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01 June 2008
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News & Analysis
Interviews with the CEOs of two chip design startups in Shenzhen give a picture of the business in the hub city in Guangdong province, one of China's biggest centers of electronics manufacturing.
Motion sensing technologies for mobile and gaming devices come in a variety of flavors, ranging from IR sensors and inertial sensors to combo devices that integrate accelerometers and gyros. Thanks to the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone—and the limitless imagination of designers—motion sensing technologies are enabling a host of novel applications.
Today's multivoltage portable system designs demand a variety of devices for managing power conversion from switched-capacitor charge pumps to inductive DC/DC converters. But when designers want a compact, simple-to-implement solution that delivers a reliable power source at low cost and requires few external components, a low-dropout regulator more often than not is the part of choice.
Key parameters to consider when looking to protect system circuitry from ESD strikes include clamping voltage, capacitance, dynamic resistance, contact discharge and packaging. But it's not enough to acknowledge these parameters; sometimes you have to look at them a little more closely.
New product introductions of the past six months show how fragmented the market is for embedded motherboards and single-board computers, particularly when it comes to small formats. In the midsize realm, ranging from about 40-50-inch2, however, the activity centers primarily on 6.7-inch x 6.7-inch Mini-ITX and 5.75-inch x 8-inch EBX motherboards, though the boards themselves are diverse.
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This article describes the system-level to RTL design and verification flow of a commercial graphics processing chip. In this flow, system models were developed to validate the arithmetic computation of video instructions and were then used to verify the RTL implementation using sequential logic equivalence checking.
With the increasing hardware diversity and complexity of embedded software systems, a model-driven development approach has become a viable method to address system-integration issues in the early stages of development. The architecture description language is suited for systems with challenging resource constraints and strict real-time requirements.
Is ANSI C or SystemC the best language for ESL? Use whichever language is best for a given requirement, while ensuring that a methodology exists to tie everything back together at the highest level.
Jack Ganssle tells us why assembly programming will always be an important--even critical--skill for firmware developers.
Today's automotive companies and suppliers face conflicting goals of reducing development time and improving quality in the face of increasing demands of greater system complexity from both customers and the government.
Technical Features
The OCP Protocol is a high-performance and bus-independent interface protocol between intellectual property cores that provides a standard for Electronic System Level design. It improves IP core reusability, making more predictable and productive SoC designs. (PDF file)
In the past, many MCUs would use ROM or UV-erasable EPROM to store program instructions. But increasingly, MCUs turn to flash technologies for code storage. The main reason for choosing flash memory is that it can be erased and updated if errors are found in the program code. (PDF file)
FPGA technology, low-cost optics, and a passive architecture have made significant contributions to passive optical networks and to the evolution of these networks. Prior to 2002, lower-performance FPGA generations served primarily as prototyping tools. Today's FPGAs are high performance, feature rich, and well suited to meet growing PON design requirements. In addition, FPGAs that offer lower design costs, flexibility, and scalability are the linchpin for turbo-charging the PON market. (PDF file)
In lowering power consumption, it is important to minimize the number of instructions a CPU must execute to get the job done, so it can spend as much time as possible in the deepest sleep mode available. This is best accomplished by using a compiler with omniscient code generation technology. (PDF file)
The unique ability of UWB signaling to operate at the noise floor enables UWB devices to peacefully co-exist and share spectrum with traditional wireless services. (PDF file)
Here's how the efficiency of PoE systems compares to traditional wall adapters in various applications, and how new techniques and technologies, including dynamic power management and emergency power management, promise to make new PoE solutions more power- and cost-efficient. (PDF file)
Frequency-domain measurement of RF power is one of the basic measurements done by spectrum and vector signal analyzers. These systems must comply with standard limits on power transmission or spurious noise emissions, and appropriate measurement techniques must be configured to avoid errors. (PDF file)
Opinion
While there is no killer app on the horizon, medical electronics is making headlines as the next growth opportunity.
The Swiss Army knife, one-size-fits-all approach to PCIe switch design is over. The transition to PCIe Gen2 coincides with a coalescing of market forces to render general-purpose PCIe switches obsolete.
Interview
Notes Anand Valavi of Wipro Technologies, " We want to get to the point where people think if they have some state-of-the-art analog work to be done, India is a good place to do it."
Vital Signs
In a year that saw a record number of filings under the World Intellectual Property Organization Patent Cooperation Treaty, inventors from South Korea and China consolidated their top 10 positions in 2007.
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