Don Tuite wrote his first technical article (on circular antenna polarization) in 1973 for Microwaves magazine, which is a sister publication of Electronic Design. He went on to author four books for electronics hobbyists. Since 1985, he has concentrated on semiconductors, working on his own as well as within chip manufacturers, for public relations agencies, and as a trade-press editor. He holds an MS degree in communications and technical writing from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) and a BS in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Email address: dtuite@penton.com Web site: http://www.elecdesign.com/
455 results found for Don Tuite, displaying items 1 - 20
November 17, 2008[Design FAQs] Multiservice Router Clock Circuit Design Challenges
What’s a multiservice router/ switch? Multiservice routers and switches are network devices that support multiple switching and routing protocols, typically adding Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching to basic Internet protocol (IP) routing services (see the figure). From an IT-services (information ...
November 17, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] Stack Monitor Chips Without Isolation Concerns To Give Your Electric Car Some Zip
Okay, you want to design an electric car. Whatever kind of motor you decide on, you’re going to want to run it at a pretty high voltage. That means stacking many batteries in series to get to that voltage, which introduces interesting challenges in monitoring and charging circuits as potentials at the negative electrodes rise above system ground. This is not a new problem. But as long as it’s been confined to products like golf carts and nuclear submarines, ...
November 17, 2008[TechView: Analog & Power] Fast ADC Sips Power, Simplifies Design-In
For portable applications as diverse as medical imaging units, professional video cameras, batterypowered software-defined radios, and industrial test and measurement designs, the 14-bit, 125-Msample/s LTC2261 analogto- digital converter (ADC) from Linear Technology dissipates 127 mW—less than one-third the power of alternative chips. The company acknowledges that much of the power savings arises from running the LTC2261 at 1.8 V (...
November 17, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Challenges Lie Ahead At The Physical Layer
The physical layer (PHY) of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model conveys the bit stream—electrical impulse, light, or radio signal—through a network. In the context of the OSI model, the PHY embraces the physical as well as the signaling aspects of the interconnect. Here, we will focus just on the electrical issues. These days, designers are usually most concerned with serial signaling. This came about as data volumes increased and parallel buses just...
October 30, 2008
[Leapfrog: First Look] Scrappy IC Startup Challenges Big Guns With Lossy-Compression ADC For Ultrasound
With TI and Analog Devices duking it out for dominance in the front ends of the world’s ultrasound medical devices, it would take some audacity for a fabless startup to design its first product for the same market. But Samplify Systems has announced chips based on a lossy data-compression algorithm.
October 14, 2008
[Web Exclusive] RTI, DARPA Up The Ante In Energy Conversion Efficiency
Ever drive by a power plant, gaze at its obtrusive cooling towers and think, “There goes a monument to wasted thermal energy?” Well, RTI International is heading a project to push the fold in thermo-electric power conversion and turn the ecosystem’s frown upside down.
October 9, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] Ultrasound AFEs Get More Specialized, Easier To Design With
An emerging business philosophy in semiconductor design says that the way to prosper in the new global marketplace is to use your engineering skills to design your customers’ products for them—or at least the “hard parts.” One corollary of this is that you have to keep beating your own previous personal-best benchmarks over and over again at the same old 18-month cycles, not just at some component level, but at the subsystem level. The reward is that...
October 2, 2008[Ideas For Design] The IFD Culture—An Interview With Hall Of Famer Bob Dobkin
Linear Technology’s Chief Technology Officer Robert Dobkin has been contributing Ideas for Design (IFDs) since his youth. He’s still enthusiastic about them. “I remember one I wrote when I was a kid. It was a current source that you could pulse on or off. I don’t know how many letters I got from that,” he said. “It had just two or three transistors in it, but it was really effective in terms of people coming back to me after reading it, which...
October 2, 2008[Ideas For Design] Who Actually Designs Reference Designs?
It’s fair to say there are really two kinds of reference designs. One is developed by chip companies that want a permanent foothold in an original device manufacturer’s high-volume platform in a consumer market. The other is produced by a chip company’s Web-based or downloadable PC tool that lets ordinary bench engineers mix and match ICs, simulate circuits, and obtain bills-of-materials (BOMs) and sometimes actual circuit board reference designs. ...
September 25, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Peer Through The High-Performance Kaleidoscope
Surveying the “high-performance” analog landscape is a lot like looking through a kaleidoscope. With each turn, you’ll see performance characteristics: precision, bandwidth, conversion rates, noise, power consumption, physical size, dynamic range, price, etc. Depending on the application, you may be happy to sacrifice some to optimize others. Turn the kaleidoscope a little, and you’ll see basic topologies or input/output configurations. Turn...
September 11, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] P25 Handhelds Incorporate High-Velocity Human Factors Design
I don’t often write about OEM products. But since I covered the challenges of designing radios for cops and firefighters in the April 30 issue (see “Radio Interoperability—It’s Harder Than It Looks” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 18657), I wanted to follow up because of a new announcement from Motorola. Vastly...
August 28, 2008[TechView: Analog & Power] Chips Help Supercaps Flash White LEDs Brighter For Higher-Res Photos
As digital-camera and phone-camera resolution increases, high-resolution image sensors require more light. Firstgeneration low-res camera phones provided barely adequate flash intensity for taking closeups of friends at parties. Even second-generation camera-phone flash is still unsuitable for image sensors with greater than 3-Mpixel resolution. And that’s just talking about still photography. Video requires in-phone camera lighting to provide...
August 14, 2008
[Web Exclusive] Barbers, Adaptability, And Electric Pickup Trucks
A recent CNN story called “Converting Gas-Powered Cars to Electric” sparked a round of e-mails among us Electronic Design editors. The story specifically described a man who ripped the engine out of his Chevy S-10 pickup and installed an electric motor, reminding me of a conversation I had yesterday with Dave, my barber. Dave drives this brobdinagian pickup camper, and we were talking about what’s under its hood.
August 14, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] RF/IF VGA Chip Does It All
According to Maxim Integrated Products, the MAX2065 fully programmable, multistate, analog and digital IF/RF variable-gain amplifier (VGA) aims to solve a number of automatic gain control (AGC) design problems in GSM/EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE, and WiMAX receiver applications (see the figure). But what does that mean? In explaining the thinking that went into the design of the...
August 14, 2008[TechView: Analog & Power] Set-Top Tuner Simplifies Design And Assembly
Tuners for set-top boxes, DVRs, PC TVtuner cards, and the like keep getting simpler to design in and less demanding to assemble into end products. Anadigics’ AIT1032 1-GHz double-conversion tuner implements upconverter, downconverter, voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), synthesizer, RF and IF amplifier, and RF and IF gain control functions with a combination of gallium-arsenide (GaAs) and silicon technologies. It’s designed to avoid...
August 14, 2008[TechView: Analog & Power] RF Power MOSFETs Top Previous PAE Standards
Power-added efficiency (PAE) is the ratio of the difference of the power gain of an RF power amp to the dc power that amp consumes. In commercial wireless systems at 175 and 500 MHz in cell phones at 800 and 900 MHz, it’s customary to use two MOSFET stages in the final output, running off a 3.6-V rail. For those typical applications, Renesas has applied a new process technology to boost PAE. The n-channel first-stage RQA0014 has 55% higher PAE than...
August 1, 2008
[ED Bookstore] Maxwell's Equations For Dummies?
One of the perks of being an Electronic Design editor is that we get lots of books that publishers would like us to review. The last time I went through the stack, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations by Daniel Fleisch caught my eye. I settled down in the nearest chair and started to skim. Then I slowed down and started to read. Professor Fleisch is a great scientific communicator.
July 28, 2008
[Web Exclusive] Ham Radio's Rejuvenation
Hypothesis: Doing away with the code requirement last March has completed a rejuvenation of ham radio that was triggered by the World Trade Center attacks and Katrina. I’m looking for reader comments yea and nay.
July 24, 2008[Design FAQs] Digital Potentiometers
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Analog What are digital potentiometers, and how are they used? Digital potentiometers are integrated circuits that implement a resistive ladder and a digital means of addressing a particular tap on the ladder that corresponds to the wiper position of a mechanical potentiometer. They’re used to...
July 24, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Beyond The $10 Million Light Bulb
Signed into law in January, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 directs the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to establish the “Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prizes” (L Prize) competition. This contest is designed to spur the development of ultra-efficient, solid-state lighting products to replace the common light bulb. Specifically, the DOE hopes to replace the 60-W incandescent lamp and the PAR 38 halogen lamp. It also calls for a...
Don Tuite wrote his first technical article (on circular antenna polarization) in 1973 for Microwaves magazine, which is a sister publication of Electronic Design. He went on to author four books for electronics hobbyists. Since 1985, he has concentrated on semiconductors, working on his own as well as within chip manufacturers, for public relations agencies, and as a trade-press editor. He holds an MS degree in communications and technical writing from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) and a BS in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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