[Engineering Feature] Key Companies Shake Up This Year's Top Employers
IIt’s been a rocky year, with unprecedented layoffs and even company closures. Few employees, from executives down to entry-level engineers, feel secure in their jobs. But some companies did see success in 2008, as indicated by our annual survey of the Top 50 Employers in Electronic Design. For the sake of objectivity, our survey focused on available financial data of publicly traded companies. Our calculations drew from numbers like employee growth, sales...
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Lou Sosa
[Technology Report] Motion-Sensing MEMS Gyros And Accelerometers Are Everywhere
In a conference room at Analog Devices (ADI), Howard Wisniowski holds a demo board a little bigger than a commemorative stamp about a meter above the table top. An ADI motion sensor and associated circuitry are on the board. Wisniowski drops the board into his other hand. As soon as the board starts to fall free, the motion sensor detects a change in acceleration. Before the board reaches Wisniowski’s lower hand, an LED flashes red and a tiny transducer on the...
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Don Tuite
[Leapfrog: First Look] Single-Chip TV Tuner Exceeds Performance Expectations
Semiconductor companies have been working for years to develop a fully integrated TV tuner, and some progress has been made. Yet even the most recent designs have their disadvantages. Many only just meet the various test standards, while others require more than a few external components to do the job. The Si2170 from Silicon Laboratories, though, is the first silicon TV tuner to exceed the performance of traditional discrete TV tuners. It ...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design View / Design Solution] Turn FPGAs Into "Key" Players In The Cryptographics Field
Many state-of-the-art embedded systems use “platform” FPGAs such as Xilinx Virtex 4/5 class devices or Altera Stratix III/IV class devices. Until recently, it wasn’t possible to deploy keyed applications in these devices, where keys are unique to each device. Although these FPGAs do have bitstream decryption keys— whether battery-backed or fuse-based—that can be chosen by the user to be unique to each device, these keys can’t be accessed from an FPGA’s...
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Mandel Yu
[Ideas For Design] Simple Quadrature Decoder Suits Rotary Encoders
Rotary quadrature encoders often are used to command digital potentiometers or digital controllers, and quadrature decoding is typically performed in a programmable device (like an FPGA or microcontroller). This design performs quadrature decoding with commonly available components, and it comes in handy when you need to use a quadrature encoder in the lab or in a simple product. This design uses a manually turned contact encoder. Contact encoders are...
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Bill Reeve
[Ideas For Design] Programmable Window Comparator Uses A Single Reference
A voltage monitor is a common hardware need. But beyond a simple compare, many systems must provide a tolerance around a specific value. Specifications of 2%, 5%, or 10% typically require a windowed comparator, with a voltage reference and resistive divider components for setting the tolerance. All are available in many forms. The controller described here, based on the Microchip 12F675, allows the user to dynamically select the window characteristic as a ...
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William Grill
[Editorial] ’Tis The Season For Seeing And Playing With New Electronic Gadgets
Every year around this time, I get invited to press conferences or events touting the newest electronic gadgets coming to market now or during the holiday season. I rather enjoy these functions, since I get to view the latest and most innovative devices. Sometimes companies will send gizmos right to my door so I can play with them for a while in the comfort of my own home. MAKING A POINT One such gadget I recently got a...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Knot Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 4)
When I was about 16, I went to work at Consolidated Cigar Corp. in Broad Brook, Conn. Shade-grown tobacco, under tent-cloth. I bicycled over there every morning in the summer. One of my first jobs in June 1957 was tying. All the tobacco plants had to be tied up with a string, to a wire overhead, to keep them from flopping over in bad weather. There were about 30 plants in a “bent” that was 30 feet long. We got paid about 11 cents per bent, as ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] ISM-Band Transceiver Simplifies Wireless Monitoring And Control
There are lots of short-range wireless technologies for implementing wireless data applications, like 802.11 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 802.15.4 ZigBee, and Ultra-Wideband (UWB). Even cellular technology can serve non-voice applications. But there are times when you don’t need the complexity of the protocol, the high speed, the networking options, or the cost. You may only need a direct point-to-point link or at most a simple star network. You may...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Communications] E-Band Radios Provide Fiber-Level Data Rates Over Wireless Links
Wireless may be convenient, but it isn’t fast enough for some network links. Fiber easily does the job, yet stringing or burying fiber is a major cost and time hassle. One answer, Endwave’s E-band millimeter-wave transmit- receive (TX/RX) module pair, operates from 71.0 to 86.0 GHz for broadband point-topoint radios carrying voice and data traffic at multi-gigabit per second rates (see the...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Embedded] MCU Exhibits Tower Power
Freescale Semiconductor’s MCF51CN ColdFire V1 microcontroller tops the company’s Tower System development boards (see the figure). The $99 kit delivers a complete development package including a copy of the Freescale MQX real-time operating system. The tower consists of a pair of “elevator” boards with four inexpensive PCI Express connectors. These connectors are found on almost every new...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Modules Make The World Go Around
Need to get a project done quickly? Modules can save time and money, especially when you’re working with wireless technologies. They often provide a family of solutions for upgrading a system with a single platform. Modules can be tiny but pack a punch. The Gumstix Overo Fireo puts more on a gumstick-size circuit board than many larger systems (Fig. 1). It includes a 600-MHz OMAP 3530...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] "1 Year, $1 Million, 1 Prototype"
My latest prototype is a four-month project to turn a pack of pachysandra into grass. Taking the organic route, I mowed down the pachysandra and ivy, cleared off the mess, layered on newspapers and cardboard, added some shredded paper and leaves, and topped it with a hefty layer of Earthmate compost, about 6 yards worth. This should kill everything while creating a good base to plant grass. It’s a process that many have used over the years, so...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Move Your Thermal Strategy For Air-Cooled Electronics Up In The Design Flow
There are two golden rules to thermal design: start simple and start early. The heat-flow path from the junction to the ambient, usually air in the local environment, determines a component’s temperature. Controlling temperature is therefore a system design challenge. Designers should employ a top-down approach that increases confidence in the thermal design as the design progresses (see the...
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Byron Blackmore
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