PLX Technology’s ExpressLane PCI Express switches not only incorporate a four-channel DMA engine that can offload memory transfer chores from the host, they also eliminate the need for DMA support on the host or its support chips.

The National Instruments Smart Camera line now has three new family members— the NI 1744, NI 1762, and NI 1764.

Billion Electric Co. Ltd. has selected the BroadLight BL2348 Residential Gateway (RG) system-on-a-chip (SoC) for a new line of high-performance customer-premises equipment (CPE).

Programmable logic devices (PLDs) are gaining favor in the automotive in-cabin systems market due to their inherent flexibility and ability to be modified at the point of manufacturing— and ultimately at the point of sale. Targeting automotive systems that include driver assistance, infotainment, and communications, programmable logic is well suited to let designers meet the ever changing tastes and needs of consumers. Automotive production volumes and price...

Solid-state disk drives are all the rage, with two flavors for embedded solutions: hard-disk form-factor devices and USB devices.There’s also a complement of flash cards, from Compact Flash to Sony’s Memory Stick, but they tend to be single devices. They often require specialized interfaces, and their capacity usually is limited due to physical constraints. Yet a third form factor may offer an opportunity, especially in embedded environments via another...

T he clamor for more digital connectivity in vehicles has car designers scrambling to implement systems that efficiently distribute audio, video, and other content. These requirements have led to the design of a future-proof system and networking architecture that can cope with the different development time frames in the consumer and the automotive worlds. While existing implementations focused on audio, Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST) now ...

We’re used to seeing in 3D. Computer imaging has taken a while to catch up. Several developments are coming together, from multicore processors to high-resolution cameras to fast refresh displays, to make 3D imaging happen. 3D imaging likes parallelism. This opens up opportunities for using graphics processing units (GPUs) that are readily available (see “What Will You Do With 1 TFLOPS Of Double-Precision Power?” at...

Looking to deliver the best of breed, IAR Systems, Micrium, and NXP Semicondcutors have put together their respective integrated development environment (IDE), real-time operating system (RTOS), and microcontroller in a single package. NXP’s industrial reference design (IRD) platform combines NXP’s ARM7-based LPC2468 with Micrium’s popular uC/OS-II RTOS with the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM C/C++ compiler and debugger. IAR’s tools support C/C++ and MISRA C....

With my new role as Group Editorial Director, I’m going to miss doing my column in each issue of Electronic Design. So here I am joining the “blogosphere.”

At one time, reference designs were simply helpful guides to the finer details of designing a part into a board. Those days are long gone. The complexity of today’s devices, in addition to the fast pace of many markets, has forced some reference designs to evolve beyond educational tools into manufacturing documentation for fully defined end products (Fig. 1). This dual role leaves...

DIGITALLY CONTROLLED POTENTIOMETERS (DCPS) find uses in a wide variety of systems for setting bias currents, variable reference voltages, and calibration settings. In industrial control and automation applications, high accuracy is a must. DCPs with 1024 taps are available, but for a few dollars instead of tens of cents. A dual, 32-tap, 50-k DCP is available for 40 cents. Can we use both of the DCPs in the package and reach similar performance to the 1024...

HERE’S A C/C++ PROGRAM that converts decimal numbers ranging from 0 to 99,999 to binary and binary coded decimal (BCD) formats. Using a simple algorithm in conjunction with pointer arithmetic and bitwise shifting increases the conversion speed without introducing excessive memory overhead and programming complexity. When decimal numbers are within the range of 0 to 9, their binary and BCD representations are identical, requiring only four bits...

SOME BACKGROUND Also known as state diagrams, statecharts can be found on napkins and coding screens as designers turn ideas into application code. They’re simple to use and understand, as they’re just a bunch of “circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin’ what each one was, to be used as evidence against us,” to quote Arlo Guthrie and his classic song, “Alice’s Restaurant.” Events cause transitions...

Measurement and process control loops often use 8-bit microcontrollers. The devices are inexpensive and widely available, and they can be programmed in many popular high-level languages—like C and Basic. However, if the loop requires a nonlinear sensor, the designer faces the added challenge of having to develop a software linearization algorithm. One solution is to design hardware to perform the required curve fitting before the sensor’s output...