[Engineering Feature] The Indianapolis 500 Electronic Edge
Surely most racing fans have May 24, 2009, circled on their calendars. For the non-gearheads, this Memorial Day marks the 93rd running of the Indianapolis 500. The event will pit 33 cars and drivers against each other in a grueling 500-mile race around a 2.5-mile track. The fastest average speed is more than 185 mph with top speeds cresting at about 235 mph. The front and back straightaways are only five-eighths of a mile long, so drivers spend a good deal of...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Infrared Sensors—The All-Purpose Detection Devices
To identify compounds or investigate sample composition, engineers often turn to infrared (IR) spectroscopy. Correlation tables can be found in various resources. One is available online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy_correlation_table. IR spectrometry works because molecules can absorb energy at specific frequencies determined by the shape of the...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Dual PowerPC Micro Delivers Secure Processing Platform
Start with a two-core PowerPC. Add a secure boot microcontroller. That’s what CPU Technology did with its Acalis CPU872 secure, multicore microcontroller designed for applications needing hardware-based security (Fig. 1). There’s nothing special about the PowerPC cores used in the chip, which is good. They are stock cores with 256 kbytes of L2 cache and 64-bit floating-point support designed to...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Overcome Barriers To Broad-Based SSD Adoption In The Enterprise
At first glance, solid-state drives (SSDs) appear to be a no-brainer for makers of storage systems for enterprise servers and laptops. After all, SSDs promise higher read/write performance, higher reliability, and lower power consumption compared to hard-disk drives (HDDs). But in practice, SSD adoption has been held back not only by a higher cost per gigabyte, but also by real-world issues that prevent them from achieving their performance and reliability...
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Alex Naqvi
[Design View / Design Solution] Design A Linear Li-ion Battery Charger For Portable Systems
Energy-storage devices such as batteries continue to change how people live. Every year sees greater daily usage of battery- powered personal electronic devices. Moreover, demands for longer run times and smaller sizes are driving continuous growth in both the battery and semiconductor industries. When the time to develop next-generation batteries takes longer than Moore’s Law, the need arises for highly integrated, feature-rich ICs that deliver...
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Brian Chu
[Ideas For Design] Monitor Transformer Winding's Temperature Without A Sensor
The use of a copper winding as a temperature sensor is not new. The traditional technique is to disconnect the ac power and the load and to quickly make the measurement using an ohmmeter. But the circuit presented here goes further. It can make the measurement in-circuit and in real time. The resistance value is derived by injecting a small dc current into the monitored winding and measuring the resulting dc potential. However, care must be taken to avoid...
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Louis Vlemincq
[Ideas For Design] Simple Technique Drives Multiple LEDs From One Processor Pin
Driving multiple LEDs with one microprocessor GPIO pin is a well-known technique. Typically, designs perform this task by issuing pulse widths and clocks of differing durations and employing multiple RC networks to distinguish between them. The design described here is much simpler. The microprocessor pin is connected to the clock of a multipleoutput sequential counter (see the figure). In its...
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Christopher Paul
[Ideas For Design] Step Down A Negative Voltage Without Using An Inductor
When you need to step down a negative voltage in a lowcurrent application, a non-inductor configuration offers two advantages: ease of use and a low number of external components. Such step-down converters can be implemented with two chargepump devices. The first produces a positive output by doubling and inverting the negative input voltage, and the second acts as an inverter to produce the desired negative output (...
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Budge Ing
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[Editorial] Building A Science Park South Of The Border Down Mexico Way
I remember listening to a catchy tune when I was a youngster called “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” It told the tale of a cowboy who fell in love with a Mexican gal. This song came to mind recently when I interviewed D.J. Hill, CEO of Silicon Border. D. J. is passionate about something in Mexico as well, but not a girl. He envisions manufacturing in North America, just south of the border, in a place called Mexicali in Baja California,...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Counting Stuff, Anyhow?
Once upon a time when I was about four years old, my father went up the road to buy a couple of piglets, and he took me along. We brought them home to our little farm in a burlap bag in the back of our pickup truck. I guess I must have thought this was quite exciting, because my mother thought I was overstimulated. She sent me in to the living room to take a nap, even though it was only 11 a.m. So, I lay quietly on the couch and tried to get to...
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Bob Pease
[Embedded in Electronic Design] A Zoom Lens Improves Photos As Well As Vision Systems
The lens and the capture electronics are the two most critical pieces of a vision system. Skimp on either, and the results are sub-par. Going with a fixed glass lens often improves quality over a plastic lens, but an adjustable zoom lens provides more options without having to move the camera. This is handy in taking photographs, but it can be useful in a range of other imaging applications as well, including robotics. Adding a built-in zoom lens to...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Module Makes High Speed USB Easy
Need a High Speed USB serial link? Then check out DLP Designâ??s module based on the latest chip from Future Technology Devices International (FTDI). The DLP-USB1232H has a standard 18-pin dual-inline package (DIP) form factor. The FTDI FT2232H is designed to handle the 480-Mbit/s High Speed USB specification, allowing the system to handle transfers up to 12 Mbaud, essentially being limited by the RS-232 transfer rate. The chip can handle bulk...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Stackable Options
The 2009 Embedded Systems Conference was the host for a range of stackable options using new standards such as SUMIT and StackableUSB. The 420-by-372 USB3201 LCD from Micro/Sys is designed to work with StackableUSB boards. It has 4 Mbits of serial flash on board plus an optional touch screen. Versalogicâ??s Ocelot single-board computer with a 1.6-GHz Atom processor sports SUMIT-104 connectors. The PC/104 ISA connector provides legacy support...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Small Form Factor SBC Stacks
VIA Technologiesâ?? Pico-ITXe single-board computer (SBc) builds on the 10- by 7.2-cm Pico-ItX form factor and adds the Small Form Factor SIGâ??s SUMIT stackable connectors (Fig. 1). the motherboard holds up to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 and has Gbit Ethernet and dual SATA ports. The SUMIT expansion supports PCI Express, USB, I2C, and LPC. The VIA P710-HD board can plug into the SBC to add...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] PCI Express Switches Large And Small
PLX Technology offers a range of 5-Gbit/s PcI Express Gen 2 switch chips for almost every embedded application. the high-port-count, multi-root/host chips include the 24-port, 96-lane PEX 8696. also, the 48-, 60-, and 80-lane versions can handle up to eight root/hosts and support multicast and read pacing. the 35- by 35-mm package uses 11 W. Pricing starts at $78.40 for the 48-port PEX 8649. the four-port, 16-lane PEX 8613 and three-port, 12-lane...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multicore Chip Handles Broadband Packet Processing
The Octeon II from Cavium Networks handles packet traffic on high-speed serial links such as 10-Gbit Ethernet, Serial RapidIO (SRIO), and PCI Express (PCIe) v2. The chip family is scalable from two to six MIPS cores augmented with a collection of accelerators from the Security Vault secure key storage to RAID 5/6 support for storage applications (see the figure). The CN63xx can ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] West Bridge Suits Media Devices
Cypress Semiconductor’s West Bridge Antioch chip is designed to sit between a media device CPU, a memory storage device, and a USB host device, providing simultaneous transfers between each connection (see the figure). This allows transfers to occur in a controlled fashion so the directory on the storage device does not get corrupted. The chip is a tiny file server that employs the Media...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Cortex-M3 Micro Comes With RTOS In ROM
The 100-MHz Cortex-M3-based Tempest series from Luminary Micro incorporates Wittenstein High Integrity Systems’ SafeRTOS in ROM along with the StellarisWare Peripheral Driver library. The Stellaris LM3S9B96 includes USB OTG, CAN 2.0, and Ethernet interfaces. It also has both the media access controller (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) on-chip along with hardware support for IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol. The microcontroller has a 1% on-chip...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Six-Pin Micro Packs In Quad 8-Bit ADCs
Atmel’s 12 MIPS ATtiny10 six-pin microcontroller fits into a 2- by 3-mm SOT-23 package, but it additionally incorporates 1 kbyte of flash, 32 bytes of RAM, and four 8-bit analog to digital converters (ADCs). The chip also has a comparator and a 16-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM) timer. Pricing starts at only $0.35. ATMEL ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Trees Speed Mobile Flash File System
Datalight’s Reliance Nitro implements a high-performance, extent-based flash file system that’s five times faster than FAT-based (file allocation table) systems. It additionally supports multiple file streams and atomic transaction points. The tree-based directory system provides the performance boost. Furthermore, it implements dynamic wear leveling to extend the flash lifetime. DATALIGHT ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Coaxial Cable—Still The Best Way To Make An RF Connection
You know about coaxial cable (Fig. 1). We all use it in one form or another, and it seems simple enough. But while modern cable products are better than ever, there are some real subtitles in their selection and application. Connecting dc and low-frequency ac including audio is easy. You just run some wires from point A to point B. The biggest challenge may seem to lie in choosing the ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Lab Bench] Looking Over Your Shoulder At The Indy 500
The Indianapolis 500 has come a long way since its start on Memorial Day, May 30, 1911. The inaugural event marked the first time a rear-view mirror was used in a motor race, courtesy of Ray Harroun on the “Marmon Wasp” for Indianapolis automaker Marmon. Harroun also was the only driver in the race who didn’t bring along a mechanic in the passenger seat. Mechanics in those early races checked the oil pressure and also served as the rear-view mirror. Harroun...
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William Wong
