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16 August 2007
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News & Analysis
Analysts at Semiconductor Insights and Portelligent went inside the iPhone to uncover the technologies and companies behind the hottest consumer device on the planet.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. are taking different paths in IC manufacturing, but the traditional capital-spending race appears to be over in the x86-based processor arena.
In varying degrees throughout the region, Southeast Asia is becoming a prime location for design and engineering services, highly sophisticated supply chains and complex product manufacturing.
A specification for 60GHz radios for short-range, high-bandwidth home networking will soon be available and transmit uncompressed HD video between devices within a room.
A networking protocol for controllers and controlled devices is claimed to enable wireless interoperability among multiple consumer electronics appliances from multiple manufacturers and may end the era of the remote control.
A recent survey reveals that venture capitalists continue to go global, with China the preferred spot for manufacturing investment and India favored for R&D and engineering.
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Vendors are now addressing power management problems in circuits that embed intelligence and targeting their PMIC solutions at portable consumer devices with increasingly smaller form factors.
Atmel Corp.'s 32bit ARM-based MCU is not quite a standard product, nor quite an FPGA or a gate array/standard-cell ASIC, but the company claims it has features and capabilities common to all of those alternatives.
NXP Semiconductors says it has introduced the industry's first fully integrated downconverter for Ku-band DVB-S low-noise block.
Vishay Intertechnology Inc. has released its Tantamount Hi-Rel COTS T97 series of solid tantalum chip capacitors, designed for safety-critical applications such as those found in the military, aerospace and medical industries.
Skyworks Solutions Inc. has launched a line of monolithic, digitally programmable low-pass filters that are said to offer good linearity and low input noise, making them suitable for apps such as adjacent channel rejection filters in direct-conversion receivers.
Industry leaders have declared that conventional SRAM, flash and DRAM will encounter scalability and endurance issues at the 45nm technology node, posing major challenges for embedded designers.
Today's cars comprise several dozen processors, a wide range of sensors, and various types of control, safety, comfort and comms systems. All these have one thing in common: the need for non-volatile storage.
Mobile products need flash memory. Implementing the most appropriate interface will increase system performance and reduce BOM.
At-speed test has been improved by a number of new capabilities, including the use of on-chip-generated functional clocks during test mode. This article offers some do's and don'ts for creating a high-quality program for at-speed test.
Engineers know that the most efficient way to deliver power is to keep the voltage high and the current low. Power engineers have known this for over 100 years; that's why they keep raising the voltages on their transmission lines.
Today's embedded devices are more functionally rich than the designs of the past. Thus, traditional test methods no longer suffice. For next-generation embedded designs, parallel test brings in more effective measurement.
Technical Features
If GPS in mobile phones is going to be a success, it is vital that designs are sufficiently intelligent to handle the challenging mobile environment—both in terms of the technological hurdles and the penetration of the mobile handset market. That means GPS has to be low power, low cost and able to deliver on performance. (PDF file)
CORBA is the required middleware layer for SCA-based SDRs. Commercial CORBA ORBs are high-performance, small-footprint software products that provide the comms framework in single- and multiprocessor SDR systems. (PDF file)
ESL can be combined with graphical system design to address challenges in long-tail applications, where design times and upfront resources are limited. (PDF file)
Designers of real-time applications are facing the challenge of optimizing the execution of complex algorithms within tight constraints and strict limits on the cost and development time. (PDF file)
Maintaining the proper level of performance is the key to integrating speech algorithms. Speech processing mainly involves compression-decompression, recognition, conditioning and enhancement algorithms. (PDF file)
The surface-conduction electron-emitter and the field emission displays have many components in common, but significant differences exist in the emitter structure that affect performance. (PDF file)
Using simple techniques, engineers can quickly troubleshoot errors in video signals and help determine and isolate problems in the device or video signal path. (PDF file)
Tomorrow's electronic products need more robust off-chip ESD protection, which designers can provide by selecting a protection TVS with good clamping performance and applying some basic board layout techniques. (PDF file)
Opinion
Vehicle-wide closed-loop systems mean that the amount of communication within and between systems will increase. Since this often demands real-time response, the CAN bus will be eventually replaced by FlexRay.
With the great demand for smaller, cheaper, feature-rich portable devices with longer battery lives, portable designers need to aggressively address all aspects of power consumption at both the chip and system levels.
Interview
MEMS pioneer Kurt Petersen of SiTime shares MEMS' development since the 1980s as well as his thoughts on where it is headed in the future.
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