Pioneer Electronics has chosen the WM8740 high-performance stereo digital-to-analog converter (DAC) from Wolfson Microelectronics for use in Pioneer’s latest Blu-ray home theater disc player. Pioneer said the player (model BDP-LX71 in the EU and Japan and model BDP-05FD in North America) aims to outperform current desktop players and bring a true cinema experience to the home.

The latest version of Accellera’s Verilog-Analog Mixed-Signal (AMS) standard, Verilog-AMS 2.3, unifies the standard’s previous version with IEEE Std. 1364-2005, the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) standard. Verilog-AMS 2.3 enables users to develop standard and tightly integrated Verilog-AMS modules, and allows EDA software tool developers to implement EDA tools without ambiguities in the language interpretation.

One of the perks of being an Electronic Design editor is that we get lots of books that publishers would like us to review. The last time I went through the stack, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations by Daniel Fleisch caught my eye. I settled down in the nearest chair and started to skim. Then I slowed down and started to read. Professor Fleisch is a great scientific communicator.

Hypothesis: Doing away with the code requirement last March has completed a rejuvenation of ham radio that was triggered by the World Trade Center attacks and Katrina. I’m looking for reader comments yea and nay.

The Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Analog/Mixed-Signal/Radio Frequency (AMS/RF) Process Checklist Version 1.0 aims to make it easier for semiconductor companies to obtain information on an AMS/RF foundry process. It specifically targets the information need to evaluate a foundry’s AMS/RF process and determine if it addresses all of the company’s needs.

In my previous column, I took a historical approach to delta-sigma modulation with the single-slope converter (May 8, p. 18, ED Online 18747). Jim Williams of Linear Tech responded, and he sent me a copy of a 1949 article by D.H. Wilkinson on single-slope analogto- digital converters (ADCs). “I’m aware of their obvious weaknesses, but the simplistic elegance of the...

When I present seminars, I often ask the members of the audience to hold up their hands if they think bipolar op amps have better gain and linearity than CMOS. I get a good majority of hands. But neither is bad! The good-old LM301A (well over 30 years old) has a good gain of 260,000 at no load, with just 75 µV p-p of gain error while its output is swinging 20 V p-p (Fig. 1). What happens ...

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...

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...

Download the full article as a .PDF, sponsored by Analog What are digital potentiometers, and how are they used? Digital potentiometers are integrated circuits that implement a resistive ladder and a digital means of addressing a particular tap on the ladder that corresponds to the wiper position of a mechanical potentiometer. They’re used to...

The proportional-control solenoids used in some industrial hydraulic systems are usually driven by microcontrollers or programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Such complex drivers typically require several different supply voltages for logic and control. (The purpose of proportional control is to move the solenoid plunger to an arbitrary position and leave it there.) A set-and-leave solenoid driver, however, should not require a costly PLC or the...

A circuit used to control the level of a video signal should have a 3-dB cutoff frequency of greater than 5 MHz for a television application or 100 MHz for a monitor application. CMOS-based digital potentiometers typically cannot be used as video devices because their frequency responses barely exceed 1 MHz. For such applications, a good choice would be a variable-gain amplifier (VGA) with analog or digital gain control. VGAs are offered...

In designing a simple spectroscopy setup, we needed to synchronize the speed of a small, inexpensive dc motor precisely to 6000 rpm (100 Hz). Our first idea was to take a phase-frequency detector type of phase-locked loop (PLL), the CMOS 4046, to maintain not only the speed, but also the phase to the reference signal. 1 In the classical approach, the motor’s speed is modeled as a firstorder time delay over time. Some math is done to obtain a good ...

The circuit shown in the figure can monitor resistance in a noisy or otherwise hostile environment. A 1:1 transformer provides isolation and a good common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR). The resistance across the secondary winding is reflected to the primary, where it forms a voltage divider with resistor R1 (see the figure). This divider produces a reducedamplitude clock signal that's coupled through C2, rectified by ...

The most common method for interfacing multiple switches—multiplexing— allows for the connection of (N/2)2 switches with N microcontroller IO lines. The method described below, which has its roots in an LED interface technique commonly known as “Charlieplexing,” makes it possible to interface N*(N – 1) switches with N IO lines. In conventional multiplexing of an N-by- N matrix with 2N IO lines, half of the lines are configured for input and...