November 5, 2009[Engineering Essentials] A Multi-Level Approach Makes Understanding Motor Control Easier
Regardless of their primary field, sooner or later, most designers have to deal with motor controls. Broadly speaking, there are two methods to incorporating these components in your design. First, designers can start with one of the many choices of microcontrollers that are available and then address the challenges of making the control do what they want. Or second, designers can start at the other end and examine the interaction between motors and...
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Don Tuite
, et al.
October 23, 2009
[Editorial] Medical Devices Take Center Stage At IMEC Technology Forum
Back in early October, I headed to Leuven, Belgium, to attend the IMEC Technology Forum. IMEC specializes in nanotechnology research in information and communication technologies (ICT), healthcare, and energy. The presentations ran the gamut of research at the facility, but the most impressive concerned the communication between cells and electronics at the nano scale.
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Joseph Desposito
October 22, 2009[Leapfrog: First Look] STT Technology Puts A New Spin On MRAM
MRAM’s full potential has been one of the electronics industry’s holy grails—until now. Maybe. Its promise includes nonvolatility, fast read and write times, and unlimited endurance. Power requirements and density have been limitations in the past, though current MRAM technology has succeeded in a number of niche applications. MRAM is complementary with technologies it may replace, including SRAM, DRAM, and flash memory. Crocus...
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William Wong
October 22, 2009[Editorial] Salary Aside, Engineering Remains A Great Profession
There has been a lot of bad economic news for engineers and almost everyone else since the financial meltdown of 2008. Hiring and salary freezes have become the order of the day, and benefits like 401(k) matches have been taken away. Add unprecedented reductions in salaries, whether as a flat percentage pullback or a via a shorter workweek, and employees are really feeling the pinch. Many of these occurrences are documented in this year’s salary survey,...
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Joseph Desposito
October 8, 2009[Leapfrog: First Look] Field-Programmable I/O Augments 8- And 32-Bit Microcontrollers
T hanks to its reconfigurable peripherals, the original programmable system-ona- chip (PSoC) from Cypress Semiconductor is one of the major microcontroller advances of the past decade. However, its proprietary 8-bit microcontroller limited its use in many higher-end applications. The release of the PSoC 3 (based on the 8051) and the PSoC 5 (based on the Cortex-M3), along with some major changes in the reconfigurable peripherals, revises the equation...
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William Wong
October 1, 2009[Engineering Essentials] Prototype Your Way To Success
An infinite number of inventions is waiting to happen. It’s often hard to figure out why one idea succeeds and another falls by the wayside. Many factors can impact success, ranging from the quality of the product, to the way it’s marketed, to the timing of its release. Sometimes, it’s just pure luck. Often, great ideas fail because the inventor spends too much time trying to develop the perfect 1.0 version instead of simply producing...
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Mike Santori
October 1, 2009[Lab Bench] Take Advantage Of Multicore Platforms
Multicore is everything these days, from laptops to servers. Getting started programming a multicore PC is as easy as downloading Intel’s Thread Building Blocks (see “Threads Make The Move To Open Source”). It’s just one of the many frameworks designed to take advantage of the multicore hardware that is readily available. Even C++ is making it easier ...
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William Wong
September 24, 2009[Technology Report] You're Using How Many FPGAs?
Designing a single-purpose FPGA prototype board is hard enough. But what about a register-transfer-level (RTL) emulation system based on FPGAs? Emulators are known for their fast compile times and simulator-like debug capabilities—features not normally associated with FPGAs. Throw in the need to support up to 1 billion ASIC-equivalent gates as well as multiple concurrent users with multiple use models, and you’ve got quite a challenge. That, in fact, is the challenge EVE faced while...
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Ron Choi
September 24, 2009[Technology Report] Tool Up For The FPGA Blitz
FPGA usage divides into two primary segments. Historically, the foremost role of FPGAs has been to verify an ASIC, system-on-achip (SoC), or application-specific standard part (ASSP). Designers now will use FPGAs to prototype a portion or all of their design, to tweak the same, or as a platform to get ahead on developing system software. According to some industry experts, as many as 90% to 100% of ASICs today are prototyped on FPGAs. For many years, a main...
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David Maliniak
September 10, 2009[Embedded in Electronic Design] USB-SATA Bridge Chip Breaks USB 3.0 Barrier
Fujitsu’s 65-nm MB86C30A USB 3.0-SATA Bridge chip looks to bring the full performance of SATA storage to USB. USB 3.0 specs up USB 2.0’s 480-Mbit/s transfer rate to 5-Gbit/s transfer. This translates into 300 Mbytes/s versus USB 2.0’s 37 Mbytes/s. This is also on par with SATA-II’s 3 Gbits/s with a typical throughput on the order of 260 Mbytes/s. This matching performance is key for external storage units. The chip also incorporates a 32-bit RISC processor and ...
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William Wong
August 27, 2009[Electronic Design Products] Use Capacitive And Proximity Sensing In Your Digital Photo Frames
Digital photo frames (DPFs) are starting to appear in many places where traditional photo albums and frames have been used for decades. The growth and proliferation of digital cameras has rendered hard-copy photos from analog cameras all but obsolete. On top of displaying the photos, DPFs can transfer them to printers and other devices, play videos, and offer remote control over all these functions without a computer. The basic DPF uses a multimedia...
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Ben Kropf
, et al.
August 27, 2009[Leapfrog: First Look] 1-GHz Cortex A8 Uses 3/4 W
Start with a standard processor core design. Highlight performance and power bottlenecks. Replace key logic with advanced clock gated logic. Significantly cut power requirements. Incorporate into popular multimedia devices. Profit. That’s Intrinsity’s plan. The company started with ARM’s Cortex A8 architecture with a 13-stage, in-order, dual-issue, superscalar microprocessor core and a global history-based branch prediction system (...
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William Wong
August 25, 2009
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multicore Designs Keep Up With Moore's Law
The transistor count keeps following Moore’s Law. But unless you’re at the low end of the 32-bit spectrum or below, multicore is the only alternative to more powerful platforms. It addresses the clock and power issues that play a much bigger part in designing new chips. Without multicore, the drive for more power-processing systems would come to a grinding halt. This has led to a plethora of multicore designs from Freescale, Intel, and Nvidia.
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William Wong
August 25, 2009
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Flat Panel Fronts Atom
The Eurotech Vx-120F-N270 12.1-in. TFT display with an eight-wire resistive touchscreen interface is home to a fanless 1.6-GHz Atom N270 processor. The system can handle up to 2 Gybtes of memory and a 2.5-in. SATA hard drive.
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William Wong
August 13, 2009[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
August 13, 2009[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
August 11, 2009
[Editorial] Auto Electronics Web Site Sheds Its Print Heritage
One of the casualties of this recession is Electronic Design’s sister publication, Auto Electronics. Are design engineers no longer interested in the subject matter? That’s not the case, for sure. For an industry that is suffering so mightily right now, enormous innovation is occurring. Like many defunct print publications, content lives on and will continue to grow in cyberspace—on the Auto Electronics ...
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Joseph Desposito
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