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SemiApps allows electronic design engineers to easily and quickly find product vendors who provide chipsets, application-focused ICs, customizable or programmable platforms, and specialized components for particular applications. New and interesting blogs from industry experts are featured on the site. (www.semiapps.com).

Engineering blogs of the month

Among our most popular blogs this month is from Quantum Parametrics co-founder Richard Mourn. He discusses the move of the IEEE-1394 (FireWire) audio-video standard into a wide range of industrial applications. He sees the popular spec for consumer electronics applications becoming an excellent choice for non-traditional multimedia applications. To make his point, Richard describes VersaPHY, a 100% compatible extension to IEEE-1394, which he says has been designed to allow many basic applications to connect to 1394 without the need for device software.

With the network established, users can get the maximum benefit by connecting devices like security and temperature sensors, doorbells, and lighting controls, all of which can now be easily be connected to 1394 with VersaPHY. The result: reduced wiring costs, along with the ability to provide information and control to the entire audio and/or video network where the devices reside, according to Mourn. Check out his blog for more details.

Bruce Swanson, technical marketing engineer for the Design-For-Test division at Mentor Graphics, offers some insights into what is going on in the realm of chip testing as the device geometries continue to get smaller. Of interest to most chip designers is Swanson’s comments on chip defects. “As the device geometries get smaller, new types of defects appear or became more prevalent. For example, at the 130-nm node more timing related defects show up. A timing defect might be caused by a partially formed via or other anomaly in the physical implementation of the IC,” he says. Check out his blog for more of his thoughts on the topic.

In his blog, David Bourner, field applications engineer at Micrel, writes what he calls a “Novice’s Guide for Bringing Applications to Market.” Thinking specifically about an RF wireless application, Bourner tells designers the big problem is modeling typical operating environments. “Trial and error techniques for gathering data that refer to a specific application are very useful; however the effort involved in setting up test environs tends to make these expensive and limited statistically speaking as they are difficult to assess as typical environments as opposed to being at either the easy or the most difficult extreme.” His blog should be interesting reading for any RF designer working on wireless projects these days.

“The trend in industrial electronics is to utilize standard interconnect technologies to simplify system integration and leverage the economies of scale, common in PCs and servers,” says Steve Moore, senior product marketing manager at PLX Technology. In addition to doubling performance, the latest PCI Express Gen 2 switches are rich in features that simplify layout and design of systems’ I/O interconnect, according to Moore. For example, a new feature called Read Pacing reduces endpoint “starvation” associated with congestion in the root complex, thanks to intelligent bandwidth allocation. For more on the new version, check out Steve’s blog.

The Wideband/Narrowband controversy is the topic of Brent Lorenz, the IP Phone Product Manager Communications Infrastructure and Voice Business at Texas Instruments in his interesting blog. For end users of VoIP services, the advantage of wideband codecs over narrowband codecs seems straightforward; wideband codecs deliver better voice quality. Wideband voice codecs also offer double the sample rate, providing an effective pass-band of 50 to 7,000 Hz. In standard narrowband VoIP calls, the voice signal samples at 8,000 Hz.

Readers Choice: The best new application-specific ICs

With more countries announcing frameworks for digital radio by the month, the new unified multiregion digital radio receiver module from Frontier Silicon reaches the market in time for OEMs to offer significant economies of scale, enhanced functionality and rationalized international distribution for new and existing audio products. Frontier’s new module was among the popular new products posted at the site last month.

The radio receiver module works with all existing Band 3 and L-Band digital radio standards for Europe and Asia. The receiver addresses the market need for a solution that supports all Eureka-147 based standards, including DAB and DAB+ and DMB-Audio.

Marty Gold

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