[Engineering Feature] Building A Virtual Wall To Protect Our Borders
It will be situated on the nation's borders, designed to prevent people from illegally entering the U.S. But please, don't call it a wall. SBInet, part of the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative, is an integrated surveillance system that aims to curb illegal immigration without the need to construct a politically controversial physical wall. SBInet's primary goal is to give U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) improved oversight of thousands...
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John Edwards
[Technology Report] Advanced Internet Services Accelerate New Fiber Options
The need for ever-faster data-transmission rates is insatiable. The good news about that is we have the ability to go faster with fiber-optic data transmission. The bad news is that fiber is expensive. With greater usage, however, that's beginning to change as newer and faster systems emerge. So while fiber has been at the core of our long-haul telephone and Internet networks, it's finally getting cheap enough to run to the home. Fiber to the home (FTTH) has long been the...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Chip Twists ARM With Custom Logic
Single-chip solutions built with standard microcontrollers have been a boon to system designers who can access a wide selection of features, performance, and pricing. Unfortunately, to get the resources not found on standard parts, you need multiple chips. The usual alternative is a custom-built solution, but expertise and upfront costs often stifle this idea before it starts. FPGAs typically are viewed as the solution to achieve this level of customization. In many cases, it's...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Increase Visibility Into FPGA-Based Prototypes
One of the most significant challenges facing verification teams using prototypes based on field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) is understanding the prototyped system’s internal behavior when it fails to perform as expected. A key factor with regard to analyzing and debugging these designs is the difficulty in observing internal signals. Today’s state-of-the-art FPGAs provide tremendous capabilities with regard to both capacity and performance....
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George Bakewell
[Ideas For Design] Single LED Takes On Both Light-Emitting And Detecting Duties
Sometimes people forget that light-emitting diodes can also detect light quite well. They're usable in a wide range of applications as inexpensive, readily available optical detectors. Typically, an LED detects light at a wavelength somewhat shorter than the light it emits, making it a wavelength-selective detector. For example, an LED that emits greenish-yellow light at a peak wavelength of about 555 nm detects green light at a peak wavelength of about 525 nm over a spectral width...
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Dejan Karadaglic
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[POV: Point Of View] U.S. Export Control Policy Hurts American Interests In China
Insistence on enforcing the existing export control policy can only damage the interests of the American high-tech industry without improving national security. This is because the U.S. is no longer the sole source of much high technology. If other nations won't follow the U.S. on restricting exports to China, then the policy can't be effective. Unilateral control by the U.S. only shackles American high-tech firms from being able to compete in China. In 2000, China's market...
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George Koo
[Editorial] Puerto Rico—A Shining Star Of Aerospace Engineering
Even as Congress debates immigration reform and Homeland Security looks to erect a virtual fence on our southern border, the populace of the U.S. is inexorably changing. More than 12% of our residents are foreign-born, the highest percentage in nearly 100 years. Latin American culture in particular is favoring the mainstream culture, fueling growth in many local economies around the country. Latinos are also making their mark in engineering. I recently visited the University...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Production Costs, Stuff, Anyhow?
A guy asked me how to optimize a bridge circuit. His design had eight op amps and over a dozen precision resistors. I showed him how to minimize the number of (expensive) resistors and precision op amps. I got it down from eight to four to two. Then I even figured how to get the number of op amps down to one. But before we finished, I had to inquire how many bridge circuits he was planning to make. That's important. If you're only going to make five or 10 or 20 of them,...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] OLEDs Will Be Everywhere—Even The Shirt On Your Back
A self-powered display— thin, flexible, and durable enough to be incorporated into clothing—is one of the goals of a $1.7 million international research project that aims to bring organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to the mass market. The research consortium, known as Modecom (for Modeling Electroactive Conjugated Materials at the Multiscale), includes 13 engineering teams from nine universities and two companies. Over the next three years,...
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John Edwards
[TechView: Analog & Power] Power Supplies Push Power-Density Limits
So what's happening in medium-sized power supplies? These days, the power output is the only thing that's medium-sized as these smaller devices provide more power density. Aimed primarily at the telecom market, XP Power's 12-, 24-, and 48-V dc output MFA350 may hold the current record for the world's smallest 350-W supply, cranking out 11.2 W/in.3 in its base version. That's 364 W across the entire 90- to 264-V ac input range from a 3.2- by 6.8- by 1.5-in....
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] New Technologies Enable More Moore
Is the end near for Moore's Law? Semiconductors are getting harder to scale due to thinner and closer wires that are getting hotter with higher impedances. Yet researchers are using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to get around these limits. James Jiam-Qiang Lu, associate professor of physics and electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, believes 3D wafer technology and the use of CNTs for interconnects will help semiconductor development maintain its ...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Digitizer Maximizes Test Data Throughput With Low Power Consumption
The first step in most test and measurement applications today is to acquire and digitize the test signal for further storage and analysis with software on a PC. A good digital oscilloscope is one common way of doing this. But for some tests, an oscilloscope is overkill and too expensive. For many laboratory, production, and field testing applications, a smaller digitizer is ideal. Agilent Technologies' DP1400 digitizer is one option for such situations. Late last year,...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Multimode Analyzer Leverages Power Of Multithreaded Platforms
Among the issues compounding design closure, none is more pressing than the timing, power, and signal-integrity (SI) loop. Timing tools have not scaled with design complexity. Runtimes for SI tools can stretch beyond 24 hours. With hundreds if not thousands of timing violations to clear in a given design before tapeout, tools must evolve to a higher level. To take timing analysis to the next level of efficiency, CLK Design Automation's Amber Analyzer boasts an architecture...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Does Multicore Scale?
The 8-bit Intel 8080 was the central component of a multiprocessor system called the Hypercube back in the 1970s. The theory was that multiple processors could tackle large problems using parallel processing. Massively parallel processing architectures like Connection Machines' CM5 also came and went as single-core processors continued to track Moore's Law in terms of performance (see the figure). Unfortunately, it now seems that...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Module Takes A Spin
The Propeller chip (see "Eight 32-Bit Cores Take Flight In Multiprocessor Microcontroller" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 12235) has found a home in the $59 24-pin SpinStamp Microcontroller module from Parallax. It is the same form factor as the Basic Stamp. The Propeller packs eight 32-bit processors. Each has32 kbytes of RAM and 32 kbytes of ROM. They' reprogrammed using the Spin programming language. This 3.3-V part contains its own voltage-regulator accepting...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tiny DSC Targets Sensors
Microchip is pushing small (6 by 6 mm) digital signal controller (DSC) chips out the door to tackle intelligent sensor applications. The 40 MIPS dsPIC33FJ12GP family is compatible with its larger brethren but pares down memory to 12 kbytes of flash and 1 kbyte of RAM. The 18- and 28-pin packages start at $1.99. The DSCs also have a 10-channel analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) with a 10-bit or12-bit mode. The 10-bit mode-enables simultaneous sampling that can eliminate the lag time...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Reconfigurable Architecture Targets Military Sensor Systems
Raytheon developed its MONARCH (Morphable Networked MicroArchitecture) architecture and chip under a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) polymorphous computing architecture contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (see the figure). It is designed to outperform existing quad-core processors by a factor of 10 in environments that MONARCH was specifically designed for—in this case, processing large...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] InfiniBand Links 512 Cores/Rack
High-performance computing (HPC) users are looking for platforms that deliver performance at a reasonable cost and within the confines of space and cooling available to them. A consistent software platform helps too. Silicon Graphics targets these users with its InfiniBand-based SGI Altix ICE (integrated compute environment). The SGI Alitx ICE packs up to four individual rack units (IRUs) in a standard rack to deliver up to 6 TFLOPS of performance via 512 cores...
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William Wong
[Component View] Clock Buffers Support 5-Gbit/s Serial Connectivity
The Gen2 high-performance, zero-delay clock buffers from Pericom Semiconductor provide reference clocks for PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 serial connectivity at 5 Gbits/s. They also meet the reference-clock requirements of fully buffered dual-inline memory modules (FBDIMM) for workstation and server applications. The family supports Intel Xeon Dual-Core processor workstation and server applications with as few as four or as many as 19 separate PCIe outputs provided by a single IC....
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Staff
[Engineering Essentials] Analog/Full-Custom Flows Move Toward Interoperability
In the age of convergence, analog and full-custom design is reasserting itself as a crucial aspect of almost all system-level designs. While analog content is growing by leaps and bounds in most IC designs, productivity for analog designers is not. In the early days of analog design, layouts for discrete devices on ICs were created by what is colloquially referred to as "polygon pushing." Devices were put together through juxtaposing rectangular shapes on metal layers...
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David Maliniak
