[Engineering Feature] Energy Efficiency Moves Up The Industry's "To-Do" List
Environmental issues continue to highlight the agendas of design strategy meetings. But it’s no longer just about “getting the lead out.” Now the focus is on optimizing energy efficiency in new chip and system designs. Increasingly, the world’s leading companies are acknowledging that power matters. As a result, companies are aggressively making a conscious effort to address tight power budgets and significantly reduce power consumption. “Things are...
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Ron Schneiderman
[Technology Report] Online Design Boosts Analog Engineer Productivity
Just about every analog IC maker provides graphical circuit design and analysis tools. Most are Web-based. Some you download to your PC. Either way, companies put them there to harvest sales leads and gain customer loyalty as you generally have to register to use them. In the most advanced cases, you can save your design on the vendor’s Web site as you iterate it. When you’re done, you can order a complete evaluation kit, with your customized bill of...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] New Synthetic Instrumentation Methods Solve Tough System-Level Test Problems
Today’s electronic components and products are evolving faster than ever, with design- to- production life cycles shrinking to just six months in most commercial applications. In addition, device content and topologies are migrating from single to multi functional components, and then to entire subsystems and systems, often as a single assembly solution (such as for smart phones and iPhone-type devices). Furthermore, d irect software control and device configuration is...
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Francesco Lupinetti
[Ideas For Design] Improve LFSR-Based Encryption With An Extra Layer Of Protection
Encryption coding schemes for asynchronous data used in message/speech communication systems typically employ an LFSR-based (linear feedback shift register) design. Such a design creates a single minimal polynomial pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) code. The state of the shift registers periodically changes according to another algorithm called the keying algorithm. To enhance security, the keying algorithm is changed periodically (say, every six months), depending on...
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Atis Mitra
[Editorial] Retooling Electronic Design For 2008
You’ll notice some changes in our first standard issue of 2008. For example, our TechView section is now one department rather than a series of individual columns from our technology editors. This will make it easier for us to provide you with more timely and compelling information. Your favorite editors will still contribute to this section, so they’re not going away. They also will have a larger role online. You can follow Don Tuite, David Maliniak, and...
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Joseph Desposito
[POV: Point Of View] Look Past The Misconceptions And Myths Surrounding Li-Polymer
Batteries based on lithium polymer (Li-polymer) have been “the next big thing” in portable power for the last 10 years. Li-polymer batteries started appearing in small consumer electronics applications, such as wireless headsets, several years ago. But these cells are finally becoming mainstream, as they are now designed into everything from laptop computers to medical monitors. Many of the initial objectives of Li-polymer researchers and designers have...
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Robin Tichy
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
DEAR EDITOR: At first I thought I picked up an April Fool issue, but no, you have Al Gore in the Tech Year in Review section honoring him for imploring engineers to turn green (Dec. 1, 2007, p. 45; ED Online 17958). What crap. Please cancel my subscription. –"RAY" Hello, Ray: There are several reasons to “turn green,” and Al Gore’s bleating about warming theories is only one of those reasons. Energy is expensive. Or haven’t you...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: The Industry] Distributed Design Teams Pose No Problem With Video Chatting
Since the rise of overseas outsourcing, video conferencing has been a popular way to do business with remote employees. Now, companies that make video chatting their primary business are making it easier for engineers to work with remote teammates. Typically aimed at casual chatters, these applications offer features like six-way video chat that could facilitate long-distance collaboration. And two companies are upping the bar for video chatting—SightSpeed...
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Kristina Fiore
[TechView: Analog & Power] Class D Audio Subsystems Stretch Apparent Distance Between Cell-Phone Speakers
Stereo systems for multiple speakers put the left and right speakers on opposite sides of the room. Personal systems use left and right ear buds or headphones to separate the sound. What can designers offer in the way of stereo on a cellular handset or other compact personal listening device that uses speakers? Maxim Integrated Products says its highly efficient MAX9775 class D audio subsystems are the answer. They enable the use of wave interference to cancel...
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Don Tuite
[TechView: Communications] Chips Help Carrier Ethernet Replace Legacy Networking Solutions
With the Brooklyn-10 and Hudson large-scale networking chips from Lightstorm Networks, designers can use carrier Ethernet to replace existing Sonet/SDH and ATM/frame-relay infrastructures. The Hudson is an operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) service accelerator or coprocessor for the Brooklyn-10 carriergrade, 20-Gbit/s layer 2 switch. Carrier Ethernet is scalable. It provides service management, quality of service, protection, and voice and circuit...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design FAQs] Digital Temperature Sensors
What common applications use temperature measurement? Temperature sensing is ubiquitous. Historically, temperature sensors have had well-known applications in environmental and process control as well as in test and measurement and communications. Contemporary applications include all those, plus high-volume consumer applications, a range of automotive applications, and medical products from MRI imagers to ...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] Software Frameworks Tackle Load Distribution
Networking and multicore chips inevitably create greater complexity, which requires solutions replete with sophisticated communication and thread management. Distributing the load is the desired result, allowing more hardware to be incorporated into a system in a coordinated fashion. The development task isn’t easy, but the use of one or more software frameworks can alleviate some of the stresses. “Software frameworks,” a wonderfully vague term, covers a lot of...
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William Wong
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Unique Touchscreen Tech Gets Ready To Enter Portable Markets
Enlisting semiconductor sultan AMI Semiconductor, Tyco Electronics’ Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR) touch technology may be appearing on a cell phone near you soon. AMI has agreed to develop a silicon solution that will allow the integration of APR touch technology from Tyco’s Elo Touch- Systems group with handheld and mobile devices. Normally associated with larger touchscreen installations in the commercial and industrial spaces, the APR technology may...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Weigh All The Costs Before Choosing Your Circuit Protection
Design engineers often give circuit protection only cursory attention. Fuses, diodes, and varistors are so well known that designers select them with little thought as to the nature of the overvoltage and overcurrent threats and the true value of circuit protection to their application. But designers should consider the costs of suboptimal device selection, many of which go far beyond protecting just the design. Circuit-protection devices fulfill two primary...
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Jim Colby
[Lab Bench] Young Engineers Need You!
Welcome to my lab bench. Hopefully, my editorial antics here and in future installments will inform and entertain as well as provoke some controversy and insight. I’ll be taking this opportunity to rant about my favorite subjects as well as technical topics that are hot—or not. And, I’ll highlight some of the technology I come across in the hands-on projects and evaluations I do for my EiED Online column. Right now, though, I want to step onto the soapbox to...
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William Wong
