[Engineering Feature] Homeland Security: Seven Years Later
Do you work for the only company in the world that can solve Tom Cellucci’s problem? If so, he’d like to hear from you. As chief commercialization officer of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), he is responsible for identifying, evaluating, and commercializing technology that meets the operational requirements of the DHS and its end users. During the IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] The Embedded Plan For JTAG Boundary Scan
In 1990, the IEEE ratified the 1149.1 standard known as boundary scan. Developed by the Joint Task Action Group (JTAG), it was created to help solve the overwhelming testing problems caused by ever-increasing larger-scale ICs and densely packed multilayer printed-circuit boards (PCBs). The old “bed of nails” method of testing PCBs no longer worked as well, and the inaccessible circuits and even pins on ICs made testing difficult if not impossible. With boundary scan, IC and...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] P25 Handhelds Incorporate High-Velocity Human Factors Design
I don’t often write about OEM products. But since I covered the challenges of designing radios for cops and firefighters in the April 30 issue (see “Radio Interoperability—It’s Harder Than It Looks” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 18657), I wanted to follow up because of a new announcement from Motorola. Vastly...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Interface High-Performance Op Amps With ADCs
The source that drives high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) sees a high-frequency ac load and a dc load of a few hundred ohms or more. Thus, a high-performance op amp with high input impedance of a few megohms and low output impedance would be an ideal choice as an input ADC driver. The ADC driver acts as a buffer and a low-pass filter to reduce overall system noise. As signals travel through the traces of a printed-circuit board (PCB) and long cables, system noise...
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Maithil Pachchigar
[Ideas For Design] Over-Temperature Alarm Circuit Uses Common, Inexpensive Components
A few simple components are all it takes to create an over-temperature alarm. The circuit in Figure 1 requires only an ordinary negative-temperature-coefficient (NTC) thermistor, two common ICs, and a handful of discrete components. The circuit uses a unipolar 12-V supply and consumes only a few milliamps in the idle state. This circuit is particularly suitable for monitoring the temperature of heatsink plates. ...
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T.K. Hareendran
[Ideas For Design] Logic Gates Added To LED Driver Create Camera Privacy Flash Warning
Privacy has become a major issue with the near ubiquitous availability of cell-phone cameras. Some people have called for a preliminary “privacy flash” that goes off just before the full flash in order to warn people that their picture is being taken. In fact, such a flash is required in Italy. You can implement a combination privacy- and full-flash light using simple logic gates along with an LED driver (see the...
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Cedric Deleglise
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Supply Bootstrapping Reduces Distortion In Op-Amp Circuits
New operational amplifiers optimized for high-performance audio and ultrasound applications combine extremely low total harmonic distortion plus noise (THD+N), -130 dB, with large output voltages on heavy, 600-? loads. One would think this might be the universal building block. In real life, it’s a bit more complex. For instance, op-amp input capacitance has a nonlinear behavior that’s a function of the input voltage. The associated input current will...
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Dimitri Danyuk
[Editorial] Graphical Programming Gets Ready To Enter Grade School
NI Week has always been one of my favorite industry conferences. National Instruments does such a great job presenting its latest innovations as well as those of others in the LabVIEW community. This year was no exception. One of the announcements at this year’s show was a product called WeDo, a classroom robotics platform from the LEGO Group (www.lego.com). It puts the power of graphical programming into the hands of...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This PNP Stuff, Anyhow?
Back in the 1960s, I worked with Joe, a good technician who was very analytical. He told me he had put in many months of study to figure out how to bet on horse races. He analyzed all the handicaps, the horses’ records and times, the jockeys’ records, and so on, just as bettors have done for years. After all those months, though, he decided he couldn’t compute how he should bet on horses. His system was never really good enough to actually predict which horse would win and...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] SERDES Chip Improves Signal Integrity, Provides For Real-Time Waveform Viewing
The VSC3441 high-speed serializer/deserializer (SERDES) from Vitesse Semiconductor incorporates clock and data recovery (CDR) circuits and advanced equalization to compensate for various impairments and losses encountered in copper cables and backplane traces and connectors. It also includes Vitesse’s VScope waveform viewing technology, making it possible to see the received signal as it really exists. The company crafted the chip in response to the need for higher-speed...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] First Dual-Port 10GBaseT-Over-Copper Chip Slashes 10-Gbit/s Ethernet Gear
Many companies have been working for years to create the definitive 10-Gbit/s Ethernet physical layer (PHY) for copper cable. With the cost of optical 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) ports lingering at about the $3000 level, copper ports still look attractive at $500/port with existing chips. Now, Teranetics is changing all that with its TNTN2022 10GE copper PHY chip. Offering two ports, it further reduces that per channel cost. 10GE copper PHY chips typically allow standard...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Adapters Simplify Infrastructure And Save Money
The 8000 series converged network adapters (CNAs) from QLogic Corporation aren’t just new network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs). Instead, they’re the first CNAs to allow the Fibre Channel (FC) storage-area network (SAN) protocol to run directly on an Ethernet local-area network (LAN). SANs have grown in importance over the years as organizations now have tons more data to store. Most of those original networks employed FC, which uses high-speed fiber...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] Intel Makes Some Multicore Lemonade
I f you have lemons, you make lemonade. That’s what Intel will be doing with its x86 architecture when it comes to Larrabee, a massive multicore solution that will take aim at high-performance graphics rivals such as NVidia and AMD/ATI (see the figure). While NVidia and AMD/ATI are taking their graphics processing unit (GPU) offerings into the more general computational realm (see “What Will You Do With 1 TFLOLOPS...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Go With The Flow—Dataflow, That Is
The parallel programming challenge will continue to grow as multicore platforms become more common and their complexity and number of cores continue to increase. The domination of sequential programming languages like C/C++ and, in some areas, Java must give way to extensions or new languages to manage multicore platforms. Tools such as Intel’s Task Building Blocks (TBB) enhance C/C++. The latest version of TBB adds the parallel_do construct that operates like...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Open Source Bites Board
Texas Instruments’ $149 Beagle Board can be purchased from DigiKey’s Web site. It contains a dual-core OMAPOMAPOMAPOMAP3 platform with a 600-MHMHz Cortex-A8 and C64+ DSP processor with video accelerator. The chip also has hardware support for Open GL ES 2.0 that can render up to 10 Mpolygons/s. The 430-MHMHz C64+ can handle HD video. Linux and Windows CE are available for the Cortex-A8, while DSP-BIOIOS and codecs run on the C64+. Open-source codecs are in the works. For...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Parallel Processing Gets Terminated
Intel’s Thread Building Blocks 2.1 adds a host of features, including the ability to terminate tasks. This is handy when a thread within a group determines that a solution has been found or an error has been detected such that the rest of the related computation can be terminated. Other new features include a parallel_do function that operates like a foreach loop found in other programming languages, recursive mutex support, and a new thread abstraction. The memory...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] LabVIEW 8.6: More Multicore And More Embedded
During this year’s NINI Week, National Instruments announced LabVIEWIEWIEW 8.6 in addition to a wide range of other NINI hardware and software. And, this latest version of LabVIEW continues to push the limits of parallel processing. Many of its more than 1200 multicore optimized analysis and signal processing routines can take advantage of Intel’s Thread Building Block runtime. LabVIEW applications can push 1 million fast Fourier transforms a second (FFTs/s)...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Fanless PC/104 SBC Uses Less Than 5 W
Looking for a low-cost, low-power PC/104 SBC? Check out Diamond Systems’ Rhodeus. This fanless SBC is based on a 500-MHz AMAMD Geode LX800. Interfaces include Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, two PS/2 ports, and a floppy and IDE port. It can handle up to a 1-Gbyte SODIMM. Pricing starts at $350 with 256 Mbytes of DDR SDRAMRAMRAM. Diamond Systems ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Eight-Core MCU Gets C Compiler
The eight-core Parallax Propeller microcontroller finally has a C compiler courtesy of ImageCraft. The ANSI C compiler supports a large memory model that exceeds the on-chip 2-kbyte limit of the eight cogs (cores). The package includes an IDE, C compiler, assembler, a range of runtime libraries, and debugging support. Applications are typically five to 10 times faster than the interpretive SPIN language tools available from Parallax. Pricing starts at...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] MCU Packs 1-Mbyte SRAM
Renesas’ SuperH 32-bit micros now have up to 1 Mbyte of SRAMRAMRAM on-chip. The 144-MHz SH7262 and SH7264 are optimized for digital audio and media players with graphical displays, including 16-bit WQVGA displays that can be driven directly. The chip includes PWMPWMPWM support suitable for motor control, SD memory card interface USB 2.0 Hi-Speed host/device interfaces, and an audio signal processor and CD-ROMROMROM decoder. An external 16-bit bus provides access to...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 32-Bit Flash MCU Targets Portable Devices
The NEC Electronics V850ES/Jx3-L microcontroller’s flash memory consumes only 0.9 mW/Dhrystone MIPS. It also only uses 1.5 µA in standby mode. The 32-bit, 100-pin processor has 16 kbytes of RAMRAMRAM and 256 kbytes of flash. Peripherals include a 12-channel, 10-bit ADC, dual 8-bit DACACs, three serial ports, three I2C ports, and five clock serial interfaces. Pricing starts at $6. Development tools and C compilers are available from NEC, IAR, and Green Hills Software....
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Verification Evolves Into Lean, Mean Bug-Stomping Machines
We all want our next-generation Pocket Rocket to do new stuff (and do the old stuff better), as well as get smaller, run longer, and cost less. We also don’t necessarily want to wait for the holiday season for it to hit the shelves. We gadget freaks are often rather impatient in that regard. For the design team, these marketplace realities don’t exactly lead to a leisurely existence. Instead, it means negotiating the extraordinary challenges of making it all...
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David Maliniak
[Lab Bench] LEDs Hold The Key To DLP Advantages
The driving forces behind Samsung’s 50-in. HL-T5089S display are Texas Instruments’ MEMS-based Digital Light Processor (DLP) Discovery Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) and Luminus Devices’ Phlatlight LEDs (see the figure). The HL-T5089S delivers a great HDTV picture for less money and uses less power than large-screen LCDs and plasma displays. It’s surprising that the core of this large-screen rear-projection...
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William Wong
[Power Design] Applications Drive Component Power Designs
Power designers often prefer particular power products or manufacturers. Some designers try to drive these preferences into every application. That’s not surprising. Such choices are usually based on successful relationships with specific manufacturers. The designers already know the products, or they can rely on a level of reliability, on-time delivery, or good prices. Many suppliers of dc-dc converters offer common input and output voltages, power levels, and features....
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Tom Curatolo
