[Engineering Feature] The Top 50 Employers In Electronic Design
Careers in the electronics industry often mix opportunities and pitfalls. The opportunities are endless, perhaps even including the chance to create and lead a world-class technology organization. But the cyclical nature of the industry creates many pitfalls, including being laid off from your favorite job and not being able to find another like it. One way to avoid the pitfalls and prepare for the opportunities is to work for a company that’s...
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Joseph Desposito
[Technology Report] Complex Wireless Standards Put Instruments To The Test
Once upon a time, RF testing was relatively simple. You would measure power output in a transmitter and look for spurious signals with a spectrum analyzer. At the receiver, you measured noise and sensitivity. Unfortunately, those halcyon days are gone forever. Radio complexity has intensified dramatically with advanced digital modulation schemes, softwaredefined radio architectures featuring digital signal processing, I/Q signal chains,...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Leapfrog: First Look] 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
[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 (...
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Daniel Harris
[Design View / Design Solution] 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
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[Ideas For Design] Maintain Power-Conversion Efficiency While Saving PCB Space
Designers of portable electronics such as cell phones, portable media players, and GPS devices are always pushing to squeeze every ounce of battery life out of the application. In particular, in the realm of power conversion, engineers aspire to ensure that every coulomb that leaves the battery finds its way to a point-of-load (POL) without being lost or dissipated as heat. The solution is not always straightforward, though, because as in...
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Peter Khairolomour
[Ideas For Design] Control Camera Time Exposure Through A Computer's Serial Port
A computer’s serial port is a convenient source of low-speed dc control signals that are easy to set from software. For example, the RTS (request-to-send) line outputs about +9 V when “on” and -9 V when “off.” This idea shows how to use this signal to control the shutter of a Canon EOS 40D camera for a computercontrolled time exposure. An ordinary cable release for this camera contains two switches, mechanically linked so that as you press the...
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Michael Covington
[Ideas For Design] Switch Tricks Electronic Ballast ICs Into Working On Low Voltages
Ballast-control ICs from International Rectifier and other similar half-bridge gate drivers feature an undervoltage lockout (UVLO) on the high-side output. This function protects the driven MOSFETs or insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) in the event that VB drops to potentially dangerous low levels. When designing an electronic ballast for operation off a 12-V dc (10.5 V to 13.6 V) battery, however, the UVLO creates a challenge ...
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T.A. Babu
[Editorial] Staying Employed In This Industry Can Be Tough At Times
In an issue where we celebrate the top 50 employers and also list the top employers in the electronics OEM, it’s worthwhile to bring up one of the dirty words of the industry—unemployment. As someone who has lived through many of the industry’s downturns and experienced layoffs firsthand, I can say with certainty that this profession is fraught with career minefields. But probably you already know that. When I found myself out of a job early in my...
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Joseph Desposito
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Current-Source Stuff, Anyhow?
Recently, a guy asked me how to draw a constant 1.00 mA from a node of a circuit. Of course, he did not tell me what volts, ohms, or frequency. But, he admitted, he basically did not know how to design a current source. So I’m sorry to waste the time of all you guys who do know how to design a current-source. But maybe this lecture can help and save you some time so you don’t have to teach all the young kids. If you need a current source, and you don’t know ...
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Bob Pease
[TechView: Communications] AC Powerline Connections Still A Viable Home Networking Choice
Using the ac powerline at home to interconnect PCs, peripherals, and consumer electronics via broadband techniques isn’t new. Several companies still make powerline modems. However, the wireless approach to home networking using Wi-Fi has become the most widespread networking option. It’s fast and convenient, and it doesn’t require any new wires. But you can also say that about the other home networking options. MoCA uses the installed base coax cable in a home,...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Multicore, Multithreaded Goes Embedded
MIPS Technologies combines multithreaded and multicore support into its latest embedded SMP platform. As with most multithreaded designs, the MIPS32 1004K’s multithreaded support provides an incremental performance boost that is less than adding another full core. Still, multithreaded support can take advantage of a core’s idle time that would otherwise waste power— a critical item in most embedded designs. Each core can include one or two...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Net Module Secures Secrets
Connect One’s IIEVB-PIC-2128 evaluation board includes the iChipSec CO2128 network system-on-a-chip (SoC) as well as Microchip’s PIC24 microcontroller. The dualcore module supports local-area network (LAN), Wi-Fi, and cellular links with SSL security. The CO2128 acts as a firewall and supports TCP/IP protocols such as SMTP, POP3, and HTTP. The PIC24 host communicates with the CO2128 using the AT+i command set. The host features 64 kbytes of flash and 8 kbytes...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Long Life For Micro-ATX Motherboard
The ITOX BL330-BR microATX motherboard can handle dual- and quad-core Core 2 Duo processors. Based on the Intel Q35 Express chip set, it offers a 1333-MHz front-side bus and QXGA video that can handle Windows Vista via the GMA300 graphics accelerator. The ICH9R southbridge supports multiple RAID configurations with up to six SATA drives. The board has a a Gig Ethernet port, eight USB, two serial, eight GPIO, and 16x and a 4x PCI Express slot plus two PCI...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Shining A Light On Bugs
Turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. This often seems to be the way to deal with programming bugs as well. Bring out the debugger or trace tools, and the problem goes away or remains difficult to locate. While application bugs don’t really react like real bugs, changing the state of an application’s environment does affect how buggy code responds. This is one reason why tools that impose no overhead on an application are...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Java Gains Static Source Code Analysis Tool
Klocwork Insight for C/C++ and Java brings static source code analysis to Java developers. It can help improve code quality while reducing bugs and addressing security vulnerabilities. Its latest version is integrated with a range of integrated development environments, including Eclipse and JBuilder. It also handles popular application frameworks such as J2EE, Google Web Toolkit, and AWT. Java support is available separately or as part of the...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] Smaller Stackable USB
New 1/4- and 1/2-size PC/104 boards allow StackableUSB to deliver more compact solutions. A single SAMTEC connector links a motherboard like the Micro/ Sys Pentium III-based SBC1685 with up to eight stacked USB devices. The smaller form factors could allow multiple expansion boards to fit where single PC/104 expansion boards would reside today. This approach allows support for a carrier board that handles multiple expansion modules. ...
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William Wong
[Embedded in Electronic Design] ARM Gets Shot Of Support
Parasoft Embedded now supports ARM’s RealView Development Suite 3.1. This Eclipse-based Parasoft Embedded plug-in for C++ test helps automate static code analysis, code coverage, peer reviews, and unit and component testing. The static analysis supports MISRA C and JSF. It also supports DO-178B development. Support for Insure++, the runtime memory analysis and error detection tool, is available as well. PARASOFT • ...
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William Wong
[Engineering Essentials] Back To Amp Camp
Amplifiers are fundamental circuit-design elements. They drive everything from earbuds to antennas. Placed ahead of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), they reshape signals from sources as diverse as strain-gauges to ultrasound probes. Through proper selection of feedback passives, they can be configured into high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, and band-elimination filters. Feed them with multiple signals, and they produce harmonic series of all the...
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Don Tuite
[Lab Bench] Simple Is Better For C And Your Lawn
It’s almost summertime, and I’ve been watching the neighbors put all sorts of chemicals on their lawns. I recommend an organic approach that includes corn gluten meal (CGM) instead. CGM is a natural preemergence herbicide and fertilizer (9-0-0) that is a natural weed suppressant. It is better for the lawn, the environment, and your pocketbook. CGM prevents weeds by stopping the germination of the weed seeds, so you need to start using it at the beginning of ...
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William Wong
[Power Design] The Polymorphous Landscape Of Bus Voltages
Voltages are bussed around all the time, but the applications and voltage levels are many and diverse. One of the high-voltage apps du jour, for example, is the data center. Everybody knows about the phenomenal rise of the Internet over the last few years, but few think much about how all of the generated data gets stored and distributed. To enable this capability, the emergence and growth of datacenters or server farms—and the power they increasingly...
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Tom Curatolo
