News & New Products
PIC32 expands connectivity support
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.
Power-converter IC targets dimmable LEDs, needs no optoisolator
The large installed base of dimmable-lighting switches dictates that most new lighting technologies, including LED lights, should support dimming, and the myriad disparate specifications for dimming switches requires these lights to meet a wide range of characteristics.
Avnet releases Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA evaluation and development kits
The Avnet Electronics Marketing operating group of Avnet Inc has announced the Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA evaluation kit and Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development kit. Both kits support the new FMC (FPGA-mezzanine-card)-expansion standard, which enables the addition of add-on modules and customization when working with FPGAs.
Team hardens SiGe circuits
Manufacturers once aimed certain process technologies at radiation-hardened designs. CMOS, for example, started out that way, when RCA (www.rca.com) developed its silicon-on-sapphire process. However, the overwhelming success of bulk-silicon CMOS processes has driven most of the alternatives into niches, forcing up their cost to the point that only the best-funded programs can use an alternativ...
Digital photomultipliers challenge vacuum-tube photomultipliers
Despite massive improvements in solid-state light sensors in recent years, the detection of extremely low light levels has remained stubbornly resistant to the incursion of solid-state devices. The problems have been how to deal with the excessive dark count once you integrate the photodiodes into a circuit and how to reduce the cost of the specialized processes that the diodes require.
1G-sample/sec, 12-bit ADC works in base stations and instrumentation
Targeting applications in wireless-communications, defense, and test-and-measurement equipment, Texas Instruments recently announced the 12-bit, 1G-sample/sec ADS5400 ADC with 2.1-GHz input bandwidth.
Quad power-converter-control chip uses PMBus.
Maxim’s new MAX16064 monitoring-and-control chip supervises four analog switching power converters.
Online power-supply-design tool evaluates 48 billion designs
National Semiconductor has made significant improvements to its free Webench online-design tool, which operates with most popular Web browsers.
Six-core DSP stresses energy efficiency
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.
16-bit, dual-channel ADCs span 20M to 80M samples/sec
Analog Devices’ new AD9269 family of 20M-, 40M-, 65M-, and 80M-sample/sec pipeline ADCs takes 16-bit samples.
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