[Engineering Feature] IP Experts: Put The Brakes On Patent Reform
Issues like the presidential campaign, healthcare, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may dominate the headlines. But Congress also has been working on the Patent Reform Act of 2007, with the House of Representatives passing HR 1908 and the Senate introducing S 1145. (For a table detailing the legislation, go to www.electronicdesign.com, Drill Deeper 17457.) Despite the law’s lack of publicity, the...
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Daniel Harris
[Technology Report] Get The Lowdown On Ultracapacitors
Call them ultracapacitors. Or supercapacitors. Whatever the name, they exhibit vastly greater capacitance than conventional caps. Singly, you can buy radiallead board-mount devices rated for 5 to 10 F at 2.5 V, flashlight-battery size units rated for 120 to 150 F at 5 V, and larger single-capacitor cans good for 650 to 3000 F at 2.7 V. Note that all of those capacitance values are in farads. Not so long ago, a couple of thousand microfarads were a lot of...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Tiny Dual-Axis MEMS Inclinometer Simplifies Industrial Measurements
Targeting industrial applications, Analog Devices’ ADIS16209 dual-axis inclinometer and accelerometer breaks new ground in price, performance, size, and ease of use. The company claims this highly integrated device is the industry’s most accurate and easy-touse tilt sensor. It’s also 100 times smaller than other available devices. The ADIS16209 offers a fully compensated direct digital output with less than 0.1° of linear inclination error. That makes...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] A Low-Power Solution For GPON Burst-Mode Receivers
The move to bring broadband services capable of supporting the triple-play applications of voice, video, and data to first-mile customers (small businesses and the home) continues to evolve. A key player in this FTTx movement is GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network), a fiber-based network that provides a higher bandwidth alternative to existing solutions such as DSL and cable. FTTx refers to the family of first-mile applications, such as Fiber to the Home (FTTH), Fiber to the Building...
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Ron Warner
[Ideas For Design] Alarm Sequencer Tells Process Operator Where To Look First
In a typical process plant, a number of plant parameters will be monitored by individual alarms to ensure safety. If any process parameter crosses its upper or lower limit, the control room is alerted. But when a problem occurs, several process parameters typically will cross their limits. To take proper remedial action, the operator must construct a fault tree and identify the root cause of the event. Using the ISIS Proteus VSM (virtual simulation...
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Vishesh Kalra
[Ideas For Design] Talk To Multiple Devices With One UART
The Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit (UART) interface is found on a variety of peripheral devices. Consider, for instance, a microcontrollerbased system with four such peripherals. Ideally, in low-cost embedded applications, you would like to connect multiple peripherals to a single UART. However, a lack of chip-select signals in UARTs complicates such a task. This is a common design problem, and there are a few conventional ways of...
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Gaurang Kavaiya
[POV: Point Of View] Patent Litigation Has Doubled And Will Double Again Over The Next Decade
Patent litigation in the semiconductor industry has been on a steady incline since 1997, as federal district court filings have slowly doubled. A decade ago, 47 suits were filed. Halfway through 2007, 53 were filed, with 109 total for 2006. Over 900 suits have been filed in all since 1997. Almost 50% of these suits were filed in the Ninth Circuit, primarily in courts located in California. The Patent Local Rules in the Northern District of California and the...
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Todd R. Miller
[Editorial] Putting Data-Center Power In Perspective
I had the opportunity to meet Roger Tipley at the recent Power Electronics Technology Exhibition & Conference in Dallas. Roger is a senior technologist and engineering strategist at Hewlett-Packard as well as a board member of an organization called The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org). The Green Grid has been operating since January and has already grown to 102 members. It is a consortium of information...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Bob: In “What’s All This Capacitor Leakage Stuff, Anyhow?” (March 29, 2007, ED Online 15116) you have a diagram of a test circuit using the LMC662. This circuit is quite a bit different from the “capacitor soakage” test circuit you referenced on your Web site. (After you get the capacitor charged up, and after you get the soakage elements charged up (which takes hours and days), the rate of change of VOUT is caused by the leakage, which you cannot really see until...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Companies Revamp Read-Heads For Multi-Terabyte Storage
Hard-disk-drive (HDD) manufacturers are hard at work on ways to pack multiple terabytes (Tbytes) of storage onto a single device. At October’s Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, two key players in the HDD market detailed their latest work in expanding storage capacity. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) revamped its readheads to make possible a 4-Tbyte drive, while Western Digital shaped current read-head technologies to deliver 3-Tbyte...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Transimpedance Amplifier With AGC Targets 803.3aq Applications
Originally deployed for 1-Gbit Ethernet, a lot of existing fiber-optic cable could manage 10 Gbits/s, thanks to IEEE 802.3aq 10GBase-LRM (long-reach multimode). This standard was approved in 2006 to address multimode dispersion in legacy fiber with a technology called electronic dispersion compensation (EDC). Previous chip sets have depended on amplifiers that were less than optimal for the new standard. But Inphy’s 1348TA S03D transimpedance amplifier (TIA)...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] DACs Simplify Factory Process Control Designs
Working in extreme temperatures or at high voltages in factory process control, distributed control, and smart transmitter applications can be tough for 4- to 20-mA current-mode transmitters and analog I/O systems. Yet four 12- to 16-bit single-channel digital-to-analog converters (DACs) from Analog Devices can make those jobs easier. These DACs integrate user-programmable current-source or voltage output. This makes them attractive because it...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] Signal Integrity Gets The Plug & Play Treatment
It’s hard to beat plug & play as a hot buzzword over the past few years. Often, the term conjures up images of Microsoft Windows. Now, Altera is getting into the mix with Plug & Play Signal Integrity. The company’s hot-swappable FPGA device uses low-power linear adaptive equalization technology—Altera’s Adaptive Dispersion Compensation Engine (ADCE). Plug & Play Signal Integrity gives system architects hot-socketable Stratix II GX...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Oscilloscope Combines Logic Analyzer With Ease Of Use For Better Debugging
Nowadays, designers have to perform more and more embedded testing and digital debugging in addition to their other typical work. So, Tektronix designed its affordable MSO 4000 series of oscilloscopes to address the ever-increasing complexity in the products that engineers design—as well as their need to do things faster. This small but fully featured mixed-signal oscilloscope (MSO) targets engineers who design, test, and debug embedded controller...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Test] Handheld DMM Gets Better With Larger Screen And Logging
The ubiquitous handheld digital multimeter (DMM) keeps getting better. You probably have one on your bench and more around the lab, and it’s still one of the test instruments you use the most. If you’re looking to replace that meter with a better one, though, Fluke’s 287 may be the answer (see the figure). The 287 has all the usual features, plus a few new ones, like its larger and better screen—a 50,000-count quarter...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] A Pioneering ESL Vendor Readies Its Second-Generation Toolset
Now that an electronic system-level (ESL) tool vendor is using the term “ESL 2.0,” I can hear the snickering already, especially from the hardcore RTL camp. Is this just some kind of marketing ploy intended to sell more of the same-old? Or is there more than meets the eye? Marketing ploy or not, ESL is to some extent a state of mind. As one of the earlier entrants in the ESL arena, CoWare has been rethinking its approach, especially in light of...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Verification Library Ensures Compliance Of OCP Interconnects
Virtual platforms used for system-level design are only as good as the models they comprise. Thus, design teams devote considerable time to developing code for verifying these models. But thanks to a system-level verification library for OCP-based (Open Core Protocol) system designs in SystemC, much of the drudgery of this task can be avoided. JEDA Technologies’ OCPchecker verification library comprehensively verifies OCP protocol correctness. The library enforces...
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David Maliniak
[Design FAQs] Compact Tracing With 32-Bit Microcontrollers
What debugging feature is more likely to be found in higher-end 32-bit microcontrollers? Microcontrollers with advanced debugging capabilities typically augment the standard JTAG interface with trace facilities. Trace information can be captured on-chip or off-chip. What is the difference between on-chip and off-chip trace? On-chip trace uses a RAM array located on the chip to store the trace data. It...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Op-Amp Noise
Why the fresh emphasis on low-noise amplification? Some of it is an issue of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Today, sensor voltages and device operating voltages are lower than they used to be, so noise is larger in relation to signal levels. Another factor is that the data converters being used have higher resolutions than in the past, so they need cleaner inputs. What kind of noise are we talking...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] Secure That Microcontroller
These days, security is being built into embedded applications at all levels, including the hardware. However, the wide range of encryption applications, standards, and protocols makes it difficult at best to create a universal platform. The tables on common encryption standards (Table 1) and common encrypted protocols (Table 2) give just a clue of the options available. Hardware...
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William Wong
[EEPN In Electronic Design] What’s Hot? Try A New Capacitor Technology, Isolation Transformers, And Displays
The fruit of a two-year research & development project, a unique and revolutionary capacitor technology from Electronic Concepts promises the highest level of protection against capacitor failure in catastrophic conditions. Known as Fuseac, the patent-pending technology addresses overheating concerns for metallized dry film capacitors in ac applications. In situations posing the threat of failure, Fuseac intuitively detects capacitor hot spots and disconnects the ...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] These Touchscreen Pushbuttons Push You Right Back
Tactile feedback could add a layer of confidence as well as a more familiar feel to passive touchscreen applications. With that in mind, the TouchSense technology from Immersion (www.immersion.com) interfaces with the graphical buttons on a touchscreen to make them feel more like mechanical buttons. Without affecting standard touchscreen functions, the system provides a fast tactile response, synchronizable...
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Mat Dirjish
