Design Features: August 17, 1995

Cover Story
When Computers must not fail . . .	When a computer failure can take down an industrial process or a whole company, computer systems that keep running command high prices. Newer software and hardware are cutting the price premium, though--and none too soon; demand is exploding for computers that just won't quit. -- Dan Strassberg, Senior Technical Editor
Design Features The hottest new technologies and the latest design techniques to help you work efficiently and effectively.
Monolithic power amps provide diverse choices in circuit structures	When choosing a power-amplifier IC, take time to carefully consider the input and output characteristics that suit your application. -- Bill Travis, Senior Technical Editor
Live insertion of digital circuits requires knowing your IC family	It's often desirable--or even mandatory--for your system to allow "live" insertion and removal of circuit boards. Although digital-IC vendors say their ICs support this operation, there's no complete or easy solution to performing it without potential damage. You can get closer to this goal, though, by understanding live-insertion/removal perspectives and limitations, along with the differences among common logic families. -- Jeffrey B. Davis, National Semiconductor Corp
Use performance modeling to predict and minimize flex cable catastrophic failures	The mechanical limitations of cabling systems can easily compromise increasingly sophisticated industrial electronics. By using test and modeling techniques reserved for higher level components, you can overcome most of cabling systems' common failure modes. -- Paul Warren and Tom Rosenmayer, WL Gore & Associates Inc.
A distributed arithmetic approach to designing scalable DSP chips	You can use distributed arithmetic to design DSP chips. Using look-up tables, it lets you develop hardware implementations of DSP algorithms in FPGAs. Pipelining lets you trade off speed vs logic resources. -- Bernie New, Xilinx Inc