Design Features: August 4, 1994
| Cover Story | |
| Synchronous Memories | As system clock speeds push past 50 MHz, designers are discovering that asynchronous memory becomes unmanageable. As a result, they are looking to synchronous memories to handle increasing system speeds. What they are finding are new design challenges.
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| Design Features The hottest new technologies and the latest design techniques to help you work efficiently and effectively. | |
| Noise-figure curves ease the selection of low-noise op amps | Evaluating plots of noise figure vs source resistance makes it easy to select a low-noise amplifier for a given source resistance. A BASIC program calculates the numbers from data-sheet parameters.
-- John W Christensen, National Semiconductor Corp |
| Canny choices condense CPLD and FPGA design cycles | The proliferation of CPLDs and FPGAs has resulted in flexible devices that reduce design time and contribute to a design's smaller size, higher reliability, lower cost, and lower power consumption. However, you must choose from among many devices, each having its own diverse architecture.
--Sung C Hu, San Francisco State University |
| Embedded RISC µPs present new debugging challenges | Embedded systems based on RISC mPs offer many advantages but present unique debugging challenges. Although a logic analyzer isn't the only tool you need to meet these challenges, it is an important one, and you should consider making it the cornerstone of your debugging strategy.
--Roger Crooks, Tektronix Inc |
| New philosophy aids shift from schematic-based | Using HDL-based techniques for developing hardware is similar to using high-level languages to develop software: An object-oriented design philosophy is directly applicable.
--Charles F Shelor, Shelor Engineering |
| Software vendors sweep aside language barriers | US software vendors face a dilemma: whether to thrust English-language products on foreign users or to "localize" products and offer their users native-language help, aide, ajuda, hjælp, hilfe, nápoveùda, ohje, pomoc, súgó, dowa, juseyeo...
-- Brian Kerridge, Senior Technical Editor |
| Desktop DOS goes undercover to run embedded systems | Embedding a PC often involves embedding the most popular desktop operating system.
-- David Shear, Technical Editor |