[Engineering Feature] Powerful Portables
If there was a motto for mobile computing, it most likely would say "take it with you." Even before Adam Osborne started Osborne Computer in 1981, computer users have wanted to carry the power of the mainframe, the mini, and then the micro along with them (see the timeline). A great deal has changed in 25 years. Two grand will snare you lots more compute power, all within the palm of your hand. Also, you needn't look for a phone for a...
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] E-Paper Chase Nears The Finish Line
Demonstrations of the latest in electronic paper technology indicate that it may finally be ready to "roll up" and "plug in" to the electronic office. E-paper comprises organic electronics that use conductive materials containing tiny balls of ink. These balls, which respond to electric charges, act like pixels on a computer display. They change in response to the charges in a process known as electrophoresis and electrochromism. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center originated...
—
Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] Power-Pinching WiMAX SoC Still Extends Range
WiMAX is coming—oh, you know, the broadband wireless technology that promises highspeed Internet service and other broadband offerings such as TV to homes and businesses, which will be in direct competition with entrenched DSL and cable TV. While few WiMAX ISPs have yet to be established in the U.S., several already exist in Europe and Asia. Like any new wireless technology, how successful WiMAX will be is really anyone's guess. Some people say it will compete with the...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] DFM Optimization Tool Drives Design Requirements To The Fab
The idea behind design-formanufacturing (DFM) products has been to bring design and manufacturing closer together. Yet designers look at the world based on performance, power consumption, and cost targets. They don't overtly concern themselves with manufacturing, and they take a dim view of any disruptive additions to their workflow or changes to how designs are handed off to physical design. However, lots of things in the manufacturing process can directly impact critical...
—
David Maliniak
[Design View / Design Solution] Jazz Up Consumer Products With Speech Recognition
Speech recognition historically has been constrained to PC-based systems, telephone servers, and high-end cell phones and PDAs. But advances in recent years have brought low-cost speech-recognition processors into the realm of consumer electronics. Today's speech-recognition processors contain more integration on chip, they're more accurate, and they're accompanied by better tools, making it relatively easy to add speech I/O to consumer products. Speech control of environmental...
—
Erich Adams
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Comparator-Based Circuits Easily Shift Voltage Level, Flip Polarity
BUDGE ING, Maxim Integrated Products Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Budge_Ing@maximhq.com Because digital systems often have only a single-polarity power supply, a common problem becomes translating an opposite-polarity pulse train into a positive-or negative-pulse output. Here are some simple circuits that can do the job easily and reliably. For positive-supply systems, the circuit of ...
—
Budge Ing
[Ideas For Design] PWM-To-RS-232 Translator Boasts Over 11-Bit Accuracy
WILLIAM GRILL, Honeywell Aerospace-Olathe, Olathe, Kansas william.grill@honeywell.com Over the years, many sensor monitor designs would have benefited by being able to have their encoded pulse-width modulation (PWM) data forwarded to and post-processed by a PC-based host. However you encode the PWM information, the PWM-to-RS-232 translator described here has a small footprint and a total cost under a few...
—
William Grill
[Editorial] From Luggable To Wearable: Musings On The Future Of Mobile Data
Seems like part of the fun of a career in the fast-changing world of electronics is sitting around reminiscing about the archaic computing products of days gone by. Put a group of techies together and often there's a conversation like the one our editors had over lunch the other day—some good laughs about the hilariously small amounts of memory that we thought were all we'd ever need (that PC with 250 megs!) and fond remembrances of the cutting-edge machines of their day—the...
—
Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] CORBA/e: Not Your Father's Distributed Architecture
What do battlefield robots, wireless basestations, air traffic control systems, sophisticated medical equipment, and the like have in common? They need a distributed communications architecture that has high reliability, high performance, and a small architecture must be powerful enough world's most sophisticated programming, power consumption and low cost. And there's one more thing. These systems same distributed communications middleware Yes, CORBA. These systems...
—
Joseph M. Jacob
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: When looking at datasheets or application notes that have the schematics of an IC in them, I often see very strange components; transistors with two, three, or even four collectors or emitters, and a component that looks like a capacitor where one plate is a resistor. The LM675 datasheet on page 5 has both of these. For example, check out Q12, Q15, Q16, and R23. Application Note 446B on the LM12 internal design also has these. On page 3, Figure 3, Q3 and Q4 have two...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] MIT Takes New Semiconductor Out For A Spin
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Francis Bitter Magnet Lab have developed a semiconductor that can improve the use of spintronics. This material could increase computing power while decreasing power consumption. Conventional electronics use an electron's charge state (current on or off) to carry, manipulate, or store information. But spintronics use the electron's spin state (up or down) to carry additional information. Portables like laptops and MP3 players...
—
Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] PoE Chip Mixes Logic And Power Devices To Kickstart New Applications
The relative dearth of recent power-over-Ethernet (PoE) product announcements made me think that 802.3af had hit some kind of plateau. Perhaps people are waiting for the IEEE 802.3af subcommittee to wrap up its classification issues and make some kind of general pronouncement about how the extra power in PoE-Plus would be delivered (see "Controller Anticipates PoE Plus," May 25, p. 26). Not quite. Silicon Laboratories has leapfrogged the competition in basic PoE...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Smart Design Squeezes 212-W AC-DC supply Into A 3- By 5-in. Footprint
Any week's e-mail includes new product announcements from power-supply OEMs, but I usually don't write about these releases unless they have something special to say about design. In fact, I'm encouraging companies that send me these announcements to explain how they engineered their products to be smaller, more efficient, more feature-packed, or whatever else might be their claim to fame. In this case, XP Power's EMA212 incorporates some interesting techniques to squeeze 212-W...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] C/C++ Compiler Targets Multicore Chips
Multicore chips bring more power to bear on a problem while lowering power consumption—but only if programmers can take advantage of their architecture. Parallelizing compilers for vector-processing single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architectures is well understood. Yet symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) processor arrays are another matter. CodePlay's auto-parallelization VectorC compiler makes this job manageable. Its approach is different from other explicit parallel...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Media Processor Drives DVD Recorder
The DVD recorder market is hot, and LSI Logic's DoMiNo media processors are fanning the flames. The DMN-8604 and DMN-8654 target such popular worldwide consumer electronics. The DMN-8604 is an entry-level chip designed for single-drive or VCR/DVD recorders with analog tuners. It also can be used in tunerless devices that typically will sell for less than $99. The DMN-8654 is designed for dualdrive hard-disk/DVD recorders. The chip adds a pair of USB 2.0 host interfaces...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] New Products
ARM9 Power Wireless Module Digi International's ConnectCore Wi-9C module houses an ARM926EJ-S processor with 802.11b/g support. It also has a 100BaseT connection and USB host and device support. The small-outline dualinline memory-module connector provides access to I/O support, including an LCD controller. The module can have up to 256 Mbytes of NAND flash and SDRAMand 8 Mbytes of NOR flash. It supports ThreadX, Windows CE, and Linux. Module pricing starts at $149....
—
William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Low Power, Multiple Cores At Spring Processor Forum
The theme at the Spring Processor Forum, held in San Jose last month, was cool—as in low power. Many products that were presented use different techniques to deliver more performance for fewer watts, such as a novel Forth-based multicore mesh from IntellaSys (see "Cores That Share Chores," June 8, 2006, p. 37). Element CXI utilizes a mesh of computing elements that fit between the basic FPGA functionality and computing blocks of complete processors (...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Chip Meets Standards For Low- And Mid-Range Digital TVs
The TC90400 targets low-to mid-range HDTV and DTV products with screens that typically measure less than 32 in. This chip from Toshiba supports standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) outputs as well as worldwide standards. FCC guidelines are driving demand for the chip. By March 1, 2007, all new televisions, DVD players, and VCRs will have to support the standards implemented by the TC90400, which can deliver 720p and 1080i digital resolutions. The 180-MHz...
—
William Wong
[TechView: EDA] Initiative Looks To Establish Low-Power Design Infrastructure
The "power problem" for today's large systems-on-a-chip and ASICs is becoming intractable. Process scaling no longer is a viable means of meeting power-management needs. A design-based solution to the problem is going to be required, especially with 65-nm processes coming online. The Power Forward Initiative is the EDA industry's effort to surmount the obstacles to lower-power IC design. Spearheaded by Cadence Design Systems, eight founding companies have joined in the effort to...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Sequential-Logic Equivalence Checker Gains Capacity And Speeds Up Runtimes
Checking functional equivalency between system-level models expressed in SystemC or C/C++ and their corresponding RTL representations is an important step toward making the high-level models useful in implementation. Calypto's SLEC sequential-logic equivalence checker, initially released last year, has been upgraded to even further solidify its position as an essential tool in flows starting from above RTL. Version 2.0 of SLEC increases capacity by 100 times for system-level...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Bluetooth EDR Apps Get Giant Range Boost From Tiny Power Amplifier
Bluetooth is a great short-range wireless technology for cell phones, laptops, PDAs, headsets, peripherals, and other devices. But it quickly runs out of steam when the range goes beyond 10 m. It's particularly troublesome with enhanced data rate (EDR) Bluetooth applications that use the full-bore 3-Mbit/s rate. SiGe Semiconductor's SE2425U power amplifier (PA) may have the solution (Fig. 1). The Bluetooth specifications include...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Active Power Mixer Performs To 4 GHz With Low Power Consumption
You can't get rid of the mixer in any RF or wireless product. That makes a good mixer the very core of every RF design. But you don't have to worry about that thanks to Linear Technology's LT5560. It can be used for upconversion or downconversion in public service radios, WiMAX transceivers, RFID readers, VHF/UHF transceivers, satellite receivers, or cell-phone basestations. Its operational frequency ranges from 10 kHz to 4 GHz. Its double-balanced mixer core design maximizes...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] SoC Soars In Satellite Radios
Beginning next year, customers for Sirius Satellite Radio products will be getting the new and greatly improved radio system-on-a-chip (SoC) from Agere Systems. The chip will find its way into automotive, home, portable, and navigation radios. Agere also designed and supplies the original Sirius chip. The new part offers a higher level of SoC integration, feature enhancements, lower power consumption, improved audio performance, and a significant size reduction. The Sirius...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Component View] Integration Shrinks Geared Motor Size
The TPM, a highly integrated geared motor (rotary actuator), is based on an ac servo motor and high-precision planetary gearing. This compact unit is less than half the size of a conventional motor and gear combination. Developed by Alpha Gear Drives, the TPM rotary actuator has an extremely high dynamic response. With an overall length of 186 mm, the TPM 50 builds up a maximum output torque of 500 nm at a mass moment of inertia of 2.9 kgcm2. The company claims that the dynamic...
—
Lisa Maliniak
