1746 results found for Analog /Mixed Signal, displaying items 1 - 20
June 30, 2009
[Web Exclusive] eBook: Building Battery Arrays with Lithium-Ion Cells
Large scale arrays based on Li-ion batteries can provide the high voltage, current, and capacity required by many emerging portable markets; however, there are numerous problems facing the designers of larger battery packs, and this paper outlines the techniques for achieving high voltage or capacity by building high cell count arrays.
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ED News Staff
June 25, 2009[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB, I read your response to Arthur Williams in the April 23 column (“Bob’s Mailbox”). The answer as to whether or not to remove the ground plane underneath inductors is: it depends. If the inductors are cans or toroids, it does not matter as the fields are contained inside the inductor. If the inductors are air wound or chip inductors, it might be best to try...
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Bob Pease
June 25, 2009[TechView: Analog & Power] 50-MHz Op Amps Self-Calibrate Offset
The MCP65X 50-MHz rail-to-rail operational amplifiers from Microchip Technology include an on-chip “mCal” calibration circuit that calibrates offset voltage at powerup or on-command. An internal power on-reset detector or a signal on an external pin initiates calibration. Self-calibration provides a lower initial voltage offset than conventional op amps, along with a means to continually control drift over time and temperature, Microchip says (...
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Don Tuite
June 25, 2009[Ideas For Design] Triple-Current-Modulation Delta VBE Thermometry Cancels Ohmic Error Sources
Delta VBE-based ( VBE) thermometry1,2,3,4 is based on this classic bipolar junction I/V/T relationship: For an ideal transistor, the VBE corresponding to ratiometric change in collector current (I2 / I1) is exactly proportional to absolute temperature: VBE = 198.4 µV * °K * LOG10(I2 / I1). Because cheap, common, and robust small-signal transistors conform closely to the ideal model, circuits that exploit the “PTAT (Proportional...
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W. Stephen Woodward
June 25, 2009[Engineering Feature] Oscillators Face The Final Frontier
High-reliability oscillator design for satellite systems poses many challenges to the engineering community. The custom nature of the design efforts as well as the quality requirements tend to lead to large, complex specifications that drive cost, design cycle time, and overall product lead time. Materials utilized in design and construction are also limited by environmental constraints such as outgassing, radiation, the use of pure tin, and shock/vibration...
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David Bail
June 18, 2009
[New Products] MEMS Accelerometer Offers Movement-Activated Features For Mobile Applications
STMicroelectronics’ LIS302DLH, a three-axis digital micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) accelerometer, is a 16-bit device measuring 0.75 mm high. According to ST, the product partakes in its Piccolo MEMS family’s 3- by 5-mm footprint and therefore is suitable for space-saving designs.
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Staff
June 18, 2009[Technology Report] Beyond The "Great Recession"
If one looks at the last 50 years of engineering boom-and-bust cycles and correlates them with the “stealth” technologies that emerged during those periods, one can see an encouraging pattern: breakthrough technologies take root during the crises and eventually transform the industry. Often, few people initially grasp these technologies or their potential. It’s also regrettably demonstrable that the actual pioneers have rarely been the ones to reap the big...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009[Technology Report] Motor Control: More Than Just Switching MOSFETs
Enter “motion control” or “motor control” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll be rewarded with links to an ad-hoc encyclopedia of solid design information. Freescale’s site (www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=02M0zpbnQXGM0zpqCKS2&tid=tMCdr) is broad, deep, and far more than a product selection guide—which it...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009[Technology Report] White Goods See Significant Motor-Control Innovations
Cars are exciting, and appliances are boring, right? That depends. While you can’t take an air conditioner for test drives on a frozen lake to evaluate its dynamic response to regenerative braking in slippery conditions, as Greg Solberg did with the Tesla Roadster, there can still be challenges. For example, cultural and economic differences in regional markets for white goods influence motor-control design. On the cultural side, to cite one case, China and Japan present a...
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Don Tuite
June 18, 2009[Technology Report] Auto Electronics Revs Up For "Greener" Pastures
The automobile and electronics industries are struggling mightily through this economic tumult. Straddling these two giants, however, is a shining beacon—auto electronics. At last year’s Convergence Conference, a panel of experts from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, and BMW suggested that the cost of electronics in a car will increase beyond the oft-quoted 20% figure and climb to 40% to 50%. Getting more extreme, Honda senior...
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Roger Allan
June 18, 2009[Editorial] How Do We Get Out Of This Mess? Try New Ideas
Life if full of unassailable assumed truths, and it’s an often disturbing but always constructive exercise to challenge them. Let’s start by questioning an easy one from everyday life: are you a good driver? Your instinctive answer is undoubtedly yes, and you would receive the same answer from anyone else you ask. But there are obviously loads of hopeless drivers on the roads. It just so happens that you, or anyone that’s asked, isn’t one of...
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Joseph Desposito
June 11, 2009
[New Products] Stepper Motor Controllers Target Bipolar, Unipolar Motors
The LS8297, LS8297CT, and LS8397 stepper motor-controller ICs from LSI Computer Systems Inc. are designed to replace the L297 in all applications while providing additional features. They offer half-step and full-step sequences in both normal drive and wave-drive modes similar to the L297.
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Staff
June 11, 2009[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
June 11, 2009[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
June 11, 2009[Engineering Feature] The Mixed-Signal Angle On DFM
When most designers think of DFM, they think of deep-submicron SoCs and digital design. But more often, DFM is a factor in analog/mixed-signal flows for RFICs as well. “There’s no such thing as a pure RFIC anymore,” says Marc Peterson, director of RFIC product planning at Agilent EEsof. “All RFICs are mixed-signal chips these days, and they’re moving to the smaller process nodes where process variability is a much bigger problem.” A key part of mixed-signal...
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David Maliniak
June 11, 2009[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
June 11, 2009[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
June 11, 2009[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
June 4, 2009
[New Products] Low-Power Op Amps Combine High Performance And Low Noise
Designed for power- and space-constrained applications, the MAX9943 and MAX9944 high-voltage operational amplifiers from Maxim Integrated Products deliver superior precision in sensor signal conditioning, high-performance industrial instrumentation, and loop-powered systems, according to the company. Also, Maxim’s MAX9945 suits portable medical and industrial applications that require low-noise analog front ends.
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Staff
June 4, 2009
[New Products] 1.5-V Op Amps Support Portable Products
The TSV6xx families of precision operational amplifiers from STMicroelectronics are designed for low-power and portable products with power-saving features like high-speed performance at low supply current, operation from a 1.5-V supply, and device-shutdown capability.
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Staff
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