April 2, 2001 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: APRIL 2, 2001

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Embedded systems, SoC design tool, EDA for SoCs, Network processors

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April 2, 2001 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
SoC Design Methods Evolve To Meet The Need For Speed
Imagine a scenario in which your design team has received the marketing department's requirements for a next-generation SoC design. But as often happens, before you can finish the lengthy design cycle, the marketers wave a red flag. The market for... — David Maliniak

[Technology Report]
Advances In Embedded Systems Cultivate Connectivity And Development Tools
Pervasive networking permeates this week's Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, Calif., as revealed by technical presentations and exhibited products touting advances in many networking standards. One such advance waiting in the wings, the... — William Wong

[Product Innovation]
Hierarchical SoC Design Tool Handles Over 25 Mgates
Most of today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices are designed in flat fashion. This is fine for designs with only about 10 million gates. But over the next few years, the ballooning gate counts and complexity of SoC designs are expected to force... — David Maliniak

[Design Application]
When Shopping For Network Processors, One Size Does Not Fit All
A fundamental shift is occurring in communications equipment as demands for very high-speed, service-enabled products eclipse demands for more-traditional routing-and-switching offerings. As with any product, the needs of an OEM, in the context of a... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Manually Operated Digital Pot Doesn't Need A Microprocessor
Digital potentiometer ICs such as the MAX5160 and MAX5161 are good replacements for mechanical types. But these ICs are designed to work with microcontrollers. In this manually operated digital potentiometer, two pushbuttons control the wiper... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
The "Starved-Circuit" Amplifier Is Revived In A Transistor Version
Back in the '60s, there was an intriguing circuit article titled "Starved-Circuit Amplifier" published in Popular Electronics magazine. It used a sharp cut-off pentode with a 3-MΩ load resistor and had a voltage gain of over 1000. Of... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Digital-To-Analog-Resistance Converter Is Optically Isolated
The subject of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) applications is generally rather tame. It's usually confined to a boring discussion of settling time, the number of bits of resolution needed, the virtues of serial or parallel interfaces, and whether... — W. Stephen Woodward

[Ideas For Design]
Active Feedback Amplifier Enables High-Performance A-To-D Conversion
Designers employing high-performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have a common problem: there are few, if any, amplifiers on the market that can provide the accuracy needed to buffer an input signal and drive a 16-bit ADC without a loss of... — Moshe Gerstenhaber , et al.

[Editorial]
Strategic Planning Must Consider The Long Term
As often as we hold meetings for planning projects to meet our short-term goals, many of us lose sight of longer-term goals or payoffs. Of course, planning for the long term requires up-front investments of time and effort that can conflict with... — Dave Bursky

[Pease Porridge]
What's All This Southern Crossing Stuff, Anyhow? (Or: The Law Of Unintended Consequences)
A couple of months ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a big headline on page 1: "Feinstein Endorses Southern Crossing." Many years before, arguments had erupted over whether or not the state should invest a few thousand million dollars... — Bob Pease

[Viewpoint]
With SoPs, Good Things Come In Small Packages
The system-on-a-chip (SoC), promulgated by the semiconductor industry, touts future circuit densities and chip sizes as projected by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Stated ITRS goals represent challenges for... — Contributing Author

[Editor's Notebook]
As EDA Tool Complexity Grows, So Do Users' Education Needs
Electronic design automation (EDA) tools are becoming vastly more complex each day. From my vantage point as an editor, I've seen wave after wave of increasingly powerful tools—from physical synthesis tools to SoC design suites to IC... — David Maliniak

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Racing Silicon
Design competition means more than just beating rival products. Designers also are in a race against silicon technology. Faster, denser, cheaper silicon is a heck of a competitor. Running a good race means stepping out to larger design scopes,... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Hardware Products
9U VME Board Packs In 16 G4 AltaVec PowerPCs Sky Computers (978) 250-1920; www.skycomputers.com Bigger is sometimes better, and VME 9U has its uses. In this case, one 9U board can... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
CoreConnect: The On-Chip Bus System
Processor Local Bus (PLB) General processor local bus Synchronous, nonmultiplexed bus Separate Read, Write data buses Supports... — Ray Weiss

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Software Directory: Operating-System Series
Lineo Embedix RealTime Embedix RealTime is a hard, real-time operating system (RTOS) that implements a split architecture for real-time and nonreal-time applications. This provides the benefits of a hard real-time... — William Wong

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Software Products
Synchronized Development And Embedded GUIs Altia Inc. (719) 598-4299; www.altia.com Designers now have interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs) at both the development and the target... — William Wong

[Embedded in Electronic Design]
Keeping Embedded Secure: Authentication And Encryption
Security demands focus the need for authentication, encryption, and digital signatures in embedded network devices as more devices are connected to the Internet. Attacks on desktops, servers, and PCs are increasing because of common platforms and... — William Wong

[Letters]
Letters
Military Waste NASA has an incredible amount of wasted systems ["Electronics Missile Guidance Changes Tactics And Strategy," Dec. 4, 2000, p. 179]. It comes down to jobs doing stupid things simply as required... — Various

[40 Years Ago]
Solid State Emerging From Infancy
Significant steps forward in solid-state electronics appeared to be the dominant theme of the recent 1961 IRE International Convention and Show in New York. Significant developments at the year's biggest electronic convention included the... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
Double-Frame-Grid Pentode Yields High Gain-Bandwidth
With both control and screen grids using frame-grid construction, a new pentode boasts performance features that far surpass those available in conventional pentodes. Compared with some of the better pentodes using conventional construction, the new... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
Grounding Technique Lets Bipolar Process Create Wireless RF PAs
A new grounding method developed by Ericsson Microelectronics makes feasible mass-production of wireless integrated power amplifiers for portable wireless applications. The double-polysilicon bipolar 0.5-µm process achieves a transit frequency... — Alfred Vollmer

[Forefront]
Scientists Put E. Coli To Work In Nanoscale Switches
Certain strains of the E. coli bacterium have gotten some bad press lately. Yet this much-maligned species may have some medically beneficial biotechnological uses after all. Researchers at Cellicon Biotechnologies, Boston, Mass., have... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Speedy Cell-Phone "Concierge" Snares 14 Million Subscribers
In what qualifies as an extraordinarily fast introduction, NTT DoCoMo of Tokyo, Japan, has transformed the wireless phone into a "palm concierge." In just a year and a half, 14 million people have subscribed to DoCoMo's i-mode service. That's 10% of... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Two-Chip Transceiver Set Will Eliminate 802.11b/Bluetooth Interference
Bluetooth and 802.11b Ethernet are popular wireless communication standards. Yet their growth is expected to cause plenty of interference problems in the license-free ISM band. The TrueRadio two-chip transceiver set, produced by startup Mobilian... — Louis E. Frenzel

[Forefront]
ISP Plans On Turning Subscriber Base Into Supercomputer Network
Juno Online Services' Virtual Supercomputing Network initiative hopes to harness the unused computing power of the company's subscribers. While the ISP currently compels its free-service users to view online advertisements and share marketing data,... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
From The Labs
Researchers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington have developed a wireless magnetoelastic medical sensor that provides easier, less-invasive diagnosis of stress-related gastroesophageal reflux disease. Developed with the support of... — Staff

[Forefront]
Discovery Of DSA Flaw May Improve Future Security Of E-Commerce
An improved method has been found to ensure the security of e-commerce transactions based on the digital signature algorithm (DSA). The development follows soon after the discovery of a significant flaw involved in such operations. If left... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
Company Wire
Sensor manufacturer Thermometrics Global Business is partnering with LG Electronics of Korea to create an infrared-technology company named Thermometrics Technologies. The joint venture will develop products for noncontact temperature... — Staff

[Forefront]
Non-PCI 10/100 Ethernet Controller Integrates MAC/PHY Functions
The LAN91C111, a non-PCI 10/100-Mbit/s Ethernet controller IC, integrates the IEEE-802.3-compliant Fast Ethernet media-access controller (MAC), the Ethernet physical-layer (PHY) interface, and a transmit and receive buffer SRAM in one chip. Built by... — Roger Allan

[Forefront]
White LED Offers Broad Temp Range And Color Yield
The TLWA1100 white LED points the way to a stable, white light source with the luminosity required for future replacement of incandescent lamps. Set to be launched by Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC), it realizes a short wavelength... — Matt DeMazza

[Forefront]
Add Programmable Logic IP To Your ASICs Or ASSPs
ASIC designers can obtain programmable logic's reconfigurability. Adaptive Silicon's RAM-based reprogrammable logic IP for ASICs, the MSA2500, has up to 25,000 ASIC gates for flexible designs. Typical logic speeds are about 50 to 100... — Ray Weiss

[Forefront]
Optimized DSPs Target Broadband Infrastructure And Imaging Applications
Wrapping memory, peripherals, and interfaces around its powerful second-generation C64x C6000 core, Texas Instruments has generated three DSPs for broadband wireless infrastructure and high-performance imaging/video applications. Offering full... — Ashok Bindra

[Real-World Engineering]
Man-In-Space Is An Ambition Whose Time Has Passed
Man-in-space has been an ambition of mankind for almost as long as man-in-air. Gigabytes of science fiction exist in print and video about human adventures above the atmosphere, and many people remain uncertain of what is and isn't "real." Some... — Lawrence J. Kamm

[New Products]

• Switches, Relays, And Sensors — Staff

• Embedded Systems — Staff

• Software — Staff

• Components — Staff

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