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USB Thinks Inside The Box
USB is the de facto peripheral interconnect outside the box. Inside, though, it’s been a different story. This year, USB has been internalized with a range of products and platforms becoming more popular. My two choices for “best” reflects this change, with Stackable- USB and the MicroBlade standards. StackableUSB (www.stackableusb.org) has its own organization behind it, and the MicroBlade...
Multicore Mania Sweeps Through Computer Design
Today’s computers are going multicore where performance matters. Whether it’s for a desktop or server, more cores are showing up in the compute engine and graphics rendering, providing users with everything from more lifelike video to solutions for computationally complex problems. This year, three products stood out. Intel’s six-core Xeon pushes the envelope for the typical operating platforms such as Linux and Windows. The Tesla C1060 opens...
Top FPGAs Excel While Best Chips Simplify Design
For design flexibility, FPGAs are unsurpassed. But they have typically suffered performance or power penalties to achieve that distinction. Now, those penalties exist no more. This year’s best FPGAs can take a leading role in highvolume and high-performance designs. The structures that typical FPGAs use to provide their configurability add overhead to their internal design. To achieve functional density and performance levels comparable to those...
Robotics Move From Industry To Space To Elder Care
Retirement isn’t coming easy to 83-year-old Joseph Engelberger, widely known as the Father of Robotics. “There’s a lot that can still be done,” he says wistfully, despite already accomplishing so much in the robotic field. In fact, Engelberger and George Devol produced Unimate, the first industrial robot. While studying for his MS degree at Columbia University, Engelberger worked for Manning Maxwell & Moore as a physicist designing control systems for...
Networking Invigorates The Home Multimedia Blitz
The continually morphing home-entertainment arena has turned to local-area networks (LANs) to tie things together. This year we chose three products, two fixed and one portable, as the first or best in their categories. One of the offerings supports the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), and you can count on DLNA becoming more of a force within this realm. These days, you can select from a range of NAS devices that are DLNA media servers. For example,...
RAM Innovator Took A New Career—And Education—By The Horns
His pioneering work in digital computer technology gave the world reliable random-access magnetic-core memory that revolutionized computer speed and power. Nevertheless, Jay Forrester says his work today is “much more important.” “In 1956, I thought the pioneering days of computer innovation were pretty much over,” Forrester said. “The biggest multiple in improvements in computer speed, reliability, and logical design were from 1946 to ’56. Rapid...
FPGA Improves Basestation Design
What are some of the challenges facing basestation designers today? The five biggest are the numerous wireless standards that must be accommodated, increased and complex frequency assignments, increased operating efficiency, capital expenditures (CAPEX), and scalability. Why must designers deal with so many standards? Most new basestations benefit from being able to handle...
From Sneaking Into Computer Labs To Sneaking Out Java
James Gosling, inventor of the Java programming language and the virtual machine, skipped many of his high school math and physics classes. His teachers knew it, but they still gave him A’s. That’s because, said Gosling, they knew why he was missing the classes. He was working for the physics department at the University of Calgary writing software for satellites. “That attitude was a huge influence on me,” said Gosling. “They understood that learning...
In AI, Robotics, And Any Field, Stand Alone To Stand Apart
If you want to make a difference, don’t follow the crowd, Marvin Minsky advises today’s students. Don’t go into the most popular field. “That could be a disaster. When I started to work on artificial neural networks, only four other researchers were involved with this field. But today, there are many thousands of them. Interesting discoveries come only every few years—so each researcher has less than one chance in 1000 of making significant contributions,” Minsky...
The Very Old And Very New Converge At Belgium’s IMEC
Though I’m interested in both history and technology, it’s unusual for both of those interests to be served side by side. But upon arriving in Leuven, Belgium, recently for the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre’s (IMEC’s) annual technology review meeting, I could not help but be struck by contrasts between the very old and the very new. Leuven, the provincial capital of Flemish Brabant, is an utterly charming college town dominated by its Catholic...
Are Designers Making Multicore More Complicated? Or Less?
Multicore is the wave of the future, with more cores in our designs as time goes on. Some push the limits, while others creep up to a half-dozen very large cores. And then there’s the problem of programming these things. Communication lies at the heart of the matter. Memory is the key in a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) or non-uniform memory access (NUMA) environment. In other architectures, communication may be packet switches, FIFOs, or a host of...
Security Challenges Move To The Factory Floor
Industrial operations gain many benefits by moving to Ethernet and TCP/IP, but those gains bring a potential downside: These popular technologies open plants up to viruses and attacks from outsiders. The shift to business networking makes it easier to move data throughout an enterprise. It’s also easier to maintain a well-known architecture than to manage networks built around lesser-known field buses. But the gains come with some tradeoffs. Manufacturing facilities...
Working Without Wires
Plant managers are adding a powerful tool in their efforts to gather more data and keep equipment running smoothly— wireless networking. It lets them locate sensors anywhere, move equipment without routing wires, and perform tasks that would have been difficult or even impossible. A range of wireless technologies is seeing increased usage as engineers gain confidence that they will work flawlessly in harsh industrial networks. In fact, acceptance of...
PACs Become Task Masters
As global pressures squeeze manufacturers, many feel the urgency to optimize equipment in their plants. Existing controls are being tossed out and replaced with modern programmable automation controllers (PACs) that deliver more processing capabilities and more network connectivity. PACs have been gaining acceptance for years, giving engineers a single platform to address a broad range of needs. These platforms include software, which eradicates the ...
Come Next February, Your TV May Be Junk
If you haven’t seen the commercials about the upcoming conversion to over-the-air, high-definition TV, then you probably don’t watch much television anyway— not even on an old black-and-white TV like the one I still have sitting on my shelf (see the figure). This antique still works and will continue to do so after Feb. 17 of next year if it’s connected to cable or a converter box. For those few of you who...
Bulletproof Your System Timing With Programmable Clocks
Ever wondered how much timing margin your system really has? You’ve probably asked some questions along these lines, such as: Does my crystal really need 20 parts-per-million (ppm) accuracy? What if noise couples to my timing clock edge? Will my display always look this good across manufacturing process corners? Is there enough timing margin to add spread spectrum (SS) for reduced electromagnetic interference (EMI)? This article helps answer...
1.5-GHz FPGA Takes Clock Gating To The Max
Flexibility is key to FPGA success, but speed is equally important. Achronix almost triples the throughput of the system by taking clock gating to the extreme. The Achronix Speedster FPGAs use a unique pipeline architecture but completely hide it from developers. Designers can use the devices with unaltered Verilog, VHDL, or RTL. Developers also can continue to use development tools like Synplicity’s Synplify-Pro and Mentor Grahpics’ Precision. ...
Compact Module Taps COM Express Atoms For Mobile Video
Congatec’s latest COM Express module, the conga-CA945, is based on Intel’s 1.6-GHz, two-thread N270 Atom processor and 945GSE Express chip set (see the figure). The module can handle up to a 2-Gbyte DDR2 small-outline dual-inline memory module (SODIMM). It has a Gigabit Ethernet controller, three PCI Express lanes, eight USB 2.0 ports, two SATA ports, and an IDE interface. Furthermore, the...
Try Multithreaded, Multicore Chip For $99
XMOS wants you to try making lots of threads with its $99 XC-1 development system, which is home to a four-core XS1-G processor (see “Multicore And Soft Peripherals Target Multimedia Applications” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 16231). It can handle up to 32 real-time threads and up to 400 Mevents/s. ...
The Internet Comes Home
The Widget Channel, initially presented by Yahoo! and Intel at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco in August, marks a trend to open interfaces that will be on connected TVs around the world. These widgets are small icons and applications that can be presented along the border of the display. The underlying system is essentially a PCstyle platform with a Web browser on top (see the figure)....
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