 |
|
Engineering Essentials
|
129 results found for Engineering Essentials, displaying items 1 - 20
|
August 28, 2008
Modern DSP Chips Serve Up Variations On A Theme
Digital signal processors (DSPs) earn their living by doing certain analog jobs better than analog circuitry. In some cases, where analog circuits can’t even be considered for a task due to cost or complexity reasons, DSPs are still a viable choice and in many cases perform those tasks effortlessly. That’s because DSPs are very good and very fast at arithmetic operations such as addition and multiplication. Clever mathematicians and engineers exploit this...
—
Joseph Desposito
August 14, 2008
Welcome To Antennas 101
Antennas are much more than simple devices connected to every radio. They’re the transducers that convert the voltage from a transmitter into a radio signal. And they pick radio signals out of the air and convert them into a voltage for recovery in a receiver. Typically taken for granted and left for the last minute in a design, antennas are nonetheless critical for establishing and maintaining a reliable radio connection. They may look complex and enigmatic...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
August 14, 2008
Antennas 102: More Questions And Answers
Empty...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
July 24, 2008
Designing Multichannel HBLED Systems
High-brightness LEDs (HBLEDs) are increasingly becoming the light source of choice in both general and specialty lighting applications. Advances in LED technology have led to higher lumens per watt. Improvements are also being made in package size, color options, color rendering index (CRI) ratings, binning, and temperature stability. LEDs bring flexibility, efficiency, and intelligence to any lighting application. A typical application of such...
—
Ben Kropf
, et al.
July 24, 2008
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
July 24, 2008
Secret Sauce And Sandpaper
Continually improving white LEDs depends to a great extent on proprietary improvements in the chemistry and art of phosphor deposition. Cree considers that part of its intellectual property very secret. However, McClear was willing to talk about a recent breakthrough in backend processing, one that he figures the competition will catch onto fairly quickly. In fact, the development has to do with the LED diodes themselves. In normal practice, when the diodes on a wafer are...
—
Don Tuite
July 10, 2008
Without Thermal Analysis, You Might Get Burned
Remember when thermal analysis meant getting your prototype back and deciding if you might need to throw in a couple of heatsinks and a fan for good measure? Try that approach now and you may find yourself in deep and without a paddle. After all, heat can hamper electrical performance and ultimately reduce mean-time between failures. Back in my engineering heyday, I never put much thought into thermal analysis because it just wasnâ??t necessary, and I know...
—
Daniel Harris
June 26, 2008
DDS Basics
Most newer signal generators, such as arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs), lower-frequency RF generators, and vector signal generators (VSGs), use direct digital synthesis (DDS) instead of fractional-N phase-locked-loop (PLL) synthesizers, which are common in older instruments and higher-frequency RF generators. Though not new, DDS has improved significantly over the past few years thanks to the arrival of faster, single-chip DDS synthesizer chips like those from Analog...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
June 26, 2008
Signal Generators Step Up And Deliver Come Test Time
All electronic circuits and equipment receive input signals and process them into new and different output signals. When you’re designing and testing circuits and equipment, where do you get those input signals? You could build your own signal source for a specific application, but that isn’t necessary. That’s because there’s a signal generator available for any type of signal, no matter what type of equipment is being designed or under test....
—
Louis E. Frenzel
June 12, 2008
Bridge-Tied Load Amplifiers
It’s possible to build a push-pull amplifier using amplifier ICs, rather than discretes, as in the traditional class B amp (see the figure). A bridged-amplifier configuration effectively doubles the voltage swing at the load. It’s also possible to build a bridge amplifier in which one stage drives one side of the speaker and a second unity-gain inverting amplifier drives the other side of the speaker. However, the...
—
Don Tuite
June 10, 2008
HVVFETs—New In Town
The HVVFET is the brainchild of HVVi chief technology officer Bob Davies, one of the key inventors of LDMOS 15 years ago. Devices utilize a vertical FET structure (something that’s been tried before) because it provides higher power density than lateral devices. The problem with those early efforts were the parasitics associated with silicon substrates. That limited operating frequencies. For HVVi, Davies came up with a novel edge termination structure and a unique gate-drain ...
—
Don Tuite
June 12, 2008
Back To Amp Camp
Amplifiers are fundamental circuit-design elements. They drive everything from earbuds to antennas. Placed ahead of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), they reshape signals from sources as diverse as strain-gauges to ultrasound probes. Through proper selection of feedback passives, they can be configured into high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, and band-elimination filters. Feed them with multiple signals, and they produce harmonic series of all the...
—
Don Tuite
May 22, 2008
Temperature Sensors Are Hot... In Circuit Design
As IC device dimensions shrink and heat management and dissipation become tougher-than-ever challenges, one simply cannot overestimate the importance of sensing IC temperature. In particular, temperature sensing has become ubiquitous, playing key roles in process-control, environmental, test-and-measurement, and communications applications. In addition, its use in electronic circuit design continues to expand throughout large-volume automotive, medical, and consumer...
—
Roger Allan
May 22, 2008
Typical Characteristics Of Contact Temperature Sensors
Empty...
—
Roger Allan
May 8, 2008
Serial-Parallel Alternatives
Select image to enlarge ...
—
William Wong
May 8, 2008
Standard Serial Backplanes Dominate New Designs
It’s likely that your current designs have you pushing the proverbial envelope. If so, then high-speed serial interfaces are the way to go. Their overall bandwidth beats their parallel counterparts. Also, the newer technologies offer plenty of other benefits, such as lower pin counts and hot-swap support. The clear leader is PCI Express (PCIe), followed by Ethernet, Serial RapidIO, and InfiniBand. HyperTransport remains a chip-to-chip link, even though...
—
William Wong
April 24, 2008
Improve Product Qualification Accuracy with Advanced Solid-State Storage Usage SMART Monitoring Technology
For software engineers, system-level hardware engineers, program managers, and product marketing managers alike, the product qualification process can be a challenging one, especially for applications requiring long product lifecycles. Since product life can be tied closely to the storage solution used, establishing the projected life of a product’s storage system solution under various application-specific usage models provides a critical—though previously unavailable—indicator of storage...
—
Gary Drossel
April 24, 2008
DDR3’s Impact on Signal Integrity
Applications demanding higher system bandwidth and lower power, such as converged notebooks, desktop PCs, and servers, continue to drive the evolution of industry standards, including DDR3 as defined by JEDEC. The latest DDR3 memory standard, JEDEC JESD79-3A, specifically supports these needs and the requirements of emerging dual and multicore processor systems. DDR3 differs from the well-established DDR2 standard in several areas, such as data rate, operating voltage, and logic....
—
John Nieto
April 24, 2008
Application Requirements
Empty...
—
Daniel Harris
April 24, 2008
Storage Must Prepare For The Zettabyte Universe
Remember when bubble memory was the top storage technology? Then along came the faster, cheaper, and higherdensity hard-disk drive (HDD). Of course, bubble memory replaced core memory. One example of the latter was the Apollo Guidance Computer, which incorporated the read-only core rope memory (it resembled a rope of woven copper wire). The Apollo 11 lunar mission in July 1969 used 36 kwords of core rope memory ROM with a cycle time of 11.7 µs to...
—
Daniel Harris
 prev. page
[1]
2
3
4
5
6
7
next page 
|
|
