[Engineering Feature] The Unblinking Eye
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is a hub for business travelers, vacationers, immigrants, stopover passengers, on-site workers—and a whole lot of suspicious-looking people. That's why it's not surprising to discover that the airport operates an extensive video surveillance system. What is surprising is how very smart the system is. When it comes to video surveillance, people tend to imagine banks of sharp-eyed human observers endlessly scanning video screens...
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John Edwards
[Technology Report] Has Anyone Seen My Data?
Most people may strive for moral and ethical righteousness. But it's still a scary world, especially when it comes to technology. Laptops and hard-disk drives with valuable and confidential commercial information seem to be stolen every day. Mainframes containing similarly sensitive data are routinely hacked. Certain semiconductor companies are overproducing chips to later sell on the black market. And it's only getting worse. Viruses, financial fraud, computer theft, and...
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Daniel Harris
[Leapfrog: First Look] Judicious Clocking Subdues Power-Architecture Cooling Needs
Keeping it cool is imperative in all kinds of applications. That's why designers are increasingly turning to the 64-bit Power architecture, which always sits at the top of the list in power/performance ratios. Following that trend, PA Semi uses the single- or dual-core PWRficient PA6T-1628M and takes the ratio more than a few steps further, consuming a mere 13 W on average for a 2-GHz processor (...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] For Better Analog Video, Try Differential Signaling
Compared to single-ended signaling, differential signaling offers many benefits: less electromagnetic interference (EMI), less distortion, lower supply voltagei, and lower costii. These advantages have prompted the adoption of differential signaling in many applications, including digital (low-voltage differential signaling, or LVDS) and analog (audio). Similar benefits should accrue to analog videoiii. But for reasons that may no longer be valid, most video...
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Miles Bekgran
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Add Position Detection Capability To Light-Curtain Circuitry
Light curtains use a linear array of LEDs and optical detectors to sense when an object breaks a light beam. Then they trigger an alarm output. However, light curtains typically don't provide spatial data to indicate where along the light curtain the light beam was broken. The design shown here adds that feature. It describes a circuit that senses where along the light curtain the beam was broken and transmits the location to a PC via RS-232. The length and resolution of...
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Gary S. Kath
, et al.
[Editorial] M2M Revolution Continues At ESC 2007
The buzz surrounding current Internet growth is all about Web 2.0 and user-generated content—YouTube videos, MySpace profiles, the blogosphere. It's a fun, consumer-centric party. But the next wave, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, promises a more serious revolution. And there's no better place to see the pieces of the M2M movement coming together than the Embedded Systems Conference, held earlier this month in San Jose. If Web 2.0 is characterized by "fat"...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] When It Comes To Backplanes, Give RapidIO A Try
Engineers developing backplanes must cost-effectively achieve the appropriate level of performance for their application. When selecting a backplane technology, they must consider the performance options available, the realistic cost economies resulting from widespread deployment of the technology, and how much support and off-the-shelf software and hardware is available through the technology's vendor ecosystem. Ethernet became the incumbent backplane technology for a wide...
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Tom Cox
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Cold Toes Stuff, Anyhow?
I sure walked into it. I've always known that I can stuff my warm feet (with warm socks) into frozen boots and just start walking, and they would warm up nicely. These are Vasque trekking boots, weighing about 2.1 lb each, well insulated down to about –20°F and extremely comfortable. So I put them on and hiked up the trail, all very cozy, on Jan. 17. The air temperature was around 10°F to 20°F—not bad. But after several hours, I got tired and needed...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Your Thought Is Its Command
What good is a robot if you can't order it around with your thoughts? Rajesh Rao, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, has answered this question with an input system that can be used to control the movement of a humanoid robot with signals from a human brain. Rao and his students have developed a system that lets people tell a robot where to go and what to pick up merely by thinking about these actions. Donning a skullcap...
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John Edwards
[TechView: Analog & Power] Sneak Preview: IEEE 802.3at Power Over Ethernet Plus Implementation Details
The IEEE 802.3at Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE-Plus) task force anticipates the release of a "usable" draft standard in August, with a firm specification to follow a year later. PoE Plus will boost the maximum power delivered to applications to something around 60 W from the basic 802.3at PoE standard's 13 W at the application. Increasing the power was relatively simple, once the task force agreed that CAT5 cable and RJ45 connectors could handle more current (the approach...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] A/V Processor Provides High Performance At An Affordable Price
Imagine a low-cost video processor for small screens that requires little energy and still packs a punch. Vivace Semiconductor's VSP100 offers all of these qualities, providing QVGA (240 by 320 pixels) playback in real time at 30 frames per second (see the figure). And since it's...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Eye Doctor Treats Fast Serial I/O Analysis And Design
Most new serial I/O methods use equalization techniques at the receiver to help boost speed and extend the range of the technology. Now there's a T&M system you can use to design, build, and test such serial I/O methods. LeCroy's Eye Doctor works with the company's SDA series of digital sampling oscilloscopes (DSO). This set of software tools combines the signal acquisition power of a DSO with digital signal processing (DSP) for digital filter synthesis and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Mixed-Signal Verification Suite Leverages Fast-Spice Technology
Consumers nowadays want handheld and portable systems that can do it all—wireless operation, eye-candy video playback, you name it. But many of these crowd-pleasing features involve a great deal of mixed-signal verification. At 65 nm, the contribution of layout parasitics stemming from interconnects is wreaking havoc on timing closure. Unfortunately, many Spice-based simulators lack the capacity for the job, while fast-Spice variants lose too much in...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] I/O, I/O, It's Off To Virtual Work We Go
Virtualization in microcontrollers has progressed from memory management units (MMU) toward virtualizing the entire environment. There have been a number of attempts at getting this right in an x86 environment, starting with the 16-bit virtual machine (VM) support in the 80386. Subsequent VM enhancements have moved toward virtualizing the 32-bit and now 64-bit environments. A hypervisor like Xen is the layer that controls the VM hardware and essentially sits between a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Move To 90 nm Cuts DSP Cost And Power Requirements
Analog Devices' Blackfin line has been extremely popular in portable and multimedia environments. Analog's move to 90 nm for its ADSP-BF52x line raises the performance bar to 600 MHz while cutting power requirements. Running at 250 MHz, the low-end core power requirements are 0.16 mW/MHz. The low end of the line gains USB support while the entire family supports Analog's Lockbox security, which includes a 64-kbit one-time-programming (OTP) area that can be used to store...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Whole Program C Compiler Optimizes Across Modules
Splitting applications into small modules is critical to building a manageable application, but most development systems only optimize code within a module. HiTech Software's new crop of PICC-18 PRO C compilers and linkers cross this boundary and do optimization by looking at the entire program. This can be especially critical for optimizations like dead code elimination, register parameters, and inlining. It allows the system to use information in one module to optimize how...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Virtually Developed, Debugged, And Deployed
Virtualization isn't something new. It's been around almost since computers moved into the mainstream. IBM's VM (virtual machine) architecture has been the mainstay on mainframes, and new support for VM hypervisor hosts has been the rage on 64-bit x86 architectures. VMs have been rolling through the enterprise and Internet server market. Moving servers onto VMs makes deployment, management, and recovery significantly easier. The uptake on the workstation and embedded side has...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DSP Decodes Digital Disks
The next-generation HD DVD and Blu-ray high-definition DVD formats will tax systems that need to decode streams with high data rates. Cirrus Logic's single-chip CS49700 audio processor can support the six surround-sound audio algorithms typically found on these discs, including Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, DTS Master, and DTS High Resolution. It handles post-processing algorithms such as Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS 96/24TM, Neo:6, MPEG, AAC, SRS Circle Surround...
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William Wong
[Component View] Water-, Dustproof Fans Come In Three AC Ratings
The latest addition to the Aquas line of water-protected fans (see figure) is an ac-powered unit that meets the IP 55 waterproofing and dustproofing standards. Designers also can order the AA1282HB-AWQ-LF in versions that meet a variety of water-protection requirements for their specific...
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John Novellino
[Engineering Essentials] High-Speed Serial Technology Drives Board Interconnects
Board and system interconnects have migrated from parallel buses to high-speed serial technologies. Mainstays like Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), Integrated Device Electronics (IDE), and Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) remain. Yet new systems are more likely to use PCI Express (PCIe), Universal Serial Bus (USB), Serial ATA (SATA), or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Many standards are available, but they tend to be complementary (...
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William Wong
