Search

This section provides information on the finalists of the 2004 innovation competition at the 15th Annual Innovation Awards of EDN periodical held at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco, California on March 7, 2005. while working on her lawn mower, Susanne Paul, a design manager for Silicon Laboratories, mulled over the challenge of overcoming the gate-oxide-breakdown problem in complementary metal oxide semiconductors power amplifiers. Paul implemented a circuit approach rather than a device-physics approach, allowing innovation at the circuit level using standard process technology. Paul discovered a way of distributing the high voltages generated during amplification among multiple devices. Meanwhile, AMCC designed the PRS 5-gigabytes per second full-duplex aggregate bandwidth and PRS 20-gigabytes per second full-duplex aggregate bandwidth packet-routing switches for distributed architectures, which allow the switch fabrics to pair with network processors with or without a dedicated centralized fabric. Moreover, the Webench active-filter design system from National Semiconductor consolidates the tools to design an active filter in one place, allowing designers to take advantage of virtually any available transfer function with just a few clicks on a Web site. The product supports a selection of filter types and users can choose from several filter approximations.

The article reports that Virgin Entertainment Group is upgrading its Multi Protocol Label Switching Wide Area Network (WAN) link at its headquarters in Los Angeles, California, in 2006. The move is aimed at ensuring it had sufficient bandwidth for voice-over Internet protocol calls and the downloading of music and video files by customers of its online service at its digital listening stations. The company is also working to reconfigure the quality of service settings on its routers in conjunction with its WAN upgrade.

This article provides information on the SATALink SiI 3132 PCI-Express incorporated to Serial ATA (SATA) II Host controller from Silicon Image Inc., a company that designs, develops and markets multi-gigabit semiconductor and system solutions for a variety of communications applications demanding high-bandwidth capability headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The Sil 3132 offers full advanced SATA functionality normally limited to server-class systems, including 3 Gb/s SATA data transfer rates. Native Command Queuing, support for port multipliers with Frame Information Structure-based switching and support for ATAPI commands, making it compatible with optical drives such as CD-ROM and DVD+/-RWS. All of this advanced functionality is packed into a small 10x10 mm package. Furthermore, the Sil 3132 offers advanced Redundant Array of Independent Disks capability through Silicon Image's SATARaid software management utility, which comes bundled with the chip. The SiI 3132 also provides added benefits as a port multiplier-aware host when connected to Silicon Image's SteelVine architecture. According to DigiTimes, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ECS together are forecasted to ship more than 102 million motherboards in 2005.

The article highlights a test of interoperability-certification procedures of Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA)-equipped products held at the alliance's plugfest in San Diego, California in December 2005. Each of the eight alliance members at the event connected one of their products to a MoCA network to simultaneously transport three high definition and eight standard definition video systems. According to the alliance, its 270Mbps physical-layer speed yields a net usable 100Mbps of bandwidth at more than 97 percent of real-world homes. Participating companies during the plugfest include Actiontec, Entropic, Linksys, Motorola, Mototech, Panasonic, 2Wire and Westell.

The article introduces the Revolution three-port and five-port Serial ATA storage processing card produced by San Jose, California-based NetCell Corp. This product is said to deliver up to three times the bandwidth of Universal Serial Bus- and FireWire-based networked storage gear. The user does not need drivers when installing to Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Linux operating systems.