Contents
June 10, 1999
Cover Story
- New mixed-signal tools target systems on chips
Designing analog chips is not easy. Designing mixed-signal chips is really tough. Improved design tools can ease the burden of your mixed-signal system-on-chip designs. - From EDN Europe: Integrated tool sets smooth the path to efficient DSP
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As time-to-market pressures continue to build for teams designing complex DSP-based products, automated design flows will be valuable. There's help-but still no substitute-for the skilled assembly-language programmer.
Design Features
- Free, friendly software uncomplicates power-supply design
Free software from power-products vendors saves you time and effort when you are configuring and characterizing power-supply designs. - Competing standards seek common ground for flat-panel displays
Several technical approaches are vying to become the standard interface between computers and flat-panel displays. While the industry searches for harmony, the approaches are highlighting the challenges of making flat-panel displays plug-compatible with CRTs. - The ins and outs of charge-pump-converter ICs
Charge-pump ICs help produce switching power supplies that are cheap, efficient, simple, and much more"RF-friendly"than supplies that use inductors. Many voltage-converter ICs are available, and choosing the right one is not always as simple as it seems. - Pre-emphasis improves RS-485 communications
Intersymbol interference places the main limitation on the maximum allowable distance for RS-485 communications, but pre-emphasis is extremely effective in reducing this interference.
Leading Edge
- Scopes, logic analyzers team to debug 1-GHz digital systems
- E-service with a smile
- IrDA software, transceiver yield smooth, fast, and easy transfers
- HP improves scopes, adds communications mask-test kit
- DAC's back with jazzy new design tools
- Motorola DSP packs tons of memory
- CMOS op amps meld needed virtues
- TI revs up DSPs for motor control
- PC Card drive hosts 40-Mbyte removable diskette
- CPLDs go upscale
- GMR isolator for digital lines keeps"nasties"away
- Bluetooth, Fast Ethernet succumb to system-on-chip treatment
- Self-timed logic technique cuts noise and power
- Replace multiple passives with custom RF networks
- Hands hold biometric-verification alternative
- CPLDs reach for 50,000-gate densities
- Partition and synthesise designs into multiple FPGAs
- Reprogram your FPGAs via the Web
- Help me spend it?
Design Ideas
- Missing-codes tester checks 16-bit ADC in 7 sec
- Switch-mode supply draws 43-mW standby power
- Circuit rejects ambient light
- V/I converter accommodates grounded load
- Digitally controlled potentiometer sets cutoff frequency
- Precision reference bans precision resistors
- Easy method calculates comparator trip points
- EDN selects 1998 Design Ideas grand-prize winners
How It Works
- Making low-loss optical fiber demands a different approach
Making optical fibers that can support gigabit-per-second data rates over multikilometer distances mandates new thinking about a material that has been available for hundreds of years.
Departments and Columns
- ednmag.comment
Know any good lawyers?
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How high is hi?
- Signal Integrity
Dual transceivers
- Name that widget!
Winners!
- Tech Toys
Who says engineers can't have fun?
