Contents
July 21, 2005
Cover Story
- Thinking inside the box: Buildings get a brain
Stuck in a highly fragmented industry, building-automation designers are formulating new initiatives to provide interoperability, simplify management, conserve energy, provide security, and reduce costs.
Design Features
- A bit-o'-power: digitally controlled power conversion
Ironically, perhaps, the last subsystem to undergo a substantive shift from an analog- to a digital-control architecture is the most universal: the power supply. Beware the hype, however. Digital power control may bring performance benefits to some applications, but until you become familiar with the inner machinations, their sophistication will exact a price in application-development time.
Pulse
- Global Designer: Hong Kong team wins power-supply-design contest
- Global Designer: Multistandard software-defined-radio adds DRM format
- Research Update: IC may become its own cooler
- Research Update: Free NIST software enhances scope timing
- Research Update: Optical switch routes single photons of quantum cryptography
- Single-chip WLAN device supports MIMO
- Energy-metering IC targets range of applications
- US military to adopt mobile base-station technology
- Architecture targets USB applications
- Ethernet takes to industry
- Connector has nonmagnetic appeal
- “Terminator” causes no panic, keeps fast signals from coming back
- IrDA gets faster, grows into new applications
Tech Trends
- Sun sets on IEEE 488, LAN and PC standards vie for its
role
The move from a T&M-industry interface standard to one or more computer-industry standards presages mostly good news for test-system designers.
Departments and Columns
- Tales From The Cube
Watching the currents flow
- edn.comment
Some products fall down on the job—literally!
- Signal Integrity
Big hurl
- Reality Check
Segway press coverage zooms, but sales falter
