[Engineering Feature] Keep Current With New Battery Technologies
A stunning array of battery types provides portable power for a sea of applications —from traction motors in interurban buses to flea-power transmitters in wireless mesh networks that harvest microscopic amounts of energy from small photovoltaic cells or piezo beams (Fig. 1). Despite a history that traces back at least to 1800, engineers continue to be presented with new chemistries and novel ways of exploiting the...
—
Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Optimized Power Supplies Beget Superior Data-Center Efficiency
LLarge data centers devour huge amounts of electrical power (see “Energy-Hungry IT Centers See Hope In Digital Power”). At the heart of efforts to reduce wasted energy, power-supply makers offer a host of ways to minimize their contributions to the problem. In broad terms, the challenge is to deliver power to hundreds of servers’ processors at very low voltage levels...
—
Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] 32-Bit Architecture Changes The Power Game For Micros
Arm and its partners are looking to give 8- and 16-bit microcontroller vendors fits with its Cortex M0 architecture. This optimized implementation of the Cortex M1 is designed to run on FPGAs. Its small size and lower power will allow it to be coupled with mixed-signal peripherals. The Cortex M0 is one-third the size of the popular ARM7TDMI- S. The base Cortex M0 configuration requires only 12k gates, which is on the same order as many 8- and 16-bit ...
—
William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Software Takes Guesswork Out Of PCB Power Integrity
It’s never been more important than in the current economic climate to get products to market with development costs held as low as possible. One of the ways that systems manufacturers can achieve that goal is through power analysis. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when all ICs ran on 5 V. But since then, we’ve seen voltage requirements spiral down to as low as 0.9 V. Complicating these matters even further, many ICs have multiple voltage ...
—
David Maliniak
[Design View / Design Solution] Digital PWM Controllers Augment System Reliability
Multiple methods are available to monitor the health of a power supply, ultimately leading to improved reliability of the power subsystem and, subsequently, the total system. These improvements can come from adjusting system operating parameters based on these real-time diagnostics or by alerting the host system that the power subsystem performance is degraded, allowing the system to adjust or schedule maintenance. Because discrete values of the...
—
Mark Hagen
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] "Unstable" Power Supply Simulates Solar Panel Behavior
This power supply may seem a bit strange, since it’s not stable in voltage or in current. However, it simulates the behavior of a solar panel and can be very useful if you’re working with a solar-powered device on a rainy day. A solar-panel circuit can be represented by a current generator and some diodes (Fig. 1a). The short-circuit current depends on the cell type and illumination. The open circuit...
—
Giovanni Romeo
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Low-Power Logic Gate Protects Fluid Sensor From Leakage Current
Fluid-level sensing is very common in industrial applications and now is being used in domestic applications to sense water levels in overhead tanks. The greatest challenge for designers is to make these sensors operate with ultra-low power using battery voltages between 2 and 6 V, while making the device insensitive to potential damage from leakage current coming from mains power running pumps and valves. The design described here uses three sections of a...
—
Shyam Sunder Tiwari
[Ideas For Design] Series Resistors, Body Capacitance Scan 16 Buttons With Two MCU Pins
In an application using a pin-limited microcontroller (MCU), I needed to scan an array of 16 buttons. The technique I used involved a series string of resistors of identical value connected between two bidirectional pins of the MCU. For simplicity, the example shown uses five resistors to scan four buttons (see the figure). A metal pad is created at each juncture between the resistors. When a person...
—
Dave Vanden Bout
[Ideas For Design] Use Variable DC Voltage To Control 70-MHz Output Phase Shifter
In many situations, designers must control the phase of an output signal in order to make certain circuits work properly. At low frequencies, an op amp can be used to vary the phase. But as the frequency gets into the RF range, output phase control gets a bit more complex. The figure illustrates an example of how to control the phase at higher frequencies. I randomly chose 70 MHz for the circuit, but any ...
—
Nick Ierfino
[Editorial] Power Companies Show Progress On Less Travelled Paths
Power is key to any design, so it’s not surprising that I often meet with companies involved in the power industry. What does surprise me is that many of these companies are working with power in novel ways. And from what I can tell, they are making good progress, too. You can find videos of some of my most recent meetings, which I describe below, including interviews and demonstrations, at ...
—
Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Rock-Hopping Stuff, Anyhow?
Untitled Document I went on a hike last weekend. Some of the trail was uphill, some was downhill, and I hiked along fine (if slowly). That’s not a surprise. But when I had to hop across a tiny stream, ...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] Tiny, Low-Cost Wi-Fi Chip Suits Cell Phones And Other Portables
CSR’s UniFi UF6000 is one of the smallest and cheapest Wi-Fi chips you can buy. Occupying only 16 square mm, the chip can be embedded into handsets and other devices where wireless connectivity is needed. 3G wireless broadband technologies give handsets a link to the Internet. But because of its high speed and extensive worldwide net of hotspots, Wi-Fi is the fastest and cheapest way to access the Internet and all its features. The UF6000 is...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Try Wireless Controls And E-Paper In Your Next Green Design
The standard way to wire a house is to figure out where to put the switches and then wire them to the outlets or lights. This requires extra wire to connect the switches to the plugs or devices and locks in the position of the switches. An alternative is to look at the problem from a wireless perspective using technologies like Zwave or ZigBee. In this case, the switch is simply a plate with a button. The wireless microcontroller can...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Low-Power SERDES FPGAs Save Power
Lattice Semiconductor’s LatticeECP3 FPGAs target the midrange sweet spot needing high-speed serializers/deserializers (SERDES). The 65-nm FPGAs deliver 3.2-Gbit/s SERDES with XAUI jitter compliance. The SERDES are grouped in blocks of four, but they can handle independent protocols including PCI Express, CPRI, OBSAI, XAUI, Serial RapidIO, and Gigabit Ethernet. The chips are designed for communication chores and include up to 7 Mbits of...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Rugged PC/104 System Targets Military Apps
Adlink Technology is looking to put more PC/104 boards into very rugged environments with its MilSystem 800. This STD-MIL-38999 version of the already rugged RuffSystem 800 is a conductioncooled enclosure that’s dustproof and splashproof with an operating temperature range of –40°C to 75°C. The motherboard holds a 1.4-GHz Pentium M with 1 Gbyte of double-data rate (DDR) memory plus a 32-Gbyte solid-state drive and a Compact- Flash...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Mini-ITX Goes 12 V
The ITOX NP101-D16C Mini-ITX motherboard only requires a 12-V power source, making it ideal for automotive and industrial applications. It runs a 45-nm, 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270 processor in conjunction with Intel’s 945GSE Express chipset and ICH7M I/O controller hub. Its total system thermal design power (TDP) is rated less than 15 W. This low-power motherboard’s 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket can handle up to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 400- or 533-MHz memory. It...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Microcontroller Targets High-Speed Communications
Freescale’s 45-nm SOI-based MPC8569E multicore microcontroller incorporates intelligent peripherals to target high-speed communications applications such as gateways and wireless infrastructure. The chip’s primary core is the 1.3-GHz e500-based Power architecture core with a 512-kbyte L2 cache and double-precision floating-point support. This is complemented with four QUICC engine RISC processors that handle communication peripherals up to four Gigabit Ethernet ...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RTOS Handles AMP And SMP
Wind River’s VxWorks 6.7 real-time operating system (RTOS) addresses asymmetrical multiprocessing (AMP) in addition to symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP). A core reservation system allows AMP-style hardware allocation on conventional SMP architectures. Wind River’s multicore interprocess communication (MIPC) provides high-speed, zero-copy communication across SMP and AMP cores. Debugging support has been enhanced to address core-specific thread and processes in the...
—
William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Rechargeable-Battery Power Management Demands Multiple ICs
Virtually all battery-based powermanagement designs depend on the associated battery, so design starts by picking the specific battery type. The battery may be the non-rechargeable primary type or the rechargeable secondary type. (For more, see “Batteries 101: From Nickel To Lithium And Beyond” at www.electronicdesign.com, ...
—
Sam Davis
[Lab Bench] Going Green, Or Just Using Old-Fashioned Design Practices?
Going green is all about cost, value, and tradeoffs. The big difference in designs from a decade ago is that more of the real costs are starting to surface. This ranges from the cost of recycling devices to how much power a system consumes. Power consumption has become the focus for hardware designers for a range of reasons, from portability where batteries are required to cooling limitations. Designing a green system is really a matter of checking out...
—
William Wong
[Power Design] The Many Faces Of Custom Power
Under the pressures of product performance, price, and the need to increasingly reduce their time-to-market, many OEMs don’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time on the power solution. Consequently, they look to power providers that can expeditiously accomplish their power requirements as they need them. However, “as they need them” is the key. Suppliers can make an innovative power product. But in the end, if it isn’t in a form factor or served...
—
Tom Curatolo
