 8.1 of PlanAhead streamlines the step between synthesis and place and route to give designers more...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Tools Target Multivoltages
Multiple voltage islands have become a critical element of power management in system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. Two tools are now available from ArchPro Design Automation to automate the implementation and verification of these multivoltage designs. The MVRC voltage rule checker catches errors in voltage states at RTL. MVSYN can modify the RTL to support as many voltage domains as needed. Both can be used at RTL or at gate level in popular design flows. They also...
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David Maliniak
[Component View] Li-Ion Batteries Last Through Long Run Times
Eight new models in Valence Technology's U-Charge Power System lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery line perform well in applications with long run times. The RT and XP models are built with the company's proprietary Saphion technology, which eliminates many of the safety issues associated with traditional oxide-based Li-ion technologies to create safe, large-format rechargeable batteries. The four RT models feature built-in battery management for voltage, temperature,...
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Lisa Maliniak
