[Product Innovation] Upgraded DSP Core Tackles Future Communication Needs
Designers are packing more functionality into less space while increasing the data bandwidth in portable devices. Unfortunately, they're quickly running out of signal-processing performance. Today's crop of DSPs can deliver 30 to 100 MIPS. But...
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Dave Bursky
[Ideas For Design] Potentiometer Regulates Fast Battery Charger
Amidst the current explosion of portable electronic devices are important issues regarding battery maintenance. Learning the tricks and techniques related to the care and feeding of batteries is essential. Of particular interest are the dark secrets...
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W. Stephen Woodward
[Editorial] Geopolitics And Chips: Is Taiwan Playing Brinksmanship?
Although I hope the situation will eventually reach a peaceful resolution, the dispute between mainland China and Taiwan looks very thorny. The recent elections have put both sides into highly posturing modes, and one side may go a bit further than...
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Dave Bursky
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Dear Bob: Re: your comments about "menus vs. knobs" in "Bob's Mailbox" (electronic design, Feb. 21, p. 133). So you think you're frustrated with menus too? So are a lot of musicians out there. There's an interesting parallel...
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Bob Pease
[Viewpoint] Power-Conversion Needs Market-Specific Standardization
The power-conversion industry faces tremendous opportunity for growth. The consumption of electrical power is increasing exponentially. From computers and the Internet to home appliances and automobiles, consumer thirst for enhanced features and...
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Alex Lidow
[Editor's Notebook] C++ Compiler Spells Relief For DSP Programmers
Programming fixed- and floating-point DSPs in assembly language has never been easy. Complications arise with very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) and superscalar multi-MAC architectures. Other variances with lots of parallelism on-chip add to the...
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Ashok Bindra
[Letters] Letters
Pay Attention To What You're Printing I was very disappointed at the standard of the article, "Shed Some Pounds With This AC/DC Transformerless Power Supply" (Nov. 22, 1999, p. 109). I will leave aside the...
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Various
[The Design Factory] Management Isn't About Overloading The Engineers
Mr. Big, the general manager, strode into the engineering department. "Say, Sparky," he said, adopting his collegial I-need-something tone, "I'm doing a financial plan for next year and I need to know how many projects engineering can do." Sparky,...
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Don Reinertsen
[40 Years Ago] Rugged Memory Stores Data On Paper-Thin Disk
Today, a paper-thin, magnetic-memory disk is a commercial reality. Just six months ago, the developmental ancestor of this flexible-disk memory made its debut at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference (ED, January 6, 1960). At the Western...
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Steve Scrupski
[40 Years Ago] Clevite Corp. Acquires Shockley Transistor Corp.
The Clevite Corp., Cleveland, Ohio, has acquired the assets of Shockley Transistor Corp., Palo Alto, Calif., a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments, Inc. The Clevite President, W. G. Laffer, said the acquisition will substantially augment the company's...
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Steve Scrupski
[Forefront] From The Labs
• The Center for Global Electronic Commerce at Virginia Tech is now open. It aims to help businesses develop expertise in electronic commerce while promoting research and education in this field. Faculty members will contribute...
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Staff
[Forefront] Company Wire
• ON Semiconductor is acquiring Cherry Semiconductor Corp. in a $250 million cash deal. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2000, subject to regulatory approval. With this move, ON hopes to play a defining role...
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Staff
[Forefront] Electronic Torque Sensor May Improve Power Steering Systems
A group of researchers at Ames Laboratory, Ames, Iowa, is now developing a material that's lightweight and cost-effective enough to rival conventional hydraulic power-steering systems. With just a 0.25-in. thick ring of the material, an electronic...
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Cheryl Ajluni
[Forefront] How About Replacing Electronics With Spintronics?
Everyone knows that electrons have a charge and spin. Typical electronic devices operate by taking advantage of that charge. Argonne National Laboratories in Argonne, Ill., however, is investigating "spintronic" devices—that is, devices that...
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Richard Gawel
[Forefront] HDL-Based Industry Organizations Unite
In a move that comes as a surprise to the EDA community, Open Verilog International (OVI) and VHDL International (VI) have announced plans to unite. The resulting, and as yet unnamed, industry organization will be responsible for driving the...
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Cheryl Ajluni
[Forefront] Magnetic Sensor Helps ASIC Measure Changing Fields
Is there a more accurate way to measure changing magnetic fields in applications like automotive navigation systems, medical imaging, land-mine detection, and industrial controls? Fluxgate-technology-based magnetometers served some of these...
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Ashok Bindra
[Forefront] Commercial Tools Optimize And Validate PCI-X Designs
The E2929A and E2922A exerciser/analyzers are designed to help chip and server manufacturers improve their I/O performance. Engineers can use these design verification tools to validate and debug chip-set, server, server clusters, or other designs...
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Richard Gawel
[Careers] Skills That Can Be Key To Job Survival
It's easy to make the argument that a good number of engineers in the early to middle part of their careers must like the companies for which they work. That explains why most of them reach a point of suddenly worrying if their work is excellent...
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Roger Allan
