Articles – Page 184

January 29, 2015

Kids goof around with all kinds of things, not knowing what will occur. It’s how they learn how the world works, and it’s why they can learn novel electronic user interfaces so much more easily than adults (which we mistake as intuition). Well, in one such bout of goofing about on our apple orchard, I was monkeying with balloons over the opening of a bottle of apple cider.

You see, my dad had this thing where he’d poke a few needle holes … Read More → "Mimicking Touch"

Undo Your Mistakes at the Customer’s Site

Debugging Software Now Works Remotely

by Jim Turley

January 28, 2015

“Programming will be the last job on the planet.” – Jaan Tallinn, co-creator of Skype and Kazaa

Even hardware is software these days. With a hardware-development language (HDL), you can “compile” gates, boards, and even entire systems. Not everybody does… but you could. Software determines product functionality at least as much as the hardware does, and programming is a much easier skill to learn (and to teach) than hardware engineering. We’re becoming an industry of coders.

Yet one of the big downsides to programming is that you generally spend more time debugging your … Read More → "Undo Your Mistakes at the Customer’s Site"

MathWorks Targets Hardware/Software

Prototyping MATLAB and Simulink Algorithms on Xilinx Zynq and Altera SoCs

by Jim Turley

January 27, 2015

The year 2011 saw a signature development in the FPGA industry – the introduction of two new programmable SoC devices. Xilinx introduced the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoCs, and Altera introduced the Cyclone V SoC and Arria V SoC FPGAs. These new programmable SoCs, each packing a high-performance dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPcore along with ample amounts of programmable logic, offered advantages for a plethora of applications. Now designers could enjoy the benefits of software application development on one of the industry’s most popular processors while gaining the flexibility and throughput potential from hardware acceleration on a high-speed, programmable logic fabric.

< … Read More →

DIY Clocks

Keeping Control Over Oscillation, Compensation

by Bryon Moyer

January 26, 2015

I should probably start with a confession. Clocks and oscillators have never been my strong suit. I get the concept of oscillation and I get the fundamental function of a crystal or other resonator, but there have been some aspects that have always bugged me – and yet I never had occasion to wrestle with them. Until now.

We’ll come back to the specifics of this in a moment, but I start with this comment simply to note (or perhaps warn) that I approach this topic with some level of naïveté. The benefit of that is … Read More → "DIY Clocks"

Get to Market Faster with Modular Circuit Design

by Kevin Morris

January 22, 2015

The concept of designing, validating and then reusing functional blocks in integrated circuits (ICs) has been entrenched in the electronics industry for decades. Software development has a similar model utilizing libraries of common function calls or objects. However, the concept of reusing printed circuit board (PCB) modules is much less common. Reusing PCB modules for common or commodity functions offers considerable advantages, for example avoiding potential signal integrity or thermal problems, by utilizing circuit data whose performance has been proven in previous generations of products. The key to successful modular circuit design is a data management system that can … Read More → "Get to Market Faster with Modular Circuit Design"

Ambiq Apollo MCU Gets Funky With Voltage

Leveraging Physics for the Betterment of Humankind

by Jim Turley

January 21, 2015

“Reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick

We all work with the same laws of physics. That’s why they’re laws, not guidelines. We deal with Ohm’s Law, Shannon’s Law, Cole’s Law (thinly sliced cabbage), and others. And one of the immutable laws of electronics is that power consumption is proportional to voltage. Raise the voltage, and you raise the power consumption, all other things being equal. And of course, that works the other way, too. Lower voltages reduce … Read More → "Ambiq Apollo MCU Gets Funky With Voltage"

Verifying Your Awesomeness

The Mire of Modern System Verification

by Kevin Morris

January 20, 2015

If a clock tree fails in a forest, and there are no vectors to catch it…

Verification has always been the black sheep of the engineering family, and for understandable reasons. Design teams are made up of intelligent, capable, and – dare we say occasionally arrogant – types who don’t take kindly to the notion that their work contains errors. Yet, we have verification teams who make their entire career finding the bugs in the work of designers.

Does this sound like a recipe for peace and harmony? </ … Read More → "Verifying Your Awesomeness"

EDA for SETs

A Flavor of Single-Electron Transistor Algorithms

by Bryon Moyer

January 19, 2015

A few weeks back, we tackled the concept of a single-electron transistor (SET). And we saw how they could be arranged in a hexagonal form for use as a non-volatile programmable fabric. The whole topic originated for me in an ICCAD paper that discussed EDA algorithms for implementing logic in such a device. Well, before discussing that, we needed to introduce SETs. So, having done that, we now return to the originating topic: how do you take random logic and implement it in a SET … Read More → "EDA for SETs"

2014 Letdown

Have We Lost The "Wow" Factor?

by Dick Selwood

January 15, 2015

At a recent semi-social, semi-business function, I was asked what I thought the highlights were in electronics in 2014. I was stumped. Not only could I not think of a highlight then, I still can not think of anything that really stuck out in the year.

I’ve sat through many new product presentations and press briefings and received many more press releases, and there is a lot of creative thinking and very good solid engineering going on, resulting in good solid products that are meeting customer needs. I’ve written about some of them and hope to … Read More → "2014 Letdown"

Little Conexant Makes a Big Noise

Telecom Company Turns its Attention to Games, Cars, and Tablets

by Jim Turley

January 14, 2015

Conexant is one of those companies that used to be big. Like Polaroid, Pan Am, Commodore, Westinghouse, or Life magazine, it carries a once-proud brand name that belies its current station. The company was spun off from mighty Rockwell International 15 years ago during the height of the networking boom, and it has steadily decimated itself since. A string of divestitures capped by a complete Chapter 11 reorganization two years ago have seen the one-time telecom darling reduced to a private firm with about $120 million in total sales.

That’s not to say that Conexant isn’t … Read More → "Little Conexant Makes a Big Noise"