Antennas: critical links in the wireless signal chain By Bill Schweber, Technical Editor
A communications chain is no stronger than its weakest link. The right antennas can strengthen the chain by yielding better signal coverage, increased S/N ratio, reduced bit error rate, and lower power consumption-all at very low cost.
Design Features
Powerline communication: wireless technology By Dan Strassberg, Senior Technical Editor
Using ac power lines to transmit data eliminates the cost of installing special wiring between distributed system elements. Still, powerline communication doesn
3-D audio: above and behind you or moving low left to right? By Maury Wright, Technical Editor
Signal-processing wizards can now position sound sources anywhere in a 3-D space using two speakers or a pair of headphones. Target applications range from entertainment to simulation to biomedical.
Capacitor amplifier reduces ripple without dc loss Martin Kanner, KEMCO, Power Controls Division
Filtering out power-supply ripple usually requires large capacitors. However, an active circuit can boost the effectiveness of small capacitors as ripple filters: The trick is to avoid introducing dc loss.
DCT scaling enables universal MPEG decoder Ram Prabhakar, Cirrus Logic
In the rapidly evolving multimedia technology, a need exists for higher resolution pictures. Image scaling can meet that need, but traditional methods can
An event scheduler for control applications KV Ramakrishnan, DRDO
Event schedulers provide multiple relative and absolute timer services for real-time system applications. They are a valuable part of many computer control systems.
Ping-Pong scheme uses semaphores to pass dual-port-memory
privilege Oyvind Teig, Autronica AS
Numerous schemes for passing data between processors and dual-port memory are possible. However, a Ping-Pong scheme uses just three semaphores, uses no state information inside the dual-port memory, and does not depend on time.
