The Best of SemiApps

The Ultimate Resource for Building Next-Generation Systems

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. Each month we bring you our best on-line postings (www.semiapps.com/thismonth). Our choices, as presented here, are based on what other engineering readers like you looked at most during the previous few weeks.

Readers Choice: The best new application-specific ICs

Among the most popular devices viewed this past month are National Semiconductor’s newest Simple Switcher synchronous regulators, which could reach a wide variety applications. The two new buck regulators from National’s PowerWise Energy-Efficient product family feature input ranges up to 42 V. The highly integrated 2.5-A LM3102 and the 750-mA LM3103 are optimized for powering digital ICsin industrial and telecom applications.

Another popular application-specific IC at the site is the Texas Instruments’ TMS570 symmetrical dual-core microcontroller. The MCU is said to be the first automotive processor solution to support a certification according to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61508 SIL3 standard, which is the highest level of safety designated for automotive applications.

Co-developed with Robert Bosch GmbH, the TMS570 MCU will be implemented in next-generation braking, steering, and chassis control applications. This MCU platform uses two identical ARM Limited Cortex R4 cores combined with an initial 2 Mbytes of on-chip flash memory. Targeted applications include chassis control, braking/electronic vehicle stability, and steering, with higher and lower memory and performance variations planned.

As vehicles become more complex and integrate more features, safety standardization is becoming increasingly important among automakers and OEMs. According to TI, the TMS570 device integrates the Cortex R4 cores in an innovative design that enables failure detection and response times required by the IEC 61508 standard. Software development for the dual-core TMS570 MCU becomes less complex by eliminating a dedicated checker MCU algorithm and communication overhead between the main controller and the checker MCU thus reducing development time and cost.

Engineering blogs of the month

In our most popular blog of the month, pulling in close to 1,200 page views, Tensilica’s Steve Leibson discusses the future of conventional digital signal processors. While he acknowledges that all media processing, ranging from voice to music to still images to video, now use the conventional DSP-core-based chips, he believes that the new generation of systems-on-chip (SoCs) will require configurable signal-processing ICs.

Among the points that he makes is that general-purpose DSPs lack the hardware multipliers needed for fast DSP execution because multipliers consume a large number of gates. There are configurable processor cores, according to Leibson, that have optional MAC units, allowing SoC design teams to include MAC function units in a more general-purpose processor core if the target application requires it.

Another attention-grabbing blog comes from Roger Taylor, a field applications engineer with SMSC’s Automotive Infotainment Systems Group. In his blog, “Networking Increases Functionality in the Car,” Taylor talks about the challenges facing automotive manufacturers regarding the integration of semiconductor–based networking functionality into cars.

“To accommodate multimedia systems in a car, North American designers are now faced with the challenge of integrating additional functionality into the head-unit. This expansion of head-unit functionality causes designers’ integration efforts to become more complicated and more expensive. In order to meet this challenge, some functionality needs to be moved out of the head unit and placed elsewhere in the car,” according to Taylor.

Design Classics Library: Application notes of note and more

Among the interesting application notes posted on the site comes from ON Semiconductor. Called EMI/ESD Protection Solutions for the CAN Bus, the app note delves into the challenges facing CAN system designers in meeting the stringent electromagnetic Interference (EMI) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) standards.

Marty Gold

Find out more on what visitors to SemiApps.com looked at most at www.SemiApps.com/thismonth.