[Engineering Feature] Hot Chips 18 Serves Up Another Summer Scorcher
A buffet of presentations covering video processing, processors and parallel processing, memory technologies, communications, and novel silicon applications is sure to keep just about every attendee's plate full at this year's Hot Chips show. Overall, 27 presentations, two keynote addresses, two tutorials, and two panels are on tap (see the table) for Aug. 20-22 at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. Justin...
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Daniel Harris
[Technology Report] Choosing The Right DSC For Your Application
What should you use, a digital signal controller (DSC) or a conventional microcontroller? Designers frequently face that question, especially when an application sits on the boundary of the performance envelope. Because DSCs span a wide range of performance and functionality, choosing the right DSC for a particular application can be daunting. Issues such as battery operation and cost are often as important as performance and hardware support for a particular ...
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Steve Marsh
[Technology Report] Overcoming The Challenges Of Moving To Full Digital Power-Supply Control
With the advent of cost-effective and powerful processors in the marketplace, digital solutions have entered a number of what were previously purely analog systems. For example, high-quality electric motors today are almost exclusively digitally controlled, using microcontrollers or DSPs. Motor speed and torque can be variably and precisely set due to the secondary control of current and voltage. This isn't yet the case in related applications, such as current or voltage supply in...
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Sangmin Chon
[Technology Report] Graphical Programming For Embedded Systems
I've always been a fan of pot pie. Why have a chicken breast, a side of mixed vegetables, and pie for dessert when you can just cram them all into one neat little package? Besides, if I eat pot pie for dinner, there's more room on my plate for cranberry sauce. Technology appears to share my fondness for the elegance of pot pie. As cell phones metamorphose into media players, PDAs, and even high-definition TVs, the features required by the underlying processors begin to add up....
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P.J. Tanzillo
[Technology Report] Making The Blackfin Perform
Optimizing source code to run on a specific platform can be challenging. While code-creation tools are improving, they haven't kept up with the rapidly increasing functionality and complexity of processors. The more complex the hardware architecture, the harder it is to program in assembly language. This creates the need for abstraction via a robust C compiler or operating system. But since not all compilers handle source code in the same manner, you may need to rewrite your C...
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Robin Getz
[Technology Report] DSCs—The Right Size For The Right Task
What do streaming audio, motor control, and power conversion have in common? Digital signal controllers (DSCs) to solve the problem. These DSP wolves in microcontroller clothing combine the integer number-crunching of a DSP with the peripherals and onboard memory of a microcontroller, providing single-chip solutions for a range of applications. Generally, DSCs continuously process the same kind of information. And usually it's with tight timing tolerances,...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] LabVIEW's 20th Anniversary Edition Emphasizes Communications Test
After two decades, LabView still ranks among the most well-known, influential, and widely used engineering software. First announced by National Instruments in the April 17, 1986 issue of Electronic Design (Fig. 1), the company now unveils LabVIEW's 20th anniversary edition, which comes with some features geared for the communications demands of the 21st century . SO WHAT'S...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design View / Design Solution] Drive And Control Electronics Enhance The Brushless Motor's Advantages
As recently as two years ago, brushless motors were significantly more expensive than brush motors. However, advances in design and materials have triggered dramatic price drops in brushless motors. Today, the cost differential between these two motor technologies is only about 10%. Brushless motors with the same horsepower as brush motors are smaller and lighter. Because they lack this brush-commutator interface, brushless motors exhibit lower acoustic noise....
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Sam Robinson
[Ideas For Design] A Little Intelligence Goes A Long Way In Power-Supply Design
Switch-mode power supplies (SMPSs) traditionally are implemented using a basic analog control loop. But recent advances in digital signal controllers (DSCs) enable designs that begin to make fully digital control schemes practical and economical. Still, early adoption of this technology is expected to be in high-end applications, where the benefits of full digital control are the most immediate. Yet many analog power...
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Lucio Di Jasio
[POV: Point Of View] Choose The Right Partner For Your ASIC Life Cycle
According to Gartner Inc., the semiconductor industry achieved record revenue in 2005, and consumer ASICs (14% growth) and wireless ASICs (9% growth) played a significant role. But as the ASIC market continues to grow, ASIC designers face a mounting number of challenges, often requiring the assistance of strategic partners. Time-to-market pressures keep increasing. Global supply-chain management is becoming a bigger problem. And, ASIC design complexities are...
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Kazu Yamada
[Editorial] One Small Step For An Engineer, One Giant Leap For Engineering
Engineers often say they don't get the same respect they did back in NASA's golden era, when the whole world cheered Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. So it's refreshing to attend an event that spotlights the engineer and the universal impact of innovative design. That focus is what makes the annual Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) a big hit with the design engineers who attend. This year's FTF, held July 24-27 in Orlando, Fla., was no exception. The importance...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: It's funny you used that circuit to demonstrate "Error Budget," as we recently went through this exercise with the exact same circuit as Figure 1 (see "What's All This Error Budget Stuff, Anyhow?" June 8, p. 18). Too bad it was only done after we discovered the problem while we were evaluating a production run. (Ouch! The circuit of Figure 2 is cheap, but the first circuit is less accurate, even if you shop for 6-cent 0.1% resistors. /rap) A...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Roadster Charges Up The Electric Car
Electric cars aren't a joke anymore. Tesla Motors will make you forget all about their boxy styling, sluggish acceleration, and limited range with its sleek, environmentally friendly Roadster (Fig. 1). Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarppening in 2003, the company set out to build a green car that doesn't compromise on looks, performance, or efficiency. Previous electric cars only had a range of 60 to 80...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Hot Air + Flywheel = A Bridge Supply With Longer Endurance
Bridge power is an interesting niche in the power-supply world because of the way it continually turns to outside-the-box technology. Bridge supplies are a subset of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) for data centers and telecommunications central offices (COs). They're only called upon to supply power for the seconds or minutes that elapse between a utility failure and the time the normal UPS is fully online, or until power is restored. The battery bank mandated for all...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] More Cortex-M3 Microcontrollers
Prices for 32-bit microcontrollers continue to drop as Luminary Micro releases a new crop of 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3-based chips under $6. The 25/50-MHz Stellaris chips incorporate a 100-mA, 2.5-V low-dropout voltage regulator, brownout detection/power-on reset, and a temperature sensor. While these features are common in 8-bit micros, typically they're external components in many 32-bit solutions. Assembler need not apply, as the system is designed for complete...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Development Kit For New 32-Bit MCU Targets Multimedia, POS, And SOHO Applications
Developers looking to get their hands on Atmel's newest AVR32 microcontroller can do so for only $499. The STK1000 has an AT32AP7000 with 32 kbytes of on-chip SRAM and 16 kbytes of instruction and data caches on a carrier boad. The main board has 8 Mbytes of flash and 8 Mbytes of SDRAM, a 3.5-in. (320 by 240) TFTLCD display, an audio digital-to-analog converter, and connectors for VGA, Ethernet, USB, CompactFlash, and SD card inerfaces. The JTAGICE mkII emulator for...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] SPARC Applications Run Faster On Xeon Via Virtualization Technology
Transitive's QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/Xeon is one of a series of virtualization products that let applications run on different target hardware. This approach can be used for hardware and application migration. In this case, Solaris applications compiled for the SPARC RISC platform run under sLinux on an Intel Xeon processor. In many cases, the applications run faster than they do on SPARC servers. Dynamic translation allows unmodified SPARC applications...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Pondering: Which Technologies Will "Hit The Wall"?
We're in the era of GHz, Gbits/s, nm, and ULSI. But the laws of physics as we know them ultimately predict that, at some point, we won't be able to go faster or get smaller. What technologies will hit the wall in the near future, and what will be done about it? E-mail your responses to dharris@penton.com ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Address-Data Multiplexed NOR Flash Targets Mobile Phones
The mobile-phone market totals a billion new handsets each year, so any chip that can cut system cost deserves attention. With this in mind, STMicroelectronics' AD MUX I/O family of NOR flash memory multiplexes address and data on the same pins (see the figure). These devices drive down the cost of mobile platforms, enabling cell-phone manufacturers to penetrate cost-sensitive markets. The address and data pins are...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] Integrated DFM Technology Takes Aim At 65-nm Designs
You can pick your poison when it comes to implementation flows. Chips can be taped out with flows from any of the three major vendors that offer them (Cadence, Magma, and Synopsys). But it's increasingly clear that at 65 nm and below, an integrated flow is essential to first-silicon success. This is especially true of DFM methodologies, in which characterized process data must be kept consistent throughout the implementation flow. To meet designers' needs in the DFM...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Tool Sorts Out The Relationship Between SoC Leakage Current And Temperature
For designs at 90 nm and below, leakage-current management has become a key design challenge. To accurately analyze chip leakage, designers must consider the temperature variation of the chip based on transistor switching current. Apache's Sahara-PTE offers an integrated means of analyzing the impact of a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design's temperature on leakage, timing, reliability, and voltage drop. Based on 3D thermal models and on the simulation kernel from Apache's RedHawk,...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Cheap Chip Makes ULCHs Even More Affordable
What's the fastest growing segment of the cell-phone industry? It isn't multimedia smart phones. In fact, it's the opposite— ultra-low-cost handsets (ULCHs). Silicon Laboratories says that 71% of all new worldwide subscribers from 2006 to 2010 will be in developing nations, as long as these basic, no-frills phones are cheap enough. Also, the number of potential subscribers will grow from 181 million to 321 million from 2007 to 2009. Silicon Labs hopes to fuel that growth...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Single-Chip TV Tuner Covers All Major Analog And Digital TV Standards
One of the last consumer electronic circuits to yield to integration was the TV tuner. Today, tuners can be put on a single chip. Infineon Technologies' Taifun TUA 6039 bipolar/CMOS tuner integrates the RF and IF functions into a single package. Designed for TV sets and set-top boxes, the TUA 6039 reduces pc-board space and power consumption by 50% compared to previous generations. It covers three RF bands and includes the IF automatic gain control amplifier as well as...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design FAQs] Hot-Swapping And Digital Power Monitoring
What is hot-swapping? During hot-swapping, a module can be plugged into or unplugged from a live supply bus without affecting the overall system operation. The idea probably comes from telephone line cards, whose edge connectors were designed with fingers of different lengths. When the cards were inserted into the backplane, ground was always connected first, followed by the power bus and the I/O pins. That was sufficient for the simple and robust electronics of the...
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Don Tuite
