[Engineering Feature] Hardware/Software Co-Design Comes Of Age
There once was a time when system design was completely serial. Entire hardware platforms were designed, prototyped, debugged, and virtually completed before any software development began. Of course, such methodologies corresponded to the days of much broader market windows. The very idea of such a quaint approach is enough to make one snicker. Today, itâ??s quite different. Those market windows have narrowed to a sliver. Hardware development typically lags...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] MEMS The Word... In Consumer Electronics
Demand for devices that can sense motion, orientation, and location is surging, and it runs the gamut from the hottest video games to critical medical technology. With accelerometers and gyroscopes based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) rapidly maturing, that demand is being met. Many of the latest consumer products include one or more MEMS IC functions that measure and control factors like movement, position, force, and even temperature. As a...
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Roger Allan
[Leapfrog: First Look] SIMT Architecture Delivers Double-Precision Teraflops
NVidia’s T10 architecture brings double-precision floating point to the company’s massively parallel computing platform. This graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture also is used in NVidia’s consumer graphics boards. Both are supported by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The Tesla S1070 1U rack-mount system incorporates four of the Tesla T10 boards, each with a single chip containing 240 cores ...
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William Wong
[Design View / Design Solution] Protect Your FPGA Against Piracy
Over the past two decades, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has transitioned from a prototyping tool to a flexible production solution in both consumer and industrial applications. With FPGA logic complexity increasing from a few thousand gates to millions of gates, the devices are able to hold more of the key functions (intellectual property) of a system. Today, designers can select FPGAs that employ various technologies to hold the configuration...
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Bernhard Linke
[Ideas For Design] Create A 250-MHz Bandwidth Digital Potentiometer For Video Level Control
A circuit used to control the level of a video signal should have a 3-dB cutoff frequency of greater than 5 MHz for a television application or 100 MHz for a monitor application. CMOS-based digital potentiometers typically cannot be used as video devices because their frequency responses barely exceed 1 MHz. For such applications, a good choice would be a variable-gain amplifier (VGA) with analog or digital gain control. VGAs are offered...
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Oleg Ayranov
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[Ideas For Design] VHDL Code Offloads LED Blinking Task To A CPLD
An earlier Idea For Design (“Hardware-Based LED Blinking Control Eliminates Software Overhead,” Sept. 27, 2007, p. 52) described a very interesting way to offload the software overhead required for a microcontroller to drive LEDs that indicate operating states to the user. That article discussed the use of memory-mapped LED control registers, buffers, and a clock source, all used to blink an LED without burdening the microcontroller code with...
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Philip Warren
[Editorial] Show Videos Take Center Stage On ElectronicDesign.com
Most of you have probably noticed the influx of videos to electronicdesign.com over the past year or so. For the most part, these videos were shot at trade shows. Typically, a staff member at the show who knows something about video cameras hooks up with an editor to do video interviews. We shoot with a handheld, harddisk- based camera. When we get back to the office, a member...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Sudoku Stuff, Anyhow?
I suspect most of you have seen these “logical” puzzles in many newspapers (not to mention little books). They consist of putting numbers into squares so each big square of nine squares has every number, one through nine. Likewise, so does every row and every column. The easy ones are too easy, and the hard ones are substantially impossible. But the moderate ones are fairly challenging and satisfying. Sudoku is a big time-waster, and I won’t recommend anybody...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Digital] CPLD Technology Scores A Big Green Zero
Last month, the FCX Clarity began rolling off the production line at Honda’s plant in Tochigi, Japan. The sedan is powered by the company’s V Flow fuel-cell stack, a compact lithium-ion battery pack, and a single hydrogen storage tank. According to Honda, it has a 280-mile driving range and gets 72 miles/kg-H2, or the equivalent of 74 mpg of gasoline. Three-year leases will be available for $600 a month to customers living in Southern California near publicly accessible...
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Daniel Harris
[Embedded in Electronic Design] VPX SBC Blends FPGAs And Dual-Core PowerPC Processors
High-speed Aurora or Serial FPDP links feed dual Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs via a pair of FPGA mezzanine card (FMC/VITA 57) slots on VMetro’s latest VPX single-board computer (SBC). The HPE640 also includes two Freescale MPC8641D dual e600 PowerPC cores. The PowerPC chips have access to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM. Each FPGA has access to six banks of memory (36 Mbytes of SRAM via four banks, 256 Mbytes of DDR2 SDRAM via two banks). A Gigabit Ethernet...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Platform Completes AdvancedTCA System
The Element/Accelerator Platform delivers full software support of AdvancedTCA systems that typically include DSP farms to handle multimedia chores. Enea’s highavailability platform addresses fault tolerance from the ground up, including protocol stacks through application and chassis management tools. Software management tools address the complete system, including in-service upgrades. Developers can build on a fully functional system instead...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Distributed Computing Augments Math Tool
The Parallel Computing Toolbox and matching Distributed Computing Server augment the MathWorks’ Matlab 2008a with parallel computing support that will be a boon to number-crunching developers. New features include parallel for (parfor) definitions as well as distributed arrays (darray) that allow data to be distributed across many servers. Users also can transition from serial Matlab programs to parallel Matlab programs without significant...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Make Or Buy: Module Mania
Make it low-power. Buying off-the-shelf parts to meet these criteria is still a challenge, but the latest crop of modules makes the job easier. Modules let designers develop custom configurations with minimum moving the design of the critical aspects of the system to the module vendors. This includes the processor and memory subsystem and usually most, if not all, of the peripheral interface. A carrier board typically contains connectors and...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Module Targets Rugged Spec
Men Micro’s ESMexpress-based XM50 targets the pending VITA 59, RSE Rugged System-On-Module Express standard. The 1.5-GHz PowerQUICC III MPC8548 processor has access to 2 Gbytes of ECC DDR2 SDRAM memory in addition to nonvolatile SRAM and FRAM. The 12-W board has three Gigabit Ethernet ports, five USB ports, three SATA ports, and an 8x PCI Express port. The XM50 also plugs into a carrier board and is enclosed in a metal case...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Tint Carrier And SBC Keep Cool
Take one SpaceSaver-II. Attach one GMS P70x. Start developing on one slick platform with Mini-PCI Express and a 2.16-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The 4- by 4-in. SpaceSaver-II provides these connectors: three video (NTSC, RGB, DVI), audio with 2.5-W amp, two SATA, IDE, two serial, eight GPIO, five USB, LVDS LCD, Mini-PCI Express, Express- Card, Compact Flash, two Gigabit Ethernet, plus support for a 1.8-in. solidstate hard drive. The...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Core Hits 2 GHz With PCI Express Connectivity
Marvell took its ARM license and cranked out the 32-bit Shiva core, which hits 2 GHz and delivers PCI Express connectivity. It’s compatible with ARM’s 16- and 32-bit instruction sets even though it isn’t part of ARM’s Cortex push. This lets designers tailor the core to its requirements. The initial crop of Shiva chips targets multimedia applications, including portable units such as mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The 2-GHz 88F6281 ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multicore And More
Freescale’s QorIQ series builds on the venerable PowerQUICC lines. PowerQUICC will remain, but the QorIQ is where the power is. The P4 series starts with the eight-core P4080, which uses Freescale’s CoreNET on-chip interconnect to deliver high performance while keeping power requirements low (see the figure). The one- and two-core P1 series offers even lower requirements. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] COM Express Targets Rugged Video Applications
The COM Express-based COM680 from Ampro combines a 1.66-MHz dualcore Core2 Duo 7500 processor with high-resolution video, including on-board video encoding for HDTV, component, and S-video outputs. The board handles resolutions up to 2048 by 1536. It also holds up to 4 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM. Interfaces include Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB 2.0, AC’97/HD audio, two SATA II, IDE, x16 PCI Express, five PCI Express, PCI, and LPC. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Chip Ties USB To Ethernet
The LAN9500 USB-to-Ethernet bridge is one of a number of new Ethernet offerings from SMSC. It incorporates a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 controller and physical layer (PHY) with a 10/100 Ethernet interface that includes an auto-MDIX PHY. The LAN9420 PCI Ethernet controller is optimized for 32-bit microcontrollers. It also has the auto-MDIX PHY. The integrated scattergather DMA and IRQ support can significantly reduce CPU overhead while delivering ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] USB Spans 8- To 32-Bit MCUs
Microchip’s latest microcontrollers, from its 8-bit PICs to 32-bit MIPS-based chips, now sport USB. At the low end is the small-footprint PIC18F1XK50 family. The 16-bit PIC24F family now adds USB OTG (On the Go) support, as does the low-cost, 40-MHz, 32-bit PIC32MX420. Other PIC32 systems run at speeds up to 80 MHz. Pricing starts at $1.32, $3.47, and $3.25, respectively. MICROCHIP ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Without Thermal Analysis, You Might Get Burned
Remember when thermal analysis meant getting your prototype back and deciding if you might need to throw in a couple of heatsinks and a fan for good measure? Try that approach now and you may find yourself in deep and without a paddle. After all, heat can hamper electrical performance and ultimately reduce mean-time between failures. Back in my engineering heyday, I never put much thought into thermal analysis because it just wasnâ??t necessary, and I know...
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Daniel Harris
[Lab Bench] DSP Pumps Up The Performance In High-End Stereo Speakers
Even in this age of tiny earbud music players, audiophiles want high-end stereo systems that provide perfect acoustics and fidelity— and technology is making these systems less expensive than ever. In fact, I recently received a letter from a reader asking about some of these developments: “I heard that Emerald Physics has a set of $3500 speakers that outperforms more expensive, $20k to $50k systems using a DSP. Is this possible?” asked S....
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William Wong
[Power Design] Protect Yourself From The Dangers Of Knockoff Battery Packs
In recent years, the news of individual battery incidents such as cell-phone and laptop fires has been eclipsed by factory fires and large recalls of lithium-ion (Liion) cells. Several large, well-known Li-ion cell suppliers have been affected. The most notable event was the recall of Sony batteries in 2005. Panasonic and, more recently, LG Chemical have had fires affecting their Li-ion manufacturing volume as well. While these factors present challenges for...
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Robin Tichy
