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Friday, 18 May 2007 |
Modern implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators, use aggressive power-management techniques to reduce SOC power. A typical modern pacemaker may consume on average only a few microamperes of current to achieve long battery life. To meet these low power requirements, engineers use many techniques that may be applicable today to other power-conscious designs. The techniques vary from analog to digital and from circuit to system level, all of which are necessary to keep power to such a minimum....more  (0) Comments |
PCI Express Prompts Quiet Evolution |
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Friday, 18 May 2007 |
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The PC’s next-generation internal peripheral bus has been quietly overturning both the PC and the embedded-computing industries with its performance and expansion potential. Largely unknown to users, the PC industry, with embedded computing following close behind, is in the middle of a quiet shift in technology. The overtaxed PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus for add-in cards is slowly giving way to the serial PCIe (PCI Express). This change is bringing new capabilities and performance levels to desktop-, laptop-, and embedded-computing systems, but it is also creating short-term design challenges with the technology evolving faster than its adoption....more (0) Comments |
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Interface Overkill? Is eSATA Necessary For Your Next System Design? |
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Friday, 18 May 2007 |
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The external-SATA interface is blazingly fast, at least on paper, but its performance comes at a bill-of-materials and development price. Should you shoulder the incremental expense in your next design, or will a more general-purpose interface suffice?...more (0) Comments |
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Digital TV Reception: The Global Challenge |
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Thursday, 17 May 2007 |
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The world is going digital. This is a commonly used phrase but sounds simpler than it is in reality. Throughout the last 15 years hundreds of companies have been involved in defining standards for the reception of digital TV. Digital TV reception nowadays is available through different transmission media such as cable and satellite as well as over the air. With the world getting smaller due to better communication you might expect that when defining new standards a 'global standard' would be the goal. However, it is nothing like that. Just like good old analog TV where we had NTSC, PAL in different variants and SECAM, digital TV knows many different standards as well, some of which are still in the definition phase. Of course politics play an important role in the standard definition process but in this article we will explain how different target applications and environments have a strong influence on the chosen technologies....more (0) Comments |
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Analog Versus Digital: Bridging The ADC-To-Processor Divide |
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Thursday, 17 May 2007 |
As an analog-world descendant, I always hear comments in the hallway about how digital designers don’t really understand analog issues. Digital designers will go so far as to unsympathetically say the same about analog-IC designers. There is no bridge between these two camps unless the participants ride the fence and enter the mixed-signal domain together. True to the analog spirit, not all data converters use the same digital format. Some converters use unsigned-binary-data types; other converters use two’s-complement signed data. To even further complicate matters, some converters produce 12- or 14-bit output words, and others produce 16-bit output words. Yet another technology is the 24-bit delta-sigma converter.
Forget the reasons for these analog-design decisions. With all of these converters, the location of the ADC LSB is in the processor’s 0-bit location within the 8-, 16-, or 32-bit word. This situation makes perfect sense to an analog designer. However, the signed-bit of a 12-bit converter resides in position 11 in the processor. If you assign a 16-bit-wide C variable to the converter’s output word, C assumes that the sign bit is in position 15. The processor does not recognize a negative number from the converter and assumes that all codes from the 12-bit, bipolar-in ADC are positive. This situation occurs because the signed bit is in the wrong position....more (0) Comments |
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New EU EMC Directive Explained |
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Wednesday, 16 May 2007 |
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Are you aware that there is a new EMC Directive 2004/108/EC that will replace the existing EMC Directive on 20 July 2007? Do you know what the main changes will be? To help you get to grips with the new Directive, REO UK has published a new handbook which is available as a free download for members or can be ordered in hard copy via the company’s web site www.reo.co.uk . One of the main changes is that the scope of the Directive is more clearly defined and it makes a distinction between two types of equipment - apparatus (a finished appliance made commercially available as a single function unit and intended for the end user) and fixed installations (a combination of apparatus and other devices which is installed permanently at a predefined location)....more (0) Comments |
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