Texas Instruments online tech day June 29, 2010

I mentioned Texas Instruments’ tech days in a previous blog during the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference. Now TI is putting on a virtual tech day on their website. Analog and digital designers can attend virtual live and on-demand training sessions and chat with TI applications people. There are live sessions that will cover both power supply design and analog signal chain design. From a note sent to me by Texas good ol’ boy Steven Chandler, the power topics are:

Integrated PoL solutions in portable applications - Pedro Artal at 10 a.m.

Today’s low-power and portable processors can be easily powered by TI’s Point of Load (PoL) solutions. Learn more about available ref designs for TI OMAP and other popular processors like Freescale and Samsung. The latest offering gives the unique opportunity to integrate a complete solution in one single IC, from chargers to high-speed USB 2.0 PHY and audio-codecs. In order to extend battery-lifetime, learn also about advanced voltage scaling schemes like Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Smart Reflex.

Total Power Solutions for Embedded Processing - George Lakkas at 11 a.m.

In applications from industrial PCs, to factory and home automation, to In-Vehicle Infotainment and Smart Signs to Battlefield Reactive Skins and Wearable PCs to Tele-Medicine and Renewable Energy Embedded Computers are at the heart of processing and control often taking up an area no larger than 2.5 square inches. Whether you’re using TI’s OMAP 35xx or Intel’s Atom or Core i7 TI has the complete Power Solutions for your system design. In this session an overview of these solutions will be presented, and Intel’s Atom, and Core i7 power requirements, TI’s design support tools, and reference designs, including TI NexFETs, will be presented in more detail.

Battery charging, gauging and protection - Jon Beall at 1 p.m.

As different battery technologies like Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) and Super Capacitor are becoming more popular, TI continues to be the leader in Battery Management solutions.  Come hear how TI can provide solutions in these new spaces including for JEITA.  An overview of Battery Charging, Gas Gauging and Protection solutions for single- or multi-cell battery applications, including for Li-Ion batteries, will be covered in this session

TI LED Lighting Power Solutions overview - Peter Di Maso at 2 p.m.

This training will present an overview of the LED general light solutions available at TI. The solutions will be for Residential, Commercial, Outdoor and Infrastructure Lighting solutions. Both AC-DC and DC-DC solutions in the forms of Reference Designs, EVMs and products will be discussed. Solutions from both Analog and Embedded Processing will be presented.

Power Design with SwitcherPro^TM and TINA-TI - Michael Krasnicki at 3 p.m.

In this session you will learn to generate dc-to-dc power supplies in minutes with SwitcherPro and simulate them with TINA-TI. SwitcherPro allows you to: select TI parts and real world components, analyze designs for efficiency/stability/size and modify designs to meet your needs. TINA-TI allows you to simulate the transient start-up, steady state, and shutdown characteristics, noise effects, line/load regulation, non-ideal component variation, and stability of your power supply.

Analog Signal Chain Design topics.The Best Products You’ve Never Heard Of - Dwight Byrd at 10 a.m.

As Texas Instruments (TI) continually adds to its ever-expanding portfolio, more groundbreaking products are created in areas once unheard of for TI. We will highlight in more technical detail a few of our latest and greatest releases in the following product areas:  ESD/EMI Protection Devices, I2C products, Voltage Level Translators, Signal Switches, Temperature Sensors, Digital Potentiometers, Load switches, Clocks, Current Shunts and others.

FilterPro3: Designing Active Filters - Thomas Kuehl at 11 a.m.

Active filters are commonly applied in ADC anti-aliasing and DAC anti-imaging applications and directly in the analog signal path to condition signals. FilterPro has been in use for two decades and is a favorite tool for filter synthesis. As time has passed FilterPro has been updated to include additional responses and capabilities; however, these changes were add-ons to the original program that limited their usefulness. Now, FilterPro has been completely rebuilt from the ground up featuring a new math engine and a new easy-to-use user interface. This session will look at FilterPro 3’s new features and capabilities using practical filter examples.

Sensors and the Analog Interface - Thomas Kuehl at 1 p.m.

In this presentation we will discuss the way to monitor many different physical phenomena, such as temperature, air flow, humidity, and power. We will discuss numerous sensor characteristics and the various styles of sensor signal conditioning that you can implement in your systems. Throughout this presentation, the output of every sensor circuit will be suitable for a conversion to a digital signal. You will leave this session fully armed to tackle your on-board or remote sensor challenges.

Deciphering Electrical Characteristics in an Op Amp Datasheet - Tim Green at 2 p.m.

The Operational Amplifier (Op Amp) is often the key analog gain block in acquiring and scaling real world signals in any data acquisition system. To predict system accuracy when using op amps it is important to understand the op amp data sheet and how individual specifications affect both the DC and AC transfer accuracy through the op amp.  Both DC and AC limitations will be discussed in detail. With this knowledge any engineer can design with op amps right the first time.

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In addition to these analog topics, there are a ton of presentations about some newfangled thing called a microprocessor, probably never amount to much, but us analog folks might want to check out those sessions too.