PIC32 expands connectivity support 11/18/2009

Microchip Technology’s PIC32MX5/6/7-family chips expand the connectivity support of PIC32 processors to cover 10/100-Mbps Ethernet; CAN (controller-area-network) 2.0b; and USB (Universal Serial Bus) host, device, and OTG (On-The-Go) peripherals.

Six-core DSP stresses energy efficiency 11/6/2009

Texas Instruments’ new six-core TMS320C6472 DSP boasts a 3.68W power-use sweet spot when operating all six cores at 500 MHz with 80% usage. The cores support 625- and 700-MHz operation with a trade-off of energy efficiency at the 500-MHz operation point.

Cortex-M3 microcontroller cuts energy consumption 10/29/2009

FPGA-evaluation boards come with design software 10/21/2009

Altium’s new NanoBoard 3000 embedded-system-development platform includes a board with an FPGA chip, an IR (infrared) remote control, and a 12-month license for Altium Designer schematic and FPGA software.

PSoC available on standard 8- and 32-bit architectures 10/2/2009

Cypress Semiconductor’s PSoC (programmable system-on-chip) processors not only enable developers to dynamically reconfigure digital-logic blocks to form custom digital peripherals during runtime, but also support dynamically reconfigurable analog blocks to form custom analog peripherals—also during runtime.

Specify an external reference clock to improve SERDES performance 10/21/2009

Various serial data standards require different clock specifications.

Keep it simple, stupid, and kiss problems goodbye 10/8/2009

Tales From The Cube: When solving a design dilemma, sometimes less is more.

Hands-On Project: Speaking of porting software 8/6/2009

This software-porting hands-on experiment uncovers a potential audio decoder for embedded-system applications, adding audio or speech to the applications' user interfaces.

Choosing between an ARM7 and a Cortex-M3 processor 7/28/2009

The Cortex-M3 offers compelling features over the ARM7, but the ARM7 currently has a larger manufacturer and tools ecosystem.

Designing a multicore + coprocessor security system 7/24/2009

Network and communications processors are moving to heterogeneous processor configurations for efficiency, cost, and best-of-breed flexibility.

Dangerous games 4/9/2009

Budding engineers benefit from physically challenging games.

Voices: Microchip’s Ganesh Moorthy 12/15/2008

Executive discusses support for embedded developers, general-purpose versus application-specific products, trends in embedded-processor integration, and software.

EDN Innovation: Awards season comes to technology 2/6/2008

Engineers rarely receive the same fame as those that toil in some higher profile professions. But I don't know of a job that demands a better combination of technical savvy, theoretical knowledge, and creative thought process.

AMD: Fading fast, nearly fini? 12/14/2007

At the moment, AMD is reeling on a number of fronts due to a number of factors. My prognosis for the troubled chipmaker has worsened.

Development boards speed learning and product-development cycle 12/3/2007

How do you use development boards? Complete our survey on development-board usage, and you'll enter a drawing for a special development prize.

Perform timing for microcontrollers without using timers 1/22/2009

Use the I/O "interrupt-on-change" feature to implement a medium-precision, long-period timer with low additional cost.

Simple microcontroller-temperature measurement uses only a diode and a capacitor 12/5/2008

Discharging a capacitor through the reverse leakage of a PN junction allows you to measure ambient temperature.

Microcontroller detects pulses 7/24/2008

A microcontroller detects output pulses in a device under test.

Hot-swap circuit allows two computers to monitor an RS-232 channel 5/29/2008

A hot-swap serial-interface circuit allows two computers to monitor all the traffic on an RS-232 port.

Tiny microcontroller hosts dual dc/dc-boost converters 5/15/2008

An Atmel AVR microcontroller can serve as the PWM controller for two dc/dc converters that provide high voltages from a two-cell supply.