[Engineering Feature] Ready For WiMAX?
It seems like it takes forever for any new wireless technology to work its way from initial idea through standards adoption to useful products. After the long development cycles of 3G cell phones, Bluetooth, Zig-Bee, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), and Wi-Fi (including 802.11n), you have to wonder if something is wrong with the system. When you dig below the veneer of hype, though, you can see that WiMAX is moving forward just fine. It isn't a perfect technology, but it...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] The Elusive Software-Defined Radio
Software-defined radio (SDR) represents the future for some wireless technologies, but it's still a work in progress. Like any technology, it's followed an evolutionary path as components and practices continue to improve. Its adoption is more widespread, too, as chips track Moore's law and as better software comes along. SDR is a moving target. Its current "reality" is relatively small today, but its definition and place in the industry continues to evolve. Cell...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Poly-Band Mobile Broadcast Tuner Makes Adding Radio/TV A Snap
The mobile nature of broadcast radios and TVs becomes more evident all the time, appearing in myriad devices like cell phones and MP3 players. For example, take analog radio. There's AM and FM. Or, try a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency FM weather radio or an AM shortwave radio for the 3- to 30-MHz band. Neither is easy. Then there's digital radio. The more common digital formats are Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), each with its own unique...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design View / Design Solution] Build A Phased Array On A Wafer To Boost Antenna Performance
The need for significant improvements in radar continues to be an ongoing concern for the Department of Defense (DoD). One of the most impressive developments addressing this need is a high-resolution RF beam-forming system using phased-array antennas. While phased arrays are far from new, a new wafer-scale antenna demonstrates important benefits that can support low-power-density arrays for a variety of radar applications. In the military arena, uses include: ...
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Fred Mohamadi
[Ideas For Design] Novel Differentiator Handles Discrete Time-Domain Signals
This Design Brief introduces a computationally efficient network that computes the derivative of a discrete time-domain (digital) sequence. While recursive differentiating networks exist, this article describes a simple tapped-delay line (finite impulse response or FIR) differentiator that has guaranteed linear phase. Although the idea of differentiation is well-defined in the world of continuous signals, that's not the case for discrete signals. Fortunately,...
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Richard Lyons
[Ideas For Design] Add Caliber Determination To Gunshot Detectors
Many communities are installing gunshot detectors on lamp poles to help triangulate the location of gunfire during holidays or to help in responding to "shots fired" 911 calls. Besides location, another piece of useful information is the caliber of the gun that was shot. Fortunately, studies have shown that each caliber has a distinct noise spectrum. Police can use this spectrum to identify the gun's caliber, rather than using loudness, which isn't reliable. The circuit...
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John R. Ambrose
[Editorial] Technology Takes Kids From Toys To Engineering Careers
My son Joe is gaming via our Wi-Fi connection, lying on the couch with his Nintendo DS, racing Mario Kart drivers from around the globe. One teenage daughter, Anna, is up in her room lounging about and chatting and texting on her cell phone. My other daughter Sarah is sprawled out, watching one of the 400 or so channels that beam down from DirectTV's satellite. I'm wireless too, but working, writing this from the back porch. Yes, wireless is everywhere. (And giving...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] ZigBee Or 802.15.4 Network Layer—Is There Room For Both?
ZigBee applications are different from other wireless networking applications, such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, CDMA, GSM, and Bluetooth. In these latter applications, the network is the application. With 802.15.4 or ZigBee, the wireless network isn't the primary application. It's the means to implement wireless communication in a primary sensing and control application, such as security, climate control, or lighting systems. A wireless network is just one of several communication...
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Chris Baumann
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: In today's Wall Street Journal, there's a full article on A4 concerning hydraulic hybrids. It was developed by the EPA, which has a small lab. UPS trucks are being used for testing, but garbage trucks will be the first commercial use. (I wonder what the standard "driving cycle" is for a UPS truck. It must be quite different from the EPA cycle for cars. Many parts of that cycle might have a lot of stopandgo, but not all—not to mention the typical garbage...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] With ZigBee Mesh Network, Remote Caregivers Keep Tabs On Patients
This year, almost 3 million Americans will turn 60. While rapid advances in health care are keeping people healthier longer, designers are increasingly looking for ways to enable individuals with medical problems to care for themselves in their own home. Wireless developer Cambridge Consultants is exploring how wireless technology can be used to implement home monitoring networks for the elderly and vulnerable. The company demonstrated a mobile telemetry...
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Christine Hintze
[TechView: The Industry] Mobile Phone Sales Top $4.4 Billion So Far In 2006
The mobile phone market is as hot as ever, according to the NPD Group. The market research company says that U.S. consumer sales totaled 67 million units for the first half of 2006. That figure is 2% smaller than the total for the last six months of 2005, but it still was good enough for a $4.4 billion tally after rebates and promotions. "There was a small, seasonal drop during the first half of this year, compared to the second half of last year," said Neil Strother, research...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Antenna-Analyzer Designer Bypasses The Business Bull
Conventional wisdom (and your neighborhood venture capitalist) says you can't go to market with a new product until you have a business plan, a second mortgage, an offshore manufacturing contract, and sales projections that guarantee 20% return on investment (for the VC). But here's a wireless product that an engineer with a day job worked up on his home workbench in his spare time. He then productized and released it to a domestic manufacturer that markets it through a small...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Visual Design Tool Tackles Multiple MCUs
Graphical design tools simplify design and decrease development times by enabling designers to concentrate on the application instead of the syntax of the underlying software. That's why I was excited to try out the latest PSoC Express from Cypress Semiconductor. It's much more polished and functional than the initial version I looked at about a year ago (see "Soft MCU Goes Graphical" at ...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] RTOS Handles Dual-Core Bound And Symmetrical Multiprocessing
QNX has added Freescale's 1.5-GHz dual e600 Power core MPC8641D support to its collection of Neutrino real-time operating-system (RTOS) platforms. The microkernel-based QNX Neutrino supports bound multiprocessing (BMP), where each core supports dedicated applications, or symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), where applications run on the next available core. The RTOS can dynamically switch between BMP and SMP modes. The Eclipse-based QNX Momentics development suite...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] 64-Bit Processor Line Cuts Mobile Power Consumption With Dynamic Cache Sizing
Intel's latest releases of its 64-bit Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors incorporate a number of enhancements, including power-management features targeted at mobile devices. The desktop and server versions incorporate Intel's Advanced Smart Cache for its dual-core chips, which include a shared L2 cache that allows full utilization by a single core if the other core is idle. The mobile versions' Deeper Sleep with Dynamic Cache Sizing feature will flush the cache during periods of...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] FPGA Delivers SPI-4.2 Core Built On Low-Cost Fabric
If you've grown tired of purchasing premium FPGAs to gain the benefit of a full-rate SPI-4.2 bridge core supporting complex packet flow and traffic management, consider the Economy Plus 2 (ECP2) family from Lattice Semiconductor. With up to 70K look-up tables (LUTs) at your disposal, the fewer than 5K LUTs required for a soft IP core that fully complies with the Optical Internet-working Forum's SPI-4.2 standard will leave you with plenty of extra logic to work with....
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Digital Design Tip: A Few HDL "No-Nos"
If you're designing a circuit in a high-level design language like Verilog or VHDL, there are a few simple rules to follow to ensure the synthesizer generates the intended circuit. First, avoid using both positive and negative edge-triggered flip-flops for the same clock signal. Triggering flip-flops off different edges of the same clock likely will result in one or more inverters being introduced into the clock path. This normally will cause an unwanted skew in the clock signal....
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Pondering: Internet Access On Airplanes
Does the thought of JetBlue offering Internet access give you the blues? Do you expect this to lead to cheaper in-flight calls using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and passengers screaming into VoIP phones, just like people screaming into their phones in restaurants? How annoying will that be? Shouldn't this raise some red flags for security? E-mail your responses to dharris@penton ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] PC-Board Design Suite Spans Layout, Schematic Capture, Routing, And Library Development
Sporting a layout module, an autorouter, schematic capture, and component/ pattern editors, Novarm's latest version of its DipTrace 1.23 PCB design software application package features a PCB Layout module, a powerful auto-router, schematic capture, and component/pattern editors, enabling board designers to develop their own component libraries. The easy-to-learn package provides an intuitive user interface and many features that can help simplify the pc-board design process. For...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] NFC Makes Great Progress In The Wireless World
It's an invisible part of our everyday lives, but in today's world, we can't get by without it. Short-range wireless is one of the most pervasive and important radio communications technologies. Ranging from 125 kHz to infrared (IR), applications are all over the place, from IR remote control to wireless broadband. And that just scratches the surface. The slew of standards and protocols includes 802.11 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zig-Bee, Gen2 RFID, Z-Wave, IrDA, and WiMAX, so there's...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Component View] Termination Resistor Runs At 40 GHz
Tt electronics' IRC Advanced Film Division has developed a microwave/RF termination resistor rated for operation at frequencies up to 40 GHz, giving designers a rugged resistive device specifically designed for transmission-line termination at high frequencies.
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Lisa Maliniak
