[Engineering Feature] To What Degree—MSEE Or MBA?
Thinking about pursuing a graduate degree? If so, you've got an important decision to make: Will it be an advanced technical degree, an MBA, or something in between? "I get this question from every student that comes and talks to me," says John Farr, director of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM) at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Most of the time, the question doesn't come from undergraduates. Farr says many engineers put off...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] Know The Way To San Jose For This Year's ESC, Or Else
This year's Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) is shaping up to be one of the hottest shows ever. Vendor expectations for the show, scheduled for April 3-7 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., reflect the cautious but generally upbeat economy. Visitors will find new technologies like PCI Express and Serial ATA as well as new processor architectures making big splashes. But don't be hypnotized by just the new developments. Plenty of refinements in existing...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Single-Chip Transceiver Brings 3G Handsets Up To Speed
The wait for 3G was like being stuck on hold, listening to an unending loop of the Muzak take on "The Wayward Wind." Fortunately, the wayward winds of 3G have stopped blowing, because its cell phones have finally arrived. And with 3G networks up and running in most major cities, service is finally available, too. Unfortunately, to this point, handset-manufacturer response has lagged. But the pace should pick up now, thanks to a faster, better way to implement a lower-cost 3G...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Solving The Wear And Tear Of Flash Memory
Hard disks have long used self-monitoring, analyses, and reporting technologies (SMARTs). Now, flash-memory disks can join the club. Flash memory-based systems have become successful because the lifetime of the flash subsystem is often much longer than the expected life of the product. (This is typically the case when there are infrequent writes to flash memory.) But while both indicate how long the media will be usable, differences exist between the two due to the underlying...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Follow Heuristic Guidelines To Make Surface-Mount PC-Board Footprints
Are you designing a pc-board (PCB) layout containing ICs or other components, but your PCB-layout software lacks footprints? Don't stress! Although it won't be optimized for production, you can quickly and easily create a PCB layout-package footprint that's suitable for prototyping. Starting with only the data sheet's package-dimension mechanical drawing, the guidelines that follow will enable you to quickly generate the needed PCB apertures, such as top copper footprint,...
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Lonne Mays
[Ideas For Design] Use Excel To Calculate A-D Level-Shifter Resistor Values
Many times, the need arises to interface single-supply analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and comparators to real-world signals like 5 V. Of course, it's possible to condition the signal using operational and/or instrumentation amplifiers. But few engineers realize that it's often possible to achieve the level shifting using a resistor network (Fig. 1). Critics of this technique point out that the resistor network can load the...
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Aubrey Kagan
[Ideas For Design] Tiny Circuit Saves Big On Relay Power
Designers frequently use special circuits to reduce the power required to hold a relay in the latched position. Analog circuits such as the "brute force" resistor-capacitor solution or the time-variable current sink tend to be very bulky or waste energy in the pass-transistor. The simple and small digital circuit shown in the figure energizes a relay coil at full power for the time required for reliable latch. It then automatically reduces the coil current by 50% to maintain the...
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James Stewart Campbell
[Ideas For Design] New Design Tools Can Make Your Analog Layouts "Shape Up"
There is no doubt that the challenge of designing analog integrated circuits gets more intense every day. Market demand and price pressures for end products reduce the design time . Add to that demanding performance and frequency requirements and burgeoning manufacturing issues and you have a potentially volatile mix. Although there' s plenty of ?time-to-market? talk, an increasingly important metric is time-to-yield. As a result, the analog portion of a design becomes critical to meet these...
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Mark Waller
[Editorial] Designers Have Some Breathing Room, But California Power Deadlines Loom
Those of you scrambling to meet the July deadline for the California Energy Commission's power-supply efficiency standards have gotten a bit of a reprieve—though you're not getting as much of an extension as the Consumer Electronics Association thinks you need. After intense negotiations between the CEC and CEA last month, California pushed the deadline for its mandatory power-supply standards from this July to January 2007. In addition to a no-load ceiling of 500 mW, the California...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Choice Of Process, Library Gets Complex At 130/90 nm
Gone are the days when "just get it right" summed up the job. Today, chips have to be right, cheap, and done yesterday. When developers search for shortcuts, they invariably choose the path of least resistance. To save time and mitigate risk, design teams gravitate toward familiar intellectual-property (IP) and process options and opt for the "free libraries" or "generic" fabrication technology. But as teams migrate to shrinking technology nodes, technical decisions become more...
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Adam Traidman
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: The letter from Dave Miller* reminded me of a recent tire episode and questions. The front tires of my Camry needed replacing. The dealer insisted that the new pair go on the rear (and rotated the rear tires to the front). He claimed that was now the recommendation of the tire manufacturers. I recall that new tires used to be put in the front. When did this change, and why? (What about the recommendation of the car manufacturer? Does its owner's manual give any...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Latest Amateur-Radio Satellite Is No Empty Suit
We've all heard references to clueless executives as "empty suits." But the old Russian Orlon spacesuit that crew members tossed out of the International Space Station (ISS) and into freefloating Earth orbit on February 3 was anything but empty. Rather, the event marked the deployment of SuitSat-1, an unusual experiment that has thrilled amateur-radio operators worldwide (Fig. 1). SuitSat carried an integrated amateur-radio...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Analog & Power] USB/AC-Adapter Battery-Charger IC Recharges Portables At Turbo Speed
The first product in a family of programmable lithium-batterycharger ICs for portable consumer applications is built around a 1-A current-mode step-down switching supply. Intended for USB or ac adapter power sources, Summit Microelectronics' SMB135 operates on input voltages from 4.35 to 6.0 V. (For applications where the ac adapter may be poorly regulated and/or an aftermarket product, the SMB135 can tolerate 10-V inputs without damage.) Charging the lithium-ion (Li-ion)...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Ethernet-Over-Sonet/SDH Mapper Offers Carrier-Class Features
Ethernet dominates the local-area network (LAN) space. However, carriers continue to use legacy plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH) T1/T3 formats. Also, Sonet and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) still dominate the metro-area network (MAN) and widearea network (WAN) arenas. Making the LAN and MAN worlds compatible requires the ability to put Ethernet packets efficiently into the synchronous optical system formats of Sonet and SDH. PMC-Sierra's next-generation PM4390 Arrow...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Metro Ethernet Access Switch Supports All Deployment Scenarios
Designers looking to break into the hot metro Ethernet market have a new tool. Accton's ES4826 MetroBox-AS Metro Ethernet access switch supports every deployment scenario, from pure Ethernet access for multitennant units to triple-play service aggregation of Internet Protocol (IP) digital-subscriber-line access multiplexer (DSLAM) and multiservices access network provisioned broadband networks. For metro access, the ES4826 features L2 switching and L3 routing with both IPv4 and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Speedy Dual-Port Memories Deliver Data At Up To 36 Gbits/s
According to their developer, Cypress Semiconductor, the latest FullFlex dual-port memories offer 150% more throughput than their competitors. With a maximum 36-Gbit/s throughput, the company says these chips also are the first dual ports to use 90-nm process technology. As a result, the FullFlex chips deliver performance compatible with wireless systems, image processing, instrumentation, and storage-area network and widearea network applications. FullFlex devices will range in...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Network Processors Make Easy Work Of Multilayer Application Acceleration
Ten additional devices in the Octeon family of system-on-a-chip processors from Cavium Networks deliver highly integrated solutions for next-generation wired networks, wireless networks, and control and storage applications. All of the models in the CN31XX and 30XX families are based on a single or dual 64-bit MIPS64 CPU core. These processors integrate multilayer application acceleration, security processing hardware, and a wide range of networking I/O options. They also...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] IP And PHY Chip Team Up For HDMI Solutions
Designers can use Silicon Image's latest intellectual property (IP) and a companion physical-layer (PHY) interface chip to implement high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) receiver and transmitter solutions. Fully compliant with the HDMI 1.1 specification, the transmit and receive blocks are available as soft register transfer level (RTL) cores that are foundry and process independent. The companion Sil 9002 transmit PHY chip fully complies with HDMI 1.1 and 1.2 standards...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: Digital] Integrate DVD Functions And Reduce Costs
Two chips integrate most ATSC HDTV DVD recorder functions. This significantly reduces the bill-of-materials cost of implementing HD digital video recorders by $15 or more. The DoMiNo 8633 and 8683 from LSI Logic perform full high-definition (HD) decoding and display, HD timeshifting, and DVD recording (see the figure). The chips can decode MPEG-2 streams with MP@HL and MP@ML resolution. They also can perform complete ATSC format...
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Dave Bursky
[TechView: EDA] In IC Design, You Can't Debug What You Can't See
It's getting harder in today's IC design flows to observe on-chip signal data. In full-chip regression simulation runs, dumping all signals for analysis is prohibitively expensive. Thus, designers must become selective. The problem intensifies in emulation, prototyping, and actual-chip observation, because access to signal data requires the insertion of logic structures into the physical hardware. Seeking to overcome "the visibility problem," Novas Software has introduced its...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Design Environment Simplifies The Design Process
Many of the bottlenecks in complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) design projects aren't really related to design itself, but rather to the design process. Factors such as multisite development work, staffing issues, and the quality of libraries and third-party IP aren't quite up there with timing closure, but they're quietly becoming problematic. Synopsys' Professional Services organization has put together what it hopes is an answer to these design-process issues in the Pilot Design...
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David Maliniak
[Component View] Biometric Sensor Has The Touch For PC Security
A tiny fingerprint sensor provides a comprehensive answer for protecting PC users against security threats like identity theft, forgotten passwords, and fake finger spoofing. The EntrePad 1610 is built to take advantage of the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) version 1.2 Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specifications and Microsoft Vista Secure Startup. The sensor offers secure matcher and local fingerprint template storage in sensor flash instead of on the hard-disk...
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Lisa Maliniak
[Basics Of Design] Model-Based Design
Target platforms needed to be the first choice when developing systems using assembler. Moving on to C, designers had more flexibility. But they were quickly locked into a specific target as the run-time libraries prevented migration to different platforms. This progression leads to model-based design. Targets, Targets, Targets Platform choice was less of an issue when there were fewer targets available. Yet these days, the options are mindboggling....
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] LAN eXtensions For Instrumentation (LXI)
What is LXI? LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI) is the architecture for test systems. It's based on proven, widely used standards such as Ethernet. What are these widely used standards? Ethernet standards include Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and Auto-MDIX (Media Dependent Interface Crossover). Interface standards include Interchangeable Virtual Instrument (IVI) driver and...
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Roger Allan
