385 results found for TechView: Analog & Power, displaying items 1 - 20
August 28, 2008 Chips Help Supercaps Flash White LEDs Brighter For Higher-Res Photos
As digital-camera and phone-camera resolution increases, high-resolution image sensors require more light. Firstgeneration low-res camera phones provided barely adequate flash intensity for taking closeups of friends at parties. Even second-generation camera-phone flash is still unsuitable for image sensors with greater than 3-Mpixel resolution. And that’s just talking about still photography. Video requires in-phone camera lighting to provide...
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Don Tuite
August 14, 2008 Set-Top Tuner Simplifies Design And Assembly
Tuners for set-top boxes, DVRs, PC TVtuner cards, and the like keep getting simpler to design in and less demanding to assemble into end products. Anadigics’ AIT1032 1-GHz double-conversion tuner implements upconverter, downconverter, voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), synthesizer, RF and IF amplifier, and RF and IF gain control functions with a combination of gallium-arsenide (GaAs) and silicon technologies. It’s designed to avoid...
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Don Tuite
August 14, 2008 RF Power MOSFETs Top Previous PAE Standards
Power-added efficiency (PAE) is the ratio of the difference of the power gain of an RF power amp to the dc power that amp consumes. In commercial wireless systems at 175 and 500 MHz in cell phones at 800 and 900 MHz, it’s customary to use two MOSFET stages in the final output, running off a 3.6-V rail. For those typical applications, Renesas has applied a new process technology to boost PAE. The n-channel first-stage RQA0014 has 55% higher PAE than...
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Don Tuite
June 26, 2008 Energy Harvesting Goes Commercial
Last June at Darnell’s Nanopower Forum, Face International demonstrated prototypes of its Lightning remote switching technology for home and business wiring (see “Zombies And Energy Harvesting” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 15788). At that conference, Lightning was essentially a charge stored in clouds of hope. By...
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Don Tuite
May 6, 2008
Higher-VBR MOSFETs Open New Design Opportunities
Several MOSFETs with higher breakdown voltages have hit the market. Some are rated for 40, 60, and 80 V, which is 10 V higher than existing devices in their respective classes, with significantly lower conduction losses. Others are rated for 900 V, again with improved conduction loss specs. At the high end of the breakdownvoltage range, Infineon Technologies is pushing the envelope with the industry’s first 900-V superjunction MOSFETs ...
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Don Tuite
April 24, 2008 Single Chip Digitizes High-Side Power Measurements
Single Chip Digitizes High-Side Power Measurements In-circuit power measurements frequently involve a currentsense amplifier or a hot-swap controller and an analog-todigital converter (ADC). Optimally, the current sensing is done on the high side of the load to avoid false grounds. But one problem with that approach is the presence of a high common-mode voltage on the amplifier input. Another is the typical ADC’s limited input voltage range. In addition, the cost of...
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Don Tuite
April 24, 2008 Monolithic Ultrasound AFEs Usurp Multiple Chips In New Designs
There are now two sources of analog front ends (AFEs) for ultrasound applications. Texas Instruments is sampling the AFE5805, the first member of a future family for portable to high-end ultrasound diagnostic equipment. Last year, Analog Devices introduced the AD9271 for the same market. Functionally similar, both are octal devices that incorporate a lownoise amplifier, variable gain amplifier (VGA), anti-aliasing filter, and 12-bit analog-to-digital...
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Don Tuite
March 27, 2008 GUI Simplifies Design Tweaks
Analog Devices re-emerged as a power-IC contender at last month’s APEC 2008 show in Austin, Texas, with its ADP1043 digital pulse-width modulation (PWM) controller for ac-dc and isolated dc-dc power supplies. To facilitate design with the device, ADI provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that interacts with the chip via an I2C bus (see the figure). The chip...
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Don Tuite
March 27, 2008 Fabless Power-Device Challenger Emerges At APEC
Can the fabless semiconductor company model work as well for power devices as it does for more complex chips? It has for Alpha and Omega Semiconductor (AOS), which emerged from the shadows at APEC 2008 in Austin, Texas, last month with a successful product portfolio. These devices include power MOSFETs, some unique transient-voltage supressors (TVS), and an array of high power-density dc-dc regulators, smart load switches, and...
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Don Tuite
March 17, 2008
900-V MOSFETs Conquer The "Silicon Limit"
One challenge in MOSFET design is the “silicon limit.” Every doubling of voltage-blocking capability leads to a five-fold increase in RDS(on). Yet Infineon beats the silicon limit with the 900-V members of its CoolMOS family.
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Don Tuite
March 13, 2008 Ultra-Quiet Buck Converter Suits RF And High-Speed Data Applications
The most challenging realm for dc-dc converters comprises cell-phone data cards, backplane adapters, and other applications that are sensitive to radiated and conducted switching noise from the converter. Enpirion, the Lucent spinoff with a converter technology that integrates the FETs and places the inductor inside the package, has quietly captured a large share of that kind of business in the last couple of years. Housed in a 3- by 3-mm...
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Don Tuite
March 13, 2008 Op Amp Cuts Power And Noise
For densely populated, thermally sensitive instrumentation applications that requires high-speed signal conditioning. Analog Devices’ single-channel 850-MHz ADA4857 high-speed voltage feedback op amp combines a number of desirable features. It burns only 5 mA, less than half that of other amps in its class. Also, it reduces input noise to 4.4 nV/vHz, also half that of competing amps. Its –91-dBc distortion specification at 10 MHz gives it a...
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Don Tuite
February 20, 2008
Companies Roll Out Their Best And Brightest At APEC 2008
IEEE’s APEC is the power industry’s premier tradeshow and convention. This year’s event, held in Austin, Texas from Feb. 24 to Feb. 28, was no exception. (APEC 2009 will be in Washington, D.C.) As a trade-press editor, I go to APEC to track trends and to learn about the dozens of new devices and ICs introduced there. Here’s a look at what I took away from the sessions and the tradeshow floor.
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Don Tuite
February 14, 2008 Sensor-Conditioning Amps Use Rejustors For Precision Compensation
Microbridge Technologies’ MBSTC-02 compensation amplifier is the first IC to marry the company’s Rejustor technology with a CMOS analog process (see the figure). Rejustors are trimmable resistors that have marked advantages over older technologies. Notably, they can be trimmed iteratively to a high degree (0.01%) of precision, while their temperature coefficient (TC) can be adjusted...
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Don Tuite
February 14, 2008 Power-Efficient Video Amp Detects Loads
The MAX9516 video amplifier from Maxim Integrated Products doesn’t just detect and report the presence of a video load. It also reduces power consumption when the load isn’t present so system designers can better manage power (see the figure). On top of that, additional features further reduce power consumption in the system. Designers who use have used traditional video amplifiers have had to add an...
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Don Tuite
January 31, 2008 Class D Audio Subsystems Stretch Apparent Distance Between Cell-Phone Speakers
Stereo systems for multiple speakers put the left and right speakers on opposite sides of the room. Personal systems use left and right ear buds or headphones to separate the sound. What can designers offer in the way of stereo on a cellular handset or other compact personal listening device that uses speakers? Maxim Integrated Products says its highly efficient MAX9775 class D audio subsystems are the answer. They enable the use of wave interference to cancel...
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Don Tuite
December 13, 2007 Jury Hands Power-One A Victory: What Does It Mean To Engineers?
On November 15, a Texas jury decided the lawsuit brought by Power-One against Artesyn Technologies (now part of Emerson Network Power) in 2005. The decision has ramifications for engineers who design power systems that step down a bus voltage at a â??point of loadâ?? such as an FPGA or processor. Immediately after the verdict, both companies issued positive statements to the press. â??The jury found both of the two asserted patents to be valid and found that...
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Don Tuite
November 15, 2007 Transimpedance Amplifier With AGC Targets 803.3aq Applications
Originally deployed for 1-Gbit Ethernet, a lot of existing fiber-optic cable could manage 10 Gbits/s, thanks to IEEE 802.3aq 10GBase-LRM (long-reach multimode). This standard was approved in 2006 to address multimode dispersion in legacy fiber with a technology called electronic dispersion compensation (EDC). Previous chip sets have depended on amplifiers that were less than optimal for the new standard. But Inphy’s 1348TA S03D transimpedance amplifier (TIA)...
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Don Tuite
November 15, 2007 DACs Simplify Factory Process Control Designs
Working in extreme temperatures or at high voltages in factory process control, distributed control, and smart transmitter applications can be tough for 4- to 20-mA current-mode transmitters and analog I/O systems. Yet four 12- to 16-bit single-channel digital-to-analog converters (DACs) from Analog Devices can make those jobs easier. These DACs integrate user-programmable current-source or voltage output. This makes them attractive because it...
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Don Tuite
November 5, 2007 Codec And System Power Management Share A Die
Put the whole power system for a portable audio and navigation system on the same die as the system's audio codec? That's what Wolfson Microelectronics has done in its Audio- Plus codec line. OEMs would like shorter bills of materials and more compact board layouts, but what's going to be integrated? Wolfson says mixed-signal audio and system power make the most sense. There are now three philosophies for power management in portable devices. ...
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Don Tuite
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