Network processing: With fragmentation comes opportunity By Nicholas Cravotta, Technical Editor
As the network-processing market takes a sharp, corrective turn toward reality, more players are entering the fray, proliferating a wider variety of architectures and specialty processors in a brilliant display of innovation-and complexity.
Design Features
Switched fabric: a stitch in time By Warren Webb, Technical Editor
As bandwidth becomes the key system parameter, designers are quietly readying switched-fabric technology to enhance and replace aging shared-bus architectures.
Pumping data at gigabit rates By Joshua Israelsohn, Technical Editor
True, exotic processes still own the highest speed turf, but CMOS kicks sand in the face of the notion that you need to burn a lot of calories to pump data at gigabit rates.
Inside USB 2.0: what the new spec means for developers Jan Axelson, Lakeview Research
Is updating to 2.0 worth it? USB-peripheral designers need to know what changes in the spec mean and how the interface handles the challenge of supporting higher data rates while still allowing low- and full-speed devices on the bus.
20-bit DAC demonstrates the art of digitizing 1 ppm, part 1: exploring
design options By Jim Williams, Linear Technology Corp
For the price of a San Francisco dinner, you can put standards-lab performance on a circuit board. Part 1 of this three-part article chronicles a 1-ppm DAC and its various design options, part 2 in the next issue presents verification techniques, and part 3 discusses the handling of parasitic effects.
ICs turn cost-sensitive consumer products into sophisticated
systems By Dan Strassberg, Senior Technical Editor
For more than two decades, transistors have helped to boost fluorescent-lamp efficiency and life. Now ICs, some containing µP cores, are adding features and sophistication that few users ever dreamed of.
