[Engineering Feature] Virtually Real
The days of the single processor are gone. The latest hardware accelerators let game designers forego canned explosions, delivering instead movie-like images and lifelike environments. Today, hardware acceleration means addressing basics like audio, video, and computation. But even the computation is being augmented by Ageia's new PhysX processor. It offloads the computations necessary to simulate the physical gaming environment...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] SystemVerilog Gains A Foothold In Verification
In its plain-vanilla form, the Verilog hardware description language is purely a designer's language that contains all of the constructs one would need to assemble an IC netlist for synthesis to gate level. But for today's extremely complex IC designs, it's unable to make the leap into the verification world. A couple of years ago, Accellera's SystemVerilog Working Group sought to build upon the foundation of Verilog and extend it with a rich set of verification capabilities. That...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] USB Branches Out
USB has long played the role of a single-host, peripheral link for mice, keyboards, and flash drive dongles. With the arrival of two new chips, however, USB will be turned on its proverbial head. Standard Microsystems' (SMSC) USB2524 lets two hosts control USB devices (Fig. 1). Newnham Research's USB-NIVO links any VGA display (Fig. 2). The video device driver in the PC drives...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Consider Fast Ethernet For Your Industrial Applications
With the increasing desire and necessity to deploy the Internet everywhere, the need for Industrial Ethernet is on the rise. RS-232 and RS-485 data transmission no longer satisfy industrial customers. Rather, these customers demand the benefits of Ethernet connectivity. The dual advantages of treating every data-acquisition node as an IP address or Web page, along with its extended reach and data rate, make Ethernet an ideal communication platform for industrial customers. Ethernet...
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Mike Jones
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Get Powerless Indication Of Video Signals For Less Than $1
Lots of modern monitors feature an indication of incoming video signals, even if the monitors are switched off. In most cases, an LED provides this indication by fading (slowly increasing and decreasing) its light intensity. This type of indication is very specific, and thus convenient, for use in other devices for the same purpose. Monitors typically stay connected to the power line, even when they're switched off. However, this doesn't apply for all video devices. Some may need...
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Oleg Ayranov
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Battery Backup Uses Delay To Avoid Glitches
The simplest link from a main supply and backup battery to a load is the diode-OR connection. But a diode-OR doesn't work when the backup battery's voltage exceeds the main supply voltage. The circuit in Figure 1 handles that condition. Its main switch-mode supply voltage ranges from 7 to 30 V, and the backup supply is a 9-V battery. IC1 is an ultra-low-power device that includes a comparator and a 1.182-V bandgap reference. During normal operation, the comparator output is low,...
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Robert Nicoletti
[POV: Point Of View] E-mail Is Broke! Authentication Can Fix It
Despite 1 billion people using e-mail every day and 80% of office workers valuing e-mail above the telephone, no other electronic medium suffers so greatly from abuse. Some 80 billion of the 100 billion e-mails sent each day are spam, ranging from the merely irritating to malevolent viruses to thieving phishing. We've had almost 25 years since the invention of e-mail to clean it up, but problems increase. Among the core problems is message spoofing, which phishing e-mails use to...
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Patrick Peterson
[Editorial] Hot Hands For Some Cool Rock: Motion Sensing Meets Audio Engineering
As an electric guitarist and rock aficionado, I was excited to see the recent announcement of a new company developing motion-controlled guitar effects—Source Audio, with its debut product, the Hot Hand controller. Hot Hand embeds an accelerometer into a ring you wear on your picking hand. A control box allows you to dial in various "wah" filters and frequencies, and a sensitivity control determines the effects via picking, strumming, or "flailing." (Flailing would be the...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: Just read your recent "Mailbox" column (ELECTRONIC DESIGN, March 16, p. 20). You commented on a reader (Mike Smolin) who stated that his tire dealer put nitrogen in his tires. There are good reasons for this. The main advantage is that nitrogen is dry, whereas compressed air has a lot of water vapor in it. (Ordinary compressed air may have some water vapor in it. A little. It may or may not have much. /rap) When the tires get hot the water boils and...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] The Transparent IC—Now You See It, Now You Don't!
John Wager, a professor of electrical engineering at Oregon State University, has to squint hard when he looks at his research team's latest invention, a transparent integrated-circuit. "You can put it in a window and not even know it's there," he says. The experimental five-stage circuit, a ring oscillator, promises to open the door to a new generation of see-through electronics. One possible application would be transparent backplane displays that appear to hang invisibly in...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Blue-Laser DVD Sales Will Soar—If Standards Fight Is Resolved
More than 10 years after the invention of their key enabling technology, blue lasers finally are starting to appear in PCs this year, bringing high-density DVD recording to computers for the first time. However, continuing standards battles could slow market acceptance of blue-laser DVD drives in 2006 and beyond. Blue lasers are engaged in a major standards battle. The Blu-ray Disc Association includes companies like Sony and Nichia, while the HD DVD Alliance counts Toshiba and...
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Krishna Chander
[TechView: Analog & Power] Controller Anticipates PoE Plus
Power over Ethernet Plus (PoEP) is still a work in progress. At its March meeting, the IEEE 802.3at PoEP Task Force was still considering test methods simply for evaluating the current-carrying capacity of bundled data wires, and most discussions centered on powered-device classification. Yet earlier this month, PowerDsine raised the stakes by introducing a highpower controller, the PD83000, for fourpair Ethernet-cable power delivery. Intended applications include video-screen...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Low-VTH Depletion-Mode MOSFETs Enable Zero-Power Monitoring And Supply Switching
Consider the newest precharged floating-gate MOSFETs from Advanced Linear Devices as very fast alternatives for normally closed relays that consume virtually zero power, and you won't go far wrong. (Typical turn-on and turn-off delay is 10 ns.) These dual and quad n-channel depletion-mode devices are attractive for fail-safe circuits in alarms, battery backup circuits, energy harvesting, alternative energy, and many other applications (see the...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Small RTOSs Tackle 32-Bit Microcontrollers
Vendors of 32-bit microcontrollers were out in force at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose in April. So were real-time operating-system (RTOS) vendors eyeing this lucrative platform. Linux and many other operating systems simply don't fit on resource-constrained microcontrollers with a limited flash memory and SRAM, but a number of existing and new compact RTOSs do. And this market is getting crowded. Express Logic's Threadx V5 offers a starting footprint that's under 6...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Java Gets Smaller And Smarter
Sun Microsystems showed off its new Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and an early access release of Java Real-Time System version 2.0 at San Jose's Embedded Systems Conference last month. The reduced-footprint Java SE platform now uses less than 23 Mbytes. Also, Sun's Java virtual machine (JVM) tuning service can improve performance from 25% to 200%. Adjustments that might be employed include the use of different garbage-collection models as well as the use of different...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Quad-Core DSP Targets Multimedia And Wireless Infrastructure
Multimedia and wireless infrastructure platforms require massive amounts of compute power—just like the kind that the MSC8144 from Freescale Semiconductor can deliver. This silicon-on-insulator (SOI) chip uses 90-nm technology. On-chip interfaces include an eight-port, 2048-channel time-division multiplexing (TDM) unit and a 1x/4x Serial RapidIO (SRIO). The chip also features a pair of Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a 500-MHz Utopia interface. The lower-speed UART and...
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William Wong
[TechView: EDA] IP Helps Characterize Intra-Die Process Variability
DFM techniques can go only so far in ironing out intra-die process variability. That's because DFM techniques to date haven't fully addressed parametric yield issues. Stratosphere Solutions, a Sunnyvalebased startup, thinks it has an answer to the acceleration of process yield ramps. In a nutshell, the key to comprehending and reducing design-related yield loss lies in statistical parametric characterization based on actual measured silicon data. Intra-die process...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Quadrature Modulator Advances Basestation Performance
Perhaps the most critical circuit in a broadband wireless system today is the modulator that translates the I and Q baseband signals into RF and upconverts them to the final operating frequency. Such circuits must have extremely low intermodulation distortion and noise but produce some useful gain. This requirement is especially critical in 3G cell-phone basestations where multiple wideband signals must be combined. Any quadrature modulator for new systems must exhibit some...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Quick Facts] Multibyte Arithmetic In An 8-Bit World
Why an 8-bit microcontroller needs more than 8-bit arithmetic: A wide range of control applications uses data with more than 8 bits of precision. Most 8-bit microcontrollers can handle limited, multibyte operations such as addition and subtraction through the use of subroutines and the arithmetic unit's carry flag. More complex operations can be built from these. Tradeoffs include performance and code space for the subroutines. Performance tends to be the biggest limiting...
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William Wong
