[Engineering Feature] Portable Media Keeps Playing And Playing And...
Portable media players, like the Apple iPod and its competitors, have been around for many years, so you might think no further improvements are possible. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Somehow, the companies that develop audio chips for these devices continue to come up with innovative ways to improve their offerings. The benefit to consumers is a more enjoyable listening experience for longer periods of time. A slew of new audio chips promising...
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Joseph Desposito
[Technology Report] Invisible Links Revolutionize Industrial Communications
Most networks are wired systems based on dozens of proprietary protocols and, more recently, on Ethernet. In an industrial environment, whether itâ??s manufacturing, process control, transportation, or building automation, these networks are used for monitoring and control in both open-loop and closed-loop control systems. Sensors monitor the physical states of the process. Control signals initiate or control the various parameters of the system. In most...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] Power Over Ethernet-Plus PSE And PD Chips With Real Two-Event Classification Play Nicely Together
Last month, MicroSemi and Akros Silicon demonstrated the first compatibility between ICs for IEEE 802.11at Power over Ethernet Plus/HiPOE power source equipment (PSE) and powered devices (PDs). The PSE chip was MicroSemiâ??s PD64001, and the PD chip was Akros Siliconâ??s AS1135. Conducted by MicroSemi, the test predates the actual release of the final 802.11at standard. But the draft standard was released last fall, and an approved version is expected...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Mixed-Signal Processors Can Aid Visual Robotic Development
A recent project for one of the exhibitors at the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo 2007, held last October in San Jose, Calif., required our company to quickly develop a motion-control system for a tracked robot. This isn’t complicated by any means, using many development tools currently available. In this case, though, the design was implemented using a visual design tool that required no manual coding at all. The goal was simple, and only three...
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Oliver H. Bailey
[Ideas For Design] Fast Load Transient Tester Circuit Features Adjustable Slew Rate
Performance under transient loads has become the most important specification of voltage regulators used to power a wide array of products whose current demands vary quickly during operation. Testing transient performance requires a load that can be programmed to change at different rates. Expensive electronic loads are available, but I found none that could supply a load that changes faster than 0.4 A/µs, which is too slow to...
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Chester Simpson
[Ideas For Design] Unconventional Use Of An Output Driver Protects Current Monitor
One of our products uses a standard 1/10-W surface-mount resistor with a high-side current monitor to detect small load changes at the product’s output. Since this circuit is part of the device’s output, it’s vulnerable to field wiring mishaps. If the field installation results in a shorted output, the resistor, which can’t dissipate much power, will be destroyed. Protecting the resistor with a PTC (positive temperature coefficient) device is...
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Bob Urman
[Editorial] Who's Winning The Computer Virus War? Probably Not Us
Back in December, I decided to uninstall the anti-virus software on my desktop computer at home. The computer was taking several minutes to boot up, and when it was finally ready to go, everything ran slowly. Whenever I opened up an Excel file, I had to wait five or six seconds while the anti-virus program frisked it. And then there were the endless popups reminding me to perform hard-disk scans and update the software until I finally got sick of it...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This AMT Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 2)
I’ve often heard that if you’re going to owe the Alternative Minimum Tax, there’s nothing you can do about it. And that makes me scream! Most of these officious statements say you can postpone some income and defer the AMT, but you’ll just pay them next year. “There’s nothing you can do to avoid the AMT.” It’s a lie! I was absent-mindedly reading some of the boilerplate on some of my other investments. “You might like to buy some AMT-free bonds,” Dreyfus...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Digital] SERDES IP Releases Tackle Top Speeds
Untitled Document High-speed design and serial buses used for chip-to-chip communications seem to go hand in hand nowadays. Whether youâ??re talking signal integrity, printed-circuit board (PCB) routability,...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: EDA] Low-Power Methodology Guide Goes Online
Capturing thousands of hours of real-world design experience, a downloadable handbook is available to guide designers in applying the Common Power Format (CPF). The guide draws from the formatâ??s usage by many of the 26 members of the Power Forward Initiative to offer detailed examples of optimized lowpower design using CPF, one of two competing low-power design intent formats (see â??Power-Intent Standards Vie For Designersâ?? Loyalties,â?? Feb. 14, 2008, p. 45, ED...
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David Maliniak
[TechView: Wireless] SiP Module Bridges Gap Between RF And Digital In Wireless Receivers
Modern wireless system design is usually a team effort, with RF engineers working on the front end and the baseband guys working on the digital back end. The trouble in receiver design, though, is at the interface where the downconverted signal at some IF must then be digitized and sent to the baseband section. This is a tricky area that neither the RF nor baseband engineers are generally prepared to attack. A mixed-signal expert is usually needed to build...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Embedded SQL Adds Tools
Encirq’s DeviceSQL 4.0 adds a number of features, including the SQL Probe Tool and the Remote DB Query Tool. Compression adapters can reduce storage requirements by 50%, while new MPHash Lite and MPAVL indexing options can increase system performance. Iterative search support makes in-memory operation more efficient. Encryption support can be applied to data and indices. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] 8-Bit LIN Micro Targets Control Applications
Freescale’s S08SG16/32 MCU is based on a 40-MHz HCS08 core with up to 32 kbytes of flash memory and 1 kbyte of RAM. It incorporates a local interconnect network (LIN) slave interface as well as SCI, SPI, and I2C with broadcast mode. The analog side has a 16-channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a built-in temperature sensor and an analog comparator that can run in power-down mode. It supports 2.7- to 5.5-V operation from –40°C to 125°C....
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] DisplayPort Receiver Simplifies Interface
IDT’s PanelPort receivers simplify DisplayPort interfacing while lowering system costs. DisplayPort uses up to four high-speed serial pairs with a capacity up to 10.8 Gbits/s, including audio and a 1-Mbit/s auxiliary channel. The VPP1600EMG DisplayPort V1.1-compliant receiver has an adaptive equalizer for a direct-drive monitor. It also supports digital brightness and contrast control. Furthermore, it incorporates a mini-LVDS (low-voltage differential ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ARMing OMAP
ARM’s RealView Development Suite 3.1 now supports Texas Instruments' DaVinci technology and the OMAP platforms, including the DaVinci TMS- 320DM355 digital media processor and OMAP35x processors. The Eclipsebased RealView support automatically configures the RealView development tools for specific TI processors. The RealView CoreSight debugger provides full visibility of on-chip peripherals. This release also adds processor-specific project templates for...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] It's Called Simulation
The term virtual prototyping has a nice ring. But it confuses the issue when it’s mixed with virtual machines and virtual memory. All three present a warped sense of reality. Of course, the term simulation also cuts a wide swath. Still, simulation is probably a better definition of today’s discussion on processor simulation. The degree of detail associated with processor simulation can vary significantly. Most designers are familiar with ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Hypervisor Tips CAP
Trango Virtual Processors now supports Atmel’s CAP architecture, blending ARM-based cores with FPGA-style custom logic for production-time configuration. Trango’s Hypervisor runs operating systems in multiple secure virtual machines. It handles real-time operating systems in addition to rich operating environments such as Linux. Trango supplies Eclipse plugins that integrate the runtime platform with the Eclipse IDE. The Hypervisor runs on Atmel’s Starter and...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tool Simulates Multidomains
The Matlab/Simulink environment from the MathWorks gained additional multidomain support with SimScape, which allows designers to specify the physical nature of a system instead of the underlying mathematical equations that define the system. By doing so, Simulink can integrate the physical model into the designer’s domain. Further, SimScape converts models into C code using Matlab’s Real-Time Workshop so the simulation can run models in real time, allowing...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Enable Your Grid Computing
MapleSoft’s Grid Computing Toolbox enables distributed computing using Maple, a WYSIWYG math environment for solving complex mathematical problems and creating rich technical documents. With Toolbox, developers can take advantage of networks of processing nodes that can handle large parallel-processing chores faster. Maple and the Grid Computing Toolbox are integrated with MatLab and Simulink from the Mathworks as well as National Instruments’ LabVIEW. A grid...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Full-Scale Simulation Means Analog And I/O
A simulation that’s an exact copy of a physical device would be ideal. Barring that, developers can choose from a range of simulation techniques that can replicate a device, allowing details such as timing and physical characteristics to be tracked through simulations that simply execute a program with no real interfaces. Different simulation methodologies provide insight into different aspects of a system. Tradeoffs are normally required to keep the...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Simulate Multiple Machines On Muliprocessors
Virtutech's Simics 4.0 takes simulation to the next level by running complex, multisystem simulations on multiprocessor hosts. This takes advantage of the multicore server migration. The application programming interfaces (APIs) for integrating thirdparty models is now available, including an improved version of Virtutech’s Device Modeling Language (DML) with improved C/C++ and debugging support. Other enhancements include IPv6 and hot-plug support. The...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Bridge PCI Express And Serial IO
The transition to PCI Express (PCIe) continues with Pericom’s PIC9X95x PCIe to serial port bridge chips. Available in two-, four-, and eight-port versions, pricing starts at $5.30. The high-performance 16C950-compatible ports support synchronous rates up to 62.5 Mbits/s. A serial EEPROM interface provides startup configuration parameters. The chips are available in a plastic quad-flat package (PQFP) or a ball-grid array (BGA) package. Drivers for Linux and...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] LCD Controller Takes On Rugged Environments
DigitalView's HE-1920 controls large, high-definition LCD thin-film transistor (TFT) displays in rugged industrial and military environments. It supports display resolutions up to 1920 by 1200. Also, it has a wide 25% tolerance for its supply voltage and locking connectors for DVI, VGA, and video inputs. It supports full-screen expansion, PIP, and a 16-bit ITU 605 bus, which lets developers create custom configurations. Pricing for the 179- by 120-mm board...
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William Wong
[Design FAQs] Offloading CPU Boosts Microcontroller Performance And Cuts Power Sponsored by: ATMEL
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Atmel Why should designers offload a microcontroller’s CPU? Performance and power consumption are the typical reasons for adding offload capability to a microcontroller. Traditionally, any hardware peripheral offloads the CPU. This includes devices like universal synchronous/asynchronous ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Success In Portable Video Starts With A Balanced Design
Planning to design a portable streaming-video product? Be prepared, because several design challenges stand in the way. The wide selection of hardware and software that’s available may seem like an advantage, but sorting through those choices can be daunting. Today, designers have to balance a number of factors— increased memory capacity, greater processing power, wider networking bandwidths, display type, and power-supply architecture— as...
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Roger Allan
[Lab Bench] Using Your Own Products Can Yield Some New Solutions
Flying to Dallas on my way to the Texas Instruments Developer Conference in February, I was reminded of the importance of using the products you design. This is much easier with consumer products, but hands-on experience is often the only way to see the advantages or flaws of a particular design choice. I have been using Samsung’s Q1B and iGo’s Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard for a number of months now, finding clear pros and cons along the...
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William Wong
[Power Design] You've Got High-Power Battery Questions, We've Got Answers
Historically, the nickel-cadmium (NiCd) cell has been the best solution for handheld applications with usage profiles requiring large current pulses. But new environmental regulations may have a marked effect on cells containing heavy metals such as cadmium. Meanwhile, a new variety of lithiumion (Li-ion) cells can support the high discharge currents required for many applications. Such batteries with high discharge rates represent a shift in Li-ion...
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Robin Tichy
