[Engineering Feature] Reconnecting The Connected Home
When researchers at the U.S. Department of Defense commissioned the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) to share data among agencies 50 years ago, they never could have imagined the importance such a network would one day have in the home. Hundreds of millions ofusers around the world now use their home network not only to share information but also toenjoy music, watch TV, talk on the phone, and play video games as realistic as life...
—
Christine Hintze
[Engineering Feature] Memory Front And Center
Intel keeps the processor chips simpler by leaving the memory and I/O interface chores to a central memory host controller (MHC). This has some advantages, including different system support using a common set of processor chips. Even so, Intel and AMD have distinct families for single-chip and mobile solutions. Intel's Xeon has larger caches and faster I/O than its Core 2 line, in addition to external cache support. This approach doesn't dictate a single chip for the MHC....
—
William Wong
[Technology Report] The Ultimate Test Drive: High-Octane Oscilloscopes
Most electronic engineers use an oscilloscope, so they know what they are, how they work, and how to apply them (Fig. 1). Right? Well, sort of. Most of today's scopes are digital storage (or sampling) oscilloscopes (DSOs), which tend to be rather complex and sophisticated animals....
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Turn Stream Processing Into A Raging River
PCI Express' impact on high-performance systems has become rather interesting now that interface standards like AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) are essentially dead. These days, high-end graphics link to a host via an x16 PCI Express (PCIe) connection. Some motherboards have a single x16 connection. But many high-end systems feature multiple slots, opening up options for products like AMD's Stream Processor. The Stream Processor is really nothing more than a customized graphics...
—
William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Gain Abstraction And Accuracy From RTL Power Estimation
Excessive power consumption can destroy a design’s commercial viability. Modern cell phones are permitted to consume no more than a few hundred milliwatts for voice communications. Yet in the past, designers were forced to estimate power consumption using a manual spreadsheet approach with inaccuracies of scores of milliwatts. Worse, the design of an advanced 3G phone with multiple functions—camera, video, audio, and data connectivity—will be especially power-critical....
—
Rajat Sewal
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Create A High Input Impedance, Rail-To-Rail Measurement System
Two very desirable features for a precision measurement system based on an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are high input impedance and a wide input range, ideally including or extending slightly beyond the power-supply rails. The circuit described here does just that. Its very high input impedance is complemented by an input range that extends 300 mV beyond the supply rails. The example circuit uses a thermocouple and a resistance temperature detector (RTD) connected to...
—
Mark Thoren
[Ideas For Design] Simplified AC Line Sensor Uses Few Parts, Little Real Estate
Typically, ac line sensors use comparators. But I had to design a power supply to be as low in cost as possible, be self-powered, use through-hole components, and take up as little space as possible on a small two-sided pc board. So I developed the simplest ac sensor possible. The resulting circuit senses the high-voltage dc bus (...
—
Alan Adamsky
[POV: Point Of View] Leverage Technology Advances To Support 3G Wireless Applications
Much has been written lately about the expansion of 3G networks in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Asia, for example, has been zealous in its adoption of next-generation wireless services. In Europe and the Americas, though, the deployment of 3G networks hasn't been as swift. Ongoing flattening or even declining capital expenditure spending has slowed network deployment and will prevent the implementation of 3G services until a predictable quality of service can be guaranteed. ...
—
Bill Vassilakis
[Editorial] Hard Times Ahead For Hard Drives—And The People Who Depend On Them
My PC dependency really hit me hard when my home desktop and my laptop simultaneously decided to go belly-up. While I'm pretty beholden to our IT experts at the office, at home, I'm the help desk. I've been scrambling to try to resuscitate both machines, particularly since my kids completely rely on the PC and the Internet for school projects. Things were so unstable, I nagged the kids to save frequently onto USB sticks. That way, anticipating the next crash, at least their...
—
Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: I was just reading your column in the Nov. 16, 2006 issue of Electronic Design ("What's All This SiO2 Stuff, Anyhow?" p. 18) and had some insights. The silicon dioxide (SiO2) added to foods for anti-caking is a little bit different from sand. Chemically, it's the same, but it's made by dissolving SiO2 in some really nasty acids and then flashing the acids off. What's left looks like a semi-solid fog. My old boss used to...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Hot Technology Produces Cool Chips
University of Washington researchers believe their ion pump marks the coolest research breakthrough in decades. That's because the tiny device does only one thing—it cools chips. As chips get smaller and denser, they also run hotter. Yet while chip performance has advanced remarkably over the past several decades, cooling technologies have remained largely unchanged. When faced with the need to dissipate heat, designers continue to turn to passive heatsinks...
—
John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] Sorting Out The Requirements For Windows Vista
As Microsoft launches its new PC operating system, Windows Vista, anxiety levels are rising for both IT managers and consumers who have become comfortable with using and administering the previous version of the software, Windows XP. Despite the upheaval such a release brings, the PC industry has undergone many upgrades in its history, and Vista will be no different. According to Microsoft, Vista will require at least an 800-MHz, 32or 64-bit microprocessor with 512 Mbytes of...
—
Matthew Wilkins
[TechView: Analog & Power] Dual 14-Bit 150-Msample/s ADC Provides AGC Input For Receivers
Meeting the need for analog-to-digital converter (ADC) sampling at rates beyond 135 Msamples/s in WiMAX applications, Analog Devices' AD9640 is the first dual 14-bit analog-todigital converter (ADC) to offer 150 Msamples/s. It provides two ADCs in the same footprint as previous single ADCs with the same performance. Also, it offers an onchip clock divider and digital inputs to the receiver-system automatic gain control (AGC) circuitry (...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Versatile Level-Translator Fills A Common Need
There are lots of ways to shift logic levels. But for versatility in a small footprint, it's hard to beat Fairchild's FXL2TD245 dual-supply bi-directional translator, with its configurability for both uni-directional and independent bi-directional voltage translation between two logic levels. The chip permits translation between levels from 3.6 V down to 1.1 V (...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] MoCA Challenges Wireless For Home Networking Dominance
The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) sponsors a home networking technology that's significantly growing in popularity thanks to the need to transport video and audio around the home between consumer electronics. Its goal is to ensure a reliable network with the simplicity, reliability, and quality of service to ensure triple-play delivery. MoCA's technology is a closely held secret unless you pony up the $12,000 membership fee, though. Essentially, it uses the...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] North + South = West?
Life is full of funny scenarios, like the two situations where north + south = west. In Silicon Valley, 680 South becomes 280 North, even though you're really headed west. And second, Cypress Semiconductor's West Bridge product line integrates the functionality of traditional North and South bridges. Of course, the first West Bridge product is named after an actual Bay Area bridge—the Antioch. But unlike its real-world counterpart, Cypress' bridge can never be overloaded...
—
Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Eight SOI Advantages Every Designer Should Exploit
Silicon-on-insulator (SOI), a semiconductor process technology available today in mass production, offers many advantages to chip designers over traditional generic CMOS: Speed: Exploiting the floating-body effect of an SOI transistor allows a current drive increase that directly translates to a significant speed improvement. Power: When using thin silicon, a near ideal subthreshold slope can be achieved in SOI transistors. ...
—
Pierre Fazan
[TechView: Digital] New GPU Promises Revolution
The Cuda, which is the latest graphics processing unit (GPU) from Nvidia, promises to revolutionize applications such as product design, data analysis, and game physics. Hundreds of on-chip cores will process these mathematically intensive applications simultaneously. Nvidia says the Cuda can process complex problems up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches. ...
—
Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] ASIC Verification Technology Brings Bugs To Their Knees
In an ideal world, ASIC verification would combine the bug visibility of simulation with the speed of FPGA prototype-based techniques. Synplicity's Total Recall technology is an attempt to achieve just that. Total Recall technology allows the capture of all signals within a design (either a module or full chip), including memory states, across a user-defined number of cycles prior to the point at which a trigger condition is met or an assertion fires. The complete design...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] FPGA Design Tool Suite Shortens Runtimes And Facilitates Incremental Design
FPGAs are getting larger and larger, as evidenced by Xilinx's Virtex-5 devices, which are produced on a 65-nm process. Designers want faster runtimes for their FPGA tools as well as other features that let them reach timing closure more rapidly. Version 9.1i of Xilinx's Integrated Software Environment (ISE) offers those runtime improvements, along with what the company calls "SmartCompile technology," which offers a further runtime boost. In addition, SmartCompile allows...
—
David Maliniak
[Engineering Essentials] Multicore My Way
Multicore designs are all the rage, and the reasons why are easy to understand. Faster clock rates are shooting power consumption and heat dissipation through the roof. Major architectural improvements have been implemented, and larger caches simply take up space. If all things were linearly related, tradeoffs would be more interesting. But in practice, using more processor cores running at a lower clock rate provides more throughput while consuming less power. Sun...
—
William Wong
