[Technology Report] Cool Ceramics Help Simplify LED Heat Dissipation
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) suffer from heat problems that understandably can limit their success as a light source. Much attention is given to the heatsink, and less is given to the layers and barriers between the LED and the heat-dissipating surface. A change of concept and material allows for significant gains in thermal management and reliability in addition to a simplified system. Using ceramics as a heatsink, circuit carrier, and part of...
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Armin Veitl
[Leapfrog: First Look] Ray Tracing Poses A Database Problem
Ray tracing is the reason animated films look so good these days and why games still have a way to go when it comes to realism, even with powerful graphics processing units (GPUs). The problem for gamers is that GPUs are rasterization engines, and most games are tuned for that. Cinema-quality animated movies tend to be created using large “render farms” that are network clusters. Caustic Graphics is looking to literally change the landscape by replacing...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Plumb The Depths Of Deep Packet Inspection
In a short time, network infrastructure bandwidth has scaled exponentially to 10 Gbits/s, with designs for next-generation Ethernet promising between 40 and 100 Gbits/s. At the same time, the complexity and breadth of applications that run over these backbones are drastically changing. Accordingly, to accommodate the ever-increasing need for network security, control, and visibility that’s required for network traffic, communications equipment needs to be...
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Daniel Proch
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[Design View / Design Solution] Build An Efficient 500-W Solar-Power Inverter Using IGBTs
With the global trend toward green power and affordable energy gaining momentum, applications such as home appliances, lighting, and power tools, as well as other industrial equipment and uninterruptible power systems (UPSs), are rapidly tapping the benefits of solar energy, converting the sun’s power to the desired alternating current (ac) or direct current (dc) at the required voltage. To efficiently generate the desired output voltage and...
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Wibawa T. Chou
[Ideas For Design] Full-Wave Active Rectifier Requires No Diodes
A full-wave rectifier can be built without using any diodes. It exploits the fact that the output voltage of certain single- supply op amps is effectively “clamped” to ground (0 V) when the input signal goes negative. The circuit combines a unity-gain follower (IC1a) and a second stage (IC1b) that combines the follower’s output signal (VO) with an inverted version of the input signal (VIN) (Fig....
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Anthony H. Smith
[Ideas For Design] Add Simple Temperature Monitoring To Battery-Management Systems
Environmental concerns are spurring the development of clean transportation alternatives. Most popular are full electric and hybrid electric motor vehicles, which use stacks of lithium-ion battery cells as the electric power source. To ensure efficient operation and long battery life, the cells are continually monitored for the available charge, known as the state of charge (SOC). The temperature of the cells is an important factor for the SOC calculation. In...
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Tim Regan
[POV: Point Of View] Use Sampled Data Compression In Your ISM Applications
Compression is ubiquitous in consumer electronics. Modern compression algorithms exploit the limitations of human hearing and vision to offer compression ratios from 4:1 for speech and more than 30:1 for video, generating “good enough” audio and video for consumers. While these applications have used compression for years, many industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) applications don’t use it. Many engineers in medical imaging, radar, sonar, test and...
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Al Wegener
[Embedded in Electronic Design] RF4CE And Other Wireless Tricks
Wireless design spans a wide range of technologies, including high-end software- defined radio, 802.11 Wi-Fi standards, and tiny 802.15.4-based systems that run off batteries for years or even scavenge power from local sources. Regardless of the technology, the resulting product must pass one or more RF-related approvals. In the U.S., designs must meet the standards of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The list of approval agencies gets longer when...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Atom-Based Computer-On-Module Links ETX And PC/104-Plus
Computer-on-module boards often delegate expansion to a custom carrier board. Diamond Systems takes a different approach by including PC/104-Plus expansion on its Atom-based ETX Pluto, which is built around a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom ETX module with a 945GSE chipset (see the figure). The ETX Pluto handles up to 2 Gbytes of small-outline dual-inline memory-module (SODIMM) DDR2. Its high-resolution...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DSP Kits Make Medicine Easier
Texas Instruments is highlighting the applicability of its low-power TMS- 320VC5505 DSP to medical products with a trio of medical development kits (MDKs), including digital-stethoscope, electrocardiogram (ECG) meter, and pulse-oximeter analog front-end (AFE) boards. These boards, which plug into a TMS320VC5505 DSP evaluation module (EVM), are designed to streamline the development of portable medical devices. Each kit includes software design...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Big Changes In The Frequency Spectrum Cultivate New Wireless Possibilities
Mark Twain once said, “Buy land. They’re not making it anymore.” Such is the case with electromagnetic frequency spectrum. They’re scarce, coveted, and very expensive. Furthermore, they’re subject to regulation both nationally and internationally. The general consensus is that most of the good spectrum are already allocated. But the opposing view is that lots of existing unused or underutilized spectrum could be used (see “...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Engineering Essentials] DMA Engines Bring Multicast To PCI Express Systems
Multicast, a technique commonly used in networking systems, allows a given processing unit to send a single data stream to multiple destinations at the same time efficiently. Typically, the switch employed as the interconnect backbone implements the actual multicast replication function. Because it’s programmable, it can duplicate a given packet to any given device connected to the switch. For example, a server can send a video stream to multiple...
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Miguel Rodriguez
[Lab Bench] Do You Remember When Today’s MCUs Were Yesterday’s High Tech?
You never know what’s going to show up in your inbox. A recent note from Matt Miller, tooling engineering manager for Commercial Forged Products, spurred a look back. “I have been marveling at the proliferation of incredibly powerful and precise modules of incredible varieties that are available these days. The price is comparatively cheap and, whoa, the bang for the buck is big,” he wrote. “I’d be very interested to see someone do an objective ...
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William Wong
[Analog/Mixed-Signal Design] Use DSM To Shift Your Signal Processing
First, to those of you who have sent me e-mails about my delta-sigma series, thank you. I appreciate the kind words and notification of errors. I also received a few e-mails from some readers, mostly grad students, wanting to let me know they are way smarter than me. They included questions guaranteed to confirm their position— for example, what effect does first- through third-stage parasitic capacitance have on overall differential non-linearity performance ...
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Dave Van Ess
