Dan Harris is the Digital Technology Editor for Electronic Design. He has a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management. His experience includes designing computer hardware for a military contractor, working as an applications engineer for a semiconductor manufacturer making SoCs, and co-founding and working as director of product development for a small firm building EDA software for hardware design. Email address: dharris@penton.com
134 results found for Daniel Harris, displaying items 1 - 20
July 24, 2008
[TechView: Digital] Multistandard Wireless Accelerator Enables Emerging Basestation Technologies
A famous cartoon coyote once called Apetitius Giganticus wanted to catch a roadrunner that sometimes went by Accelerati Incredibilus. The coyote always used some outdated technology to try to catch the roadrunner, who relied on speed and simplicity to avoid becoming lunch. So if FPGAs and ASICs are the coyote and Freescale’s MSBA8100 wireless basestation accelerator is the roadrunner, then, well, you get the picture.
July 24, 2008[TechView: Digital] GPIO Expander Takes A Bite Out Of Power
The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians were known for attempting to recreate the “Midas touch,” whereby they would practice alchemy in their ongoing quest to find the perfect catalyst to turn lead to gold. Yet they forgot one important aspect of Midas’ legend. King Midas came to hate wealth and splendor and started worshipping Pan, the Greek god of nature. Thus, you could say that Midas came to love all things green. Catalyst Semiconductor had Pan in mind...
July 10, 2008[TechView: Digital] CPLD Technology Scores A Big Green Zero
Last month, the FCX Clarity began rolling off the production line at Honda’s plant in Tochigi, Japan. The sedan is powered by the company’s V Flow fuel-cell stack, a compact lithium-ion battery pack, and a single hydrogen storage tank. According to Honda, it has a 280-mile driving range and gets 72 miles/kg-H2, or the equivalent of 74 mpg of gasoline. Three-year leases will be available for $600 a month to customers living in Southern California near publicly accessible...
July 10, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Without Thermal Analysis, You Might Get Burned
Remember when thermal analysis meant getting your prototype back and deciding if you might need to throw in a couple of heatsinks and a fan for good measure? Try that approach now and you may find yourself in deep and without a paddle. After all, heat can hamper electrical performance and ultimately reduce mean-time between failures. Back in my engineering heyday, I never put much thought into thermal analysis because it just wasnâ??t necessary, and I know...
June 26, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] Copper Energy Saves Plenty Of Energy—And Pennies
Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. That saying has been around since pennies were actually made mostly of copper, not just copper-coated like they are today. Copper can also be found in our bloodstream. It has been used to carry water and transfer heat. Most recently, it has been used for interconnects in semiconductors. But what about putting the metal to work as part of a nonvolatile memory technology? Researchers from...
June 19, 2008[Technology Report] Motion Blur Distorts Digital Video's Future
Back in the dark ages, watching TV was a challenge. If you were on the fringes of the broadcast networks’ ranges, you and your siblings had to take turns holding the TV set’s rabbit ears to improve its reception. And if the set stopped working, you were in for a trip to the local drug store with a bag full of vacuum tubes. These days, if you’re talking about a TV not functioning, you’re likely referring to the shift from analog to digital...
June 12, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] Drive Straight To The EEPROM On A Single Bus
With the cost of materials and labor rising, wouldn’t it be nice to find out the amount of pavement needed for a new road has been minimized? Microchip has taken that concept and applied it to its latest line of EEPROM devices. The company’s UNI/O family only requires a single trace be paved from the microcontroller EEPROM—and even a fresh engineering graduate could be trusted to handle the routing of a single trace (...
May 22, 2008[TechView: Digital] Dive Into New Markets With Platform FPGA
The “F” in FPGA could easily stand for flexible, rather than field. In fact, the flexibility that today’s FPGAs provide is far more important than the ability to program a device while in the field, at least for most designers. And since Xilinx leads the industry where flexibility is concerned, it seems only natural that its latest offering, the Virtex-5 FXT, provides a nice platform to build your next system or device family around. With flexibility in...
May 22, 2008[TechView: Digital] DDR2 Memory Serves Up An Ace
In the interest of all things “green” and with server energy consumption ever increasing, there is a great desire to lower power consumption where possible, especially as energy costs continue to soar. Noting these trends, Samsung Semiconductor’s latest DDR2 memory dual-inline memory module (DIMM) enables servers to score an ace in the low-power department. These fully buffered modules offer between 1 Gbyte and 8 Gbytes of capacity and provide up to 50% power...
May 22, 2008[TechView: Digital] TSMC Announces First 40-nm Process
Earlier this spring, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) revealed its 40-nm semiconductor process technology. Its portfolio includes embedded DRAM, mixed-signal, RF, and multi-project wafer (MPW) prototyping. The process improves gate density by a factor of 2.35 over 65 nm. It also reduces active power usage up to 15% over 45 nm and provides the smallest SRAM cell size and macro size in the industry, according to the company. The process is available in...
May 15, 2008
[Web Exclusive] Green Chemistry Initiative Has Critics Seeing Red
California is preparing the nation’s toughest standards for chemical use with its Green Chemistry Initiative (GCI), which was launched about a year ago. And if you thought the European Union’s Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) were tough, you ain’t seen nothing until you meet a bill signed into law last October by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
May 8, 2008[TechView: Digital] The "Ferros" Would Be Proud Of This New NVM
In ancient Egypt, the Horus of Gold represented a form of a pharaoh’s name most typically thought to mean “superior to his foes” and associated with eternity. These qualities would be highly desirable in any nonvolatile memory (NVM) product. Now suppose you could take a standard serial flash memory and add virtually unlimited endurance and the ability to perform write operations at bus speed. That’s right—no write delays after data reaches the memory device, and...
April 24, 2008
[TechView: Digital] Carbon To Replace Copper On Semiconductor Superhighways
Copper has had plenty of time in the sun as a medium for electrons to travel to work each day. And although it has only been used in semiconductor interconnects for about 10 years, its days may be limited thanks to carbon. The debate on using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for semiconductor interconnects has been ongoing for a while now, but recent research indicates that carbon offers first-class service to travel-weary electrons.
April 24, 2008[Engineering Essentials] Storage Must Prepare For The Zettabyte Universe
Remember when bubble memory was the top storage technology? Then along came the faster, cheaper, and higherdensity hard-disk drive (HDD). Of course, bubble memory replaced core memory. One example of the latter was the Apollo Guidance Computer, which incorporated the read-only core rope memory (it resembled a rope of woven copper wire). The Apollo 11 lunar mission in July 1969 used 36 kwords of core rope memory ROM with a cycle time of 11.7 µs to...
April 24, 2008[Leapfrog: First Look] SDRAM Chip Set Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before
When it comes to achieving more memory in the same amount of space, we typically talk about process shrinks, die stacking, multichip packaging, and other techniques. But MetaRAM, a fabless company that recently “de-cloaked,” has shot its new DIMM-based SDRAM torpedoes into the market and scored a direct hit. Web 2.0-type applications are causing bottlenecks in memory usage. Also, processing power is doubling every 18 months while DRAM capacity doubles only...
April 10, 2008[TechView: Digital] SERDES IP Releases Tackle Top Speeds
Untitled Document High-speed design and serial buses used for chip-to-chip communications seem to go hand in hand nowadays. Whether youâ??re talking signal integrity, printed-circuit board (PCB) routability,...
March 27, 2008[Engineering Feature] Build Your Next Company Around Robotics
Ever Googled the term “robotics”? The only major company and product that show up in the top 100 hits are Microsoft and its Robotics Studio, a development tool that leaves a lot to be desired. (Not one of the dozen or so folks interviewed for this article uses it.) In fact, most of the search results include news, collegiate research, education, and events. Yet in 2006, Korea’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy predicted the global...
March 27, 2008[Engineering Feature] Team Awkward Turtle Takes Second At FIRST
Engineering can be fun, challenging, and thrilling. While most kids today may not see it that way, that perception is changing thanks to programs like Dean Kamen’s For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST). As part of this competition, teams of students build robots and go head to head, trying to complete particular challenges. The program involves more than 150,000 students ages 6 to 18 and 44,000 mentors competing in nearly 40 countries. Many of...
March 17, 2008
[TechView: Digital] Rad-Tolerant FPGA Gets Ready For Blastoff
Engineering for space (as in less than 3 degrees Kelvin) requires a greater emphasis on radiation tolerance, mass, size, power consumption, and reliability. But since space applications are typically low-count, FPGAs can play a crucial role in their development and deployment. The latest part in Actel’s RTAX-S family, the RTAX4000S, is a 4 million-gate rad-tolerant FPGA qualified for MIL-STD 883 Class B.
Dan Harris is the Digital Technology Editor for Electronic Design. He has a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management. His experience includes designing computer hardware for a military contractor, working as an applications engineer for a semiconductor manufacturer making SoCs, and co-founding and working as director of product development for a small firm building EDA software for hardware design.
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