February 19, 2001 Magazine Archive

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ISSUE DATE: FEBRUARY 19, 2001

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Smart power, Best of ISSCC 2001, 3G cell phones, PC-based ATE

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February 19, 2001 - In This Issue

[Technology Report]
Driving Toward 3G Cell Phones: Are We There Yet?
No, 3G cell phones aren't available yet. But we're getting close. The first 3G phones will show up in Japan this year as NTT-DoCoMo initiates its WCDMA system in May. European countries will no doubt be next as they're already on the upgrade path... — Louis E. Frenzel

[Product Innovation]
Smart Power Blocks Build New Approach To DC-DC Conversion
As microprocessors and ASICs have migrated toward lower supply voltages and higher currents, they have forced systems designers to adopt distributed power architectures. These architectures minimize the power distribution losses associated with... — David G. Morrison

[Design Application]
PCs Provide The Key To Economical Yet Effective Automated Test Systems
The ordinary personal computer makes convenient automated testing possible on an everyday budget. In general, the PC-based system is usually dedicated to testing a specific component or circuit. Large-scale automatic test equipment (ATE), on the... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Tunable Diode Laser Photocurrent Amplifier Has 80-dB Logarithmic Gain
Tunable diode lasers (TDLs) are of increasing importance in many optoelectronic applications, including wavelength division multiplex communications and chemical analytical spectroscopy. TDLs are unexcelled as coherent, high-intensity,... — W. Stephen Woodward

[Ideas For Design]
Hot-Swap Controller Creates A Flexible Current Limiter
Current limiting is often necessary to protect a power supply from short circuits and load surges, which can pull the supply voltage low. ICs containing p-channel MOSFETs and adjustable current limits are available for this purpose. Yet most are... — Contributing Author

[Ideas For Design]
Precision Current Source Design Employs Bootstrapped Integrator
The general-purpose current source in Figure 1 is accurate within 1% and insensitive to temperature (less than 50 ppm/°C). It also has a high output resistance and a wide compliance range (4.3 to 34... — Clayton B. Grantham

[Ideas For Design]
12-V Amplifier Is Designed Using Low-Voltage Digital Potentiometer
Analog circuits today are typically biased from ±5 V to ±18 V. But the trend is toward lower voltages. For this reason, many components are designed to operate primarily in ±5-V systems. One example is the digitally controlled... — Contributing Author

[Editorial]
Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Megawatt Or Two?
If the situation wasn't so close to home and potentially dangerous, it could almost be considered a large practical joke. Unfortunately, the power shortage in California is real. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, the power does black out from... — Dave Bursky

[Viewpoint]
Magnetic Developments Must Keep Pace With An Explosive DSL Market
By now, we should all be familiar with the explosive growth in digital subscriber line (DSL) technology. Estimates are that cable-modem and DSL subscriptions will rise 77% annually between 1999 and 2004, and revenues will grow from $1 billion to... — Contributing Author

[Editor's Notebook]
Choosing Components Gets Tougher When There Are Strings Attached
Getting the right hardware and software components and tools for a project shouldn't be difficult given the plethora of choices. There are dozens of programming languages to pick from. Development environments from multiple vendors for multiple... — William Wong

[Conference Preview]
Wider Bandwidths Surpass Density As Driving Force For New DRAMs, CPUs
Memory density has traditionally been a key technology driver that has taken center stage in the digital technology papers at past International Solid-State Circuits Conferences (ISSCCs). But this year's presentations, which took place earlier this... — Dave Bursky

[Conference Preview]
CMOS ADCs Surge Past 1 GHz As VCOs Race Toward 50 GHz
Scaling analog circuits and data converters in CMOS has always been a daunting task for designers. But those hurdles get taller as developers begin migrating toward design rules of 0.25 µm and below for lowering power consumption, size, and the... — Ashok Bindra

[Conference Preview]
RF, Wireless, And Optical Technologies Become The Hot Topics
Over 40% of the papers presented at this year's ISSCC were communications- or networking-oriented. That was to be expected given this year's theme, "The Internet Age: Technologies Driving Digital Convergence." Memory, microprocessor, and other... — Louis E. Frenzel

[Conference Preview]
LSI Designs Bring MPEG-4's Potent Multimedia Performance To Fruition
Multimedia is taking off like gangbusters in entertainment, education, and medicine. But the huge amounts of data—text, speech, music, images, graphics, and video—make representation a challenging task indeed. Admittedly, much work has... — Stephen Grossman

[Letters]
Letters
Be Open To New Perspectives I enjoyed "Sensors To Transform Vehicles Into Electronic Cocoons" [Jan. 8, p. 74]. What was Mr. Rabinow's/your test? I think you're right; the key really is free... — Various

[40 Years Ago]
Redundancy Promises High Reliability
Reliability demands of military electronics are forcing development of advanced concepts of redundant circuit design. Majority voting, network, and adaptive concepts are commanding the interest of the armed services, now saddled with the "put in two... — Steve Scrupski

[40 Years Ago]
IR Maser Offers First CW Coherent-Light Source
Coherent-light communication systems appear significantly closer to realization with news of a cw infrared maser developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J. The device, employing a mixture of helium and neon, delivers a principal... — Steve Scrupski

[Forefront]
Extended PC Promises A Bright Future For Consumer Electronics
If you're tired of opening the newspaper's business pages and finding yet another dire prediction for the overall U.S. economy, perhaps a narrower vantage point will help. Factory sales of U.S. consumer electronics will grow by better than 5%... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Vendors Show Off Streaming Media, Internet Appliances Using Power Lines
Power-line networking is on the way to a home near you—in fact, yours. This technology allows users to simply plug their devices into standard wall outlets to connect to a network. A number of vendors demonstrated PC networking and streaming... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Linux 2.4.0 Boosts Performance While Expanding SMP Support
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has released the Linux 2.4.0 kernel for general use. Now that its testing—which has been extensive because of its long list of improvements and bug fixes—is complete, the new kernel will find its way into... — William Wong

[Forefront]
Groups Aim To Make Molehill Out Of Mountain Of Electronic Trash
In 1998, approximately 20.6 million PCs in the U.S. became obsolete. Only 2.3 million of these, or 11%, were recycled. The rest found themselves in landfills, a dangerous proposition for a number of reasons. Landfills already have precious little... — Richard Gawel

[Forefront]
GaN-Based HEMTs Fabricated On 4-in. Silicon Wafers
To harness the high-frequency benefits of gallium nitride (GaN), Nitronex Corp. of Raleigh, N.C., has developed proprietary processing technology for fabricating GaN-based high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) on larger low-cost silicon wafers.... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
3D Chip Design Crafts Imaging Subsystem On A Single Chip
For the past two decades, designers have attempted to create 3D circuits to reduce IC chip area, eliminate lengthy interconnections, and cut chip counts. The latest attempt by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 3D-IC, both of Lexington,... — Dave Bursky

[Forefront]
Company Wire
Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. has been added to the Standard & Poors 500 index. The S&P500 is widely used as the standard for measuring the performance of large-company stocks. Vitesse makes high-performance ICs for high-speed... — Staff

[Forefront]
Totally Digital Audio Solution Enhances Sound Quality
A digital audio solution from Texas Instruments enhances design flexibility for creating digital sound quality in audio systems. With a true digital audio amplifier, this system keeps the audio signal in a digital format from the source to the... — Lisa Eccles

[Forefront]
CMOS 12-Bit DAC Updates At 400 Msamples/s
Suitable for satellite basestations and high-resolution imaging applications, Fujitsu Microelectronics' MB86061 digital-to-analog converter (DAC) combines a deep-submicron CMOS process with a novel segment-shuffling technique in a segmented... — Ashok Bindra

[Forefront]
Disk System Sports Plug-In 5-, 10-, And 20-Gbyte Drives
Multimedia and streaming media have voracious ap-petites for storage and for high-speed data transfer. These de-mands are overwhelming the capabilities of CDs and DVDs. But a new drive system delivers up to 10 times the performance and massively... — Stephen Grossman

[Forefront]
Signal-Processing Modules Increase PCI Bus Performance
PCI-based bus systems can perform high-end image and signal processing with the VantageRT 7400 system from Mercury Computer Systems. It consists of the RACE++ high-speed multiprocessing Interlink adjunct modules and the G4 vector-processing... — Ray Weiss

[Careers]
Make Telecommuting Work For You As An Engineer
Over the last several years, a great deal of press has focussed on the advantages and limitations of telecommuting—that is, performing office work while at home. This approach has proven very successful for jobs whose tasks, responsibilities,... — Peter Varhol

[New Products]

• Interconnects — Staff

• Digital — Staff

• Discrete Semiconductors — Staff

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