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As the oil and gas industry concentrates increasingly on drilling long horizontal laterals, the necessity for improvements in rig design becomes more apparent. When operating in areas with considerably less [...]

The forces converging on the telecom and networking businesses have their roots in the changing desires of end users, and changing traffic patterns reflect those desires. For home-computer users, the [...]

One of the responsibilities of board-level designers is to ensure that verification and failure-analysis engineers have adequate access to signals without resorting to drills, bed-of-nails testers, or focused ion beams. [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are many reasons to consider outsourcing all or part of a chip design. Perhaps you are on a board-level-design team, and the correct approach to your new [...]

Super-speed USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0 sounds like a great idea. Just start with widely used, fast, and bulletproof USB 2.0 and graft in the PHY (physical-layer) interface from another [...]

In simpler times, FPGA power consumption was a simpler issue. In the traditional applications of high-capacity FPGAs, such as expensive network routers, telecommunications switching gear, and prototype boards for ASIC [...]

Today, most design managers depend on some sort of verification-coverage metrics to answer three primary questions, according to Mentor Graphics' chief verification scientist, Harry Foster: Where have I been, where [...]

It was a shimmering promise on the horizon: As SOCs (systems on chips) became more complex, we would simply move from RTL (register-transfer level) to the next-higher level of abstraction--what [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The SOC (system-on-chip) began life in the image of the board-level computers that preceded it: as a central processor that a CPU bus connected to local memory and [...]

The almost-mythological fourth generation of wireless service--4G--could be the fountainhead of an entirely new way of thinking about SOC (system-on-chip) architectures. Or it could drive a simple evolution of today's [...]

Wireless links are becoming ubiquitous in electronic systems. At high data rates demanding wireless connections, WiMax and 3G cellular dominate, whereas, at the other extreme, standards such as ZigBee and [...]

It is a well-publicized trend that HDTV (high-definition TV) is sweeping through the next generation of SoC (system-on-chip) platforms. SoCs for set-top boxes, television monitors, disk players, and--in the near [...]

Video is going handheld. Consumer-electronics manufacturers are rushing past handheld DVD players to compete against the Video iPod. Handheld receivers for the emerging DVB (digital-video-broadcast) standards are on everyone's drawing [...]

The easiest lesson to draw from the consumer-electronics market is that integration is everything. Mobile beats portable. Palmtop beats mobile, and shirt pocket trumps palmtop. Even in desktop devices, such [...]

Company crafts multi-user AM/FM/GIS to cover 25,000 mi of lines and facilities along 660-ft corridor Duke Energy Gas Transmission has completed one of the most extensive AM/FM/GIS deployments in the [...]

by Ron Wilson The explosion of interest in CE (carrier Ethernet) seems to be at the front of everyone's mind these days. In case you haven't been following the networking [...]

by Ron Wilson STA (static-timing analysis) was nearly an instant success at timing closure 15 years ago, and nothing much has changed since except for creating partitioning/scheduling algorithms to parallelize [...]

by Ron Wilson Mentor Graphics has continued to expand the reach of its product with its core Catapult C synthesis engine. In December, the company added support for control-logic synthesis [...]

By Ron Wilson Crickets, cicadas, katydids, and some other insects make noise by beating their wings. More significantly, they can change the pitch of their wing beats and, hence, the [...]

By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor The US patent system needs fixing to the point that there are debates over just whose interests we should fix first. But no one seems [...]

By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor The SiGe team wanted to produce an RF-front-end module using the best technology for each component but still remaining cost-competitive with monolithic approaches. Entering the [...]

by Ron Wilson Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have announced a significant advance in the retention time of multiatom quantum-memory devices--from a previous maximum of 32 msec to [...]

By Ron Wilson Engineers and scientists have long had an intense interest in energy-scavenging devices that can extract small amounts of electrical energy from such ambient sources as temperature gradients, [...]

by Ron Wilson As the end of the road draws ever nearer for flash memory, researchers are leaving no stone unturned in their attempts to find an alternative nonvolatile-storage mechanism [...]

by Ron Wilson The advantages of imaging individual atoms in electronic materials are obvious. As you learn more about the subtle impact of small quantities of impurities on a crystal, [...]

by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Providing a reference design for ultra-low-cost handsets to OEMs in Asia means a lot more than sending them a development board and a data sheet. [...]

Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To ISQED 2008 The International Symposium on Quality in Electronic Design, volume 2008, will take place March 17 to 19 in San Jose, CA. [...]

by Ron Wilson The Georgia Institute of Technology and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center have developed a novel approach to the formation of nanoporous copper [...]

Edited by Ron Wilson Looking Ahead To DesignCon 2008 This long-standing electronics-design conference will open in its 2008 incarnation at the Santa Clara, CA, convention center, Feb 4 through 7. [...]

by Ron Wilson AmberWave Systems announced recently that it is entering a joint-research and licensing agreement with the University of California-Santa Barbara for exploration of mesoporous materials. These materials constitute [...]

by Ron Wilson Thermoacoustic devices convert heat directly into intense sound waves with relatively high efficiency-reportedly 40% of Carnot-cycle efficiency. (A Carnot cycle employs the principles of the Carnot Theorem, [...]

by Ron Wilson A new carbon-fiber-enhanced plastic material from NEC Research has the potential to both more evenly spread heat in the enclosures on electronic devices, such as cell phones, [...]

by Ron Wilson Holographic-data storage has been one of the continuing research quests that always seems to have great theoretical merit but even greater implementation problems. In principle, the technology [...]

Edited by Ron Wilson Looking ahead Ron Wilson To the International Electron Devices Meeting Convening in San Francisco on Dec 11 through 13 and arguably the world's foremost conference on [...]

by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor Designers in the consumer market work under enormous pressures. Have these circumstances changed the way they design chips and systems? The demands on consumer-electronics design [...]

By Ron Wilson Scientists can force the oscillation at microwave frequencies of nanoscale sandwiches in which a layer of copper film separates two layers of magnetic film. However, the resulting [...]

by Ron Wilson, Executive Editor The promise of wireless USB seems unbeatable--eliminate all those little, somehow inflexible cables that make a rat's nest of everyone's desktops, and turn where to [...]

by Ron Wilson HyperTransport, the physical-layer interchip-communications standard whose claim to fame has been its use on Advanced Micro Devices ( www.amd.com ) CPU chips, has rolled out its most [...]

With the move to 130-nanometer, and even 90-nm designs, new options in system-level integration are opening up. A system-on-chip a couple of years ago might have been no more than [...]

In applications that range from DSL terminations to network switch fabrics, the quest for integration has led designers to put high-speed serial interfaces onto their system-level chips. Often this is [...]

In many ways, the ability to integrate high-speed serial I/O drivers and receivers onto a system-level IC is a godsend. But more often than not, this particular gift is blessed [...]

Reconfigurable computing is one of those technologies that seems to dwell in never-never land, where pirates are fought (successfully) and treasures are found (without taxes). It always glimmers with promise. [...]

Intellectual-property (IP) reuse has been presented to the system-on-chip design community as one of those things, like two hours of exercise and 18 glasses of water a day, that you [...]

Lack of differentiation has been a deadly problem inherent to system-on-chip-based wireless devices. Interoperability and regulatory requirements constrain the design of terminals and basestations to a quite narrow range of [...]

With integration encompassing not just the logic for a communications chip but also the physical-layer (PHY) analog components, a lot of things get more complicated. It's easy to anticipate the [...]

Choosing the right process is getting to be a difficult step in IC design. That's ironic, because not that long ago the choice of process for a new IC was [...]

Among the applications that still hold a glimmer of promise for some eventual volume sales, small-office, home-office (Soho) networking equipment-in particular, function-specific network appliances-are interesting. Because of the size of [...]