[Engineering Feature] Top 101 Components Showcase Industry Innovation
Every week over the past five years, EEPN’s Products of the Week e-newsletter has been sent to over 70,000 subscribers. Covering notable products and technologies in the semiconductor, components and assemblies, computer board/module, and design/test sectors, this concise offering generates significant interest in each product category via direct links to the manufacturer’s datasheets or product information. The components that appear in each issue (here...
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Mat Dirjish
[Technology Report] 45th DAC Takes The SoC Methodology Plunge
At the inaugural Design Automation Conference in 1964, then known as the SHARE Design Automation Workshop, the fledgling design-automation industry batted around some of the fundamentals of its mission to engineers. Papers carried titles such as “A method for best geometric placement of units on a plane,” and “New horizons in graphic output on the IBM 1403 printer.” Some of that year’s program hinted at yet unformed methodologies. Now, as the EDA...
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David Maliniak
[Leapfrog: First Look] Sensor Detects Light And Proximity For Unique Mobile Applications
Suppose you were designing a digital camera, and you wanted to extend its battery life by turning off its big power-hungry display screen whenever its users have their eye up to the optical viewfinder. Or suppose you were designing a notebook and you wanted a feature that would turn the keyboard backlight on only when the user’s hands were near the keyboard. Or suppose you were designing a touchscreen phone and you wanted to deactivate the on-screen buttons when...
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Don Tuite
[Design View / Design Solution] Build A Real-Time Flash GUI For Embedded Network Devices
A critical concern for any embedded device is the user interface. Embedded network devices hold a tremendous advantage for creating an intuitive user interface by using a Web browser. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by using an embedded Web server on the embedded device and creating Web pages written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is very easy to understand and implement for static Web pages, but it’s a very poor option for rapidly changing ...
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Chris Uribe
[Ideas For Design] New Way To Use Kirchhoff's Current Law Simplifies Circuit Analysis
The well-known Kirchhoff’s current law is often used in linear circuit analysis. It’s also called Kirchhoff ’s first law, Kirchhoff ’s point rule, Kirchhoff ’s junction rule, and Kirchhoff ’s first rule. The law says that at any point in an electric circuit, the sum of currents flowing toward the point is equal to the sum of currents flowing away from the point. That is, the net current flow into the point is always zero. This article describes a new way of using...
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Anshi Chen
[Ideas For Design] Use PWM To Maintain Motor Speed And Phase While Eliminating Loop Filter
In designing a simple spectroscopy setup, we needed to synchronize the speed of a small, inexpensive dc motor precisely to 6000 rpm (100 Hz). Our first idea was to take a phase-frequency detector type of phase-locked loop (PLL), the CMOS 4046, to maintain not only the speed, but also the phase to the reference signal. 1 In the classical approach, the motor’s speed is modeled as a firstorder time delay over time. Some math is done to obtain a good ...
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Richard Heming
[Ideas For Design] Simple Circuit Uses FET To Protect Car's Video Driver From Overvoltage
In a typical automotive video application, the video digital-to-analog converter (DAC)—from a rear camera or DVD player, for example—is followed by a low-pass reconstruction filter and an amplifier that transmits a video signal to the LCD. This amplifier, and all such similar automotive circuits, must be protected from direct connection to the car’s battery voltage. Since these voltages range from 12 to 16 V, the minimum protection required is 16...
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Ron Koo
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[Editorial] Speaking Of Components, Here's An LED Story
The question seemed innocent enough. What type of bulbs do I need for those lanterns? The lanterns in question were a set of five solar-powered models that my wife Lorraine purchased at Costco about a year ago for $89. This wasn’t her first request for that information, but I admit I don’t always pay attention to requests like these. For some reason, this time I listened. So I’m going over the possibilities in my head, trying to remember what the...
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Joseph Desposito
[POV: Point Of View] Improve The QoS In Your Ethernet Control Systems
The use of Ethernet in industrial control applications is growing at an estimated 50% compound annual growth rate. Leading companies such as Cisco, Rockwell Automation, and Schneider Electric are promoting the use of standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet as the basis for industrial Ethernet. As a result, the non-deterministic aspect of Ethernet must be addressed in time-critical control systems. Standard IEEE-1588 time synchronization can compensate for some of the...
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Keith Prettyjohns
[Pease Porridge] Bob's Mailbox
HI BOB, Any big trips to exotic spots planed this year? We’re headed for Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island for a change of pace. (I may go to Scotland in September. /rap) My question: Do you have some circuitry I could use for an electronic bagpipe simulator? It would need nine notes selected by removing fingers from some form of contact that would reasonably simulate a finger hole. I don’t need too many...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Digital] Dive Into New Markets With Platform FPGA
The “F” in FPGA could easily stand for flexible, rather than field. In fact, the flexibility that today’s FPGAs provide is far more important than the ability to program a device while in the field, at least for most designers. And since Xilinx leads the industry where flexibility is concerned, it seems only natural that its latest offering, the Virtex-5 FXT, provides a nice platform to build your next system or device family around. With flexibility in...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] DDR2 Memory Serves Up An Ace
In the interest of all things “green” and with server energy consumption ever increasing, there is a great desire to lower power consumption where possible, especially as energy costs continue to soar. Noting these trends, Samsung Semiconductor’s latest DDR2 memory dual-inline memory module (DIMM) enables servers to score an ace in the low-power department. These fully buffered modules offer between 1 Gbyte and 8 Gbytes of capacity and provide up to 50% power...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Digital] TSMC Announces First 40-nm Process
Earlier this spring, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) revealed its 40-nm semiconductor process technology. Its portfolio includes embedded DRAM, mixed-signal, RF, and multi-project wafer (MPW) prototyping. The process improves gate density by a factor of 2.35 over 65 nm. It also reduces active power usage up to 15% over 45 nm and provides the smallest SRAM cell size and macro size in the industry, according to the company. The process is available in...
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Daniel Harris
[TechView: Wireless] Software-Defined Transceiver Chip Handles Any Band And Protocol
Imagine handsets that can work on any network, in any country, and on any frequency with the prevailing protocol and with seamless handoffs. Such devices do exist, but they aren’t cheap. The implementation of multimode and multiband wireless devices requires multiple transceivers, increasing cost as well as power consumption and size—specs that commodities like cell phones can’t afford. Software-defined radio (SDR) offers a potential solution, but it also is...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Design FAQs] Variable Gain Amplifiers Sponsored by: ANALOG DEVICES
Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Analog What are VGAs? Variable gain amplifiers (VGAs) are signal-conditioning amplifiers with electronically settable voltage gain. There are analog VGAs and digital VGAs, or DVGAs. An analog voltage controls the gain in both, which differ in how it is applied. A digital-to-analog converter ...
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Don Tuite
[Engineering Essentials] Temperature Sensors Are Hot... In Circuit Design
As IC device dimensions shrink and heat management and dissipation become tougher-than-ever challenges, one simply cannot overestimate the importance of sensing IC temperature. In particular, temperature sensing has become ubiquitous, playing key roles in process-control, environmental, test-and-measurement, and communications applications. In addition, its use in electronic circuit design continues to expand throughout large-volume automotive, medical, and consumer...
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Roger Allan
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Tiny Sensor Detects Dangerous Gases Quickly And Efficiently
Under the leadership of Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a team of engineers is developing a very small gas sensor that they predict will be able to detect very tiny amounts of hazardous gases faster than currently available gas sensors. It also will be able to detect toxic industrial chemicals and chemical-warfare agents. In addition to being...
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Mat Dirjish
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Measuring Large Flows With Small Sensors Improves Accuracy
Flow sensors are critical components in a variety of medical applications, from monitoring the output of gas delivery systems to ensure accurate flow rates to monitoring a patient’s breathing. Ventilators, anesthesia delivery, oxygen concentrators, spirometers, insufflators, sleep apnea diagnostic and treatment equipment, pulmonary-function test equipment, and other critical devices all require flow measurement. Some of the flow-sensing technology available...
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Donna Sandfox
[EEPN In Electronic Design] Design For Electromagnetic Compliance In Ethernet Systems
With many appliances transitioning to Internet Protocol (IP) networks, the Ethernet interface finds itself in these products for the first time. This makes electromagnetic compliance (EMC) a challenge. Ethernet’s unshielded twisted pair (UTP) data-transmission cable acts as an antenna. Common-mode noise that leaks to it will show up as conducted or radiated emissions, creating unique electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues. Another requirement is...
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Amit Gattani
[Lab Bench] Know Your Limitations Before Designing Your Next Robot
Nuance was the name of the game at last month’s Robo- Business show in Pittsburgh. This year, the aisles were populated not just by people and remote-control robots but also by a few autonomous robots— and some of these robots weren’t research projects but platforms that were for sale. During one of the last tech sessions of the show, CCS Robotics chief technical officer Anthony Diodato described the company’s SpeciMinder robots and how they have...
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William Wong
