[Engineering Feature] Energy Scavenging Offers Endless Power Possibilities
The universe is full of energy, and efforts to harvest that ambient energy are as old as the windmill and sailing ships. The convergence of three exponentially improving technologies, however, is creating striking new opportunities for ambient energy harvesting that can power applications unthinkable only a few years ago. The key to unlocking these opportunities is effectively managing minuscule amounts of power. Talk about extracting energy from the...
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Richard Quinnell
[Technology Report] OLED Displays Bring Much-Needed Light To The End Of The Economic Tunnel
oOrganic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology continues to buck the industry’s current economic struggles, carving out lucrative applications in numerous display and lighting applications. And indications show that active-matrix (AM) OLEDs rather than passive-matrix (PM) OLEDs will eventually dominate this space. DisplaySearch forecasts that OLED display revenues will reach $6 billion by 2015, up from $591 million in 2008, with a compound annual growth rate...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] Alliance Launches Open-Source In-Vehicle Infotainment Development Platform
Leading automobile manufacturers and hardware and software suppliers have formed the Genivi Alliance, a nonprofit organization committed to driving the development and broad adoption of an open-source in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) reference platform (see the figure). The group will unite automotive, consumer electronics, communications, and application development companies investing in the IVI market and...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Programming The CUDA Architecture: A Look At GPU Computing
Graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally designed to perform the highly parallel computations required for graphics rendering. But over the last couple of years, they’ve proven to be powerful computing workhorses across more than just graphics applications. Designed with more resources devoted to data processing rather than flow control and data caching, GPUs can be leveraged to significantly accelerate portions of codes traditionally run on CPUs,...
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Brent Oster
[Ideas For Design] Switching Circuit Increases Number Of USARTs Available From MCU
This design builds on a previously published Idea for Design (“Talk To Multiple Devices With One UART”). Our solution allows you to increase the number of USARTs (universal synchronous, asynchronous receiver/transmitters) available on a microcontroller with minimum hardware. Typical 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers have one programmable USART for communication. But designers...
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Ashish Aggarwal
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Simple Solution Provides PWM Signal Fault Protection
This idea was created to solve a design problem we faced a few months ago. The circuit we were working on was used to steer an H-bridge that was controlled by a TMS320F2810 digital signal processor (DSP). During the final phase of the design, we discovered by chance that everything worked fine when the circuit was initially powered. However, if it was powered off for 5 to 15 seconds and then powered on again, the circuit started draining a lot of current...
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Arturo Mediano
, et al.
[Ideas For Design] Simulated Grounded Inductor Needs No External Capacitors
Inductors designed with active elements are very desirable to designers today because conventional spiral inductors are too big, too heavy, and too costly, and they require tuning. During the last few decades, various grounded inductors have been created using different high-performance active building blocks, such as operational amplifiers and operational transconductance amplifiers. But op amps suffer from a finite gain-bandwidth product (GBP) and GBP interdependence,...
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Abhirup Lahiri
[Editorial] Who's Paying Top Dollar For Comm Services Nowadays?
I’ve always felt that telecommunications cost way too much. Cell phones, Internet access, cable TV, landline phones, and other services exact a heavy toll on the average family’s budget. On the home front, providers have been sensitive to these costs by offering triple-play services. Yet on the mobile front, providers are still charging a lot for cell-phone service and Internet connectivity. A recent conversation I had with a fellow who lost his job is...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This "Free Amplifier" Stuff, Anyhow?
One of my friends was working on a story. She observed correctly that an “ideal” op amp would have infinite gain and common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR)—and zero IB and VOS— and zero price. She conceded she would never get rich selling those op amps! But there is a zero-price op amp, and I have been using them for many years—over 40. Maybe you have too. Let’s assume I have used three-fourths of an LM324 for three tasks, and that is working...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] Ultra-Low-Power Wi-Fi Module Targets Industrial And Sensor Network Applications
When you think of wireless sensor networks for remote monitoring and control, you probably think of ZigBee, Bluetooth, Crossbow, or some proprietary ISM-based (industrial, scientific, medical) radios. While such networks work fine, there is always the issue of tying them to an enterprise local-area network (LAN) or the Internet, and that takes extra work. Now you can use Wi-Fi for such applications with minimal interfacing issues thanks to...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Visual Debugging Hooks Into Your Applications
Text-based programming has led to a host of text-based debugging tools, from command-line interface debuggers to graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) that are still essentially text-based. Arrays and structures may be displayed in windows, but they’re textbased at heart. This isn’t to say that graphics have been completely ignored, though. DSP data can be plotted with tools like Analog Devices’ VisualDSP+ and Texas Instruments’ Code Composer...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 32-Bit Micro Fits In 5.5 mm2
Renesas fits its latest r32c/100 series 32-bit microcontroller into a 64-pin quad flat no-lead package (QFP), 80-pin QFP, and 100-pin, 5.5- by 5.5-mm land-grid array (LGA) package. the 50-MHz r32c/111 sips 600 µA/MHz. it has up to 512 kbytes of flash memory and 63 kbytes of rAM. A 32- by 32-bit multiply-accumulate (MAc) augments the floating-point unit. the chip has nine serial ports; a 26-channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADc); and a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Micro Has Touch Sense For All GPIO Pins
The STMicroelectronics 8-bit, 16-MHz stM8s10x and 8-bit, 24-MHz stM8s20x support serial, i2c, and serial peripheral interface (sPi). they also include a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADc) and dual watchdog timers. the touch sensor support takes a digital approach, using internal timers to track the charge and discharge rates. An external resistor per touchpad is needed. All general- purpose i/o (GPio) pins are supported. About 2 kbytes of code are...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Cortex-M3 Micro Makes Great Gateway
Luminary Micro’s 130-nm, low-power LM3s9000 series features on-chip 10/100 Ethernet MAc/PHy with iEEE 1588 Precision time Protocol (PtP) support, usb on-the-Go MAc/PHy, and cAN 2.0 (controller Area Network), making it ideal as a gateway between networks in addition to handling a range of embedded chores such as motor control. the 100-MHz micro is based on ArM’s latest cortex-M3 core with 96 kbytes of rAM and 256 bytes of battery backed-up rAM. the external...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] All-In-One: Capacitive Touch, Segmented Display, Low Power
Microchip’s 8-bit PIC18F87J90 incorporates a charge time measurement unit (Ctmu) for capacitive touch sensing or precise time measurement plus direct drive lCD support. the lCD controller delivers software-programmable contrast support. these 64- and 80-pin devices support up to 128 kbytes of flash, 4 kbytes of rAm, and a real-time clock/ calendar. pricing starts at $2.58. the pIC18F87J90 plug-In module costs $25. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Atom Mini-ITX Sports Dual Gigabit Ethernet Ports
The AIMB-210 from Advantech is a mini-ItX motherboard that hosts a 1.6-ghz N270 Atom processor and a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports, making it a great platform for gateways and firewalls. It also has six serial ports, eight uSb 2.0 ports, and a compact flash slot. It supports dual displays plus low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) and tv-out support. there’s an internal compact flash slot as well. ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Caught In The Ethernet
Upon entering its fourth decade, youâ??d think Ethernet would show signs of age, being pushed aside for newer, stateof- the-art networking technologies. Well, ummm, no. Rather, Ethernet has evolved in step with changing requirements and standards. In the beginning, it involved PC ports on a coax bus local-area network (LAN). Over time, the technology has morphed into many other forms of networking, from simple I/O ports on embedded controllers to...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Lab Bench] What Can You Build With Ethernet, USB, And An Arm?
Tucked away in a couple of smaller booths at January’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of companies with an interesting approach to network attached storage (NAS). One was PogoPlug. The other was Ctera. They have slightly different business models, but the hardware looked similar. In fact, it looked a lot like Marvell Semiconductor’s SheevaPlug (Fig. 1). The...
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William Wong
[Power Design] Changes To IEEE 1625 Establish A High Bar For Battery Design
Several years ago, some laptop fires scared the public and prompted widespread recalls by some of the most reputable lithium- ion (Li-ion) cell manufacturers. The long-lasting repercussions in the battery industry ranged from cell supply shortages to public misconception about the safety of portable electronics. Individual companies have taken many steps to ensure that these events do not recur, and the industry has joined forces to unify safety...
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Robin Tichy
