Anablog

One of the exciting things that happened yesterday at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association conference in Clearwater Florida is that Sherry Hess, vice president of marketing for AWR announced their Graduate Gift Initiative. To a gasp of the 100 engineering department heads in the room, she explained that AWR would give every EE graduate, undergrad or post-graduate a free copy of AWR’s software tools for microwave and analog design. The tools can also do signal integrity as I explained in my recent article coming out this Thursday. From the press release:

AWR Corporation, the innovation leader in high-frequency EDA, today announced the AWR Graduate Gift Initiative, which will provide qualifie...Read More

I had a great interview with the architects of MontaVista Software's 1-second boot-time real-time Linux. After the interview went to press it occurred to me to ask Alexander Kaliadin a related question. If smart people like him can figure out how to boot a computer in less than a second, is it also possible to turn the computer off in a short time? His answer was that you could possibly just flip the power switch, if the hardware was designed to allow this. His response and elaboration are below.

There is no problem to shutdown the kernel within 250ms or less. However network and file operations might affect this scenario - for example if your stack is waiting for network hands shake to complete with server in another country or you need to dump 8-16-...Read More

Well, I know analog guru Jim Williams was disturbed that he would not be able to get Polaroid film for his oscilloscope camera. Jim is an analog guy, after all, so he does not typically use digital scopes where you can take a screen shot. He does have a big stash of film in his freezer. Now there may be hope for the industrial and medical Polaroid films, there are companies that will keep supplying them,. But consumers and professional photographers have been left out in the cold. So I was delighted to see that a comp any is trying to keep Polaroid film in production. From the press release I received a few days ago:.

The Impossible Project saved the last Polaroid film production plant in The Netherlands in 2008 and was since then re-inventing a new Instant Film for Polaroid Cameras.

My buddy Phil Stittner came to the last analog breakfast with a network analyzer he made from a kit. The kit is based on this nice article by Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Baier, DG8SAQ (pdf), the designer of the circuit. The only problem Phil had was that the oscillator in the analyzer needed very specific transistors in order to work.  Phil tried substituting some he had handy and it would not oscillate. Since there is an RF signal path in this kit they warn people they need to be experienced, which to me means any production tech could whip one out, but if you are a PhD, you better buy the thing pre-assembled. “Doctor, put the soldering iron down and step away from the bench!”

Dave Van Ess, an apps engineer over at Cypress Semiconductor has a nice article about ADC noise over at Electronic Design. Now me, being an analog curmudgeon, I don’t see how you can call “noise” something deterministic like ADC quantization error, but that it what everybody seems to be calling it. Maybe it is like when the digital guys started calling bus-width bandwidth, because lets face it, bandwidth is a pretty cool word. Anyway, Dave brings up an important concept and a critical factor for preparing your signal path error budgets. EDN’s Bonnie Baker wrote about noise here, and ...Read More

I see that GM canceled the Cadillac Converj electric vehicle. More concerning to electric vehicle enthusiasts is that GM also canceled the engine plant that was going to make the internal combustion engine for the Volt and Cruze. We’ll see if the much-vaunted GM Volt is the next casualty. Note how little EV (electric vehicle) hype GM is generating now that the Volt is in the hands of real engineers rather than hype-slinging executives. If GM’s goal is really to get profitable, then they should be dropping the Volt any day now.

By now everybody and their mother must have heard about Bloom Energy and their ceramic fuel cell gizmo. I heard about it last week as I hammered down a few beers, ahh, I mean, as I was doing some interdepartmental team-building with several engineers who work at various bay-area companies. They were a little skeptical, as engineers tend to be. We are the ones that have to implement the marketing fever dreams. That is never as easy as it sounds My pals pointed out the huge costs for the Bloom boxes, how it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a house. They mentioned that the box takes a long time to warm up, so it ...Read More

As a former auto engineer, I feel sorry for Toyota, I really do. To me it seems like their primary error was just believing their stuff has to be superior and can never break. Unfortunately, as cars get more and more complex, horrid problems like these unintended acceleration events are sure to occur. The rocket scientists that designed the Space Shuttle thought they were infallible and hot stuff too, until the ridiculous complexity of the machine caught up to them and the inevitable disasters started occurring. Maybe Toyota did the same kind of oversimplification of analysis that NASA did.

And be...Read More

The ARRL (American radio relay league) Santa Clara Valley Section Convention is March 20 and 21, 2010 in Monterey, California. This is at the old Fort Ord military base. My army buddies used to call it Planet Ord. From the website:

The Santa Clara Valley Section Convention (RadioFest 2010) sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School Amateur Radio Club will be held on March 20th and 21st near Monterey, CA. The event will be held at the General Stillwell Community Center Ord Military Community (old Fort Ord), 4260 Gigling Road, Seaside, CA 93955   The "Ham Cram" is on Saturday and free exams on Sunday.

This year's events will include:

·...Read More

I have four fluorescent light can fixtures in the ceiling of my porch here at the Domicile of the Future. Three of the fixtures are dead. The first problem is that the previous owner wired the fixtures to a motion sensor, so the lights are constantly cycled as people walk past the house. Actually I like that feature, so I guess the real problem is that the previous owner did not realize that compact fluorescents (CFLs) don’t like to be cycled a lot, they have a limited life since there is a sharp spike in the tube that wears out as it repeatedly strikes the starting plasma. OK, fine, so I assume the bulbs are bad, and not the ballasts. So I go to Home Depot and buy what I think are replacement bulbs. They look almost identical, but these common bulbs that you can buy have a plastic protrusion between the pins. But the pin-spacing was the same so...Read More

Apparently I am not the only person that admires signal integrity guru Henry Ott. His great book, Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering just won the 2009 Publishers Association Award for Engineering and Technology for Excellence in Publishing. Henry will be giving a class in San Francisco near the airport on April 28-30 2010. The cost is $1395, or $1245 if you register by 2-26-2010. There is a $100 cancellation fee. The course fee includes course notes, continental breakfast, lunch, morning and afternoon beverage breaks, and a copy of the 872-page book. A summary of the course:

• CABLING Electric and magnetic field coupling, crosstalk. Cable types:

I am a big fan of Henry Ott, who points out we should not even use the term ground plane. He asks where is ground in a satellite? He prefers the term “reference plane”. So when I had lunch with Sherry Hess, the vp of marketing over at AWR, the people that give us Microwave Office, I was happy to hear that one of their top researchers, Dr. John Dunn, has a great slideshow on grounding concepts as applicable to simulators like AWR makes. I told her we would love to have that available and now Dr. Dunn has written a nice white paper on the grounding in simulators (pdf).

We all have had to tack on an imaginary 1 G-ohm resistor in SPICE i...Read More

I was delighted to see a physicist come up with a far-UV light that kills bacteria with much more effectiveness that regular UV lights. Infections in hospitals kill millions every year, so this device is a welcome addition. Hospitals that just enforce basic hand-washing and room hygiene cut those rates in half, and this device will be a good weapon the arsenal to wipe out hospital borne staph also called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) completely.

When my mom was dying, one of the things that made the experience even more painful laws that she caught MRSA in the hospital. Once you have MRSA, you have to be in isola...Read More

Peregrine Semiconductor has just released the PE42440 SP4T (single-pole four-throw) RF switch. They intend these parts for wireless base stations and general RF use. I am really taken by silicon-on-sapphire technology. Firstly, it makes for devices that are radiation hard. Because there is no silicon substrate, there is no place for cosmic and gamma rays to make free holes and electrons as the rays plow through the part. That keeps the devices working to specification in satellites and such. Silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) also has better thermal performance than glass (silicon dioxide) dielectric isolation, Crystal silicon is 10 times better than glass and SOS is 3 times better than glass. I touch on this in ...Read More

I got a press release from the delightful; Kate Reed over at Atom PR about Echelon helping implement the smart grid, where electric and gas meters will be network nodes. Echelon has technology that puts light network traffic on the electrical system inside your building. They built on that foundation to become experts in the smart grid. Now they divide their business between building automation/control and smart meters. Last year I met with Steve Nguyen, Echelon’s director of corporate marketing, who explained how Echelon used distributed intelligence at the nodes to lighten network traffic. For instance, if you have a temperature sensor somewhere in your building, you don’t have that sensor constantly spitting out ...Read More