[Engineering Feature] Design For Manufacturing Sheds The Hype
Four to five years ago, the hype surrounding design-for-manufacturing (DFM) technology for advanced system-on-a-chip (SoC) design was near insufferable. At that time, 90 nm was the state-ofthe- art process node and most fabless houses were preparing for a shrink down from the 130-nm node. And without some way of feeding process parameters back into the design side, the likelihood of any chip yielding at 90 nm was slim to none. This set off a bit of panic among the...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Latest Test Solutions Measure Up To Wireless Challenges
Demand for test solutions in the communications and wireless sector continues to soar. Not only has there been an explosion in the adoption rate of new wireless technologies, but couple that with tough standards, multiple radios per product, and millions of devices to test, and it quickly becomes evident that testing capability is critical to the success of any wireless device today. Not to fret, though. Test and measurement companies are on top of the situation. A...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Storage Technology Begins To Crystallize
It’s not in stores yet, but Freescale Semiconductor hopes its silicon crystal approach to flash memory will address the scaling issues that can be found with current approaches. The continuing demand for nonvolatile storage will likely mean this technology will be employed sooner than later. The floating-gate approach to NOR flash implementations is vulnerable to extrinsic reliability fallout as scaling increases. Likewise, the processing ...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Reduce The Small-Memory-Footprint Requirements In Wireless Sensor Networks
Products based on wireless technology have been steadily insinuating their way into our lives since the 1980s. Wireless devices such as Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle have become common items in many of today’s households. Similarly, within the industrial market segment, the use of small wireless sensor devices is becoming more widespread within office buildings and on factory floors. Equipment manufacturers are incorporating and connecting...
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Derrick Lattibeaudiere
[Design View / Design Solution] Measuring Mains Current Doesn't Have To Be Difficult
Monitoring the current taken by a mains-powered appliance can be a challenge, particularly if the application demands an inexpensive solution that must provide galvanic isolation for user safety. Common solutions employ either a current-sense resistor or current-sense transformer to convert the line current to an ac voltage that’s then converted into a proportional dc voltage. The dc voltage may then be processed using various techniques to provide a...
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Anthony H. Smith
[Ideas For Design] Spice Model For An Ideal Transformer Allows Bi-directional Operation
This Idea For Design provides an alternative to an earlier IFD that noted that Spice does not have a device model for an ideal transformer (“A Spice Model For The Ideal Transformer”). The author explained, “Instead, Spice provides a coupled-inductor model in the K statement that includes self and mutual inductances.” The author’s proposed solution is a model that...
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Ken Hatch
[Ideas For Design] Redundant Power-Supply Diode Features Fanless Passive Cooling
A Schottky diode is an excellent way to connect multiple batteries or dc power supplies to a load. With a forward-biased “or” diode between each supply and the load, faults are isolated. Weak, low, or shorted supplies can’t sink current from the other supplies. Unfortunately, the heat produced by a diode can be difficult to remove in some applications. This circuit was created to reduce the heat dissipated by a power-supply “or” diode in a redundant 50-V...
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Daniel Gomez-Ibanez
[Ideas For Design] Charge-Pump VCO Increases Parts Count But Saves On Cost
This charge-pump voltagecontrolled oscillator (VCO) has a number of neat features: single positive power-supply operation, positive VCO reference voltage, fast response, high linearity, temperature compensation, and open collector output. Seldom are all of these features present simultaneously. Though the component count is relatively high compared to commercially available devices, cost is low because all components are garden variety. Central...
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Jim Keith
[Editorial] Prototyping Electronic Circuits The EZ Way
SchmartBoard has announced that patent 7,511,228 has been granted for the company’s “EZ” technology for hand-soldering surface-mount technology (SMT) electronic components (see the figure). This brought to mind a SchmartBoard demo I once participated in at an EDS trade show. The company was betting that anyone could solder a tiny chip to a board in a matter of seconds with its new technique. I’m...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Bridge Amplifier Stuff, Anyhow?
I was helping some engineers working on a strain-gauge preamp not too long ago. We had it functioning, but there seemed to be some bad linearity problems. We even set up a little calibrator and tried to get it linear, yet we kept getting odd errors, using the conventional amplifier setup per Figure 1. The guys said, “We don’t have to worry about precision or calibration because we’re calibrating it in ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] Quad 10BaseT Ethernet PHY Transceiver Consumes Just 2 W/Port
for years to make a low-power 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) twisted-pair transceiver, especially in multiport versions to make 10GE 48-port switch platforms practical. Now, Aquantia has accomplished that goal with its AQ1401 quad-port, AQ1202 dualport, and AQ1103 single-port 10GBaseT Ethernet physicallayer (PHY) transceivers (see the figure). The speed and power characteristics were ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] Largest Cross Point Switch Has 25,600 Switching Paths At 6.5 Gbits/s
The 160-by-160 M21165 cross point switch from Mindspeed Technologies provides up to 25,600 unique switching paths, making it the largest cross point switch on a single die, according to the company (see the figure). Each of the paths is capable of frequencies and data rates to 6.5 Gbits/s. The target applications for this non-blocking and fully protocol- agnostic switch include ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Software Confronts New Yield-Management Paradigm
Yield analysis, a science formerly left to process engineers in foundries, is not a luxury any longer. According to Collett International’s research, at least 40% of designs face at least one respin with an associated delay of from four to six weeks. At least 22% of designs will see two respins, so make that delay 12 to 16 weeks. Some 60% of the issues causing these respins are silicon related. Let’s not forget that the new mask sets for each respin...
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David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Are You Using More Than One Software Analysis Tool?
Actually, a better question for many embedded developers is whether they’re using even one code analysis tool. In many cases, the number of static or dynamic analysis tools used by a programmer is zero. At the same time, the goal that seems to be on top of everyone’s list is getting bug-free software done on time. Unfortunately, this can be a challenge when you aren’t using these tools. Most developers know that finding and fixing bugs early is less...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] The Latest Static And Dynamic Analysis Tools
Designers can take advantage of a host of new static and dynamic code analysis tools from different vendors. Coverity has a range of static and dynamic analysis tools, but its Coverity Build Analysis addresses an aspect that is key to the development process but often overlooked—the build process. It helps Coverity stand out from the pack in addition to helping prevent bugs in the build process by identifying issues such as using the wrong object...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Chip Links PCI Express And USB
The OXPCIe200 PCI Express (PCIe) bridge links a 1x PCI Express host to a pair of USB host interfaces or one USB host interface and an SPI/SRAM interface (see the figure). The bridge also provides access to a serial port and eight generalpurpose I/Os (GPIOs). The bridge’s dual-USB mode provides one high-speed and one full-speed USB 2.0 host interface. The high-speed interface has a...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Common-Law Accelerator Offloads DSP
Adding a Control Law Accelerator (CLA) to Texas Instruments’ line of C28x DSPs can boost performance in applications such as motor control, LED lighting, and digital power by a factor of five. This allows the TMS- 320F2803x chip to handle more demanding applications or deliver high performance with lower power requirements. The F2803x family’s C28x DSP core delivers 60 MIPS. Compared to the F2802x, the newer siblings provide peripheral ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] NAND Delivers Capacity And NOR Capabilities
Samsung’s Flex One NAND has moved to 40 nm. It combines multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC) flash with an SRAM front end providing NOR functionality, including the ability to run applications directly. The Flex One uses a 2-kbyte SRAM cache to implement SLC flash. Designers can configure the flash memory split into SLC (code and data) and MLC (data) partitions. MLC storage density is twice the 1-bit/cell total for the SLC...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] What Was That Noise?
“Noise” can have different meanings. It could be the common phenomenon of, say, a buzz in an audio system. Other times it may refer to something less acoustic, perhaps a limit on the precision of measurements. As an example of the way the latter has become more problematic for designers, consider the analog portion of one channel in an industrial control or automotive system. As IC and sensor supply voltages keep shrinking, that kind of noise has...
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Don Tuite
[Lab Bench] Accelerometers Shake Up The Old Ways To Play
Is it time to think outside the box or just give it a shake? Movement- or gesture-oriented input isn’t new. Try shaking a cell phone like Apple’s iPhone. Matched with the right application, like a game, juggling the phone may produce the effect you want. Then again, it may not. These little tricks are brought to you by accelerometers. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology has made these devices small and inexpensive. They’re used to shut down...
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William Wong
