Electronic Design Update: September 3, 2008

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Electronic Design UPDATE e-Newsletter | September 3, 2008 | FREEmagazine subscription digital or print!ADVERTISEMENT You’re Invited to IEEE GLOBECOM – The Communications Conference & Expo of 2008!
Themed “Building a Better World Through Communications,” IEEE GLOBECOM features keynote speakers Kaoru Yano (President, NEC Corporation), Richard J. Lynch (Executive Vice President and CTO, Verizon Communications), and Dr. Flavio Bonomi, (Head of Cisco Research, Cisco Systems) as well as 11 Symposia, 22 Tutorials, 9 Workshops, a Design & Developers Forum with 18 sessions, and the Communications EXPO. Join us 30 November – 4 December in New Orleans, LA for the Communications Conference of the Year!
For more information, visit www.ieee-globecom.org/2008. commentary |Engineering A Hall Of Famer By John Arkontaky, Associate Editor
Once a year we at Electronic Design ask our readers to stand up and recognize those who have made major contributions to the electronic engineering world. Our “2008 Electronic Design Hall of Fame” is primed to hoist another class of engineer superheroes onto your proverbial shoulders. So, whether you’ve worked with the engineer and shared ideas at the bench; for the mogul in launching a major technological innovation; use the candidate’s technology every day; are in sheer awe of his body of work; or if you just want to see someone in your industry win, we want to know what the engineers think a hall of famer is made of. Read the full article... lab bench online |VIA ARTiGO: Small But Powerful By William Wong, Embedded/Systems/Software Editor
Technology Editor Bill Wong runs the VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX-based ARTiGO through its paces along with Fujitsu’s 320-Gbyte SATA drive. Read the full article... engineer's resource | 2008 Engineering Hall of Fame Edison. Hewlett and Packard. Nyquist. Dobkin. Torvalds. They’re just some of the innovators who are members of Electronic Design’s Engineering Hall of Fame. Who belongs in the Class of 2008? Your vote counts! New Product Showcase: TI's New Step-Down Converter

Doug Phillips, Worldwide Marketing Manager for Power Management at Texas Instruments, discusses the ultra-thin, 6MHz, 500mA TPS62601 step-down converter. Watch it now...
Your Ideas For Design Can Win $500 Send us your Ideas for Design and we'll pay you $150 for every Idea for Design that we publish. In addition, the year's top design as selected by our readers will earn an additional $500, with two runners-up each receiving $250. You can submit your Ideas for Design via e-mail to [email protected], or you can mail your material to: Ideas for Design Electronic Design 45 Eisenhower Dr., Suite 550 Paramus, NJ 07652 Click here for our guidelines on Ideas for Design. IFD of the week |Use Inexpensive Components To Create An Infrared Close-Object Alert Circuit By T.K. Hareendran
Many robotic applications require a sensor to detect close or very close obstacles. Typically, reflective-type infrared sensors are used for this task. But the circuit in the figure shows an infrared close-object alert system built around two popular and less expensive integrated circuits: the LM555 timer and CD4060 CMOS, 14-stage, ripplecarrying binary counter/divider and oscillator. At the heart of the circuit lies a CNY70 reflective opto sensor module. Read the full article...

ADVERTISEMENT Looking for the latest design techniques and technology in your market? Check out Electronic Design's Design Hotspots. Here you'll find exclusive content from our editors in Embedded, Power, and Analog technologies as well as Green Design and ROHS. We've also compiled Ideas for Design schematics here for your circuit design sweet-tooth. These spots are chock-a-block with information, so don’t delay! video of the week | NI Week: First NI Reconfigurable IO Boards, Ever

Todd Dobberstein, Product Manager for Industrial and Embedded Applications at National Instruments, introduces the first ever NI RIO (reconfigurable I/O) boards, eight in all. (Video might take a minute to download, click only once.)

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Click here for more information. Engineering TV | Printed Solar Power Plextronics, Inc. is an international technology company that specializes in printed solar, lighting, and other electronics. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Penn., Plextronics' focus is on organic solar cell and organic light emitting diode (OLED) lighting, specifically the conductive inks and process technologies that enable those and other similar applications. In printed solar cells, sunlight is collected in the photoactive layer to create charge carriers. When voltage is applied to the device, these carriers are separated into positive and negative charges and then directed to the conductive electrodes (cathode and transparent anode) to create power. The hole transport layer improves extraction of positive charges from the photoactive ink by matching of energy levels to photoactive ink. The combination of the Plexcore PV inks in a printed solar cell enables consistently improved device efficiency, which results in the ability to convert more sunlight into power.

news from the editors |

ASSET Helps Establish Boundary-Scan Initiative

ASSET InterTech recently became one of the founding members of the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative’s (iNEMI) boundary-scan adoption project. The initiative—a consortium of over 70 manufacturers, suppliers, and related organizations—started the project to encourage greater use of the IEEE 1149.1 boundary-scan standard (commonly known as JTAG, after the Joint Test Action Group, which defined the original specification). Read the full article...

WirelessHART Spec Submitted For IEC Balloting

The HART Communication Foundation (HCF) has submitted the WirelessHART Communication specification (HART 7.1) to the International Electrotechnical Commission for approval as a publicly available specification (PAS). Read the full article...

NVIDIA GPUs Powering Stanford Medical Research

Graphics processing units (GPUs) from NVIDIA are delivering over 1 petaflop (1000 teraflops) of processing power in a distributed computing application at Stanford University. According to statistics published by the university, 11,370 active NVIDIA GPUs provided 1.251 petaflops, or 42% of the total processing power for the Folding@home application. Read the full article...

Content Protection Scheme Okayed For WirelessHD

The Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA) has approved and published a new supplement to the Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) Specification for the use of WirelessHD. The supplement represents the first approved, standard content protection method for the distribution of HD content. Read the full article... quick poll | Thanks to new processors, digital video is appearing everywhere. How do you feel about its ubiquity?

It's great! The applications are endless, from security to entertainment.
Some video can be convenient, but other applications seem superfluous.
It's awful! We already suffer from information overload.

Click here to take the poll. Remember to scroll down. The poll is at the bottom of the page.

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Mark October 15, 2008 on your calendar now. From 10AM-5PM the editors at Penton Media’s Electronic Design Group are joining together to bring the latest in power design information direct to you the designer with the premier of ONE POWERFUL DAY, an online conference with a full day of top speakers on top topics via web conferencing. Watch for more information as registration will be opening soon. Marquee Sponsorship by International Rectifier. focus product |

Power Managers Maximize DTV Efficiency

Targeting the February 2009 transition from analog to digital TV, the UCC28061 dual-phase PFC controller with Natural Interleaving technology and the TPS54331 SWIFT dc-dc power-management converter promise to boost energy efficiency in and reduce the size of digital TVs. Read the full article... product picks online | CFB/VFB Amps Provide 500-MHz To 1.5-GHz Bandwidth PXI Controller Breaks Speed Limits Energy-Harvesting Demo Kit Enlists Low-Power MCU Data Logger Supports Many Thermocouples Tactile Switch Offers Multiple LED Options upcoming industry events | IMTS 2008
Chicago, Ill.
Sep. 8-13 Autotestcon
Salt Lake City, Utah
Sep. 8-11 CDNLive 2008
San Jose, Calif.
Sep. 9-11