[Engineering Feature] High Efficiency Challenges Power-Management Design
The semiconductor industry has always forced the power-supply industry to follow its trendsetting lead. For the last decade, that trend has been to cram more transistors into a single package, particularly microprocessors. This led to microprocessors with smaller feature sizes and tighter spacing between internal components. To be operational, smaller feature sizes forced the processors to operate at a lower voltage. This, in turn, required lowervoltage power...
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Sam Davis
[Technology Report] New Techniques Enhance Efficiency Across All Loads
Engineers who design products that plug into the ac mains face upcoming efficiency mandates that will make power-supply design tougher—and, one hopes, more lucrative. To some extent, the same is true for designers of portable equipment, as consumers get used to ever more powerdraining features while simultaneously demanding equal or longer battery life. Back in the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created a voluntary labeling program...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] DC-DC Converter Makes Single-Cell Microcontroller
Silicon Labs has met the challenge of cutting power consumption to a single cell with its C8051F9xx, which fits into a 4- by 4-mm package (Fig. 1). Ranging from 0.9 to 3.6 V, its operating voltage is ideal for one- or twocell solutions. This 25 MIPS, 8051-compatible microcontroller has a 5-V tolerant I/O with a built-in 24.5-MHz (2% accuracy) clock. It also boasts a second,...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Customize Power Supplies Freely With A Digital Feedback Loop
Tighter power regulations and safety issues are demanding efficient and intelligent power supplies that can be monitored externally and manufactured cost-effectively, with minimal hardware changes. Power-supply engineering advances have shown that digital control of the power-conversion feedback loop enables designers to create more accurate and reliable power supplies with increased power density, at lower costs and with faster...
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Keith Curtis
[Ideas For Design] Use Digitally Controlled Potentiometer To Adjust Voltage Reference Output
The output voltage of a voltage reference device can be adjusted using a digitally controlled potentiometer (DCP) without significantly changing the device’s temperature coefficient (TC), which describes how the output voltage changes as the operating temperature changes. Some voltage references include a trim pin for fine-tuning VOUT using a DCP. However, even parts without a trim pin can be adjusted using a DCP. First, consider the case of...
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Dipti Desai
[Ideas For Design] Two AA Cells Power Class D Amp To Produce Huge Audio Volume
Class D audio amplifiers like the MAX9704 offer almost 90% efficiency, but they need 10 V to operate. For battery-operated systems, that would require a large number of batteries wired in series. You can avoid bulky battery packs by incorporating a switched-mode boost converter like the MAX1771, which generates 12 V from inputs as low as 2 V and delivers output currents up to 2 A. A battery-operated class D amplifier can then run off a pair of AA cells. ...
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Nick Allen-Rowlandson
[Ideas For Design] Add Fail-Safe Shoot-Through Protection To Power MOSFET
MOSFETs are widely used as power switching elements in regulators and motor controllers. They can be either discrete devices or integrated into ICs in various H-bridge configurations. A common arrangement uses a high-side (HS) power MOSFET, M1, and a low-side (LS) MOSFET, M2, to drive an inductive load (Fig. 1). When the HS FET is switched on and LS FET is switched off,...
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Dongjie Cheng
, et al.
[Editorial] Putting All Your Power Adapters In One Basket
Welcome to this year’s edition of Electronic Design’s One Powerful Issue. In trying to decide what my contribution might be, I needed to look no further than my desk at home. Sitting on it are power adapters for a cell phone, PDA, Bluetooth headset, and notebook PC. This has become almost unmanageable for me, not to mention unsightly, since the cords run all over the desk and down the side to a power strip on the floor. What a mess. To make things...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This LED Power Stuff, Anyhow?
Recently, NSC put on a webcast with Howard Johnson, NSC’s Chris Richardson, and some guys from Philips and Future. As they had set it all up and presented it at the last minute, I didn’t know what points they were going to make. When they made their pitch, it all made perfect sense—but I wasn’t prepared to contribute very much. I sat there like a “fifth wheel,” not making many comments. But I did set up one experiment, which wasn’t shown on the webcast. I...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Analog & Power] Ultra-Quiet Buck Converter Suits RF And High-Speed Data Applications
The most challenging realm for dc-dc converters comprises cell-phone data cards, backplane adapters, and other applications that are sensitive to radiated and conducted switching noise from the converter. Enpirion, the Lucent spinoff with a converter technology that integrates the FETs and places the inductor inside the package, has quietly captured a large share of that kind of business in the last couple of years. Housed in a 3- by 3-mm...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Op Amp Cuts Power And Noise
For densely populated, thermally sensitive instrumentation applications that requires high-speed signal conditioning. Analog Devices’ single-channel 850-MHz ADA4857 high-speed voltage feedback op amp combines a number of desirable features. It burns only 5 mA, less than half that of other amps in its class. Also, it reduces input noise to 4.4 nV/vHz, also half that of competing amps. Its –91-dBc distortion specification at 10 MHz gives it a...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Smaller SFP+ Optical Transceivers Save Space And Power
The lower cost and wider availability of network interface cards (NICs) and other optical components have led to the recent upsurge in 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) networking. According to a recent report by research firm IDC, installation of 10GE ports will more than double from 1.4 million in 2007 to over 3 million by 2010 as more and more network switches and other datacom equipment adopt 10GE technology. Avago’s SFP+ (small form-factor...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Access Processor Aggregates Multiple Protocol Traffic For Carrier Ethernet Transmission
An excess of acronyms represents the protocols used in carrying various types of data traffic. Nowhere is this more profound than in cellular communications, where basestations must maintain the older legacy protocols as well as implement all the new ones. The challenge in making equipment that can handle this job lies in pulling all those different protocols together and transmitting them over a lower-cost medium. That lower-cost medium is...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] GPON Platform Ready For FTTH Rollout
The adoption of passive optical networks (PONs) is growing as large carriers like AT&T and Verizon implement their video and data plans for consumers. Many smaller local carriers are beginning to offer fiber to the home (FFTH) systems as well. PONs are also being adopted worldwide in Japan, France, and China. While growth is evident, though, PONs haven’t hit the accelerator to faster adoption. In the meantime, chip vendors are beginning to offer silicon...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Digital] FPGA Gets The Hang Of Low Power
Until recently, low-power FPGAs were about as oxymoronic as bipartisan cooperation and bug-free code. But the FPGA landscape is changing for the better as more vendors can say with a straight face that they offer low-power FPGAs without having their marketing guy laughed out of the room. Not only that, but FPGAs also have been getting more and more design wins in battery-based portable applications in which low power consumption is...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] 10 FPGA Tricks Provide Power-Saving Treats
1. Select an FPGA with an ASIC-like power profile. That means no inrush power, no boot-up configuration power, ultra-low standby power (especially over extended temperature ranges), and low dynamic power. Low-power and secure in-system programmability allow secure design modifications and field upgrades. 2. Look for single-chip, small-form-factor (portable-friendly) FPGAs. The ASIC-like form factor is the smallest footprint available ...
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Fares Mubarak
[TechView: EDA] System Design Environment Goes "Soft"
Enabling system design in the “soft” domain, before a hardware platform has been settled upon, brings numerous advantages—not the least of which is maximizing flexibility as deeply as possible into the design process. An important byproduct of such an approach is the ability to create differentiation. To this end, Altium’s Innovation Station comprises a complete system-design environment that combines the company’s Altium Designer software...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 3U VPX Hits The Sweet Spot
In recent years, two seemingly conflicting technology trends have affected many rugged embedded aerospace and defense applications. First, system designers have witnessed rapidly increasing requirements for processing speed, bandwidth, and distributed processing through the adoption of serial fabrics. Meanwhile, size, weight, and power (SWaP) are critical design considerations for emerging applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and...
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John Wranovics
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Why Can't I Do What I Want?
Challenges abound when you’re dealing with computers and trying to get something done—and computers are everywhere these days, from cell phones to light switches. Occasionally, these flaws may be a design oversight. In other cases, the barriers may be by design. Recently, I was trying to get some MP3 ringtones onto my new LG VX9900 EnV by using a free tool called BitPIM (see the ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit Houses PICO-ITX
For prototype or production, the VIA ARTiGO Builder Kit provides a compact, 15- by 11- by 4-cm, x86 platform. The system uses between 15 and 20 W from the PWB-N550 power board, and the case still has space for a 2.5-in. hard disk or flash drive. The $300 kit is based on VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX board running a 1-GHz VIA C7 processor that can handle up to 1 Gbyte of DDR2 533 small-outline dual-inline memory-module (SO-DIMM) system memory....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Dual-Head Graphics Target XMC Slot
XMC slots looking for high-performance graphics can try Thales Computers’ XMC-G72. This dual-head XMC mezzanine card has an x8 PCI Express interface that delivers an AMD/ATI M72-CSP128 graphics controller with 128-Mbyte on-chip GDDR3 memory and dual outputs. DVI/CRT or dual-CRT versions are available. The rugged conduction-cooled version routes the digital DVI video output to the Pn4 rear I/O connector. Drivers support 2D and 3D acceleration...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Universal Graphics Module: The New Standard For Graphics Control Modules
The demand from embedded applications for high-performance graphics has increased dramatically as larger flat-panel displays have become readily available and very desirable components are integrated in systems ranging from medical imaging to point-of-sale. Yet interface reliability, interchangeability, and long-term availability have been sticking points for designers in choosing which controller to use. Embedded designers needed a...
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Christine Van De Graaf
[Embedded in Electronic Design] OMAP ARMed With Cortex
Texas Instruments' latest crop of OMAP processors is based on ARM's 600-MHz superscalar Cortex-A8 core. The 65-nm OMAP35x line includes four chips, starting with a long A8 core and moving up to a C64x DSP/A8 dual-core solution at the high end. The latter comes complete with 2D/3D OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Running at 300 MHz, the A8 core is comparable to a 600-MHz ARM 9 processor while only consuming 220 mW. Multiple power domains, adaptive voltage scaling, and dynamic...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Peripheral Controller Chip Makes Nice With PCI Express
MosChip Semiconductor Technology's MCS9901CV PCI Express (PCIe) to peripheral I/O controller targets peripheral expansion. The 1x PCI Express (PCIe) interface can access any of the devices, including an I2C port, a 1.5-Mbit/s parallel port, a limited ISA bus interface, a USB 2.0 host, and up to four RS-232, RS-485, and RS-422 mode serial ports. Four mode select pins specify 14 combinations of peripherals support, since a full complement cannot be active at one time. For...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Traversing The Telecom Standards Maze
Proprietary designs once dominated telecom equipment. Individual companies provided total solutions encompassing the customer premises equipment, central-office gear, and a link with the wide-area network. To remain competitive, cut costs, and keep pace with technological innovation, vendors are now moving from proprietary to standards-based designs. Several organizations are involved in the definition of open platform standards (see “Guide To The...
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Stuart Jamieson
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Modules And Motherboards
Modules and small motherboards like VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX or Kontron’s nanoCOMExpress offering are designed to pack commercial off-theshelf (COTS) performance into a small package (see the table). The ever-expanding set of options is necessary to address new interconnects such as PCI...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Stop The Waste In Your Battery-Charger Conversion
Excess energy waste during battery charge is, of course, a bad idea for the environment and poor design practice. In fact, the problem has deepened to the point where it’s now an international regulatory agency issue. Battery-charger efficiency is more challenging to specify and measure than ac-dc power-supply conversion efficiency. It’s usually understood as the amount of energy stored in the battery relative to the energy consumed by the charger during...
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David Gunderson
[Lab Bench] Make The Universal Serial Bus Your Universal Power Supply
Why don’t all devices that draw less than 500 mA come with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) socket? Finding a charger these days hasn’t gotten any better, yet USB sockets are everywhere. Only a fraction of these devices, from cameras to cell phones to wireless headphones, has a USB socket, and it would be nice if that number would increase. So why bring the topic up here? Because you or one of our other readers will likely design or select the...
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William Wong
[Power Design] Demanding Dynamic Loads: Can Power Devices Keep Up?
With each new generation of processor, the trend is toward lower voltages, higher currents, and faster dynamic loads. As a result, power-system designers are challenged to provide ever-faster transient response. They also have to do it using less board area while providing cost-effective and efficient power-systems solutions that offer the requisite performance. The question is if power devices can keep up. Power designers traditionally responded to the need...
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Tom Curatolo
