[Technology Report] Design Reuse Comes Down To Collaboration
Of all the areas in which the EDA industry has forged standardization efforts, perhaps none has seen more success than those in promoting intellectual-property (IP) reuse. Whereas other standards efforts in EDA have fragmented the industry rather than bringing it together around common interests, the efforts to create a standards-based infrastructure for IP have managed, for the most part, to avoid hijacks by any single entity's selfish motivations. In fact, three industry...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] Cortex M3-Based Micros Add Speed, Memory, And Other Features
The industry enjoyed some financial relief when Luminary Micro announced its ARM Cortex M3 platforms priced under $1 (see "32-Bit ARM MCU Hits One-Dollar Mark"). Now, the company's latest efforts double that core's 25-MHz speed and extend the peripheral set with additional analog and pulse-width modulator (PWM) features. The Stellaris LM3S6xx and LM3S8xx push the...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Upgrade To High-Speed USB Handsets Without A Complete Redesign
Cellular-service providers continually strive to make more features available to their subscribers, features that will increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) in a market reaching saturation. Over the last few years, handsets have integrated digital-still-camera (DSC) functionality. Now, most of the handsets found at your local store have cameras equipped as standard. The idea behind this is that subscribers will take pictures and share them with their friends using airtime in...
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Ray Casey
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[Ideas For Design] Clamping Circuit Lowers Distortion, Improves Overdrive Recovery Time
Some amplifier applications require clamping or limiting due to large, sporadic signals appearing at the amplifier input. Clamping these errant signals protects the amplifier and other sensitive downstream circuitry. It also improves overdrive recovery time and can lower distortion. At the heart of the clamp circuit described here is the AD8099 high-speed, low-noise, externally compensated amplifier. The device consists of a single-stage amplifier followed by a unity-gain...
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John Ardizzoni
[Ideas For Design] Create RS-485 Adapter To Convert Data Lines From Full- To Half-Duplex
Multiprotocol interface ICs can be used to connect a UART to an RS-485 bus architecture called point-to-point full-duplex (PTP-FD). The PTP connection usually requires drivers and receivers to be constantly enabled, and therefore "present" on the line. So when such a circuit board must fit into a point-to-multipoint, half-duplex system (PTM-HD), the entire board (usually) must be redesigned. A simple trick, though, can adapt an existing PTP-FD board, which provides a single...
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Massimo Caprioli
[Editorial] Can Gaming's Powerful Pull Get Kids Into Engineering?
It may seem ironic that today's most advanced chips are designed for what some might say is our most trivial of pursuits—gaming (see "Games Flourish In A Parallel Universe,"). Yet video games exert a powerful force, not only in the world of electronic design, but also on the psyches of our younger generations. I'm a bit too old to be much of a gamer. Growing up, I could only...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] The Explosion Of Multicores: Use Software To Level The Playing Field
As CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs) evolve, many of their design features are beginning to look remarkably similar. As a result, many of today's most common workloads will soon have a choice about where to execute. All the major hardware providers have told users to expect processors that feature increasingly non-uniform and complex memory hierarchies, rapidly increasing core (and thread) counts, and the integration of specialized acceleration units. These new processor...
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Matthew Papakipos
[Pease Porridge] What's All This VBE Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 2)
I've been debating with a guy who argues that a transistor won't work as a transistor unless its VCE is bigger than its VBE (see figure) . He keeps reading this in books. Also, he points out that if the base and collector are nominally tied together to make a diode,...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Researchers Take Silicon Out For A Spin
Over the last decade, spintronic technology has found its way into consumer electronics, used in devices like cell phones, hard drives, and RAM. Now, researchers at the University of Delaware have opened a door to making spintronics even more ubiquitous. They've demonstrated how to control electron spin in silicon, today's semiconductor of choice (...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Zombies And Energy Harvesting
Suppose someone were to design a way to power a heart pacemaker by scavenging some of the energy of the beating heart itself, doing away with batteries. Could your heart continue beating after your death in some sort of perpetual-motion scenario? Would you become a zombie? I had that conversation with Roy Freeland, CEO of a British company called, eerily enough, Perpetuum. Freeland had mentioned the possibility of harvesting the energy of the beating heart at the...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Technologies Keep Your Cycles On Time And Accurate
Imagine that the earth's rotation became unpredictable and varied between one and 100 hours. What effects would this have on life as we know it? Utter chaos would ensue, and many species would cease to exist. With ICs, chaos leading to failure is guaranteed if you try to use a replacement IP block or core that isn't "cycle accurate" to improve speed, reduce power usage, and decrease area. In fact, if you try to use such a block or core, you probably will have to redesign...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] IP-Metadata Standard Gains Automatic Regsiter Mapping
One of the hallmarks of the SPIRIT Consortium, a standards organization focused on IP/tool integration, is its IP-XACT specification. IPXACT provides a unique way to describe IP metadata in an XML format, enabling the exchange of architectural design data at all points in the front-end design flow (see "Design Reuse Comes Down To Collaboration,"). Thanks to the donation of the...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Third UWB Method Solves The Home Networking Problem
Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is that weird wireless technology that spreads the signal over at least 500 MHz of bandwidth between 3.1 and 10.6 GHz, achieving blazing data rates at a range up to 10 m. Fully blessed by the FCC in February 2002, it has seen some frenetic action over the past five years as designers look for a wireless solution for personal-area networks (PANs) and home entertainment connectivity. There are three types of UWB: impulse radio, orthogonal...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Microformats: People First, Machines Second
It's amazing what you can find bouncing around the Internet. I stumbled across microformats while looking for something else. Microformats are a way of embedding semantic information on a Web page. They're designed to augment human-readable versions so software can easily and accurately extract the same information. Also, they're based on a small set of open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Microformats are an implementation of the REST...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] My Little RTOS
Still rolling your own small-footprint real-time operating system (RTOS) for low-end micros? You're in a minority that's shrinking fast. Even if you're moving to 32-bit platforms, getting an RTOS is easier than ever. So why build your own? Reasons like size, optimization, and owning the RTOS make no sense these days. There's a plethora of options when looking at any variable, from licensing to targets. Open-source has had a major impact, as has royalty-free licensing. Even...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RTOS Targets FPGA Soft Cores
LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux Micro Edition (ME) targets the Xilinx MicroBlaze soft core, which can be used with the Virtex and Spartan FPGAs. BlueCat ME supports MicroBlaze's MMU-less (memory management unit) environment. It also automatically configures a board support package based on the parameters set by a designer via Xilinx's MicroBlaze EDK (embedded developers kit). BlueCat Linux supports Xilinx's PowerPC-based FPGAs. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Suite Combines RTOS And Development Tools
IAR's YellowSuite brings together the company's small-footprint (3 kbytes) PowerPac real-time operating system (RTOS) with its IAR Workbench integrated development environment and visualState, IAR's UML-compliant graphical state machine design tool (see "IAR's STR730 Kit Delivers Solid ARM7 Development Platform"). YellowSuite works with any ARM-based platform, like Luminary Micro's...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RTOS Takes Advantage Of Intel's Latest Virtualization Technology
Green Hills Software's secure and safety-certified Integrity Workstation real-time operating system brings its "Padded Cell" technology to Intel's latest 64-bit platforms that support Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT). Integrity Workstation incorporates the high-assurance Human Interface Device Manager, which handles the display of information at multiple security levels. The operating system is designed to meet DO-178B Level A and Evaluated Assurance Level (EAL) 7 of...
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William Wong
[Component View] Touch-Sensitive Switches Have No Moving Parts
With no moving parts and insensitivity to liquid spills and other contaminants, the rugged, touch-sensitive switches in ITW Switches' ActiveMetal series have a virtually unlimited life span (see figure). Based on ITW's Active Touch technology, these switches stand up to water,...
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Staff
[Engineering Essentials] Architecting New Dimensions Of Medical Imaging
Several technologies—like 4D (3D over time) ultrasound imaging (Fig. 1)—have taken the medical-imaging market by storm. The medical field will continue to benefit from Moore's Law as speed and resolution continue to improve. Take for example the joint effort...
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Daniel Harris
