[Engineering Feature] New “GIG” Becomes More Of A Reality
The Global Information Grid (GIG), an open-yet-secure mega-Internet in which all soldiers may have their own IPv6 address, is moving from the concept phase and into the hardware/software development phase (see the figure). In a sense, it's ironic that the defense and intelligence...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] MEMS On The Move: Motion Sensors For The Masses
The MEMS motion sensor is no longer the bastion of just the automotive and industrial markets. Thanks to the maturation of design and manufacturing methods, these accelerators and gyroscopes are meeting the price points for mass-market requirements. As a result, they've extended their reach into many consumer, computer, well-being, well-care, and security applications. For instance, low-cost, small-form-factor, multi-axis MEMS sensors are being used in high-volume...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] Software Probes Monitor And Repair Applications
A program that never needs changing or fixing is a rare one. That's why debugging, monitoring, and patching tools are in every programmer's toolbox. While some of these tools are akin to rope and stone knives, more advanced development environments provide dynamic insight into applications. This is where Wind River's SensorPoint technology fits. SensorPoints are part of Wind River's Lab Diagnostics and Device Management programs, which address the entire development and...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Rise Of Multiprocessing/Multithreading Sharpens Focus On Interrupts
Potentially substantial performance gains from the use of multithreading and multiprocessing architectures have captured the attention of designers of consumer devices and other electronic products. Multithreading uses cycles when the processor would otherwise sit idle to process instructions from other threads. Multiprocessing, on the other hand, introduces additional independent processing elements in order to execute threads or applications concurrently. Embedded applications running...
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William E. Lamie
[Ideas For Design] High-Speed Full-Wave Rectifier Requires No Diodes, Few Parts
Systems requiring power conversion and level detection employ full-wave rectification, traditionally provided by a diode bridge. But diode bridges consume a significant amount of board space and reduce signal amplitude. An alternative solution involves using separate amplification for the positive and negative half-cycles and a comparator to switch between them. This solution typically requires numerous ICs and can suffer from delay mismatch between the two...
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Tamara Papalias
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[Ideas For Design] Use Current-Mirror Biasing To Avoid Squegging In RF Oscillators
If you've ever designed an RF oscillator, you've probably encountered squegging. Sometimes called "motor boating," squegging causes oscillators to start and stop at frequencies much lower than the frequency of interest. Viewed on an oscilloscope, squegging looks like bursts of oscillations. On a spectrum analyzer, it looks like a Christmas tree. In some designs, such as super-regenerative receivers or wildlife radio tags, this might be a desirable side effect. In most cases,...
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Madhu Siddalingaiah
[POV: Point Of View] Yes, You Can Easily Shift From 8-Bit To 32-Bit MCUs
Designers and programmers face several obstacles when an 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) no longer meets the performance needs of their application and a change in architecture is required. At the top of the list of problems are power consumption, pin compatibility, tools migration, and additional programming complexity. Today, system designers run into the limits of 8-bit MCUs much more frequently as applications expand and customers demand more features. "Historically, this...
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Jeff Bock
[Editorial] Following Engineering Passions Earns Admission To The Lunatic Fringe
At a Texas Instruments media and analyst event last month, I found myself sitting in a suburban Dallas movie theater wearing 3D glasses and eating tortillas with TI's Principal Fellow Gene Frantz, the "father of the DSP." As you may recall, the first DSP was inside TI's 1970s educational toy, the Speak & Spell. Frantz says that the Speak & Spell originated as an "under the table" project, getting the official go-ahead at TI only after Frantz and his peers had worked...
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Mark David
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
Hi Bob: Just read Bob's Mailbox from the April 12 issue with great interest—in particular, the letter from Terry Hosking about audio capacitors and your reply. It seems to me that the audio field above all others is one beset by pseudoscience and pure wooly thinking. (I tend to agree. /rap) As someone who earns his living as an electronics engineer, but also was a...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] OLED TVs Get Ready To Hit The Japanese Market
Major players in the electronics market have long been exploring ways to turn organic LED (OLED) displays into a potential successor to LCD screens for TVs. Last month, Sony became the first company to announce plans to start selling the ultrathin TVs in Japan within the year. The company's 11- and 27-in. OLED TV displays were a hit at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and at a recent display forum in Tokyo, where participants were drawn to the 3-mm thick...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Arc-Detecting Circuit Breakers Will See Wider Use
The 2008 National Electrical Code (NEC) will require arc-fault circuit interrupters (AFCIs) throughout new homes in the U.S. So, your new construction should now incorporate ground-fault circuit interrupters (GFCIs) that trip on an unbalance between line and neutral, basic circuit breakers that trip on gross faults, and AFCIs that trip on arcs. AFCIs are "don't burn the house down" protection, as opposed to the "don't electrocute yourself" protection provided by GFCIs. They...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Digital] FPGAs Boot In A Flash
According to Lattice Semiconductor, the company's LatticeXP2 family represents the industry's first line of single-die, 90-nm, nonvolatile FPGAs. Based on the previous generation, these devices offer up to 40k lookup tables, up to 885k of embedded dual-port memory, up to 12 DSP blocks, and up to four phase-locked loops (PLLs). The 1.2-V devices also boost performance by 25% and use up to 33% less static power compared to their predecessors in a package as small as 8 by 8 mm....
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] Small Mixed-Signal Memory Chip Packs A Large Punch
Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim brings the memory shopping mall to you. With a 2-kbit (256 by 8) EEPROM, 12 user-programmable I/O channels, a real-time clock/calendar/alarm, CPU reset monitor, 64-bit factory-programmed ROM ID, battery monitor, and watchdog timer, the DS28DG02 (see figure) offers...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Test] Instrumentation 2.0: How Software-Defined Instrumentation Is Changing T&M
Coined by National Instruments, Instrumentation 2.0 refers to a software-based approach to instrumentation that lets users create their own end measurement outcomes from raw measurement data. Instrumentation 2.0 is virtual instrumentation (VI), where the instrument is a PC with software that defines the measurement capability. It's flexible, and in many ways, it's a better fit to the world of electronics test today than previous T&M methods. Instrumentation 1.0 is what...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Productivity Gains Eliminate Verification Bottlenecks
It's now the rule rather than the exception: Logic designers must accept responsibility for verification. But time is short, so it behooves EDA vendors to enhance verification productivity. In the latest improvements to its Logic Design Team (LDT) portfolio of verification tools, Cadence addresses three key bottlenecks that hamper productivity (...
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David Maliniak
[Component View] Flex Circuits Offer High-Density Capability
Stratos Optical Technologies now offers increased packaging density as a custom manufacturing option for its optical flex circuit products (see figure). The new optical flex circuit design is called the Shuffle because fiber channels can criss-cross each other for optimum routing paths. The...
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John Novellino
[Design FAQs] Fingerprint Authentication
Sponsored by Fujitsu How does fingerprint sensor (authentication) technology work? Fingerprint authentication is one of many biometric forms of human identification. A fingerprint sensor captures a digital image of a fingerprint pattern, normally at 500dpi (dots per inch) resolution in gray-scale using 8 bits per dot. First, one fingerprint image (or more) is registered on the device used...
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Daniel Harris
[Engineering Essentials] Put High-Speed Communications To The Test
Need speed? These days, what designer doesn't? It seems that your job primarily revolves around making everything go faster. Of course, faster often equates to increasing difficulty and complexity. The impact of this craze has probably affected the area of data-transmission standards as much as anything else, as both existing and new standards grapple with the thirst for more speed. THE SERIAL-DATA REVOLUTION While...
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Louis E. Frenzel
