271 results found for Design View / Design Solution, displaying items 1 - 20
July 24, 2008 Floorplanning A Power Delivery Network With Spice
Greater system complexity and ever-higher clock speeds continue to push IC power consumption to the limit. And though every generation escalates the demand on IC current, voltage levels drop due to steadily declining feature sizes on the silicon. Those lower voltage levels cause the power-supply noise margin (typically 5% from nominal) to shrink across the chips’ power-supply terminals. A noise level of 250 mV might be acceptable for a 5-V power...
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Jitesh Shah
July 10, 2008 Technology Options And Issues For FPGAs
The five mainstream FPGA vendors—Actel, Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, QuickLogic, and Xilinx—have a combined market share of approximately 98%. The remaining percentage points account for a few specialty suppliers that offer FPGA-like capabilities. All of these companies are fabless operations and rely on wafer foundries in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, or Germany to produce their wafers. As a consequence, they only have access to the technologies...
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Bernhard Linke
July 10, 2008 Protect Your FPGA Against Piracy
Over the past two decades, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has transitioned from a prototyping tool to a flexible production solution in both consumer and industrial applications. With FPGA logic complexity increasing from a few thousand gates to millions of gates, the devices are able to hold more of the key functions (intellectual property) of a system. Today, designers can select FPGAs that employ various technologies to hold the configuration...
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Bernhard Linke
July 2, 2008
Smart Optics Push Camera Phones Out Of The “Dark” Ages
Since the introduction of the camera phone in 2001, having a camera in a cell phone has transitioned from being an added feature to a standard item. Today, more than 80% of cell phones have at least one camera. Camera-enabled phones offer the convenience of having a camera that’s permanently on and, quite literally, “on-hand” for every occasion.
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Eran Kali
June 26, 2008 Add Modular Plug-In Functionality To Any Embedded Design
Utilizing modularity in an embedded design opens up a number of new possibilities when compared to standard embedded applications. It enables the design of compact form-factor devices, without sacrificing functionality. Modularized embedded designs can be designed economically, because they can be tailored to the application—avoiding unnecessary functionality and cost. They’re also production-friendly, since they open up new diagnostic possibilities without...
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Brant Ivey
June 12, 2008 A Signaling Gateway Can Stand Alone
The signaling gateway bridges next-generation IP and traditional packet-switched telephony networks (PSTNs) that handle, for example, the signals for establishing, controlling, and billing calls. Gateway design calls for the blending of IP-based protocols, conventional switched-circuit protocols, operating systems, management, and high-reliability hardware system design. MicroTCA, AdvancedMC hardware, and offthe- shelf software can provide building blocks to develop ...
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Stuart Jamieson
, et al.
June 10, 2008
Correct-By-Construction Layout Generation And Modification
Physical design verification software typically identifies faults in physical layouts by finding design-rule-check (DRC) violations and layout-versus-schematic (LVS) mismatches after layout is complete. So-called “correct-by-construction” layout generation is a method for generating and modifying polygonal features during the layout construction process so that the layout satisfies both design-rule constraints and connectivity requirements.
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Arya Raychaudhuri
June 10, 2008
About Polygon Processing Engines
Correct-by-construction polygon processing capabilities, which together are commonly called a polygon processing engine (PPE), enable a physical designer to perform all forms of layout transformation in a post-stream-out GDS database.
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Arya Raychaudhuri
May 22, 2008 Build A Real-Time Flash GUI For Embedded Network Devices
A critical concern for any embedded device is the user interface. Embedded network devices hold a tremendous advantage for creating an intuitive user interface by using a Web browser. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by using an embedded Web server on the embedded device and creating Web pages written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is very easy to understand and implement for static Web pages, but it’s a very poor option for rapidly changing ...
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Chris Uribe
May 8, 2008 Designing For High Speed In Current-To-Voltage Conversion
Communications channels used to be a challenging exercise in pure analog design. Today, modulation occurs in the digital domain in many systems. But the transmitted signal is analog, so there’s always a conversion. For any communications system, choices for the digital- to-analog converter (DAC) and its current-to-voltageconverting op amp depend on the required bandwidth. As DACs and op amps get faster, they move closer to the transmitting...
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John Ardizzoni
April 24, 2008 Bridge Architecture Solves Performance, Design, Cost Problems In New Portables
Interconnecting peripherals and mass storage to embedded processors has always been a challenge, but now it’s an even more critical part of designing portable devices. Designers must solve numerous problems, such as power consumption, data speed, and configuration flexibility, while minimizing parts count and cost. One solution that bears consideration is the West Bridge, a fast interface solution that can simplify many embedded portable designs. The...
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Danny Tseng
April 10, 2008 Mixed-Signal Processors Can Aid Visual Robotic Development
A recent project for one of the exhibitors at the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo 2007, held last October in San Jose, Calif., required our company to quickly develop a motion-control system for a tracked robot. This isn’t complicated by any means, using many development tools currently available. In this case, though, the design was implemented using a visual design tool that required no manual coding at all. The goal was simple, and only three...
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Oliver H. Bailey
March 26, 2008
Analog Multiplier Improves the Accuracy of High-Side Current-Sense Measurements
High-side current-sense amplifiers are used in a wide variety of applications where reliability and accuracy are paramount concerns. In computer notebooks, these devices monitor the battery’s charge and discharge currents, as well as currents in USB ports and many other supply rails that may need to be powered down to control heating and power dissipation.
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Maurizio Gavardoni
March 27, 2008 Implement A Complete ARV Controller In A Single SoC
From toys to mobile home appliances, there has been a proliferation of simple robotic vehicles— and they all rely on some form of a processor. Some use 8-bit microcontrollers, while others use custom silicon or combinations of discrete components. With today’s technology, you can use a single off-theshelf semiconductor device to create a complete autonomous robotic vehicle (ARV) controller, regardless of vehicle size. This article will show how to build such a...
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William Lovell
, et al.
March 13, 2008 Customize Power Supplies Freely With A Digital Feedback Loop
Tighter power regulations and safety issues are demanding efficient and intelligent power supplies that can be monitored externally and manufactured cost-effectively, with minimal hardware changes. Power-supply engineering advances have shown that digital control of the power-conversion feedback loop enables designers to create more accurate and reliable power supplies with increased power density, at lower costs and with faster...
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Keith Curtis
March 5, 2008
Verify SoCs Faster And More Predictably With SystemVerilog And Constrained-Random Stimuli
Verifying the integration and operation of new IP in a legacy system-on-a-chip (SoC) becomes challenging. This is true particularly when the legacy SoC environment was built using a directed test methodology and validation of new IP requires corner case stimulus to achieve required functional coverage.
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Henry Angulo
, et al.
February 28, 2008 Zero-Drift IA Takes The Strain Out Of Sensor Measurements
Sensor measurements typically translate physical phenomena of interest into electronic-circuit parameters such as resistance and capacitance, which can then be read with a bridge circuit. Bridge circuits produce an output voltage or current signal that is ratiometric with respect to temperature and powersupply voltages, thereby enabling the measurement system to be immune to these variables. Sensor examples can include: Thermistors for temperature...
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Prashanth Holenarsipur
February 14, 2008 Networking Processor Peripherals With I2C
As microcontrollers drop in price and offer more capabilities, designers have found it more costeffective to utilize multiple small controllers in both single-board and multiboard systems. Such auxiliary processors can relieve the main processor of timeconsuming tasks such as scanning keyboards, display controllers, and motor control. These controllers can also be configured as a wide range of application-specific peripherals. Recently, I was given the task...
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Mark Hastings
January 31, 2008 New Synthetic Instrumentation Methods Solve Tough System-Level Test Problems
Today’s electronic components and products are evolving faster than ever, with design- to- production life cycles shrinking to just six months in most commercial applications. In addition, device content and topologies are migrating from single to multi functional components, and then to entire subsystems and systems, often as a single assembly solution (such as for smart phones and iPhone-type devices). Furthermore, d irect software control and device configuration is...
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Francesco Lupinetti
December 18, 2007
Harmonic Distortion And Board Layout
Given that printed-circuit boards (PCBs) are made from material that is practically speaking electrically linear (i.e. constant impedance), then why can it introduce nonlinearities into a signal? The answer is that the board layout is “spatially non-linear” with respect to where currents flow.
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Edited by Bill Boldt
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