[Engineering Feature] The Connected Home Remains Stuck On Pause
Multimedia nirvana is coming to the home... hopefully sometime in our lifetime. A flood of HDTVs, set-top boxes, home-theater PCs, and universal remotes (I have six, by the way) has poured into the market, yet getting them to play together is a challenge even a geek would like to avoid. Nonetheless, the climate is improving. Next year, we’ll likely see a convergence around standards such as UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), DLNA (Digital Living Network...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] The Field Of Energy Harvesting Begins To Ripen
One cannot talk about energy harvesters without discussing wireless mesh networks, sensor batteries (particularly thinfilm batteries), and supercapacitors—along with concepts of power management—nearly in the same breath. Harvesting is a complex and evolving discipline that promises rewards and challenges for engineers who want to take existing skills in new directions. Most of the technical background information in this report was derived from interviews...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Processors Automatically Shut Down To Save Power
The multicore Opteron processors in AMD’s “Shanghai” line are designed for performance, but their new Smart Fetch technology can also save power. A core can detect when a thread becomes idle. After a programmable delay, the core flushes its L1 and L2 cache to the chip’s L3 cache before shutting down. In addition to a faster startup, this gives other cores access to the core’s working set. Power savings up to 21% are possible when cores aren’t running...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Reap The Rewards Of Intelligent, Configurable Power Management
Traditionally, system designers addressed increasing price sensitivity and demands for feature-rich products by using ASICs, CPUs, dedicated microcontrollers, and memory ICs for desired product features. This hikes both the demand for power and the complexity of power management, forcing developers to consider how to support and manage multiple power-supply sources intelligently, within the strict power, thermal, and area constraints of complex modern...
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Mike Brogley
[Ideas For Design] Micro-Structured Transducer Accurately Measures Pressure
Today’s micro- and nano-structured sensors boast excellent linearity, resolution, and wide measurement ranges. As a result, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are playing an increasing role in many more applications. This design describes a novel use of such a sensor—a non-contact differential variable-reluctance transducer (NCDVRT)—in the pressure port of a system. The application involves the selection of a stainless-steel membrane and...
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J. Jayapandian
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[Ideas For Design] Tame Switching Supply Noise While Maintaining Efficiency
A number of situations could benefit from the high efficiency of a switched power supply, save for the supply’s intrinsically high noise level. For example, an optical communications application using a large number of laser diodes could employ a switched power supply to avoid the need for heat-removal techniques. However, the laser diodes require a noiseless environment. A hasty decision to use a switcher would not be rewarding ...
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Samuel Kerem
[Ideas For Design] Controller Maps Auto's Electric Drive Voltage To Existing Thermal Fuel Gauge
While converting an older Volkswagen to electric power, we wanted to display the battery voltage on the existing fuel gauge. The gauge used an electromechanical regulator to resistively control the heating of a bi-metallic thermal strip. The regulator is periodically pulsed by the vehicle’s 12-V battery power. The conversion application provides a proportional control uniquely coded to synchronize and scale into the vehicle regulator’s proportionalcontrolled ...
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William Grill
[Editorial] Hunkering Down For The Holidays And Beyond?
In a tough economy, there’s always the question of how people will spend their money and time, especially during the holidays. Some folks will “cocoon,” meaning they’ll stay home and hunker down in front of the TV or PC for fun and order out or cook for sustenance. Electronic equipment plays a large role, which is good for the industry and may serve it well this year. With this in mind, I attended one of the pre-CES (Consumer Electronics Show) mini trade...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
BOB, I read your article “What’s All This Analog Engineering Stuff, Anyhow?” (Oct. 2, p. 18, ED Online 19754) I totally agree that the need for trained analog engineers is not going away. (I am not so interested in training, but in education. /rap) I have been in analog...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Analog & Power] Fluorescent Ballast ICs Demonstrate Clever Dimming Design
International Rectifier has two new control ICs for dimming compact and tube-type fluorescents. Most designers won’t ever see them, though, because they go into the bases of compact bulbs or into lighting fixtures. Still, they’re interesting to study as examples of energy-efficient design and for the elegant way they provide dimming, including dimming in legacy systems that use triac controls. The IRS2530D DIM8 squeezes a complete dimming...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Direct Conversion Creates Pull For Continuous-Time Sigma Delta
It’s curious how a nascent trend can unleash a breakthrough technology with far-reaching effects. The case at hand involves an evolving movement toward the commoditization of basestations that tends to favor direct-conversion receivers, according to Nitin Sharma, product marketing manager for high-speed converters at Analog Devices. This trend led ADI to look at the continuous-time (CT) sigma-delta architecture for a standalone analog-to-digital...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] Good Things Come In Round Packages
Lots of PIC programmers will want to get their hands on the MPLAB ICD 3 from Microchip (see the figure). It uses the faster USB 2.0 interface to improve chip programming times by a factor of 15. The higher-speed interface also moves data to and from memory quicker, providing a snappier debugging interface. This makes operations like single stepping faster. The MPLAB...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] The RTOS Motto: On Time And On Budget
Real-time operating systems (RTOSs) tend to be a checkbox item for many embedded projects. But is an RTOS always necessary? The answer is application-specific, so understanding what one will deliver is key to determining whether it becomes a requirement or an extravagance. In general, an RTOS can be used anywhere a non-RTOS is employed. However, it’s rare to find an operating system with a matching RTOS that has exactly the same application programming ...
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William Wong
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Capacitive Sensors Squeeze Versatile Touch Into Tight Quarters
Probably the greatest demand for highly featureridden touchscreens comes from the portable market, with the iPhone and similar communications products as ripe examples. But while it’s one thing to integrate a simple touchscreen accepting single-touch input to control the basic functions of a device, simple touchscreens are few and far between these days. Give or take a few millimeters, the typical area for input on a cell phone is about the size of a credit...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] USE GDTs For Surge Protection In Broadband Digital Comm
Gas discharge tubes (GDTs) have evolved to a level of providing very reliable and effective surge protection in telecommunications systems and equipment, safeguarding against lightning and power-fault conditions. Due to their robust nature and superior electrical characteristics, GDTs have already become the preferred replacement for carbon blocks in traditional telephone-service applications. Because of their ultra-low capacitance plus low insertion and ...
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Tim Ardley
[Lab Bench] 2008 Was A Year Of Plenty For Processing And Storage
The economy may not be growing, but processing power and storage continue to climb. For example, the lab got a little crowded with the arrival of Intel’s software development platform (see the figure). Inside this massive rack-mount system are four of Intel’s latest hex-core Xeon “Dunnington” processors. That’s 24 high-performance cores in one box. Its care and feeding includes a RAID array of eight...
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William Wong
[Power Design] The Industry Migrates To 48-V Input DC-DC Conversion
In my previous column (“Applications Drive Component Power Designs,” Sept. 11, 2008, p. 18, ED Online 19486), I contended that the application drives the selection of a specific power component—or it even forces the creation of a custom component. But, it must be admitted, there is another side of the coin. Many price-sensitive engineers see value in changing their ...
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Tom Curatolo
