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ANALOG BIT BOMB

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı Whatıs a nV Between Friends? ı All Greek To Me ı Bank Heist ı More For Less ı Sources and PDF

In the age-old battle against bloat, the hardware wizards seem to be holding their own. I think this is one explanation for the slowdown in PC sales. For many years, hardware had trouble keeping up with the corpulence of software, forcing users onto a PC-upgrade path just to keep up.

But now there are so many MIPS and megs that even programmers who never met a feature they didnıt like are hard-pressed to soak them up. Indeed, Iım probably not alone in admitting that even my three-year-old PC has so much horsepower I canıt recall exactly whatıs under the hood.

Letıs see, Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information dutifully reports that Iım getting by with a mere Pentium II at 300 MHz. I suppose I should feel a bit wimpy what with all the gigahertz buzz Iıve been hearing, but the fact is, my PC keeps up with my typing just fine. The only time I ever notice a processing bottleneck is when Iım running engineering software (Xilinx Foundation place and route comes to mind), but I donıt do that often enough to feel compelled to make an upgrade.

I thought I had 32 MB of RAM, but it says I have 64 MB. That makes me feel better. Of course, because my PC supposedly has virtual memory, I suppose Iıll never see an actual "Out of Memory" message. At least, Iıve never noticed my disk having any VM swapping convulsions.

Speaking of disk, SysInfo says I still have about half of my 8-GB space free. I probably only use about 1 GB of stuff (mainly Word, Explorer, and Outlook) on a daily basis. However, writing for Circuit Cellar does involve picking up a lot of clutter such as demo tool suites and oh-so-many VIPs (Very Important (at-one-time) PDFs). Maybe there will come a day when Iıll have to do some housecleaning or be more choosy about the stuff I download, but until then, the more the merrier.

Weıre sitting pretty on the desktop, but what about the real world? Well, it looks like the embedded hardware wizards are doing a number, too. For instance, there was a time when 8- or 10 bits of resolution for an ADC was considered upscale. Nowadays, thatıs practically standard equipment on even the lowliest MCU.

Next came 12-bit ADCs and then, fueled by digital audio, 16-, 18-, and 20-bit ADCs. Surely thatıs enough to handle most blue-collar data acquisition tasks, right?

NEXT

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