[Engineering Feature] Build Your Next Company Around Robotics
Ever Googled the term “robotics”? The only major company and product that show up in the top 100 hits are Microsoft and its Robotics Studio, a development tool that leaves a lot to be desired. (Not one of the dozen or so folks interviewed for this article uses it.) In fact, most of the search results include news, collegiate research, education, and events. Yet in 2006, Korea’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy predicted the global...
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Daniel Harris
[Technology Report] Developers Refine Their Embedded Wares For ESC
Keep two watchwords in mind when you head to next month’s Embedded Systems Conference—more and better. Scheduled for April 14-18 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., this year’s show will reveal a number of incremental improvements as companies deliver systems based on established standards and product lines. For example, Intel will offer its latest Xeon processor chip sets with an eye on power management. The tech...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Verification Gets A Whole Lot Smarter
In a survey of its own users, Mentor Graphics found that more than half of them spend more than half their time in functional design verification. Of those users, 78% are manually writing directed test sequences. This major timesink cries out for automation. Another 41% use constrained random vector generation to augment those directed tests. Further, a solid two-thirds of those users surveyed do their verification at the functional level. Only about...
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David Maliniak
[Design View / Design Solution] Implement A Complete ARV Controller In A Single SoC
From toys to mobile home appliances, there has been a proliferation of simple robotic vehicles— and they all rely on some form of a processor. Some use 8-bit microcontrollers, while others use custom silicon or combinations of discrete components. With today’s technology, you can use a single off-theshelf semiconductor device to create a complete autonomous robotic vehicle (ARV) controller, regardless of vehicle size. This article will show how to build such a...
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William Lovell
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[Ideas For Design] LMC555 Timers Delay Hardware Reset To Collect Debug Data
Most microprocessors have some type of hardware watchdog that can be used to reset the microprocessor and the surrounding hardware to a known state if firmware inadvertently stops executing code. But it may be advantageous to record the watchdog-overflow event in nonvolatile memory (NVM) for debug purposes prior to resetting the hardware. The circuit in Figure 1 uses two LMC555 timers that delay a hardware...
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Ken Turocy
[Editorial] Countdown To The End Of The Analog TV Broadcast Era
As you probably know, analog TV broadcasts will cease on February 17, 2009—less than a year away. For many viewers, it will be a nonevent, simply because they don’t depend on over-the-air broadcasts for their viewing. But the number of American households that will be affected is staggering. A study by the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) put this number at 22 million back in June of 2007. What’s even more astonishing is that in an earlier...
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Joseph Desposito
[POV: Point Of View] Industrial Network Standards Need Good PHY SIlicon Implementations
Industrial networks are moving from analog to digital operation to realize higher functionality while reducing design effort and bill-of-materials costs. Although proprietary solutions have emerged, there is great momentum behind the use of open standards to speed design, reduce costs, and ensure interoperability. Several networking standards suit industrial applications, including Fieldbus-based solutions such as Profibus and the emerging Foundation...
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Paul Pulley
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB: I would like to ask about designing a sinewave amplitude attenuator with programmable attenuation. Preferably, it will just contain basic components (op amps, transistor, resistors, caps, etc.). Input: 1-V p-p sine wave (1 kHz frequency), symmetric at 0-V level. Desired output: still at 1 kHz, but the amplitude varies from 0 to 1000 mV. –JOERICH SUNICO HELLO,...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Analog & Power] GUI Simplifies Design Tweaks
Analog Devices re-emerged as a power-IC contender at last month’s APEC 2008 show in Austin, Texas, with its ADP1043 digital pulse-width modulation (PWM) controller for ac-dc and isolated dc-dc power supplies. To facilitate design with the device, ADI provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that interacts with the chip via an I2C bus (see the figure). The chip...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Fabless Power-Device Challenger Emerges At APEC
Can the fabless semiconductor company model work as well for power devices as it does for more complex chips? It has for Alpha and Omega Semiconductor (AOS), which emerged from the shadows at APEC 2008 in Austin, Texas, last month with a successful product portfolio. These devices include power MOSFETs, some unique transient-voltage supressors (TVS), and an array of high power-density dc-dc regulators, smart load switches, and...
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Don Tuite
[Design FAQs] Class D Amplifiers For Portable Applications
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Analog Devices What is class D amplification? Class D amplifiers are a more efficient alternative to class AB (push-pull) power amplifiers for audio signals. Class D is particularly attractive in portable applications because it helps extend battery life. Complete 3-W class D amplifiers are now...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] Power Formats: You Can Have It Your Way
Now that there are two competing industry formats to capture power intent for low-power designs—the Common Power Format (CPF) and the Unified Power Format (UPF)—design teams need to understand the similarities and differences between the two. A few design companies may be able to ignore one format or the other, but most design companies will use both formats. The first reference to the CPF file format came in early 2006, ...
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Dave Allen
[EEPN In Electronic Design] For More Efficient Cooling, Try Splayed Pin-Fin Heatsinks
The immense processing power generated by today’s cutting-edge ICs enables engineers to design extremely powerful applications. Unfortunately, the higher processing power comes with a dramatic increase in the magnitude of heat dissipation that makes heatsink selection a very complex task. Splayed pin-fin heatsinks consist of a base and an array of embedded round pins splayed outwards (Fig. 1). Forged...
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Barry Dagan
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Consider Your Materials Carefully In Microprocessor And ASIC Design
Microprocessor and ASIC designers must address the thermal and mechanical protection of IC die while considering system cost and reliability. Lids and heatsinks are common solutions for mechanical protection. To ensure reliability, designers seek to minimize die junction temperature and often consider high thermal conductivity to be the most important attribute of lid material. Yet thermal performance and reliability hinges on other factors: match or ...
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Mark A. Occhionero
[EEPN In Electronic Design] PiP Technology Cuts PCB Assembly Costs While Boosting Reliability
OEMs are constantly maintaining or, better put, trying to trim their manufacturing budgets while ensuring product reliability. A big area of interest in the cost-cutting process is the assembly of printed-circuit boards (PCBs). But with their wide array of devices, components, and component types plus their various mounting processes, PCBs offer great potential for errors and big expense. One solution gaining popularity in this arena is pin-in-paste (PiP)...
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Mat Dirjish
[Lab Bench] Hollywood And Silicon Valley Both Love Remakes, Sequels, And Series
Do it once. Do it again. Even better, turn a remake into a series. They make lots of money. It works in Hollywood, and it works for the electronics industry too—sometimes. Just like movies, there are flops in electronics. But while the whims of the viewing public tend to have more of an effect on the success of movies, changes in technology can have a profound effect on whether a particular remake or series of products even makes sense. Some changes are...
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William Wong
