[Engineering Feature] Better, Faster, Cheaper—Pick Any Two
It used to happen at the kickoff meeting for every new program. The engineer managing the development team would come in with an armload of overhead-projector transparencies for the business-unit managers and marketing people, who were there to learn about features, design challenges, schedules, resources—the usual stuff. Inevitably, about the third foil down, would be one of those triangle graphics with a bubble at each vertex (...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] FPGA Design Issues 201
It doesn't matter if you're the logic designer, hardware engineer, or systems engineer, or if you wear all of those hats. If you use an FPGA in any sort of complex system with high speeds and multiple protocols, you'll likely wrestle with device configuration, power management, intellectual property (IP), signal integrity, and other key issues. But you needn't face these challenges alone. Applications engineers at the top FPGA houses face them every day, and they've come up with some...
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Daniel Harris
[Design View / Design Solution] What's In Your Network?
Our business, campus, and home networks today are full of important traffic being moved from node to node as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, a significant amount of the traffic in our networks is not what we might consider important. SPAM is consuming a large amount of network bandwidth today, but that’s just one of the many types of traffic creating havoc in our networks. The “cost” of things like SPAM, worms, or viruses isn’t just the network...
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Stephen Cole
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[Ideas For Design] Digital Resistor Sets Operating Power For Laser Driver
Designers can use a photodiode in conjunction with a power-control feedback loop to compensate a laser driver circuit for temperature effects and the effects of the laser's aging. But a photodiode's response can vary by as much as 40%, so the system needs additional compensation. That can be achieved with a digital resistor that varies the power set-point in response to temperature. For example, the MAX3740 VCSEL laser driver and DS1859 dual temperature-controlled digital...
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James Horste
[Ideas For Design] Self-Powered Eight-Channel Tester Checks Battery Discharge Rates
Nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries are made by many manufacturers and have different charge ratings. Also, with repeated use, the maximum charge that NiMH batteries will hold diminishes at different rates. Therefore, it's difficult to gauge the useful life and charge capacity of these batteries. To measure NiMH battery performance, a multichannel battery discharge unit was designed. The unit includes a serial interface through Windows Hyperterminal and is powered by the...
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Zhizhang Xia
[POV: Point Of View] Consolidation Strikes The ASIC Market As Revenues Grow
Relatively fragmented in the 1990s, the ASIC market now comprises a handful of top-tier providers, a generally struggling middle tier, and smaller companies consisting of startups and established application specialists. This consolidation will continue, as application-focused vendors pick up market share at the expense of vendors stuck in an older model where raw technology was king and could be used to address a wide spectrum of applications. Those days are long past, and...
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Jordan Selburn
[Editorial] Keyless Access May Be In Your Future With Everyday Biometrics
For decades, biometric identification has been the province of high-security applications. Retinal reflection and hand geometry, for instance, are used to lock down top-secret government and financial facilities. Yet simple technologies like fingerprint recognition now can be found on cell phones and laptops. Biometrics also are adding a new level of security to passport control, and they speed security checks for frequent flyers enrolled in registered traveler programs. I...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: I have been following your silicon-dioxide (SiO2) articles and just saw Steve Krueger's response ("Bob's Mailbox,") naming it under the trade name Cabosil. We use Cabosil at our company as a thickening agent for adhesives and epoxies during manufacture. When I had my first exposure to it, I was told it was small glass spheres. (There are some epoxies with air-filled...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Chip Rebuilds Neural Pathways
Jaideep Mavoori, a University of Washington researcher, spends a lot of time thinking about communications—not telephone or radio, but the sophisticated network that is the human body's nervous system. He's most interested in helping people, afflicted by injury or disease, rebuild their ability to control voluntary body movements. "We want to help people get back at least some of what they've lost," he says. The brain acts like a central processor for the body's...
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John Edwards
[TechView: The Industry] FDA Approves Study Of Next-Generation Retinal Implant
Thanks to tiny technology, victims of retitinitis pigmentosa (RP) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may be able to see again someday. The Food and Drug Administration has approved clinical trials of the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which is the next phase of a collaboration between the University of Southern California Doheny Eye Institute, Second Sight Medical Products, and the Department of Energy. Diseases like RP and AMD attack the retina's...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] University Research Provides Fuel-Cell Insights
If you have direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) in mind for your projects, check out an article in the IEEE Power Electronic Society's latest newsletter. "Electrical Dynamic Behavior of a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell" by M. Ordonez and others of the Memorial University of Newfoundland reports on a series of empirical evaluations carried out on a standard experimental DMFC from Fuel Cell Technologies and relates their test results to a theoretical fuel-cell equivalent circuit. The good...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Popular Buck Switchers Expand Online Tools, Reduce Noise Sensitivity
If you're designing mid- to low-volume systems with a buck converter in the power chain, you may have used one of National Semiconductor's Simple Switcher voltage-regulator chips, which now offer a couple of new wrinkles. An enhancement in the Webench design environment already makes using these switchers "simple." Meanwhile, a novel technique reduces noise susceptibility in current-mode feedback. Webench online design tools span a range of National products. For Simple...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Assess The Risks Before You Go IP Shopping
Intellectual property (IP) was one of the hottest topics at last month's DesignCon—particularly IP quality and prices. Fortunately, the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) has created a tool that lets users shop comparatively for hard IP and gauge the risks of each block under consideration. The Hard IP Quality Risk Assessment Tool was created by a group of IP vendors, integrators, and foundries. This core group started with a standardized questionnaire for...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Design Tip: Flash Management And Error Correction Codes
High-density NAND flash memories are key components in the burgeoning consumer market. Applications are rapidly expanding beyond USB keys and MP3 players to cell phones, media players, and game stations. This market is characterized by an ever-increasing demand for greater memory capacities and lower cost per bit. Multilevel-cell (MLC) technology, where each NAND flash memory cell stores two or more bits of data, offers significant benefits in density and cost. Yet its data...
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Robert Pierce
[TechView: EDA] Equivalence Checker For FPGAs Unearths Synthesis Errors
FPGAs, popular as they are these days for prototyping and/or production runs, come with their own little quirks. One of those is the nagging tendency for functional errors to appear in synthesis and subsequent optimizations. To address this verification gap, OneSpin Solutions has unleashed an equivalence checker that supports all sequential operations performed by FPGA synthesis tools. The 360 EC-FPGA (...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Tool Ends The Guesswork On Placing PC-Board/Package Decoupling Capacitors
Good design practice mandates liberal use of decoupling capacitors (decaps) in the design of both IC packages and pc boards. But where should they be placed for optimal power delivery? Many designers resort to guesswork or, worse, overdesign when it comes to decaps. It's easy to forget that those decaps take up space and add cost whether they're actually helping smooth out the power picture or not. Sigrity's OptimizePI comes into the decap fray to provide minimum-cost decap...
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David Maliniak
[Engineering Essentials] Interconnecting Mini MEMS Spawns Max Challenges
If you're looking for a challenge, try interconnecting microelectromechanical-systems (MEMS) ICs with conventional ICs and other MEMS ICs. If you've mastered that skill, move to the front of the line, because MEMS technology involves a high level of integration between many dissimilar functions. Generally, it's about integrating electronic with mechanical functions. So what's considered the ultimate goal of such a process? It's a seamless integration of the MEMS structure...
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Roger Allan
