[Engineering Feature] The Processor Wars
Just when you thought all was quiet on the personal computer (PC) front, with entrenched competitors grimly holding onto their market share, a new battle has broken out. Due to the rise of the mobile Internet device (MID), traditional computer processors face new competition from the camps of cell-phone and set-top box vendors. The result is a confusing call to arms as processor vendors recruit developers to occupy territory in what is still a nebulous...
—
Richard Quinnell
[Leapfrog: First Look] 1.5-GHz FPGA Takes Clock Gating To The Max
Flexibility is key to FPGA success, but speed is equally important. Achronix almost triples the throughput of the system by taking clock gating to the extreme. The Achronix Speedster FPGAs use a unique pipeline architecture but completely hide it from developers. Designers can use the devices with unaltered Verilog, VHDL, or RTL. Developers also can continue to use development tools like Synplicity’s Synplify-Pro and Mentor Grahpics’ Precision. ...
—
William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Test The DigRF Interface On Mobile Internet Devices
Cell phones and other mobile Internet devices (MIDs) typically use two primary chips—the RF section or radio transceiver and the baseband (BB) section, which handles the digital processing associated with modulation and demodulation and other physical-layer functions. Since the radio generates and receives analog RF signals and the baseband chip performs digital operations, some data conversion between the two is involved. The big question has been where...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Design View / Design Solution] Bulletproof Your System Timing With Programmable Clocks
Ever wondered how much timing margin your system really has? You’ve probably asked some questions along these lines, such as: Does my crystal really need 20 parts-per-million (ppm) accuracy? What if noise couples to my timing clock edge? Will my display always look this good across manufacturing process corners? Is there enough timing margin to add spread spectrum (SS) for reduced electromagnetic interference (EMI)? This article helps answer...
—
Greg Richmond
[Ideas For Design] Design A Low-Cost 4- To 20-mA Receiver Circuit For Control Loops
Current-mode control loops (particularly the popular 4- to 20-mA controls) are used in many industrial applications because of their immunity to induced EMI from motors, contactors, relays, and other sources. Off-the-shelf process controllers often have 4- to 20-mA (sometimes 0- to 20-mA) output options for adjusting speed, pressure, temperature, or some other parameter in a closed-loop control system. The receiving circuit needed for the 4- to 20-mA control...
—
Ken Whiteleather
[Ideas For Design] 10-GHz Divide-By-100 Prescaler Connects To 100-MHz Counter
The prescaler described here connects to the front end of a 100-MHz frequency counter to extend its coverage range to 10 GHz. The circuit is a far less expensive way to measure frequencies above 100 MHz than buying a 1- or 10-GHz frequency counter. The divider was built inexpensively. Creating this low-cost prescaler required some tradeoffs, and some rules were not followed (discussed later in the article). When you use this or any similar ...
—
Wayne Ryder
[Ideas For Design] Simple Battery Monitor Works With Higher Battery Voltages
Battery-operated equipment often requires a low-voltage monitor to warn the user when the battery voltage is too low or to perform other functions, such as power-source switching or device shutdown. Many specialized ICs are available to satisfy this need, but most target applications that use fairly low-voltage lithium or NiCd batteries. Thus, they’re not directly compatible with applications using lead-acid batteries, which may go as high as 14 V during...
—
Jim Christensen
[Editorial] Parting With Old Electronics Can Be Hazardous To Someone's Health
I just recently emptied out a storage unit I had been renting for many years. As a consequence, my garage took over the job of storing all kinds of different electronic equipment. Part of my original storage plan was to unload the old electronics little by little, mainly through eBay. I tend to think of eBay as this great storage bin in the sky, where you get paid to store an item and can buy the same or similar item back whenever you want, if the need for...
—
Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Floobydust Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 5B)
People keep asking me when they will get to see my latest Dead Car List, where I keep track of all the disabled and abandoned cars I see on the road. Alas, while I have a couple of grocery bags of raw data on dead cars, I have not been able to find time or priority to organize them into a list. I’ve been too busy for 15 years, writing columns and other technical stuff. Here’s the real problem. Cars now just about all look the same. It used to be that I could...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: Embedded] Compact Module Taps COM Express Atoms For Mobile Video
Congatec’s latest COM Express module, the conga-CA945, is based on Intel’s 1.6-GHz, two-thread N270 Atom processor and 945GSE Express chip set (see the figure). The module can handle up to a 2-Gbyte DDR2 small-outline dual-inline memory module (SODIMM). It has a Gigabit Ethernet controller, three PCI Express lanes, eight USB 2.0 ports, two SATA ports, and an IDE interface. Furthermore, the...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Try Multithreaded, Multicore Chip For $99
XMOS wants you to try making lots of threads with its $99 XC-1 development system, which is home to a four-core XS1-G processor (see “Multicore And Soft Peripherals Target Multimedia Applications” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 16231). It can handle up to 32 real-time threads and up to 400 Mevents/s. ...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] The Internet Comes Home
The Widget Channel, initially presented by Yahoo! and Intel at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco in August, marks a trend to open interfaces that will be on connected TVs around the world. These widgets are small icons and applications that can be presented along the border of the display. The underlying system is essentially a PCstyle platform with a Web browser on top (see the figure)....
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DSP Delivers Low-Cost Floating Point
Texas Instruments has added a trio of low-cost, 300-MHz, floating-point DSPs to its portfolio. The dual-core OMAP-L137 combines an ARM9 with a C674x floatingpoint DSP core. The single-core $10.41 C6745 incorporates an 8/16-bit NAND/ SDRAM interface with a 10/100 Ethernet MAC, while its $11.72 C6747 sibling has a 16/32-bit NAND/SDRAM interface and adds a USB 1.1 host interface, 128 kbytes of SRAM, and an LCD controller. The OMAPL137 has the same peripheral set...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Fixed-Point DSP Provides Performance And Connectivity
Analog Devices is targeting low-power, high-performance applications with the BF51x low-end additions to the Blackfin family. Targeted at signal-processing chores for multimedia products, the 400-MHz BF51x devices have a standby power requirement under 1 mW and use 1.8-V I/O. They can deliver 8.5 MMACs/mW. Two SPI, two UARTs, two audio serial ports, and an Ethernet MAC with IEEE-1588 time synchronization support provide connectivity. The Ethernet MAC is...
—
William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Synthetic Instrumentation No Longer A Test Case
Synthetic instrumentation (SI) offers a different approach to test and measurement. It uses a collection of basic hardware and software building blocks in a flexible, open, and modular architecture to synthesize the stimulus and measurement functions required by a given test application. So, why do we need it? As electronic products become increasingly integrated and dependent on software, testing procedures get more complex and...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Lab Bench] Come Next February, Your TV May Be Junk
If you haven’t seen the commercials about the upcoming conversion to over-the-air, high-definition TV, then you probably don’t watch much television anyway— not even on an old black-and-white TV like the one I still have sitting on my shelf (see the figure). This antique still works and will continue to do so after Feb. 17 of next year if it’s connected to cable or a converter box. For those few of you who...
—
William Wong
[Analog/Mixed-Signal Design] Using Delta-Sigma Can Be As Easy As ADC (Part 3)
Part 2 of this series showed how a dual-slope integrator could fix the major limitations of a single slope converter, and I received several e-mails in response (August 28, p. 18, ED Online 19512). For example, Harry Bissel of WTC questioned my choice of polyester capacitors for low dielectric absorption. “I don’t believe that ‘Polyeste’ belongs in your list of...
—
Dave Van Ess
