Contents
March 31, 2005
Cover Story
- WiMax wireless broadband: Fixed-flavor questions abound, mobile lurks
Chip vendors begin to deliver enabling products despite skepticism about what—other than a mobile essence—differentiates WiMax from earlier wireless-broadband schemes.
Design Features
- Locomotives pull into the digital age
Century-old diesel-electric technology endures. - Assembly required: using reference-design resources
Reference designs are essential marketing tools for complex silicon products that can reduce a development team's effort to complete a design using a target set of chips.
Leading Edge
- Force-sensing resistor enables designs for the “ring” cycle
- Light converter transforms intensity to digital
- Low-cost USB data-acquisition modules include instrument-panel software
- Devices optimize packet-based networking and VOIP
- Device integration drives down USB cost
- MathWorks spins verification and validation add-on for algorithm-modeling tool
- Protocol analyzer/exerciser handles ASI switched-fabric architecture
- Source/measure device-test instruments get smarter, faster
- DAA helps caller ID accomplish foreign exchange
Tech Trends
- All design is analog—some more so than others
Digital design is becoming analog, as submicron processes require engineers to deal with the parasitic effects that result from the analog behavior of all electrical circuits.
Departments and Columns
- edn.comment
Locomotives: not your father's smoke-belching bucket of bolts anymore
- Signal Integrity
Spread your returns
- Analog Angle
Validate Spice models before use
