And the winner is...
EDN's 14th annual Innovator/Innovation campaign to recognize the best in the electronics industry was particularly sweet this year. Despite the industry's struggles to rebound from economic gloom, a group of engineers and products proved that there are no boundaries when it comes to creative thought and design.
By Joan Lynch, Managing Editor, and Staff -- EDN, April 15, 2004
At a festive banquet at the W Hotel in San Francisco on March 29, EDN proudly announced the winners of the 2003 Innovator/Innovation campaign. In addition to naming the Innovator of the Year and Innovations of the Year in 13 product categories, EDN recognized the Best Contributed Article of 2003, the Best Start-up, and the winner of the Open Circuit Contest. And, to support the efforts of future innovators, EDN and sponsors Altera, Analog Devices, Avnet, Maestro Marketing and PR, National Instruments, and Samsung will donate a $10,000 scholarship to the university of the Innovator of the Year's choice.
You can find photos of the event, along with information on all of this year's finalists, at www.edn.com/innovation. And come back soon to find out how to enter our 15th annual Innovation competition.
INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR
AMD64 design team led byFred Weber, AMD
It remains to be seen who will win the battle of 64-bit processors, but AMD clearly got a huge head start on Intel by staying with an architecture that's compatible with Athlon and Pentium 32-bit processors. Chief technology officer Fred Weber challenged the four-part team to extend the x86 architecture for full application compatibility, increase the cache size and performance, integrate core-logic functions, widen the memory path, and integrate a high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect that came to be known as HyperTransport. The resulting Athlon 64 and Opteron processors can perform transparent and simultaneous 32- and 64-bit multitasking. The design effort yielded compatible products for both the desktop and the server markets that could immediately run 32-bit operating systems and applications and that would minimize the effort of moving to 64 bits. AMD, www.amd.com.
INNOVATIONS OF THE YEAR
ANALOG FUNCTIONS
AD8099 op amp, Analog Devices
Decades of op-amp design used fundamentally the same input structures. Input-architecture variations lead to compromises among distortion, noise, dc precision, power, and speed. But significant performance improvements derived more from fabrication-process innovations than from the rare topological advance. The AD8099's novel input structure improves on this longstanding trade-off with a common-mode linearizing circuit without sacrificing differential-mode performance. Analog Devices, www.analog.com.
APPLICATION-SPECIFIC STANDARD PRODUCTS/SOCs
AR7 ADSL router on chip, Texas Instruments
A shared broadband connection has been a key driver of home networking. Toward that end, Texas Instruments has enabled manufacturers to integrate the router and DSL modem—ultimately reducing the price that consumers pay for gear. The AR7 is a single chip, not a multichip module. The device even integrates a 12V line driver yet is made in pure CMOS. Texas Instruments, www.ti.com.
COMPONENTS
LIS3L02 three-axis low-g accelerometer, STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics' LIS3L02 micromachined accelerometer is a three-axis device that can measure down to 30 µg of acceleration and provides analog and digital output. To achieve this performance, the company developed in-plane and out-of-plane micromechanical structures with epitaxial-growth and grinding processing steps to provide 20-micron-thick structures with low mechanical stress. A high-yield-strength epitaxial polysilicon layer provides further robustness. These developments yield a two-chip device in a 1.8-mm-high, 7×7-mm-footprint package. STMicroelectronics, www.st.com.
DIGITAL ICs
HardCopy Stratix, Altera
The silicon concept behind Altera's HardCopy Stratix allows you to directly compile your design to HardCopy devices. In the past, you would first create an FPGA-housed prototype, then ship the configuration bit stream to Altera for conversion. In effect, this bypass-the-FPGA capability, enabled by latest versions of Altera's Quartus II design software with its HardCopy Stratix-tuned floorplanner and timing models, expands the company beyond its programmable-logic roots and into the structured-ASIC arena. Altera, www.altera.com.
EDA: DESIGN EXPLORATION
Link for ModelSim cosimulation environment, The Mathworks and Mentor Graphics
The Mathworks, in collaboration with Mentor Graphics, has developed a solution that allows designers to concurrently simulate both algorithms and hardware implementations. The integrated cosimulation environment provided by Link for ModelSim significantly narrows the gap between algorithm and hardware implementation by adding either Verilog or VHDL to the simultaneous direct mixed-language-simulation capabilities of Matlab and Simulink. The Mathworks, www.mathworks.com; Mentor Graphics, www.mentor.com.
EDA: PHYSICAL ANALYSIS
Redhawk-SDL Full-chip SoC Dynamic Power Integrity Solution, Apache Design Solutions
RedHawk-SDL provides a vectorless dynamic solution for full-chip verification of transient voltage drop. Driven by static-timing-analysis windows, it uses propagation and switching statistics instead of vectors, improving coverage and decreasing analysis time. Apache Design Solutions, www.apachedesignsolutions.com.
EMBEDDED PRODUCTS
Cornice SE embedded subsystem, Cornice
The first-generation Cornice SE features 1.5 Gbytes of storage, which is roughly equivalent to 30 compact discs of music or two hours of VHS-quality MPEG digital video. The new rotating-magnetic-storage design is rugged enough to withstand a 1m drop onto solid concrete. Samsung, RCA, Rio, iRiver, Creative, and others have introduced portable consumer products based on Cornice's technology. Cornice, 1-303-651-7291, www.corniceco.com.
NETWORK AND COMMUNICATION CHIPS
BCM4317 AirForce One chip, Broadcom
Broadcom is now delivering the first single-chip 802.11b implementation for small portable devices. The AirForce One chip integrates the 2.4-GHz radio, baseband processor, MAC, power amplifier, and other radio components using a mainstream CMOS process. The company claims that a module with the IC and a handful of discrete components is 87% smaller than competing designs and uses 97% less power than other 802.11b modules. Broadcom, www.broadcom.com.
POWER ICs
xPhase scalable power-management chip set, International Rectifier
The xPhase chip set forms a scalable architecture that allows you to add or remove phases of a dc/dc buck converter. The IR3081 control IC contains all of the one-per-converter circuitry, including VID (voltage identification), PWM-ramp oscillator, error amplifier, bias source, and fault detection. The control-and-phase ICs connect through a five-wire bus that communicates the bias, timing, average current, error-amplifier output, and VID voltage. International Rectifier, www.irf.com.
POWER SUPPLIES
B048K120T20 V*I chip BCM, Vicor Corp
The V*I Chip BCM (bus-converter module) from Vicor provides an isolated intermediate bus voltage from a narrow-input-range dc source to power nonisolated point-of-load converters. The BCM uses the new SAC (sine-amplitude-converter) topology, which operates at a switching frequency of 3.5 MHz, an order of magnitude higher than the operating frequency of typical pulse-width-modulated converters as deployed in isolated dc/dc-converter bricks. The high switching frequency enables a BCM to use only 0.85×1.26 in. of board space and attain a high power density of 800W/in.3Vicor Corp, www.vicorpower.com.
PROCESSORS
Athlon 64 microprocessor, AMD
The AMD Athlon 64 processor architecture natively supports both 32- and 64-bit x86-compatible processing. In 64-bit mode, the Athlon 64 processor can support full, transparent, and simultaneous 32- and 64-bit-platform application multitasking. It extends the physical-address space to 1 Tbyte of installed RAM. The 16 64-bit, general-purpose, integer registers quadruple the number of general-purpose registers available to applications and device drivers. The 16 128-bit XMM registers double the register space for current SSE/SSE2 (streaming-SIMD-extensions) implementations. AMD, www.amd.com.
SOFTWARE
TimeMachine Debugger, Green Hills Software
Green Hills Software's TimeMachine debugger enables developers for the first time to step and run applications in reverse at the source-code level and to inspect past variable and register values. This feature enables a developer to backtrack from the manifestation of an application error to identify the root cause of the error. The TimeMachine debugger operates nonintrusively by working with the real-time trace that the Green Hills SuperTrace Probe captures. Green Hills Software, www.ghs.com.
TEST AND MEASUREMENT
LabView 7 Express graphical development environment, National Instruments
The LabView environment for test, measurement, and control applications features 38 Express interactive VIs (virtual instruments) that deliver advanced measurement functions in easy-to-configure dialogue boxes. With Express VIs, engineers can with just a few mouse clicks create applications outside their area of expertise. This software brings graphical programming to new application areas: Engineers can configure FPGAs using LabView without specialized knowledge of hardware-programming languages. National Instruments, www.ni.com.
START-UP OF THE YEAR
Motia
Motia targets building chips that can add smart-antenna technology in a wireless-product design that can double or even quadruple range. Motia's technology essentially makes an existing antenna into a multielement antenna that improves reception by combining the signals received at each antenna element and adjusting the antenna characteristics to optimize performance as the user moves and the environment changes. Motia, www.motia.com.
BEST CONTRIBUTED ARTICLE OF THE YEAR
"The taming of the slew," by Jim Williams, staff scientist, Linear Technology, EDN, Sept 25, 2003
OPEN-CIRCUIT CONTEST WINNER
Harry May, Beamreach Networks
