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16 August 2008
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News & Analysis
If you think Taiwan is missing in semiconductor action, think again. It may not be generating as much buzz as mainland China, India or Vietnam, but there is no denying that Taiwan is still a prime destination for key industry players.
Intel Corp. revisited its research on floating-body cells (FBCs) for advanced cache designs in microprocessors during the 2008 Symposium on VLSI technology in Hawaii.
How will the spoils of the format war compare with the bounty that Blu-ray's predecessor, standard-definition (SD) DVD, enjoyed during its reign as the video optical-disc format king?
While the May 12 Wenchuan 8 earthquake in Sichuan province caused innumerable injuries and deaths as well as enormous loss of property, Chengdu—the capital city of Sichuan province and the center of the electronics industry in western China—remained unscathed.
By attending this year's IIC-Taiwan technology conference, keep abreast of trends in the field as a whole to ensure design timeliness and marketability.
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The rising shortage of analog engineers has made digital chip powerhouses like Freescale Semiconductor Inc. redouble its efforts in recruiting and grooming skilled practitioners in the alchemy of mixed-signal processing.
A wide array of precision devices is readily available to designers building high-performance systems, whose layout and designs are very important. For systems with multiple boards, however, board interconnection can be a critical piece of the PCB design.
We electronics engineers have made it much easier than those in other engineering disciplines. Thanks to Moore's Law, which should be actually be called Moore's Conjecture, that we have benefited from its incredible advances in our basic components and tools over the last 50 years.
The U.S. TV broadcast industry's march toward becoming digital is set to unfold by the February 2009 digital switchover, when all high-power analog transmitters will be switched off. To be positioned to successfully compete in the future, serious consideration should be given to migrating as quickly as possible to a core infrastructure that is all-digital, HD-capable, and able to support the origination of multiple program streams.
The deployment of DVB-T for mobile TV has already started in Europe, China and in other parts of Asia despite the higher power consumption. Recently, a new and fast emerging segment that is taking traction is in-car mobile TV. This application requires multiple antennas to support diversity in ensuring consistently good picture quality.
Virtual field testing solves the huge problem in validating the RF-performance of receivers in any organization. A variety of DVB-T transmissions across Europe's 45 countries makes in-depth field testing a major undertaking. Because of this, the Digital TV Labs Virtual Field Test Suite enables comprehensive and speedy validation of RF front-end performance.
Displaying high-quality imagery and video has become an essential feature of mobile handset design. To provide true mobility, the user's viewing experience must be satisfactory under ambient light conditions. It requires display settings that should be adjustable. Ideally, the handset itself will adapt its display to accommodate changes in ambient lighting when the user is moving.
It's tough to find an embedded system that doesn't do some type of digital signal processing, and it's quite difficult to look for an embedded processor that doesn't have DSP-oriented architectural features. Because of these, all processors have to be DSP-related. We're seeing the DSP splinter into many sub-industries, each with diverse requirements for both hardware and software.
Technical Features
Most tuners in TV and STB applications use the traditional single conversion mixer oscillator PLL concept. This concept is able to handle analog or digital TV signals, or both at the same time. This article elaborates how to achieve an ultra-low-cost tuner reference design using the Infineon MOPLL tuner TUA 6039-2 or its mirrored version TUA 6037. (PDF file)
As premium sound systems grow in size and power requirements, Class D audio amplifiers are being redesigned to answer the unique automotive challenge. (PDF file)
The purpose of creating LXI alliance is to simply integrate test systems; improve the throughputs of the test systems; reduce the cost; utilize the mature technologies like Ethernet and 1588; and assure the compatibility among different providers. (PDF file)
The number of electrical products used in private homes and offices is growing at an extremely fast pace. But these products consume considerable amounts of electrical power during standby mode. This article proposes a power management solution for electrical devices during standby mode, compliant with power efficiency specifications. (PDF file)
Opinion
Servicing both signal processing and energy conservation trends this year, IIC-Taiwan will be held on Sept. 9-11 in Taipei.
Microkernels were popular in the 1980s. However, their proponents promised much and delivered little. In 1993 it was demonstrated that the performance problems weren't inherent in the microkernel concept. Today, the reduction in TCB size is the real advantage of microkernels: small size implies fewer bugs and hence, increased security and safety.
Interview
Looking into how Numonyx positions itself in the flash memory market and how it sees the competition with industry leader Samsung, Harrison said the company's strategy is to achieve profitability through the efficiency and cooperation between Intel and ST to lead in flash memory industry.
Vital Signs
The global piezoelectric crystal market hit $4.8 billion last year and will climb to $6.91 billion by 2012, for an annual average growth rate of 7.5 percent, predicts Innovative Research and Products Inc.
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