[Engineering Feature] Who's Listening? Weaving A Security Blanket For Handhelds
Your day might start out something like this: You drive to the airport, passing through several tollbooths equipped with video cameras and an E-ZPass billing system. When you get to the airport, you show your ID at the check-in counter and hand your bags over to the attendant. You then shuffle-through a security checkpoint with x-ray machines and metal detectors before boarding your plane. When you finally arrive at Chicago's Midway airport, you retrieve your bags and catch a cab...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] IDEs Of Change
Does anyone remember the days when there was a virtual cornucopia of development tools? Well, the latest bounty is even larger. But when it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), an interesting consolidation has occurred. While the number of unique IDEs continues to shrink, IDE sophistication is on the rise. It's becoming increasingly difficult to start a brand new IDE from scratch. Likewise, it's more difficult to maintain a unique IDE that supports a range of...
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William Wong
[Leapfrog: First Look] Breaking A New Sound Barrier: It's A Mic-On-A-Chip
Spurred on by advances in MEMS CMOS processing, a low-cost, tiny single-chip microphone with high acoustic quality has moved from fantasy to reality. According to developer Akustica, it's the industry's first single-chip CMOS MEMS microphone. The chip replaces common electretcondensermicrophone (ECM) units, a technology that's remained fundamentally unchanged for 50 years. ECMs are mechanical devices with size, manufacturability, and uniformity limitations. "We're not...
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Roger Allan
[Design View / Design Solution] Design A Clock-Distribution Strategy With Confidence
Clock-distribution devices create multiple copies of a master clock and distribute them to a variety of integrated circuits. They accept single-ended or differential clock inputs and supply multiple single-ended or differential outputs that are divided or delayed versions of the input clock. A low-phase-noise crystal oscillator (XO) is commonly used to drive clock-distribution devices. Their sinusoidal outputs are then converted to square waves or pulse trains. Clock jitter is...
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Demetrios Efstathiou
[Ideas For Design] Reduce AC-Couupling Capacitance In Transmission Systems
Communication systems often require large ac output coupling to remove dc voltage on the transmission line and to isolate ground connections between transmit and receive systems. Generally, a feedback network is used to minimize the output capacitance. Yet once the feedback's tradeoffs are understood, the circuit can be reorganized and improved. The final feedback network presented here yields a more compact solution with equivalent performance. The traditional feedback network...
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Tamara Papalias
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[Ideas For Design] Digital Volume Control Eliminates Zipper Noise
In low-end audio systems, digital potentiometers can be used as audio attenuators or amplifiers (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, a large change in volume at an arbitrary time can cause an abrupt discontinuity in the audio signal. The result is audible clicking, or zipper noise, which precludes the use of this simple design in mid-level or high-end audio systems. But designers can reduce zipper noise by converting the random change in...
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Alan Li
[POV: Point Of View] IP Trumps Process In Cutting Power Use In Mixed-Signal ICs
From a silicon design perspective, the industry has long held the notion that power consumption can be reduced simply by porting chips forward to the next process technology node. Yet as more consumer electronics move from 130-to 90-nm mixed-signal ICs, power reductions no longer scale with technology advances and finer geometry. To select the most power-efficient chips, systems developers must look beyond process shrink capabilities and rely upon their semiconductor provider's intellectual...
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Duncan Furness
[Editorial] ESC Gives Life To Smart Fabric, Smart Dashboard
There was so much to see at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose earlier this month. But a couple of applications really jumped out at me in terms of their potential impact. There has been a lot of talk about smart fabrics—clothing materials that can monitor the health of the soldiers, athletes, or medical patients who wear them. Echelon took this idea a step further and demonstrated a smart carpet at its booth at ESC (see...
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Mark David
[TechView: The Industry] Photon Detector Speeds Up Interplanetary Communications
In science fiction, starship captains can pick up the phone and talk to headquarters back on Earth in real time. In reality, messages to and from our interplanetary probes take hours to cross the cosmos. That's because they rely on RF technology. A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research Laboratory for Electronics, though, may have a solution—optical technology. The team has developed an ultrasensitive light detector that could be used to...
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Richard Gawel
[TechView: The Industry] LCD Backlights, Light Sources For Microdisplays Drive Market Growth For Solid-State Lighting
In the neverending quest to improve display technology, no component is left untouched. Light sources for non-emissive displays are significantly shifting away from lamp-based technology and toward newer, solid-state options like LEDs, organic LEDs (OLEDs), and lasers. Such developments are finding use as backlights for LCDs and as light sources for microdisplay-based projectors. Solid-state technologies improve displays by increasing the color gamut, reducing the number of...
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Kimberly Allen
[TechView: Analog & Power] Digital Isolators Turn To RF
For a long time, there was little activity in the universe of nonoptical digital isolators. But the past two months have seen three developments (See ED Online 11998 and 12231 at www.electronicdesign.com). The most recent is a 2500-V digitalisolator family that probably represents the shortest-range sub-light RF-transmission path in history. In fact, Silicon Laboratories' Si844x is quite similar to an optocoupler, except 2.1-GHz transceiver pairs replace the optical...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Analog & Power] Low-Power, 12-Bit, 250-Msample/s ADC Offers 1.2-GHz Analog Input Bandwidth
Linear Technology has pushed sampling rates for its 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) family for high-IF applications to 250 Msamples/s while holding the chip's power consumption to a modest 740 mW at 2.5 V. Analog input bandwidth for the LTC2242-12 is 1.2 GHz. By running the part at 2.5 V, it can be driven with either a full 2-V or a 1-V p-p signal (see the figure). Yet even with 2.5 V running the analog side, the...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Embedded] 32-Bit ARM MCU Hits One-Dollar Mark
Luminary Micro has aimed its guns at the low-cost embedded microcontroller market, but it's using a 32-bit firearm to tackle jobs normally handled by its 8- or 16-bit cousins. Two of the biggest problems that 32-bit MCUs have to overcome are cost and power. The LM3S10x hits both with pricing that starts at $1 and power requirements that match its cousins. The basis for the LM3S10x is ARM's Cortex-M3, which is designed for lowpower operations. It runs the 16-bit Thumb-2 ARM...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Infiniband Hits 10M Messages/s
Message bandwidth requirements grow more quickly than the number of processors. So, fast mesh interconnects like InfiniBand are needed with large clusters of multicore processors. Pathscale's 10X-MR meets those challenges, linking InfiniBand with PCI Express. The key to its success is a high message rate with low host overhead without the need for sophisticated protocol engines like those found in high-end Ethernet solutions. The $795 10X-MR PCI Express adapter implements a...
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William Wong
[TechView: Embedded] Embedded News
Light IPC Links Disparate Hosts Enea's Linx interprocess communication (IPC) software supports a range of operating systems, including Linux. Linx is based on the IPC embedded in Enea's OSE real-time operating system. Its robust, message-passing system supports processors from DSPs through 64-bit processors and underlying protocols from shared memory to Ethernet. Communication is transparent to all underlying hardware and software. It supports redundant...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] HyperTransport 3.0: The Third Time's The Charm
HyperTransport's third time around adds more robust performance and features to an already successful run. The new standard not only extends HyperTransport's range and throughput, it also moves it into high-reliability environments that require features such as hot-swapping and power management. Not surprisingly, HyperTranport 3.0 raises the link speed with a top end of 2.6 GHz. It remains backward-compatible with the 1.0 and 2.0 standard devices. Version 2.0 introduced...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] Silicon-On-Insulator Process Keeps Cool At 3.5 W
The C7-M ULV processor from VIA Technologies comes in a range of configurations, from the low-power, 3.5-W, 1-GHz Model 779 to the 1.5-GHz Model 775, which tops out at a rather cool 7.5 W (see the figure). The C7-M's silicon-on-insulator technology cuts power requirements by 20% while increasing performance by 15%. VIA's TwinTurbo technology lets the processor quickly switch from low power to fullspeed mode. The die size is only...
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William Wong
[TechView: Digital] New Products
FPGA Development Software Keeps Connections Correct Xilinx's Platform Studio 8.1i adds a host of new features, including a system assembly panel that uses color-coded graphical connectivity views to aid the editing of bus connections. Its system block-diagram viewer lets developers visualize the entire system hierarchy. The Platform Studio includes the Embedded Development Kit (EDK) and the Integrated Software Environment (ISE) 8.1i. The EDK costs $495....
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William Wong
[TechView: EDA] Distributed Processing Cuts PC-Board Autorouting Times
Rather than having to plan your autorouting runs for large pc boards so they can run overnight or over a long holiday weekend, wouldn't it be better to break up the job and run it on a CPU farm or on other networked computer resources? Designers know all too well that automatic routing, or autorouting, is a big bottleneck. Autorouting iterations on large boards can take days to complete. It's a process that's been screaming for relief. Now, Mentor Graphics has brought...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] Standard Cell-Optimization Tools, Originally For IDMs, Now Seek To Penetrate Fabless Market
At its introduction almost three years ago, Zenasis Technologies' ZenTime was marketed as a standard cell-optimization tool largely for integrated device manufacturers (IDMs). But Zenasis has broadened its horizons and business model by breaking ZenTime out into an expanded product line that specifically addresses optimizations for leakage power, timing, and area—all concerns for fabless shops. Zenasis has now adopted a platform-and-plug-in-module approach as opposed to a...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] Efficient Digital RF Power Amp Slashes Basestation Power, Size, And Cost
Blame it on RF power amplifiers. Large and costly, they comprise roughly 40% of a basestation's cost. And since these amplifiers must transmit wide bandwidth signals of various modulation types, linearity is critical. But linear amplifiers (usually class AB) are very inefficient, leading to considerable power consumption and high heat output. Furthermore, required linearization techniques like feedforward and predistortion are costly and power-hungry, and they add to the...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] UHF Transceiver Extends Range For Telemetry And Other Wireless Applications
If your wireless applications don't require the sophisticated networking capability of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or ZigBee, you can always use transceivers for the unlicensed UHF industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) bands, including 315, 433, and 902-928 MHz. For simple sensor monitoring and other minimal telemetry and monitor and control operations, the ISM band transceivers provide a simple and inexpensive way to implement a wireless link. No special protocol is needed in these...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Wireless] 2.4-GHz Power Amp Consumes Least Power
More and more portable devices are incorporating Wi-Fi. You'll find it in digital cameras, personal digital assistants, and industrial wireless devices as well as in laptops. Power amplifiers for these applications must be able to meet the standard's extreme power output specifications, but they also should go easy on the power consumption. Avago Technologies' MGA-412P8 highoutput linear power amplifier primarily targets the 802.11b/g wireless local-area network market. Yet it...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Component View] Compact Socket Accepts 0.50-mm Pitch BGAs
An innovation in fine-pitch socket technology makes possible a ball-grid array (BGA) socket adapter system with a 0.50-mm pitch. This hybrid design uses male and female pins in an interstitial pattern that offers the reliability of screw-machined terminals with multifinger contacts in a compact surface-mount technology (SMT) socket. One benefit is the adapter's small overall size—it's only 2.00 mm larger than the device package, with no external hold-downs required. This...
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Lisa Maliniak
