266 results found for Leapfrog: First Look, displaying items 1 - 20
August 14, 2008 Big, Black, And Bold Oscilloscope Breaks Performance Barriers
The WavePro 7 Zi series from LeCroy revolutionizes oscilloscope design and functionality (Fig. 1). While the 15.3-in. WXGA LCD touchscreen can display all sorts of useful data at the same time, the real breakthrough is what’s inside, as its hardware and software make it one of the best scopes on the market. The series includes five basic models with maximum bandwidths of 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4, and 6...
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Louis E. Frenzel
August 14, 2008 RF/IF VGA Chip Does It All
According to Maxim Integrated Products, the MAX2065 fully programmable, multistate, analog and digital IF/RF variable-gain amplifier (VGA) aims to solve a number of automatic gain control (AGC) design problems in GSM/EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE, and WiMAX receiver applications (see the figure). But what does that mean? In explaining the thinking that went into the design of the...
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Don Tuite
July 24, 2008 Smart As A Brick—A New Approach Rejuvenates IBA
By moving digital feedback and PMBus control upstream from point-of-load (POL) dc-dc converters in intermediate-bus-architecture (IBA) power-distribution schemes, Ericsson Power Modules may have sidestepped a patent problem that has all but dried up new IBA developments. The brains are now in the formerly “dumb” bricks that step down 48 V dc to whatever the POLs need. In addition to jumpstarting a stalled digital IBA, Ericsson’s engineers have improved system...
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Don Tuite
July 10, 2008 SIMT Architecture Delivers Double-Precision Teraflops
NVidia’s T10 architecture brings double-precision floating point to the company’s massively parallel computing platform. This graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture also is used in NVidia’s consumer graphics boards. Both are supported by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The Tesla S1070 1U rack-mount system incorporates four of the Tesla T10 boards, each with a single chip containing 240 cores ...
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William Wong
June 26, 2008 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...
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Daniel Harris
June 12, 2008 Charger Chip Supports Datacenter Memory System Backup Apps
How does a chip company maximize return on its non-recurring engineering investment? It could duplicate its intellectual property (IP) in a range of ICs aimed at similar applications, but with different feature sets tailored to those apps. Or, it can put the same IP into a narrower range of more versatile ICs. Linear Technology saw that a certain class of its customers had intrinsically similar needs, but a wide variety of what were essentially I/O...
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Don Tuite
June 12, 2008 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 (...
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Daniel Harris
May 22, 2008 Sensor Detects Light And Proximity For Unique Mobile Applications
Suppose you were designing a digital camera, and you wanted to extend its battery life by turning off its big power-hungry display screen whenever its users have their eye up to the optical viewfinder. Or suppose you were designing a notebook and you wanted a feature that would turn the keyboard backlight on only when the user’s hands were near the keyboard. Or suppose you were designing a touchscreen phone and you wanted to deactivate the on-screen buttons when...
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Don Tuite
May 8, 2008 Embedded Algorithms Enable Low-Cost Cell-Phone Zooming
Digital cameras, by themselves and in cell phones, represent one of the hottest segments of the consumer market. To compete, designers need to lower their costs while improving performance. Tessera Israel achieves these goals as well as better reliability with software algorithms that eliminate the need for conventional mechanical zooming. The company’s OptiML Zoom uses optical distortion to zoom in on an image with up to 3X magnification. This solution...
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Roger Allan
April 24, 2008 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...
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Daniel Harris
April 10, 2008 Power Over Ethernet-Plus PSE And PD Chips With Real Two-Event Classification Play Nicely Together
Last month, MicroSemi and Akros Silicon demonstrated the first compatibility between ICs for IEEE 802.11at Power over Ethernet Plus/HiPOE power source equipment (PSE) and powered devices (PDs). The PSE chip was MicroSemiâ??s PD64001, and the PD chip was Akros Siliconâ??s AS1135. Conducted by MicroSemi, the test predates the actual release of the final 802.11at standard. But the draft standard was released last fall, and an approved version is expected...
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Don Tuite
March 27, 2008 Verification Gets A Whole Lot Smarter
In a survey of its own users, Mentor Graphics found that more than half of them spend more than half their time in functional design verification. Of those users, 78% are manually writing directed test sequences. This major timesink cries out for automation. Another 41% use constrained random vector generation to augment those directed tests. Further, a solid two-thirds of those users surveyed do their verification at the functional level. Only about...
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David Maliniak
March 13, 2008 DC-DC Converter Makes Single-Cell Microcontroller
Silicon Labs has met the challenge of cutting power consumption to a single cell with its C8051F9xx, which fits into a 4- by 4-mm package (Fig. 1). Ranging from 0.9 to 3.6 V, its operating voltage is ideal for one- or twocell solutions. This 25 MIPS, 8051-compatible microcontroller has a 5-V tolerant I/O with a built-in 24.5-MHz (2% accuracy) clock. It also boasts a second,...
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William Wong
February 28, 2008 Dueling 12-Bit ADCs Make Their Debut
The highest demand and the most vigorous competition between companies that make analog-todigital converters (ADCs) lie in the sampling range from 50 to 65 Msamples/s in 10- and 12-bit resolutions. Market demand is highest for eight- and 10-channel devices with the lowest possible power consumption per channel. In late January, within days of each other, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor announced groundbreaking new chips for that market...
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Don Tuite
February 28, 2008 Old Ideas In New Design = Lower Power, Higher Performance
Elegant designs have always blended old and new while meeting certain criteria. In the case of VIA Technology’s Isaiah architecture, these criteria included higher performance, lower power consumption, and pin-compatibility with the company’s C7 line of x86-compatible microprocessors. The result was a chip design with twice to four times the performance within the same package and power envelope. The architecture’s execution pipeline is key to...
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William Wong
December 13, 2007 32-Bit MCU Blends Together Old And New
Microchip needed to move into the 32-bit space, which was encroaching on its 8- and 16- bit market. But the company didnâ??t follow the line of ARM adopters. Instead, it looked at the silicon landscape and chose MIPS Technologiesâ?? M4K core to herald its entry into this competitive space (Fig. 1). It has lots of company, too. Almost all of ARMâ??s licensees are adopting its Cortex-M3 with standard parts for...
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William Wong
December 3, 2007 Power LEDs Promise Brighter, More Cost-Effective Lighting
The votes are in, and readers have selected Cree’s XR-E series power LEDs as the most significant Leapfrog technology story of the year (see “White Power LED Lights The Way With A 160-Lumen Output,” Nov. 16, 2006, p. 39). And Cree has come a long way in improving the XR-E series since that story broke. Improvements in the die, packaging, and materials have led to the company’s Cool series. These lights are “a more efficient version of the...
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Roger Allan
November 15, 2007 Tiny Dual-Axis MEMS Inclinometer Simplifies Industrial Measurements
Targeting industrial applications, Analog Devices’ ADIS16209 dual-axis inclinometer and accelerometer breaks new ground in price, performance, size, and ease of use. The company claims this highly integrated device is the industry’s most accurate and easy-touse tilt sensor. It’s also 100 times smaller than other available devices. The ADIS16209 offers a fully compensated direct digital output with less than 0.1° of linear inclination error. That makes...
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Roger Allan
November 5, 2007 Test System Pushes MIMO Standards Into The Spotlight
Multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) uses its multiple transmitters, receivers, and antennas to achieve greater link distance and reliability as well as higher data rates. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, to tell you that MIMO is now an option in most of the latest wireless technologies. Already, it's being used in 802.11g/n Wi-Fi wireless localarea networks (WLANs). It's also being picked up in some of the new WiMAX products. And there's no doubt...
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Louis E. Frenzel
October 25, 2007 Embedded 32-Bit Cores Hit 1 GHz
The demands of multimedia are pushing hardware to extremes, requiring advanced architectures and support for multimedia single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instructions. DSP and graphics support also are part of the mix. Yet ARM's Cortex-A9 and MIPS32's 74K 32- bit cores both break the 1-GHz barrier. Chips based on these architectures will wind up in high-volume applications such as residential gateways with Voice over IP (VoIP) support,...
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William Wong
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