July 3, 1997

WHAT'S HOT IN THE DESIGN COMMUNITY

COTS goes to Mars

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology is now out of this world. NASA's Pathfinder, scheduled to land on Mars on July 4, uses commercially available hardware and software to keep the cost of the mission low--less than a (relatively) paltry $200 million. The Pathfinder spacecraft is under the control of an IBM RAD-6000 single-board computer, a version of the PowerPC. A mobile Mars rover, Sojourner, operates with an Intel 80C85 µP, chosen for its low power requirements and its resistance to radiation. Software control comes from VxWorks, a commercial real-time operating system from Wind River Systems.

A unique landing system also contributes to the mission's low cost. Instead of descending to a soft, rocket-assisted landing from Mars orbit, Pathfinder will land directly from its interplanetary trajectory, using a parachute and a cocoon of inflatable air bags to cushion its impact. The air bags will cause the spacecraft to bounce repeatedly, perhaps as high as 100 ft, until it comes to rest. The air bags will then deflate and retract, and the spacecraft--if necessary--will set itself upright by opening protective "petals."

--by Gary Legg

Wind River Systems, Alameda, CA. 1-510-748-4100, fax 1-510-749-2010, www.wrs.com

Digital camera zooms video into notebooks

Silicon Vision's fully digital iVision cameras and new Aires zoomed-video PC Card allow system designers to add videoconferencing, image-recognition, surveillance, process-control, and other imaging applications to portable systems. Moreover, the company is offering OEMs three ways to purchase the camera technology for desktop or portable applications.

The iVision cameras directly transfer a digital image from a CCD image array to a video-capture card. The all-digital approach allows companion software to control all aspects of camera operation, including frame rate, color calibration, scene sensing, exposure timing, lighting, and others. The camera supports a maximum resolution of 512×492 8-bit pixels, and the digital control allows an end user to adjust the frame rate to match the requirements of an application and the image-processing capability of a host. The Aries pc card supports the zoomed-video PC Card standard that allows the camera-to-host link to operate at a sustained 27-Mbyte/sec data rate.

Silicon Vision offers OEMs the camera and desktop- or notebook-interface technology in turnkey private-labeled kits; the company also offers finished cameras and reference designs for the system interfaces, as well as the modules necessary to build a camera, along with camera and interface reference designs. OEMs should be able to offer their customers complete camera systems for less than $300.

--by Maury Wright

Silicon Vision, Fremont, CA. 1-510-770-2300, www.siliconvision.com.

Wind adds embedded-Internet twist to Tornado

Wind River Systems' Tornado software-development product now offers the option of creating systems with embedded Internet capability. In addition to Internet communications protocols, such as transmission-control protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Tornado for embedded Internet offers a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server, a Web browser, and Java support. All the Internet software runs on the VxWorks RTOS.

Tornado preserves VxWorks' real-time operation by running Java threads as separate VxWorks tasks in their own memory partitions. This separation prevents any Java task, even garbage collection, from interfering with higher priority tasks. The Java tasks are nondeterministic, but their operation does not compromise the timeliness of VxWorks tasks. By mapping the Java threads to VxWorks tasks, Wind River also avoids introducing incompatibility between its execution of Java and Sun's standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Along with the JVM, Tornado for embedded Internet offers various components for graphical communications between an embedded system and the network. Its communications stack includes TCP/IP BSD version 4.4. The package offers both the Hot Java and the Device Mosaic browsers for reading network data and an HTTP server for providing data to the network. It also offers the RtX-Windows graphics package, which the company based on its X11 application-programming interface. However, you can scale the package to fit the memory constraints of embedded systems.

You can use Tornado's development tools to access the Tornado for embedded-Internet software packages. The Wind River JVM, for example, includes instrumentation code that eases JVM's use with the WindView software-analysis tool. The packages and tools run under Unix, Windows 95, and Windows NT and are priced separately.

--by Richard A Quinnell

Wind River Systems, Alameda, CA. 1-510-748-4100, fax 1-510-749-2010, www.wrs.com.

Order space-level products off the shelf

A line of off-the-shelf products from Interpoint offers space-level reliability screening and radiation resistance. Traditionally, you'd pay a bundle of NRE charges and endure long leadtimes to obtain Class O, H, or K products. The three respective classes impose increasingly rigorous reliability-screening requirements on products and differ in radiation-hardness specs: O has none, H stipulates 50 kRads, K requires 100 kRads. A variety of reliability reports is available, either free or for a charge, depending on the class of product. Available products include 5 and 15W dc/dc converters and two lowpass EMI filters.

--by Bill Travis

Interpoint Corp, Redmond, WA. 1-206-882-3100, fax 1-206-882-1990, www.interpoint.com.

Get Design Ideas on CD-ROM

Three years' worth of EDN's Design Ideas is available to subscribers and EDN Access registered users on a $29.95 CD-ROM. (The regular price is $39.95.) The disk includes hundreds of hardware and software ideas, schematics, and software listings from 1994 through 1996. To order, call 1-800-366-2665 or 1-617-928-2500. Or, you can e-mail your order to orders@repp.com. Please include your name, address, and phone number, along with the number of CDs you want and $29.95 per CD plus $4 shipping-and-handling charges for the first CD and $1.50 for each additional CD.

--by Fran Granville

Audio not forgotten in the rush to RF

Despite the spurt in wireless-design activity, vendors are not ignoring the basic audio needs of many systems and are providing amplifier ICs with various power levels and features. The TPA0102 stereo amplifier from Texas Instruments provides two 1.5W bridge-tied channels; a 600-mW, single-ended, stereo-line output; and a stereo-input multiplexer. Driving a 4 ohms load, the device offers THD plus noise of less than 0.05%. You can use the 5V device, which comes in a 24-pin TSSOP with an exposed thermal pad for heat-sinking to the pc board, at 3.3V and get 600-mW output per channel. For driving headphones, a control line lets you switch the IC between bridge-tied load mode and single-ended drive. The $2.54 (1000) IC draws 1 µA in shutdown mode.

For multimedia applications, the LM4832 from National Semiconductor includes 250-mW stereo amplifiers (rating into an 8 ohms load at 1% THD), and a two-input microphone preamp stage with separate left and right volume, treble, and bass controls. You establish all settings via an I²C bus, and the 28-pin IC in SOIC and DIP packages can also control an external audio power amp through this bus. The 5V device includes National's 3-D sound circuitry for spatial enhancement, consumes 7 µA in shutdown mode, and costs $2.99 (1000).

For portable designs, National's single-channel LM4864 audio amplifier can drive loads as low as 4 ohms; it can provide as much as 300 mW into an 8 ohms bridged load with 1% THD when using a 5V supply. It operates with 2.7 to 5.5V supplies and consumes 0.7 µA in shutdown mode. The amplifier comes in eight-pin MSOPs, SOPs, and DIP packages and costs less than $1 (1000).

--by Bill Schweber

Texas Instruments Inc, Dallas, TX. 1-800-477-8924, ext 4500, www.ti.com.

National Semiconductor Corp, Santa Clara, CA. 1-408-721-5000, www.national.com.

Clever packaging and local smarts bring hot-swapping to remote I/O

National Instruments is enabling designers of distributed data-acquisition applications to plug in replacement I/O modules without rewiring or reconfiguration. The secret is a combination of clever packaging and current technology. A DIN-rail-mountable FieldPoint system (with prices starting at $665) comprises a network module that communicates with a host computer via an RS-232C or RS-485 interface and one or more 3-kV-isolated I/O modules, each of which mounts on a terminal base. You wire the sensors and actuators to the terminal bases via either spring or screw terminals. You then plug the appropriate I/O modules onto the bases.

Wiring in the bases forms a bus among the modules and carries the I/O-module outputs to the network module. The network module contains the power supply for itself and the adjacent I/O modules, the local intelligence, the configuration memory, and the RS-232C or RS-485 interface. You can plug and unplug I/O modules without removing power. Because the network module knows the I/O-module configuration, a replacement I/O module is properly configured the instant you plug it in. The system currently includes five types of analog and digital I/O modules.

Full-function server software for Windows NT and 95 enables the system to communicate with software packages that conform to the Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) standard. Among these packages are the vendor's LabView, BridgeView, and Lookout.

--by Dan Strassberg

National Instruments, Austin, TX. 1-800-258-7022, fax 1-512- 794-8411, info@natinst.com, www.natinst.com.

8-bit RISC-processor architecture gets real

The first part in Atmel's AVR family, the AT90S1200, has emerged after last year's announcement of the 8-bit RISC CPU architecture (see "Industry's first 8-bit RISC processor debuts," EDN, Sept 12, 1996, pg 21). AVR contains 32 general-purpose registers and an 8-Mbyte, direct address reach for program and data. The CPU uses a 16-bit, fixed-length instruction with a load/store architecture and delivers single-cycle execution--10 to 15 times faster than the 8051.

The 4- to 16-MHz AT90S1200 operates from 2.7 to 6V. Atmel offers AVR Studio, a debugging environment for simulation and real-time emulation. You can get the tool, which contains an absolute assembler, from Atmel's Web site. In addition, IAR Systems (San Francisco) offers a relocatable assembler and an ANSI-compliant C compiler. You can also buy a $49 evaluation board and $2495 in-circuit emulator for the AT90S1200.

The AT90S1200 features 64 bytes of EEPROM and 1 kbyte of flash memory, which you can program through the chip's SPI. The AVR device also features 15 programmable I/O lines, one 8-bit timer/counter, a watchdog timer, an on-chip analog comparator, an internal RC oscillator, and on-chip power-on reset. The device sells for approximately $1.80 (1000). It fits into 20-pin DIPs, SSOPs, and SOIC packages and drops into an 8051 socket.

--by Markus Levy

Atmel Corp, San Jose, CA. 1-408-441-0311, www.atmel.com.

PCI-bus data-acquisition board's DSP µP ups throughput

United Electronic Industries' PowerDaq series PCI data-acquisition boards take full advantage of PCI-bus capabilities. These boards include Motorola's 66-MHz, 24-bit, 56301 DSP µP, which provides the bus interface and manages the board's housekeeping functions. UEI designed the boards as bus masters but incorporated slave capabilities because, in testing PCI motherboards, the company found many motherboards that don't properly support PCI-bus masters. UEI designed the PowerDaq boards to prevent them from flooding the host CPU with interrupts. The boards collect interrupt requests from their several subsystems and generate a single interrupt. This approach reduces the percentage of time the host CPU spends on interrupt service.

The series' initial board, the $1650 PCI-PD-1M-16, includes 16 single-ended analog inputs; a 1.25M-sample/sec, 12-bit ADC; two analog outputs; eight digital inputs; eight digital outputs; and three user-accessible, 16-bit counter/timers. The board always powers up in a known state and has separate trigger circuits for initiating channel scans and A/D conversions. With each board, the vendor ships separate drivers for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well as quick-start and calibration software. In addition, the vendor supports Visual Basic, Visual C++, and the Windows 95 and NT versions of HP VEE (Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, CA) and LabView and LabWindows/CVI (National Instruments, Austin, TX).

--by Dan Strassberg

United Electronic Industries, Watertown, MA. 1-800-829-4632, fax 1-617-924-1441, sales@ueidaq.com, www.ueidaq.com.

Calendar

July 28 to Aug 1

Digital Signal Processing: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementation, Los Angeles, presents real-time and real-world implementation of DSP strategies. Tuition costs $1495. UCLA Extension, Short Course Program, Los Angeles, CA. 1-310-825-3344.

July 28 to Aug 1

Conference of the Brazilian Microelectronics Society, Caxambu, Brazil, emphasizes interaction among materials, processes, de-vices, and circuits. ISHM, Reston, VA. 1-703-758-1060.

Aug 3 to 8

Siggraph '97, Los Angeles, focuses on computer graphics and interactive techniques. The conference includes a technical program; a three-day exhibition; and special venues highlighting art, animation, applications, and interactivity. A creative-applications lab supports hands-on experience with conference-related applications. The conference also offers 12 paper sessions, 16 panels, and 35 courses. Siggraph '97, Chicago, IL. 1-312-321-6830.

Aug 11 to 13

Wireless Communications Conference, Boulder, CO, focuses on technological advances in the commercial wireless industry and features personal communications systems, cellular systems, paging, wireless systems, and LANs. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD. 1-301-975-2776.

Aug 18 to 20

International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design, Monterey, CA, presents advances in low-power systems and components. Low-power design topics include fabrication, technology, circuits, systems, and software. ISLPED 97, Hamden, CT. 1-203-287-9555.

Design spiral-chip inductors without going around in circles

OEA International's Spiral tool lets you design, characterize, and optimize etched, single-layer and multilayer (stacked) spiral inductors on silicon, GaAs, ceramic, multichip modules, and pc boards. Spiral uses OEA's 3-D field-solver with the company's new Cougar circuit simulator. You input either the number of turns needed or an inductance value along with other geometric parameters. Spiral creates the inductor, which you can then optimize for maximum Q.

Spiral outputs a GDS-II layout cell representing the inductor and generates s- and z-parameter models using the field-solver and Cougar simulator. You can plot your design and view s- and z-parameter table outputs using Spiral's 2-D/3-D visual interface. Spiral runs on Unix-based platforms and has a starting price of $40,000.

--by Jim Lipman

OEA International, Santa Clara, CA. 1-408-738-5972, fax 1-408-738-2017.

Interconnect technique provides less-than-100-psec chip-to-chip delays

An interconnect technology from Alpine Microsystems provides multichip speed and bandwidth performance equivalent to that of single-chip circuits. The technique uses a series of silicon-based substrates embedded within a standard surface-mount IC package. Solder-bump patterns on a silicon carrier substrate mirror the bond-pad pattern of the die to interconnect. An automated flip-chip process then bonds the die to the carrier. The process then combines two or more of the intermediate carrier substrates on another silicon substrate, again using solder-ball interconnects. This mother substrate then goes into a standard BGA or QFP. The advantages of the technology are low cost (as compared with multichip modules, for example), testability (Alpine uses a bump-die probe for testing), and leadtimes of approximately six weeks for prototypes.

--by Bill Travis

Alpine Microsystems, Campbell, CA. 1-408-364-8000, fax 1-408-364-8008, www.alpinemicro.com.

IC eases RF up-translation

The MRFIC1813 up-converter from Motorola combines a balanced up-mixer and a transmitting exciter amplifier. You can use the device for outputs of 1.7 to 2.5 GHz, and IF frequencies are 70 to 350 MHz. Motorola designed the GaAs device for low-side injection. It comes in a 16-pin TSSOP, provides 12-dB minimum or 15-dB typical IF-to-RF gain, and requires just ­5-dBm local-oscillator power. Typical output power is 3 dBm; output is 0 dBm at 1-dB gain compression.

Motorola designed all ports of the IC to require minimal off-chip matching circuitry. Power consumption for the 2.7 to 4.5V device is typically 75 mW. The MRFIC1813 costs $1.95 (100,000).

--by Bill Schweber

Motorola Semiconductor, Phoenix, AZ.1-602-413-3593, www.mot.com/sps/general.

Converters push into tinier packages

Not all applications need megasample speed or 14 bit-or-better resolution. By avoiding those constraints, IC vendors can put moderate-speed, moderate-resolution converters into smaller packages for applications such as battery-powered instrumentation, system monitoring, and gain or setting control.

The AD781x family of A/D converters from Analog Devices, for example, comprises two 8-bit and four 10-bit devices. Sampling rates go as high as 350k samples/sec for the AD7810 10-bit device in eight-pin MSOPs, SOPs, and DIP packages selling for $2.45 (1000). The family also includes four- and eight-channel converters. All the devices include an internal track/hold amplifier, operate from 2.7 to 5.5V, and dissipate just a few milliwatts of power.

Also in eight-pin MSOPs as well as SOIC and DIP housings, Burr-Brown's 12-bit ADS7816, ADS7817, and ADS-7822 A/D converters offer various feature combinations, all with low-power operation and serial interfaces. The ADS7816 and ADS7817 sample at 200k samples/sec and include differential input, 2.3-mW dissipation, and 80-dB CMRR. The ADS7817 operates down to input ranges as low as ±100 mV with an external 100-mV reference. The ADS7822 operates at 2 to 5.5V and samples at 75k samples/sec while dissipating 0.54 mW and 0.06 mW at 7.5k samples/sec. Each costs $5.18 (1000).

Maxim has introduced a pair of multichannel, 50k-sample/sec, 8-bit A/D converters that also operates at 2.7 to 5.5V. The $2.70 (1000), eight-channel MAX1110 comes in an SSOP-20 package; the $2.45 (1000), four-channel MAX1111 comes in a QSOP-16 package. Both converters include an internal 2.048V reference and 150-µA current consumption at maximum speed, which drops to 6 µA at 1k sample/sec and to 2 µA in automatic power-down mode. You can configure the inputs for unipolar or bipolar range and for single-ended and differential mode via each converter's serial port, which is compatible with SPI, QSPI, and Microwire formats. Differential mode halves the number of channels.

For level setting and control, the 5V MAX5352 and 3.3V MAX5353 voltage-output D/A converters from Maxim feature 12-bit resolution and double-buffered serial inputs in an eight-pin package that is half the size of an eight-pin SOIC. The devices let you access the inverting input of the output amplifier, so that you can configure outputs for remote sensing, gain, or high-output-current capability. The outputs can swing rail to rail, settling in less than 15 µsec, and the converters require less than 280 µA. They cost $4.20 each (1000); a 10-bit version of the 3.3V device is also available for $2.90.

--by Bill Schweber

Analog Devices Inc, Norwood, MA. 1-617-937-1428, www.analog.com.

Burr-Brown Corp, Tucson, AZ. 1-800-548-6132, www.burr-brown.com.

Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA. 1-800-998-8800, www.maxim-ic.com.

Flash companies take it to court

SanDisk and Samsung are currently in a legal dispute regarding alleged Samsung NAND flash infringement of several SanDisk flash patents (see "Data storage in a flash," pg 65). At press time, cross-licensing negotiations between Samsung and SanDisk had broken down, the International Trade Committee (ITC) had issued its final ruling that Samsung had infringed upon SanDisk technology, and the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) had upheld the validity of these patents. The ITC has therefore blocked NAND flash shipments from Samsung in chip, carrier, or pc-board form into the United States. Samsung is appealing the ITC's ruling to the US Court of Appeals and is also redesigning products around the patents; availability is targeted for year-end.

Less clear is the impact of the ITC's decision on companies that manufacture systems outside the United States containing Samsung NAND flash memory. SanDisk believes that the ITC ruling also blocks shipments of these systems into the United States. Samsung predictably disagrees. The impact on the other major NAND provider, Toshiba (Irvine, CA), is also unknown. If you design or manufacture your product in or ship it to the United States, investigate the status of this dispute before proceeding with a NAND design.

--by Brian Dipert

Samsung Semiconductor, San Jose, CA. 1-408-954-7000, fax 1-408-954-7870, www.samsung.com.

SanDisk Corp, Sunnyvale, CA, 1-408-542-0500, fax 1-408-542-0403, www.sandisk.com.

Tools ease move to HDL-based FPGA design

Higher chip densities are forcing FPGA designers to shift from a traditional schematic-based design approach to designs based on Verilog or VHDL HDLs. Two companies have introduced EDA-tool environments to help you make this transition.

Galileo Extreme from Exemplar Logic lets you enter an FPGA design in Verilog or VHDL and synthesize the design to the gate level for a targeted FPGA family. The tool includes syntax checking for both HDLs. Exemplar benchmarks of Galileo Extreme against a previous version of the tool show an average 15% improvement in FPGA-chip area and performance with as much as a 40% improvement on some designs. An improvement of Galileo Extreme over its predecessor, Galileo 3.25, is Extreme's use of a fully hierarchical design database. According to the company, this capability reduces system-memory requirements by 50% and provides faster runtimes.

Galileo Extreme also supports Xilinx's (Campbell, CA) new M1 place-and-route tools, libraries for Xilinx 4000EX and 4000XL and QuickLogic (Santa Clara, CA) pASIC 1 and 2 families, and RAM inferences for Altera (San Jose, CA) 10K and Actel (Sunnyvale, CA) 3200DX devices. The product also improves delay estimation with technology-specific wire-load tables, includes LPM (Library of Parameterized Modules) parameter passing in Verilog, and maps Lucent Technologies' (Allentown, PA) ORCA devices to look-up tables. Galileo Extremeis available now at starting prices of $7500 for a single-FPGA-vendor version and $10,000 for a multivendor version that includes all supported vendors.

VeriBest's FPGA DeskTop, running on Windows NT, combines VeriBest design tools, three new tools, and an interactive HDL tutorial. You use VeriBest's new tools, FPGA DesignView, HDL Writer, and WaveBench, for both HDL or schematic design entry. After entry, you synthesize the design to logic with the company's FPGA Synthesis tool and then target the synthesized design to a vendor's FPGA library. Supported vendors include Actel, Altera, Lucent, and Xilinx.

FPGA DesignView, an HDL design-environment file and tool manager, helps move design files between tools and automatically launches applications at appropriate times in the design. DesignView covers both schematic- and HDL-design entry. HDL Writer is a context-sensitive text editor for Verilog and VHDL. Using templates and color-coding, the tool aids in learning Verilog and VHDL in design contexts. WaveBench is a Verilog and VHDL graphical-stimulus editor that lets you drag and drop waveform edges to configure stimuli. When you use WaveBench with an HDL simulator, WaveBench lets you create simple waveform stimuli instead of generating a complex testbench for exercising a design. WaveBench outputs either VHDL or Verilog.

FPGA DeskTop comes in three configurations. Prices for FPGA Schematic DeskTop, which targets designers who are considering schematic-based HDL design, start at $11,200. It includes Design Capture for mixed HDL/ schematic entry, a VHDL or Verilog simulator, DesignView, WaveBench, HDL Writer, and the HDL tutorial. Top-Down DeskTop targets designers who already understand or are adopting HDL design. With prices starting at $20,800, the suite has FPGA Schematic DeskTop, VeriBest's FPGA Synthesis tool, and a single-vendor FPGA Optimizer for FPGA device families from that vendor. Graphical DeskTop, with prices starting at $28,800, is for designers who want to use graphical-entry tools for state machines. It includes Top-Down DeskTop and VeriBest's Graphical High-Level Design (VGHLD) tools. VGHLD contains a state-flowchart, state-diagram, and spreadsheet-based state and truth-table editors. VGHLD writes VHDL or Verilog.

--by Jim Lipman

Exemplar Logic, Alameda, CA. 1-800-632-3742, fax 1-510-337-3799, www.exemplar.com.

VeriBest, Boulder, CO. 1-303-581-2300, fax 1-303-581-9972, www.veribest.com.

3-D graphics processor provides top-end realism

Texas Instruments' TVP4020 3-D graphics processor allows you to attain the visual realism of top-end workstations on consumer applications, such as PC games, virtual-reality products, and virtual-WWW browsers. This processor results from a cross-licencing agreement that joins TI's RAMDAC and 3Dlabs' (San Jose, CA) Permedia graphics technologies. Catering to consumer applications, the TVP4020 combines high-performance 3-D processing, 2-D graphics acceleration, and advanced video processing. Packaged in a 272-pin PBGA, the TVP4020 costs $35 (50,000).

The 3-D IC processes as many as 1 million polygons/sec and renders as many as 80 million pixels/sec. The IC also includes a single-pixel divide function for fast perspective correction and an 8-bit colour-texture palette that reduces memory by enabling texture compression.

The IC includes on-chip SVGA functions that enable acceleration of Windows applications. The IC's 3-D execution pipeline can process 2-D features such as texture units for tiled bit-block- line transfers (bit-BLTs), chroma-key test used for transparent bit-BLTs, and bilinear filter for stretch bit-BLTs. The IC's 230-MHz RAMDAC supports resolutions and refresh rates as high as 1600×1200 pixels at 83 Hz.

Video processing enables 1024×768-pixel, MPEG-1 or -2 playback at 30 frames/sec using 24-bit colour. An X-Y scaling and filtering feature enables you to manipulate live video on a full screen or in a window. A colour-space converter reduces CPU and bus loading. The device supports PCI and AGP buses as well as application-programming interfaces, including MS-Direct 3D, Silicon Graphics' OpenGL, and Autodesk's Heidi.

--by Brian Kerridge

Texas Instruments, Paris, France. +33 1 30 70 11 65, www.ti.com.

Hot-swap PCI cards with impunity

Discrete circuits that allow PCI-card hot-swaps usually require as many as 57 parts, including logic gates, comparators, MOSFETs, and passive parts. Harris Semiconductor's HIP1011 power-distribution controller reduces components to 15 and still supports the PCISIG specification 2.1.

The power controller resides on a motherboard; its key feature is the independent control of all the PCI supplies (12, 5, 3.3, and ­12V). The device achieves this control by integrating low-current MOSFETs that can handle both ±12V lines simultaneously rather than sequentially. For example, the 12V line p-type MOSFET has an R_ON of 0.24 ohms and handles 500 mA. The ­12V line n-type MOSFET has an R_ON of 0.7 ohms and handles 100 mA.

When you insert a card into a PCI live backplane, its bypass capacitors draw large transient currents as they charge. And these transients cause other cards to reset and disrupt system operation. The HIP1011 avoids these effects by placing its MOSFETs in the supply-input circuits, immediately latching them off when the chip detects overcurrent or undervoltage as you insert or remove a card. The controller uses a constant current-charge gate drive, which in turn produces a predictable linear MOSFET turn-on or -off. The HIP1011, packaged in a 16-pin narrow SOIC, costs $4.37 (10,000).

--by Brian Kerridge

Harris Semiconductor, Finchampstead, UK. +44 1734 328585, fax +44 1734 328148, www.semi.harris.com.

When 16's too small and 32's too large, 24 will do

Unless you design for the OEM-computer or Internet-access-device market, 24 doesn't seem like a popular binary number. For many computing applications, 16 Mbytes of synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) is inadequate, but 32 Mbytes is just too expensive. A nice memory compromise is 24-Mbyte SDRAM, which Smart Modular Technologies employs in its SM56403-7074N6AF memory module. The company believes that the 24-Mbyte size works well for Network-PC products, for example, which are sealed and, therefore, preclude memory upgrades.

Initial modules operate at 66 MHz, although 83- and 100-MHz versions are due this year. The company has configured the first modules as 3M×64 bits in two banks. The first bank of 2M×64 comprises eight 2M×8-bit SDRAMs. The second bank of 1M×64 uses four 1M×16-bit SDRAM chips. In volume, the modules cost approximately $190.

--by Brian Kerridge

Smart Modular Technologies, Milton Keynes, UK. +44 1908 234030, fax +44 1908 234191, www.smartm.com.

Single chip offers phone-line interface and speakerphone functions

Motorola's MC33215 performs ac- and dc-line termination, two- and four-wire conversion, and line-length AGC and DTMF transmission. The unit contains all the circuitry you need for a multiple-feature electronic speakerphone. The speakerphone part includes a half-duplex controller with signal and noise monitoring, base microphone and loudspeaker amplifiers, and power-supply circuits.

The IC operates at line currents as low as 4 mA, allowing parallel operation with conventional telephones. Packaged in 52-pin TQFPs or 42-pin SDIPs, the MC33215 costs approximately $2 (100,000).

--by Brian Kerridge

Motorola Semiconductors, Tou-louse, France. +33 61 19 90 00, fax +33 61 40 44 99, www.mot.com/.

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