[Engineering Feature] The Telemetric Way To Weight Loss
Severe obesity is a major health issue in the Western world, particularly in the U.S. In addition to diet and exercise, the use of laproscopic surgically implanted bariatric bands has experienced a surge in popularity over the last few years. In fact, it's gaining more favor over other drastic stomach bypass procedures. According to the Millennium Research Group, the laproscopic bariatric device market, which includes gastric bands and devices like extended-length hand instruments, is...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Eye Pattern Sample Size And Clocking
Instruments such as those in LeCroy's Serial Data Analyzer (SDA) family measure jitter and create eye patterns based on the time difference between crossing points in the data stream and those of an ideal reference clock. This involves sampling at a high rate and processing a long record. Specifically, all of today's high-speed serial data standards require minimum sampling rates of 20 Gsamples/s and rise-time capabilities faster than 300 ps. Setting the phase-locked...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Weapons Of Noise Detection
The war on noise now takes us into the next frontier: the high-speed serial backplane. Actually, this is about both noise and jitter, which is a practical approach, if not rigorously correct. Tektronix's Pavel Zivny likes to limit noise to "all things undesirable in the vertical (voltage, or power for optical signaling) direction," distinguishing it from jitter, "which is all things undesirable in the ‘horizontal,' i.e., time, direction." The problem is that it's difficult to...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: Industry First] USB Stacks Up With A Modular Industrial Form Factor
The stackable PC/104 form factor has proved itself indispensible in numerous applications. But its Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is moving toward oblivion as the number of chips that can directly interface with it nears zero. USB, one of the interfaces replacing ISA, is ubiquitous on PCs and laptops. Embedded systems tend to be the last to jump on the bandwagon, though USB will be found on most PC/104 single-board computers (SBCs). What's lacking is a stackable version...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Brighten Your CMOS Image Sensor Prospects By Resolving Dark Current
Implemented with matrix-addressed photodiode arrays, CMOS image sensor (CIS) solutions take full advantage of the economies of scale afforded by a highly developed semiconductor-manufacturing infrastructure. The chip industry's steady march to finer submicron nodes, combined with adding more features on a per-pixel basis, continue to push CIS solutions ahead of charge-coupled devices (CCDs). In fact, CIS technology makes it possible to integrate imaging, timing, and readout...
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Jae Song
[Ideas For Design] Create A PWM Signal Simply, Inexpensively
Sometimes you need to generate a pulse-width-modulation (PWM) signal for your circuit to simulate a certain behavior. The technique described here generates a simple programmable PWM signal for less than a dollar. The technique uses an MSP430F20xx 14-pin microcontroller (MCU). The devices in this series incorporate Timer_A2, which allows you to generate one PWM signal without CPU intervention. The timer houses two capture-compare registers, called CCR0 and CCR1, which...
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Juan Alvarez
[Ideas For Design] Adding Feedback Boosts Peak Detector's Precision
The standard way to measure the peak of a signal involves the use of a diode. But if the diode is used alone, the input voltage must be significantly larger than the diode's turn-on voltage to obtain acceptable accuracy. Because turn-on voltages range from 200 mV in germanium diodes to 700 mV in silicon diodes, a simple diode peak detector requires an input voltage of 2 to 7 V, respectively, to achieve a 10% error. You can significantly improve resolution and accuracy in...
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Tamara Papalias
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[Editorial] Video Streams In Multiple Formats At CES, But Robots Steal The Show
I'm back from another CES, and as always, it was an exciting but overwhelming event. You readers tell us CES is the number-one exhibition on your show-attendance wishlist, so hopefully a good number of you were there too. This year's gala had more relevant programming for engineers, with a Storage Vision event prior to the show and an IEEE networking event right after. Still, bless you if you survived CES and were ready to stay on in Vegas for a technical conference. Its...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Irresistible Tech Forces Meet Immovable Medical Needs
Facing skyrocketing costs, healthcare providers are turning to mobile technology to improve the efficiency and quality of care, particularly PDAs and smart phones. Yet the primary impediment in delivering this technology is the disparity between consumer product lifecycles and medical device lifecycles. The CPUs, memory, communication chips, and LCDs in cell phones, media players, and so forth have a market lifetime measured in months. Their suppliers typically are eager...
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Lawrence Ricci
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Diffusion Stuff, Anyhow?
Once upon a time, if you wanted to make a junction transistor, you could start with a small seed crystal of pure germanium. Using Czochralski's 1917 methods, the crystal was gradually rotated and pulled out of a lightly doped N-type material and grown into a small boule. After suitable growth, a small amount of acceptor impurity such as gallium was added to the melt, causing the germanium to form a PN junction. This was all consistent with the theory of William Shockley, published...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Apple Takes A Bite Out Of The Cell-Phone Market
It's amazing how a company known for its computers and music players can become the talk of the cell-phone world with just one announcement. Introduced on January 9 at San Francisco's Macworld show, Apple's iPhone is a real breakthrough (see the figure). It includes: ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Floating-Gate Technology Voltage References Go Down To 1.25 And 2.5 V
A precise, temperature-compensated voltage reference circuit lies at the heart of every analog-to-digital converter. Voltage-reference technology hadn't changed fundamentally in decades until last year, when Intersil announced a single reference chip based on precharging a floating gate. The company now has announced several additional voltage references. But first, let's look at the technologies. "Bandgap" voltage references have been around since Bob Widlar developed...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Coder/Decoder Prepares TVs For 2009's Switch To HD
With 2009 quickly approaching, standard-definition television will be a thing of the past as high definition (HD) moves in for good. Yet the equipment that will encode and decode HD signals will need to be able to do it quickly and efficiently. With this in mind, Fujitsu Microelectronics America (FMA) will make a real-time H.264 coder/decoder (codec) IC available next month. The MB86H50 is based on an H.264 processing algorithm developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Software Makes Protocol Analyzer Act Like A Logic Analyzer
Software really is the test instrument. Lecroy's BitTracer, which runs on the PETracer Gen2 Summit PCI Express Protocol Analyzer, provides a physical-layer view of PCI Express traffic that's similar to what a logic analyzer might display. But it also provides this capability on a protocol analyzer. Designers can view the bit stream traffic before it's decoded into high-level packets to better understand what signal integrity issues may be causing data corruption. Most PCI...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Test] Handheld Spectrum Analyzer Addresses WCDMA Basestation Testing
The installation and regular maintenance of cell-phone basestations require tests for troubleshooting or verifying that the equipment meets federal regulations and wireless interoperability standards. Portable test instruments conveniently carry out these tests. On-site measurements often require the engineer to move around a building, work outside, or even go underground. This makes the work more difficult and time consuming. The last thing you want to do is carry around large, heavy...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Tool Characterizes Standard Cells For Statistical Timing Analyzers
Statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) is gaining in popularity these days, particularly as 65-nm processes move toward maturity and designers become increasingly concerned about fab yields. SSTA helps get around the statistical pessimism of traditional static timing analysis. It also provides for better optimization of timing, power, leakage, and yield. But those SSTA tools from the likes of Cadence, Extreme Design Automation, Magma Design Automation, and Synopsys need...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] AMC Spec Provides More Power And Options
The AMC.0 R.2 specification from PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group) increases the maximum power for MicroTCA cards by 60 to 80 W and the management power from 100 to 150 mA. It also defines a new midsize module and better LED faceplace placement guidelines. Additions were made as well allowing press fit, surface-mount, and through-hole style connections versus the initial compression-fit style along with support for a variety of ejector handles that will increase the areas...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 3U CompactPCI SBC Can Be Host Or Peripheral
The CompactPCI C903 single-board computer (SBC) from AI Tech Defense Systems runs a 600-MHz 750FL PowerPC. The board can act as a system peripheral or as a host. It has 1 Gbyte of double-data-rate SDRAM with error-correction-code protection, 128 Mbytes of flash, 64 Mbytes of boot flash, and up to 2 Gbytes of NAND flash plus 128 kbytes of NVRAM. It also has a PMC slot. Air-cooled and conduction-cooled versions are available. Pricing starts at $3790. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] IPC Software Supports VPX-Based SRIO And Switched Serial Fabric
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has introduced IPC 2.0 (Inter-Processor Communications) for its DSP VPX and VPX/REDI-based (VITA 46/VITA 48) single-board computers and peripherals that are designed to work with Serial RapidIO (SRIO) and SRIO switch fabrics. IPC 2.0 supports the messaging API model as well as the global shared memory model. It is compatible with legacy systems. IPC 2.0 includes support for Wind River’s VxWorks 6.3. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] What's New In Programming Languages?
Cremains the most popular embedded programming language, and it has been number one for years. Still, your toolkit should include a bit more, especially when dealing with trends like the new and improved Internet plus heterogeneous and multicore systems. Some options in that toolkit might be scripting languages, parallel programming, and graphical programming. Scripting languages started out on PCs and servers, but they're equally applicable to embedded systems (see "...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PMC Compute Node Packs Multiple FPGAs For Parallel DSP Processing
Micro Memory's rugged MM-71xx CoSine FPGA PMC Compute Nodes series brings Xilinx V-4 FPGAs to 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) sites. The boards are available with 89k to 156k FPGA slices with up to 600 Xtreme DSP slices. The main FPGA has 1 Gbyte of DDR2 memory. Micro Memory's Cosine IP, a preconfigured system-on-a-chip (SoC), supports the board. With Cosine IP, developers can add custom logic without the need to configure things like DMA...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dual Star Marks 14-Slot MicroTCA Backplane
Elma Electronic's 5U MicroTCA shelf houses a 14-slot MicroTCA backplane. It can handle 10 AdvancedMC cards, two power modules, and two MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) slots. It also has three pluggable fan trays. The 5U MicroTCA shelf pricing starts under $2000. MicroTCA shelves are also available in 4U through 8U versions as well as a Portable 7U Tower. Elma Electronic www.elma.com...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Parallel Programming And Multicore Environments
Multicore chip designs, large symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) systems, and clustering can bring many processors to bear on an application. But without proper software, they're simply large collections of processor cores and memory. And conventional serial programming languages don't make handling an expansive suite of computing elements any easier. The current approach for tackling transaction-oriented Web traffic is to distribute a large number of conventional...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Heat Pipes Cool Mini-ITX Systems
Logic Supply's Serener GS-L02 systems are designed for secure, sealed, and silent operation in harsh environments. They're available with a range of fanless Mini-ITX motherboards with VIA or Intel x86-compatible processors kept cool with heat-pipe technology. They include room for a 3.5-in. hard-disk or solid-state memory. Prices start at $450. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Processor Targets Secure, Expandable Consumer Multimedia Storage
Silicon Image's SiI5733 provides scalable and secure storage for HDTVs, digital video recorders, and set-top boxes. Hard drives can be encrypted and matched to the chip so they can only work with the matching device. RAID and daisy-chain expansion are transparent to the user, who simply adds more units to the chain. The Sil5733 supports 3-Gbit/s SATA-II and eSATA connections. Pricing for the Sil5733 starts at $5. It's available in a 10- by 10-mm, 80-pin quad flat no-lead (QFN)...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Development Kit Reads Data Into 32-Mbyte USB Flash Drive
Based on the company's Vinculum USB host controller IC, Future Technology Devices International's DLP-VLOG development platform implements a data logging application that reads temperature, humidity, and voltage data into a 32Mbyte USB flash drive. The kit includes a C compiler, device programmer and debugger, and C source code for the onboard VNC1L-1A USB microcontroller. The DLP-VLOG costs $250. ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Don't Be A Separatist—Think "System"
Everyone knows that chips, no matter how complex or well designed, don't exist in a vacuum. Neither are they designed and then tossed in a drawer. Rather, they exist as part of a system. The silicon must be interfaced to some kind of package, which, in turn, is attached to a pc board. That chain of interconnects—chip through package to pc board—is itself a complex system, with chains of interactions that can ripple back, forth, under, and around each other....
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David Maliniak
