[Engineering Feature] Stanch The Bleeding Of Leakage Power At 65 nm
As 90-nm process technologies began entering the mainstream a few years ago, it became clear that device delays were no longer the chief culprit. Interconnect delays had caught and passed them, becoming the number-one contributor to timing woes. Now as the 65-nm node is hitting its stride, a parallel trend has arisen for designers in the power domain. No longer is dynamic power consumption the dominant factor in total power budgets. Rather, leakage...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Next-Generation Multifunction Power ICs Help Shrink Mobile Systems
With mobile equipment manufacturers demanding ever smaller and lighter handheld systems, the trend is to create smaller ICs that offer greater functionality. However, meeting those functionality, size, and weight requirements becomes a more difficult proposition in power-oriented applications. For instance, switching regulators must be very efficient, particularly when multiple switchers are integrated into an IC. Battery- charger circuits must be...
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Sam Davis
[Leapfrog: First Look] Test System Pushes MIMO Standards Into The Spotlight
Multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) uses its multiple transmitters, receivers, and antennas to achieve greater link distance and reliability as well as higher data rates. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, to tell you that MIMO is now an option in most of the latest wireless technologies. Already, it's being used in 802.11g/n Wi-Fi wireless localarea networks (WLANs). It's also being picked up in some of the new WiMAX products. And there's no doubt...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design View / Design Solution] Move Over Iso Amp—Make The Switch To Digital Isolation
Isolation is a means of preventing current from flowing between two communicating points. Typically, isolation is used in two situations. The first is where there's the potential for current surges that may damage equipment or harm humans. The second is where interconnections involve different ground potentials and disruptive ground loops must be avoided. In both cases, isolation is used to prevent current flow, yet allow for data or power flow between the two points. ...
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Thomas Kugelstadt
[Ideas For Design] Twisted Pair Accurately Reads Digital Temperature Sensor At 1000 m
The best way to make midrange, low- to medium-accuracy temperature measurements (considering size, cost, performance, and ease of use) is to use an IC temperature sensor. But most IC temperature sensors are designed for applications where the circuits to which they connect are nearby. Therefore, the inclusion of sensing, digitizing, and signal- processing functions in one IC greatly simplifies the design of such sensors and the data-acquisition interface. ...
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Tina Alikahi
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[Ideas For Design] Tuning A Quadrature Encoder By Ear
The human ear is very good at detecting noise or missing cycles in a waveform, and since we have two ears, we can monitor two signals at once. I recently repaired an older lab instrument containing a quadrature encoder made with an incandescent lamp, a slotted disc, and two photocells (left side in the figure). It turned out that the lamp brightness, and hence the supply voltage, was quite...
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Michael Covington
[Editorial] Engineering Bridges Isn't Just Civil Anymore
During my days as an engineering student at Manhattan College, my calculus teacher used to say, "No partial credit! Get wrong answer, bridge fall down!" This was the first thing that flashed through my mind back in August when I heard about the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota. My very next thought was that an error in calculations couldn't have been the cause of this disaster. So what was the cause? The day after the collapse, Michael J. O'Rourke, a...
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Joseph Desposito
[POV: Point Of View] The Five Myths Of Solid-State Storage: Why It’s Not As Expensive As You Think
Embedded system designers need more from a storage system than higher capacities. Today's applications require enhanced performance, reliability, and security, all of which can effectively be met with advanced solid-state storage. This technology offers many tangible benefits, including multiyear product cycles, no product wearout, the ability to accurately forecast usable storage system life, and security options beyond encryption. But OEMs continue to design in substandard...
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Gary Drossel
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Stability Stuff, Anyhow?
A guy recently asked me how I would look for a voltage reference that's stable versus temp cycling. I told him I would take several of the best voltage references I had and use a dual-slope DVM of at least six digits to compare them to the units in question. He then asked if comparing some references to some other ones was kind of incestuous. This is not rocket science. You take several good voltage references and leave them the heck alone! Apply some bias and just...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Tesla's Tests Confirm Roadster's 245-Mile Range
Tesla Motors created quite a stir when it announced its all-electric Roadster in 2006, with 250 miles per charge and 0- to 60-mph acceleration in 4 seconds. Critics were quick with their skepticism. But in September, the company put its Validation Prototype 1 (VP1) to the test, confirming these claims with only some slight modifications (Fig. 1). According to Tesla vehicle systems ...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: Analog & Power] Codec And System Power Management Share A Die
Put the whole power system for a portable audio and navigation system on the same die as the system's audio codec? That's what Wolfson Microelectronics has done in its Audio- Plus codec line. OEMs would like shorter bills of materials and more compact board layouts, but what's going to be integrated? Wolfson says mixed-signal audio and system power make the most sense. There are now three philosophies for power management in portable devices. ...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Multiple Modes Flatten Flyback Efficiency Curves
One trouble with most power converters is that they achieve their best efficiencies only at high load levels. At moderate and low loads, their efficiencies can fall to as low as 40%. This is unacceptable when systems being powered spend most of their on-time drawing less than full power. Dealing with this leads to power supplies that incorporate extra transformer windings, rectifiers, and control circuitry for standby operation. More elegantly (and...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Ethernet Transceiver First To Include IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol
By far, Ethernet is the most widely used local-area networking (LAN) technology. More than 90% of all LANs use it in some form, wired by CAT5 or CAT6 or even wireless. Now, the industry is beginning to adopt Ethernet for a wide variety of automation, data-acquisition, test and measurement, and other real-time applications. Yet one of the biggest problems with Ethernet in industrial applications is the non-deterministic nature of the data ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Quad Equalizer Lets You Go Faster And Longer With High-Speed Serial Channels
When implementing systems using gigabit serial data transmissions in cables or in backplane transmission lines, you're very limited in the lengths you can achieve because of the severe attenuation and distortion. An established way to compensate is to use equalization at the receiver. The equalizer anticipates the distortion and adds corrective measures that enable you to implement higher-speed interfaces over longer signal paths. Now, you can buy...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Serial-To-Wi-Fi Module Enables Wireless M2M Without Programming
Connecting a device to the Internet for remote monitoring or control in machine-to-machine (M2M) applications isn't easy. Yet Wi-Fi is quickly becoming the most asked for requirement in M2M applications, such as point of sale, medical devices, and security. While the hardware is well known, the project is more of a software development effort. Now you can add Internet connectivity via any Wi-Fi 802.11 wireless local-area network (WLAN) access point or hot spot with a...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] Wireless Technologies Work Together To Cheat Death
The Grim Reaper isn't a happy fellow these days as technology and medicine continue to keep people around. When you usually hear about someone coming back from the dead and getting a second chance at life, you assume it was dreamt up in Hollywood. Yet thanks to technology from Boston Scientific, people like my friend Tim can continue ticking for the foreseeable future. Diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF) many years ago, Tim has had...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] Design-For-Test Tool Eliminates Need For Gate-Level Scan
If there's a truism in design debug and test, it's that the earlier you can find a bug, the less costly it is to fix. Thus, finding bugs at RTL is far preferable to finding them after synthesis. With DeFacTo Technologies' HiDFT-Scan, designers can analyze their RTL IC and system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs, create the appropriate scan-test structures, and insert them into the RTL code. HiDFT-Scan works within existing design flows and with...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Freeing Communications
Migration of software to open source is often a well kept secret, even though PR agencies try their best to get the word out. A good example is Enea's LINX. At the SourceForge open-source project Web site, we find that "LINX is a distributed communication protocol stack for transparent internode and interprocess communication for a heterogeneous mix of systems." So why was this project started? LINX is integrated with Enea's OSE real-time operating...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Linux At Home In Mobile Phones
MontaVista's Mobilinux 5.0 brings a host of new features to the mobile-phone space. At the top of the list is Micro-SELinux, MontaVista's subset of the NSA-sponsored SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). Pruning SELinux allows mandatory, policy-based access control to be implemented on low-end embedded platforms. The basic Mobilinux weighs in under 2 Mbytes, though typical systems are on the order of 16 Mbytes. Mobilinux boots quickly (under 5 s), enabling a cell...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] USB Module Supports Low-Cost FPGA Development
DLP Design's $119 USB-based DLPFPGA Module sports a Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA. It provides a rapid prototyping environment that can be plugged into a host using the 50-pin header. The module can operate off power from the USB interface or from the host. The Spartan 3E XC3S250E has 250k system gates. The module has an SPI flash chip, 128 kbytes of SRAM, and an on-module voltage regulator. Packed with training material and Xilinx's ISE WebPACK...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Compilers Target Quad-Core CPUs
Version 7.1 of the PGI compilers and tools from the Portland Group, a subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, features a host of improvements including code targeting quad-core AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. The compilers can take advantage of the Opteron's 128-bit wide floating-point units and avoid merge dependencies. The alignment of hot loops lets the compilers take advantage of the expanded 32- byte code fetch window. And, Version 7.1 provides...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PCI Board Handles Four-Axis Stepper And Servo Motion Control
Adlink's PCI-8174 incorporates a DSP with a motion-control ASIC to handle stepper and servo motion-control functions where time-critical motion sequences are common. The board can operate in a standalone mode, and multiple cards can be linked together. Software security protection prevents illegal copying of custom software.The PCI-8174 costs $1190 (see figure). ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] New Generation Of PCIe Switches Brings New Functionality
PLX Technology's latest batch of PCI Express (PCIe) switch chips adds a host of new features, such as dual-cast support in addition to 5-Gbit/s transfer rates. The collection includes the PEX 8648 (48 lanes, 12 ports), PEX 8632 (32 lanes, 12 ports), PEX 8624 (24 lanes, six ports), PEX 8616 (16 lanes, four ports), and PEX 8612 (12 lanes, three ports). Each chip supports PLX's read pacing algorithm to ensure fair sharing of bandwidth. The chips also provide ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 1-2-3-4: What Do We Need More Cores For?
Multicore is here to stay, but how many cores do we need? While more typically is better, AMD is looking to fill a gap between dual- and quad-core chips with the tri-core Phenom for desktops. The Phenom likely will start out as a quadcore chip with one core disabled, but it will be priced between two-core and fourcore chips. It will find a home as long as there remains enough of a price gap between its siblings. Still, power users and servers will...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Autos Getting The Most From MOST150
MOST (Media Oriented System Transport) is creeping into high-end autos to deliver high-performance multimedia to passengers. The MOST150 standard pushes bandwidth to 150 Mbits/s and adds an IP channel to the mix that can carry Ethernet 100BaseT traffic. It also doubles the MOST bandwidth to 50 Mbits/s compared to MOST25 (see figure). MOST addresses fixed-bandwidth applications such as...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tiny SBC Fits In Tight Places
Tiny SBC Fits In Tight Places VIA Technologies' 10- by 7.2-cm VT6047 Pico-ITX single-board computer (SBC) is designed for compact applications. It can use an x86-based, fanless VIA Eden or a C7 processor. It needs only a 30-W power supply, but it provides standard I/O like Ethernet, serial ports, USB ports, 7.1-channel audio, and DVI interfaces. The board has a SATA and an ATA storage interface. It supports up to 1 Gbyte of DDR2. A TV...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Mini-ITX Sports Dual-Core AMD CPUs
Kontron's KT690/mITX supports AMD's dual-core Turiona and Sempron CPUs while incorporating Radeon X1250 graphics. The board has a Compact Flash slot, a PCI slot, and a mini PCI-Express connector, plus PCI Express x8, VGA, and DVI support. Storage interfaces include four SATA-II ports, RAID support, and an ATA133 interface. There are 10 USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 7.1 HDA sound, and eight general-purpose I/Os...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Family Extends 8/32-Bit Continuum
Freescale's Flexis line got a boost with a pair of 50-MHz 32-bit MCF51QE32 V1 Cold- Fire chips. They target mobile applications and draw only 370 nA in the lowest-power stop mode. The chips have 8 kbytes of SRAM and 32 kbytes of flash; a 12-bit, 20-channel analog-to-digital converter; two SCI ports, two I2C ports, and two SPI ports; 54 general-purpose I/O (GPIO); and an internal clock. Pricing starts at $1.94. Meanwhile, Freescale released its V2 Coldfire ...
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William Wong
[Component View] Thermal Protectors Feature Dual-Spring Mechanisms
A family of three thermal protectors from Selco Products offers high-reliability overheat protection, automatic reset, a dual-spring-mechanism design, and sharp "snap-action" sound when activated. The dual-spring design includes strong shock and vibration resistance to ensure extremely stable contact performance. The JP7 targets ac equipment in harsh industrial conditions (see figure). It comes in a...
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Staff
[Basics Of Design] For The Best Receiver Testing, Record And Play Back Real-World Signals
The testing of any new wireless receiver design usually requires conventional test instruments such as a vector signal generator and appropriate output instruments like a scope, vector signal analyzer, or spectrum analyzer. But the result is only a partial test of what the receiver will actually do with real signals, since such testing wonâ??t account for noise, interference, and other conditions such as multipath and fading effects. One...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Engineering Essentials] Printed-Electronics Technology Flexes Its Muscle
The growing field of printed electronics combines liquid functional materials with state-of-the-art printing equipment to create semiconductor components and electronic circuits. The resulting devices are functionally similar to their traditional silicon-based counterparts. However, they're also less expensive and have a number of unique features that open the door to a wide range of new electronic applications, from tiny "smart labels" to full-body-sized...
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Klaus G. Schroeter
