[Engineering Feature] Semi ICs Drive Auto Safety And Control Innovation
In the never-ending battle to add more end-user value, the focus among automotive component and car manufacturers has turned to improving safety and control for vehicles. Driver assistance, collision prediction and avoidance, lane-departure warning, and electronic stability control (ESC) are just some of the systems getting a lot of attention these days. However, “value” isn’t the only driving force behind these technological pursuits....
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] MOST Emerges As "The" Auto Multimedia Standard
Who would have thought 10 years ago when the MOST Cooperation was formed that today’s automobiles, with all of their multimedia features, would turn into home entertainment centers on wheels? In fact, two years prior in 1996, U.S. automotive manufacturers weren’t even keen on adopting the MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) protocol. Such wasn’t the case with their European and later their Asian counterparts, who began discussing the concept (...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] MOST Boasts Expanding Hardware/Software Support
The MOST automotive protocol seems to add new hardware and software suppliers to its cadre daily. Parts suppliers are realizing the strong market opportunity in supporting a network that meets modern and future automotive infotainment system requirements with a high level of quality of service and at ever-improving cost levels. A crucial element is the fiber-optic transceiver (FOT) circuit for the high-speed fiber version of the 150-Mbit/s protocol. In the...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] IPTV Makes Channel Surfing More Like Web Surfing
How do you watch television? Nearly 70% of us get our TV via one of the major cable providers. Satellite has carved out a good niche and grabs more than 20% of that market. If it’s strictly over the air, then hold your hand up as one of the 15% who still claim that as their means of reception. (That will change, as analog TV transmission expires on February 17, 2009.) Now the dawn of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) is changing the landscape even further. AT&T,...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Ultrasound AFEs Get More Specialized, Easier To Design With
An emerging business philosophy in semiconductor design says that the way to prosper in the new global marketplace is to use your engineering skills to design your customers’ products for them—or at least the “hard parts.” One corollary of this is that you have to keep beating your own previous personal-best benchmarks over and over again at the same old 18-month cycles, not just at some component level, but at the subsystem level. The reward is that...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Get The MOST Out Of Your Automotive Communications
T he clamor for more digital connectivity in vehicles has car designers scrambling to implement systems that efficiently distribute audio, video, and other content. These requirements have led to the design of a future-proof system and networking architecture that can cope with the different development time frames in the consumer and the automotive worlds. While existing implementations focused on audio, Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST) now ...
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Wolfgang Bott
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[Design View / Design Solution] Use ZigBee For Cost-Effective WPAN Sensing And Control Solutions
Wireless personal-area networks (WPANs) are exceptionally useful for sensing, monitoring, and control applications. Cost-effective WPANs have the unique potential to implement wireless connectivity in many end products where this functionality wasn’t considered previously. A thorough, fact-based, logical, and organized evaluation of key WPAN design factors can closely manage system financial objectives, increasing end product value with a positive...
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Pattye Brown
[Ideas For Design] Simple Threshold Switch For An LED Indicator
I needed a simple LED indicator showing that a particular voltage level had been reached—specifically, that a capacitor had charged to a particular potential. I was convinced that there must be a way that a programmable zener diode, such as the TL431, could be used but I found no simple circuits. My first thought was just to connect a series current limiting resistor and LED to the cathode so that the LED would light when the reference potential was reached...
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Robert H. Russell
[Ideas For Design] Six MOSFETs, Four Pins Create Two-Input Combo NAND/NOR Gate
This CMOS two-input combination NAND/NOR gate is a three-input, fourpin logic gate. A p-channel enhancementtype MOSFET (Q1) and an n-channel enhancement-type MOSFET (Q4) form one complementary connection. Q2 and Q6 form a second complementary connection, while Q3 and Q5 form the third (see the figure). A low input at A will close Q1 and open Q4. A high input at A will open...
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Lakshmi Narasimharao Chitturi
[Editorial] GaN-Based Power Device Signals Next-Gen Power Conversion
International Rectifier Corp. has successfully developed a GaN-based (gallium-nitride) power-device technology platform. It’s expected to provide improvements in two key application-specific figures of merit, on resistance and gate charge, of up to a factor of 10 compared to state-of-the-art silicon-based technology platforms. On resistance relates to how much current you can process in a unit area. It also can be related to the cost per amp of...
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Joseph Desposito
[Editorial] Traffic Jam? Bored Kids? Don't Worry—As Long As MOST Is On Board
As a father in a family that has spent a lot of time on the road, particularly round-tripping on Route 80 from Ohio to New Jersey for just about every holiday, I know from experience that multimedia in the car can be a lifesaver! With my three kids at all the various stages growing from tot to teen, packed in our progressively wired wagons and minivans, we have definitely made the most of in-car entertainment. I’ll never forget the worst traffic delay of...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] FPGAs Get Behind The Wheel Of In-Cabin Automotive Systems
Programmable logic devices (PLDs) are gaining favor in the automotive in-cabin systems market due to their inherent flexibility and ability to be modified at the point of manufacturing— and ultimately at the point of sale. Targeting automotive systems that include driver assistance, infotainment, and communications, programmable logic is well suited to let designers meet the ever changing tastes and needs of consumers. Automotive production volumes and price...
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Dave Elliott
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Space Heater Stuff, Anyhow?
keep hearing people say that the cost of energy is forcing them to choose between paying for gas to get to work, or buying food, or heating the house, or paying the mortgage... So they scrimp as much as they can and then lose their house to foreclosure. That’s very unfortunate. I can’t tell you how to save money on groceries, but other people will tell you how to do that. I can’t tell you all the ways to burn less gas in your car, but it is possible...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Test] Data-Logger Trio Handles Heat, Pressure, And Budgets
Targeting temperature and pressure data-logging applications across a wide range of industries, Omega Engineering offers a number of cost-effective solutions. Whether in the field or in house, these instruments pair comprehensive feature sets with cost-effective pricing. Described as a precision resistance temperature detector (RTD) temperature recorder, the OM-CP-RTDTEMP2000 has one of the largest memory capacities of any similar data ...
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Mat Dirjish
[TechView: EDA] Synopsys Takes The Analog/Mixed-Signal Plunge
Recognizing an opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of the expanding analog/mixed-signal (A/M-S) design community, Synopsys has launched the Galaxy Custom Designer, which takes the Galaxy design platform into the realm of fullcustom design implementation. Custom Designer has been built from scratch in an effort to carve market share from Cadence’s aging Virtuoso analog design environment. Given the push for greater integration in IC...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Millimeter-Wave MMIC Power Amp Operates From 18 To 33 GHz
Getting high output power and excellent linearity in a millimeter-wave amplifier is no easy trick. But Avago has done it with its AMMC/P-6333 (see the figure). This high-performance driver amplifier offers high gain and power with excellent input and output return losses. It also targets the need for broadband and eliminates the need for a negative voltage. Primary...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] Sensor Offers Web-Based Monitoring
Sensor Offers Web-Based Monitoring Remote monitoring of temperature and other physical environmental characteristics just got easier with Newport Electronics’ wiSeries wireless sensors. This radio complies with IEEE’s 802.15.4 standard and transmits on one of 16 channels in the 2.4- to 2.483.5-GHz ISM band. The device uses direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) and a star network topology. Unlike most radios using this standard, the wiSeries...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DIMMs Do More DRAM
DRAM chip density continues to climb. But the hunger for more memory seems insatiable, especially with virtual systems running on multicore processors. One way to get more memory in a system is to support more memory sockets, though this requires more motherboard space and more drivers. Another is to use higher-density chips, yet this can be more costly. MetaRAM puts a DDR3 cont rol ler between the memory socket and memor y chips (...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DSC Lets Coprocessor Handle Real-Time Analog
Texas Instruments’ C2000 digital signal controller (DSC) gets a major boost with the Control Law Accelerator (CLA). This 32-bit floating-point controller speeds up the processing, often by a factor of five, of analog chores such as motor control and power-supply management. It executes programs stored in shared SRAM, up to 64 kbytes. The main 60-MHz C28x core has its own SRAM, flash, and boot ROM. It also has access to the full peripheral complement, while...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] MCU Packs In Massive nvSRAM
Recording data on flash has limitations, so Cypress Semiconductor turned to nonvolatile SRAM (nvSRAM) with its latest PSoC family of 8-bit configurable microcontrollers. The PSoC NV can offer up to 256 kbytes of nvSRAM plus 2 kybtes of conventional SRAM and 32 kbytes of flash. The nvSRAM has a transfer rate of 1 Mbyte/s and eliminates the wear issues of flash. This can be critical in embedded data logging applications where replacement is not ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 3D Imaging: You've Just Got To See It
We’re used to seeing in 3D. Computer imaging has taken a while to catch up. Several developments are coming together, from multicore processors to high-resolution cameras to fast refresh displays, to make 3D imaging happen. 3D imaging likes parallelism. This opens up opportunities for using graphics processing units (GPUs) that are readily available (see “What Will You Do With 1 TFLOPS Of Double-Precision Power?” at...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Kit Combines RTOS And IDE
Looking to deliver the best of breed, IAR Systems, Micrium, and NXP Semicondcutors have put together their respective integrated development environment (IDE), real-time operating system (RTOS), and microcontroller in a single package. NXP’s industrial reference design (IRD) platform combines NXP’s ARM7-based LPC2468 with Micrium’s popular uC/OS-II RTOS with the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM C/C++ compiler and debugger. IAR’s tools support C/C++ and MISRA C....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Implement Your DLP Ideas
Texas Instruments’ Discovery 4000 Starter Kit lets developers create applications based on TI’s digital light processing (DLP) system. Kits start at $4999 for a 1024-by-768, 0.55-in. digital micromirror device (DMD). The kit includes a board with the DMD and support FPGA and ASIC chips. Windows drivers are included. A 1080p version is available. The DMD can operate across the light spectrum from IR to UV, suiting it for many different...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] OLEDs Put On Quite A Display
Of all the leading display technologies, none has generated more excitement as the display technology of the future than organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). OLEDs possess all of the positive attributes of any current display technology with little or no negative features—at least not yet. For example, they don’t require any backlighting like other displays, such as liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). OLEDs present bright, clear video and images...
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Roger Allan
[Lab Bench] Will Getting Closer To Flash Be Cheaper? Faster? Better?
Solid-state disk drives are all the rage, with two flavors for embedded solutions: hard-disk form-factor devices and USB devices.There’s also a complement of flash cards, from Compact Flash to Sony’s Memory Stick, but they tend to be single devices. They often require specialized interfaces, and their capacity usually is limited due to physical constraints. Yet a third form factor may offer an opportunity, especially in embedded environments via another...
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William Wong
