[Technology Report] Can RF MEMS Master The Mass-Market Challenge?
After many fits and starts, RF MEMS technology may finally create some waves within the electronics market this year, thanks to recent advances in manufacturing and improved device reliability. Whether or not this year's new RF MEMS products can pass the litmus test for modest entry into mass-market applications, though, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, expect RF MEMS to gradually penetrate such applications. As for getting below the magical $1 and $2 price barriers needed to gain...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Use Ethernet Over PDH In Sonet/SDH Networks
Carrier Ethernet unlocks many potential revenue-generating services that telecommunications service providers, known as carriers, must deploy to maintain their competitive position. However, most carriers aren’t ready to convert to a pure Ethernet network due to Ethernet’s lack of native support for link monitoring, fault isolation, and diagnostic testing. These attributes, which enhance service quality, are native to the plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH) and...
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Arthur Harvey
[Ideas For Design] Pay Attention To Switch Arrangement To Improve PGA Performance
Programmable-gain amplifiers (PGAs) are often used in communication systems, such as basestations. Designers can select fully integrated, single-IC PGAs, which are now available with bandwidths over 500 MHz. But obtaining the low second- and third-order distortion that is critical in communication applications isn't easily achieved. Combine that with the desire for greater choice in the attenuation level and step size, and designers may opt to construct a PGA using a...
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Dolly Wu
[Ideas For Design] Anti-Theft Alarm Lookalike Protects Parked Motorcycles
Sometimes, a simulated anti-theft device can deter a would-be thief just as well as an actual alarm system. To that end, the circuit in the figure automatically flashes two super-bright LEDs, mounted in the rear-light cluster of a motorcycle, to simulate the warning commonly used to...
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Kevin Bilke
[POV: Point Of View] Even Busy Engineers Can Take Advantage Of Lifelong Learning
Globalization has put engineers on the front line of an unrelenting drive by companies to shorten development cycles and cut production costs. This means engineers must seek new tools and methods to improve their efficiency and speed in delivering new product designs to the marketplace. Whether you're a recent college graduate, in the middle of your career, or even counting the months until retirement, you must pursue an aggressive plan to stay on top of current technologies....
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John Meredith
[Editorial] Everything That’s Dis-Integrated Gets Put Back Together Again
As electronic design becomes more complex and divides into increasingly esoteric sub-specialties, new opportunities arise for "re-integration" to bring all the outsourcing back together into a logical and efficient development flow. In fact, re-integration was one of the salient themes of this year's Semico Summit. Electronic Design was pleased to be media sponsor of this year's conference, held last month in Phoenix, and attending gave me a chance to gain the...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: Your tip on how to phase a generator into the electric grid would work ("What's All This ‘Others Stay Lighted' Stuff, Anyhow?"). Phasing sets of the not too distant past used a couple of incandescent bulbs and a guy poised with his finger on the button, just as you said. I wanted to explain, however, that in the electric power industry, we go to great...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Students And Robots Rumble In Atlanta
Elementary and high school students get regular exposure to math and science, but they rarely get to experience engineering. Fortunately, that's starting to change. More and more students—some as young as six years old—now build their own robots and square off against other budding young designers in regional and even international competitions. It all started 15 years ago with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an...
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Ron Schneiderman
[TechView: Analog & Power] Full-Featured Battery-Charger ICs And Fuel-Gauge IC Take Charge
It's all about power nowadays as consumers snap up portable devices that require more and more juice. Designers are hard pressed to keep users' tanks topped up and to give those users an idea of how far they can go on what's left in those tanks. Maxim's latest solutions include a pair of power-management ICs as well as a programmable fuel gauge that can be built into battery packs. The MAX8662 and MAX8663 do more than integrate two synchronous buck regulators, a boost...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] High-Density SoC Makes GPON And FTTH Triple Play Practical And Affordable
With speeds of up to several hundred megabits/s, fiber to the home (FTTH) would be the best broadband service available—if it weren't so expensive. Freescale Semiconductor takes a shot at reducing some of those costs with its MSC7120 chip set. According to the company, the average U.S. home is going to need as much as 40 Mbits/s to support one HDTV channel, two MPEG2 digital TV (DTV) channels, Internet access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, gaming, and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] RapidIO Versus Ethernet: What You Really Need To Know
Designers who are trying to decide which interconnect they should use in their embedded systems should check out "System Interconnect Fabrics: Ethernet Versus RapidIO Technology." Written by Greg Shippen, this white paper provides a detailed and advanced marketing-oriented description of the logical, transport, and physical layers of these technologies. White papers are a dime a dozen these days, and many are pretty shallow. At 56 pages, though, this one is a real treatise on...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] PCB Design/Simulation Suite Furthers Instrument Integration
Since its acquisition of Electronics Workbench and its printed-circuit board (PCB) design and analysis tools, National Instruments has sought to meld those tools with the stuff of its core competency—namely, virtual instrumentation and effective capture and application of real-world signals in a simulation environment. The result is embodied in Multisim 10.0 (...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Next-Generation Hardware Accelerator Sports Up To 512M ASIC Gates
The first fruits of EVE's acquisition earlier this year of Tharas Systems is the ZeBu-AX next-generation hardware accelerator. Designed for ease of use, it offers close to unlimited capacity as well as plug-and-play, event-accurate mixed-language simulation acceleration. The system provides scalable capacity of up to 512 million ASIC gates. Its one-pass compilation executes at 125 million ASIC gates/hour on a single workstation, mapping onto the accelerator the design under...
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David Maliniak
[Component View] Rugged ATR-Short Chassis Handles Eight 6U Modules
The E120 (see figure) can withstand extreme altitude, temperature, moisture, shock, vibration, EMI/RFI, and chemical exposure. This rugged, eight-slot, 3/4 ATR-Short chassis accommodates up to eight standard conduction-cooled 6U by 160-mm ANSI/IEEE 1101.2-1992 VMEbus or ANSI/VITA...
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John Novellino
[Engineering Essentials] Cutting-Edge Breakthroughs Expand ADC Boundaries
Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs)—the workhorses of the industry—have plowed their way through applications like industrial process control, medical instrumentation, communication systems, and radar for decades. Continual increases in performance specs have kept these blue-collar devices in step with the latest advances. February's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco presented the cream of the ADC crop. A number of papers on...
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Don Tuite
