[Engineering Feature] Active Auto Safety Markets Shine Beyond 2009
Safety sells. That statement seems to sum up the general feeling among automotive-components makers and market analysts. Auto-component makers see a consistently upward track for active safety productsâ??devices, systems, and assemblies that aid in crash prevention. And in a November 2006 Texas Instruments white paper titled â??Transforming Performance Safety in Automotive Applications,â?? analysts forecast that active safety and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) will...
—
Mat Dirjish
[Technology Report] IC Packages Feel The Squeeze
How much can one package take? As consumer electronics design features scale down to 45-nm and even 32-nm nodes, IC makers are pushed to the limits to shoehorn more functionality into these packages- and lest we not forget the even thornier interconnection issues. The logical approach is packaging in the Z direction, or 3D IC packaging. In the meantime, IC makers try to satisfy consumer demands with advanced methods for tried-and-true wire-bonding...
—
Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] 64-Core Chip Spins SMP Design To Higher Performance Levels
Typical general-purpose symmetrical multiple-processor (SMP) multicore designs contain about eight cores. Specialized architectures, on the other hand, push the number of cores into the hundreds. Tilera ups the ante for SMP with its 64- core/tile Tile64 chip (see the figure). Its iMesh interconnect incorporates five different packet networks with five switches per tile (see the table)....
—
William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Go Green With 100-W And Higher Audio Power Amplifiers
We know Class D audio amplification offers advantages in efficiency and size for battery-powered devices. What you may not know, however, is that these advantages can now extend to amplifiers up to 500 W thanks to solid-state driver ICs designed specifically for Class D. Systems based on these new ICs outperform Class AB when it comes to THD+N measurements and simplify the designer's job by accepting ground-based analog audio inputs. Other attractive features include overcurrent...
—
Alex Mihalka
[Ideas For Design] Constant-Current Source Creates Slope-Compensation Ramp In SMPS
A switched-mode power supply (SMPS) employing peak current-mode control (PCMC) requires a ramp signal to slope-compensate the inner (current) control loop. Slope compensation stabilizes the current loop, which would otherwise exhibit subharmonic oscillation when operating in continuous conduction mode with a duty factor near or above 50%. Also, the current that should be controlled is the average value of inductor current, which is directly related to load ...
—
Claude Abraham
[POV: Point Of View] With PV Technology, Spread Electronic Mayo On Your Roof
Today's PV market is a tremendous success story, with compound annual growth of more than 30% over the last 10 years, sales climbing to tens of billions of dollars, and the prospect of further growth fueled by a developing perfect storm of market forces - as long as the industry continues to achieve lower costs for solar-generated electricity. PV now uses as much or more of the silicon feedstock supply as other electronic devices, contributing to the runup of...
—
John Langdon
[Editorial] January’s Smartphone Stars Don’t Seem So Smart Today
The recent releases of the Motorola Q9 and Q9m smartphones got me thinking about last January's Consumer Electronics Show. Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, proclaimed in his keynote that users no longer needed to lug around a notebook computer. Instead, Motorola's Q could serve as a suitable replacement - and fit into a shirt pocket, too. He also noted that the Q's multimedia capabilities could be used for music, photos, and videos. The Q wasn't the only hot smartphone at the...
—
Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Safety Margin Stuff, Anyhow?
Sometimes it's easy to tell if you have a safety margin. With a voltage regulator, or any linear amplifier, if it was oscillating, you could add a fix - often, a simple series R-C network from the input or output to ground. Good. But is it good enough? To be safe, you should put in a square wave of voltage (or pull out a square wave of current through a little R-C network) and make sure that there isn't any bad ringing. Now, to be quite sure, you would have to...
—
Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] For Multicore Graphics Programming Support, Try LabVIEW 8.5
The best just keep getting better. Version 8.5 of National Instruments' Lab- VIEW graphical programming environment brings a lot to the design table, like enhanced multicore support including integration with FPGAs. Among its impressive improvements, NI has spruced up LabVIEW's multicore support. LabVIEW has supported multithreading for years, but the plethora of multicore platforms makes it more important for developers to be able to...
—
William Wong
[TechView: Analog & Power] Silver-Zinc Laptop Batteries Gain Traction At IDF
Don't write off lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries just yet, but their competition is gaining ground. Formerly known as Zinc Matrix Power Inc., ZPower appeared at last month's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco to discuss an early, unnamed adopter of its technology as well as reveal more about its plans to get around the high cost of silver. It all hinges on a plan to get companies that recover silver from used X-ray film to start...
—
Don Tuite
[TechView: Test] SAS And SATA Protocol Analyzer Targets Portable And Field Testing
The increased adoption of the fast Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces has brought about a need for improved and faster testing. Catalyst Semiconductor's portable STX-131 is ideal for field engineers and service technicians who need to test and troubleshoot these interfaces on the go. The STX-131 interfaces with laptops and PCs via a standard USB port (see the figure). Cables connect it to the SAS or SATA bus for data...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: Test] Wireless LAN Analyzer Identifies And Classifies All 802.11n Traffic
Wi-Fi hotspots and access points are everywhere, and their number is still increasing. Most new and replacement hotspots will incorporate the IEEE's new 802.11n wireless local-area network (WLAN) standard, which incorporates multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas and other new technologies to boost the wireless data rate to more than 100 Mbits/s. The new equipment is based on the pre-n draft 2.0 version of the standard, which isn't expected to be ratified...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
[TechView: EDA] Model Library Supports Virtual Platforms
Not all aspects of electronic-system-level (ESL) design have proved as worthy as others. Yet the virtual platform has seen some of the broadest adoption among ESL technologies. These fully functional software models of complete systems have been in use for several years for the acceleration of system development and hardware/software co-verification. Since its May 2006 acquisition of Virtio, Synopsys has worked to transform that company's virtual-platform offerings from...
—
David Maliniak
[TechView: EDA] FPGA Synthesis Adroitly Handles Late Incremental Design Changes
FPGA synthesis comes with pitfalls that are becoming more of a liability as the devices themselves grow in complexity. Timing closure can take multiple synthesis iterations. Also, design iterations are getting longer. Last-minute design changes mean a full place-and-route run, requiring hours for a large FPGA. And, it's difficult to control and analyze how logic is mapped to device-specific blocks. Mentor Graphics' Precision RTL Plus tool takes these issues...
—
David Maliniak
[Embedded in Electronic Design] What Can We Say About DLNA?
Home multimedia devices will start sporting the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) logo this year, and the number of products adopting this standard will likely increase. Most vendors of multimedia hardware are members of DLNA and have access to its standards. The cost of joining is minimal, and it's a requirement for getting devices DLNA-logo certified. Meanwhile, we can provide a little insight into the structure and operation of DLNA devices...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Clean Cabling Versus Home High Def
I usually like standards. They can crop up in standards organizations and committees and make it easier to plug things together. Then, de facto standards can grow organically - and get pushed by companies with big bucks. Unfortunately, such pushing often results in standards that don't necessarily provide interoperability. Likewise, there can be issues as to whether a standard is open or closed. Closed standards tend to limit the field, often allowing vendors to maintain...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Flash Drive Hops Onto Header
Silicon Systems' SiliconDrive USB 10-pin Module plugs into the 10-pin USB 2.0 header found on most motherboards, thereby providing a rugged, solid-state bootable device. It's available in versions up to 4 Gbytes and incorporates Silicon System's PowerArmor and SiSmart technology (see "Solving The Wear And Tear Of Flash Memory" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 12120). Pricing starts at $199. Silicon...
—
William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Celeron-Based Panel Pitches Fan
The fanless iGO17/19 widescreen LCD panels from iGoLogic house a 1.5-GHz Celeron processor, 512 Mbytes of double-data-rate(DDR) RAM, 802.11b/g wireless local-area network (WLAN)support, a Compact Flash socket,and a 2.5-in.,40-Gbyte hard disk. The 16.6-by 12.5- by 3.3-in. case has VESA mountings.The motherboard includes five serial ports, two Fast Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse interfaces, and AC'97 audio support. The Integrated Intel 852GM display interface...
—
William Wong
[Component View] Flexible Enclosure System Meets UP Type 12 Standards
Designed for use in UL Type 12 industrial environments, the CC3000 Operator Interface Enclosure System from Hoffman protects humanmachine interface (HMI) devices in accessible, attractive, and customized enclosures. The CC3000's modular design offers maximum flexibility. Users can select from four standard sizes or specify exact dimensions in millimeter increments from 250 by 250 mm to 600 by 600 mm. Body depths of 120 and 200 mm are available. ...
—
Staff
[Engineering Essentials] "New" Approaches To Wireless Test
With frequencies soaring to new heights, wireless and RF testing gets pushed to the limit in terms of complexity and cost. In fact, higher frequencies in the gigahertz range are now commonplace. Simple AM and FM/PM have disappeared, replaced by the more complex digital modulation methods. Binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phaseshift keying (QPSK), and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are the norm these days. And, cell phones extensively...
—
Louis E. Frenzel
