Today's Feature

Big changes await disk drive industry by Bolaji Ojo, EBN
The hard-disk drive industry is finally coming to terms with the reality that many of its underlying technologies are approaching their performance limits. Starting this year manufacturers are gearing up to debut faster, more cost-effective, less power-hungry serial technologies to replace parallel SCSI and ATA interfaces.

Boards Roll for Embedded PCI-X by Charles J. Murray, EE Times
The quest for higher performance in embedded applications is pushing systems manufacturers to search for a successor to the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group's (PICMG's) venerable 1.0 architecture. Vendors in growing numbers are addressing that need with the rollout of single-board computers based on PICMG's new embedded PCI-X specification.

Philips Unveils USB Bridge Controller Chip by By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
Hoping to take advantage of Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports already widely available in a range of consumer appliances, Royal Philips Electronics (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) is rolling out what the company claims is the industry's first USB bridge controller chip.<

Darpa Takes on Optical Interconnects Challenges
CAN We Talk?
Today's Feature : Archive

Industry News

Dual Intel Processor Board Claims Industry-First Socket 604
Pact Promises Enhanced Board-Level Data-Acq Products
The Promise Of An Integrated CompactPCI PICMG 2.16 Platform
Bluetooth Adapter Targets USB-Enabled Peripherals
Middleware Product Packs DRI Interface
Low-Cost Bluetooth Adapter for USB-Enabled Peripherals
New PC Card Spec Rides Express, USB 2.0
New Group to Define Interfaces for Mobile Processors
Bus Switch Families Offer High-Speed at Lower Voltage
PCI Group Takes Express to Comms
Industry News : Archive

Product Reviews

Serializer and De-Serializer Chips Pack Multiple Channels, Testability by Alex Mendelsohn

Modularity Endows CompactPCI Board With Data-Conversion, DSP by Alex Mendelsohn

Multi-Chip-Module Houses TI DSP, Big FPGA by

EBX-Compatible Industrial PC Board Packs Hardware Security
Product Reviews : Archive

Today's Feature

RapidIO Gains Chip Support, Legitimacy
By David Lammers, EE Times.The infrastructure needed to bring the RapidIO interconnect to the networking market is coming together, squelching questions about whether the chip-to-chip technology has lost momentum to competitors HyperTransport and the Intel-spearheaded Advanced Switching derivative of PCI Express. At Motorola Inc.'s Smart Network Developer Forum (SNDF) Motorola officials unveiled working silicon for the company's RapidIO-enabled PowerQuicc III communications processor. Other members of the RapidIO Trade Association demonstrated prototype bridge and switch chips, development software and logic analyzers that support the parallel and serial versions of the high-speed interconnect specification.

Faraday Primes USB 2.0 Cores for Mature Process Technology
By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times.When it comes to spinning out new intellectual property cores for SoCs, Faraday Technology Corp. is eager to be first out of the gate. But the company doesn't necessarily want to rely on the latest manufacturing technology for the job. Recently, the company qualified six USB 2.0 cores for 0.18- and 0.25-micron technology provided by foundry partner UMC. The company promises to deliver six more cores using two versions of 0.13-micron process technology, but not until the second half of the year.

Instrumentation I/O Enters a New Age With USB and Local Area Networking
The IEEE-488 bus, the standard interface for programmable instrument control, is now being challenged with the advent of two options-Universal Serial Bus and Ethernet-based local area networking. Bertram S. Kolts of Aglilent Technologies examines the trade-offs for each, and consider the ascendancy of USB and LANs for test and measurement.

Rambus Touts Redwood Parallel Bus
By Rick Merritt, EE Times. Rambus Inc. shows parallel buses still have plenty of headroom despite an industry rallying around various serial interface flags when it formally rolls out its Redwood logic interface technology. Redwood is differential physical-layer technology for running parallel chip-to-chip connections up to 6.4 GHz over 15 inches of a four-layer pc board.

USB On-the-Go Making Gains
By Tim Sullivan. With wireless connectivity waiting in the wings, a supplement to the USB standard called USB on-the-go has begun to gather momentum as a way to connect mobile devices on a point-to-point basis, without a PC intermediary. This is especially true in the cellular phone market, where Irvine, California-based Transdimension, maker of a USB on-the-go chip, announced a licensing agreement with Motorola in February. The announcement followed a similar agreement made late last year with Qualcomm. In the PDA market, Sony will be using a USB on-the-go product, the ISP1362 from Royal Phillips Electronics, in its Cliý handheld devices. Other companies working on USB On The Go technologies include ARC, Hewlett Packard, and Cypress Semiconductors.

Transmeta Tells Public that TM8000 CPU has Graphics Bus
By Peter Clarke. Struggling processor maker Transmeta Corp., told the public today that its latest microprocessor, the TM8000, has three main bus connections including a graphics port, and is able to execute eight instructions per clock cycle. The company is now disclosing to others that the buses are: a 400-MHz clock frequency Hypertransport bus; a 200-MHz clock frequency DDR-400 double data rate memory interface; and an AGP-4X graphics interface.

Standard will give Broadband Connectivity to Mobile Users
By Nicolas Mokhoff. The IEEE 802 standards committee said it will create an air-interface to deliver wireless services to mobile users traveling at speeds up to 250 kilometers/hour (155 mph) at rates comparable to current broadband connections, such as cable or DSL.

Nucleus RTOS Integrates with USB Package
Accelerated Technology, the embedded systems division of Mentor Graphics, and MCCI have integrated the Nucleus real-time operating system and protocol stacks from Mentor Graphics with MCCI's USB Data Pump, a firmware package for multi-function USB peripherals such as keyboards, joysticks, and printers.

MediaQ Chips will Support NEC's Mobile Display Interface
By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times.NEC Electronics Corp. has developed a mobile version of the CMADS serial interface for high-resolution panel displays, and MediaQ Inc. said it will support the interface in its forthcoming LCD controllers.

Direct Digital Pix-to-Print Format Proposed
By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times. Printing pictures from a digital camera without having to use a PC could become a reality if six camera and printer manufacturers have their way. They have proposed an industry standard, tentatively called DPS, to enable direct-wired connection between printers and digital still cameras for direct printing without the use of PCs. Canon Inc., Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard, Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., Seiko Epson Corp. and Sony Corp. all are promoting adoption of DPS, which stands not for one specific idea but instead has several meanings, including direct-print service, digital photo system and digital imaging protocol for print service.

QLogic Sails in Fibre Channel
By Crista Souza, EE Times When he became chief executive of QLogic Corp. in 1995, H.K. Desai decided to steer the I/O components supplier away from its bread-and-butter SCSI technology into an emerging area known as Fibre Channel. Twenty-nine profitable quarters later--and a 30th under way--it looks like Desai had the right idea.

Sonics Provides Peripheral Backplane as Bus Alternative
By Michael Santarini, EE Times. System-on-chip silicon-backplane intellectual-property vendor Sonics Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has released a piece of IP that connects peripheral cores to Sonics' SiliconBackplane or proprietary buses.

Philips, Toshiba Grab Spotlight at Bluetooth Confab
By Robert Keenan, EE Times. As Bluetooth developers gather in San Jose, Calif. they'll be greeted by two new product offerings from Toshiba America Electronics Components and Philips Semiconductors. In separate announcements today, Philips will unveil an upgraded RF/baseband module and new codec for Bluetooth designs while Toshiba will send an IC to market that combines Bluetooth RF and baseband functions.

Common Physical Layer Issues Underlie New I/O Standards
By Kevin Donnelly, Vice President, Network Communications Division, Rambus Inc.Los Altos, Calif. The challenge before the industry is to sort through the various emerging I/O standards. To a large extent, the potential performance and cost of a system are determined at the physical layer of the interface. Thus, system architects must understand the tradeoffs between various parallel and serial interconnects. Parallel buses incur minimal latency. At the physical interface of the parallel bus, data is instantly available on each clock edge for load-store applications. The data is available to the control functions inside the processor without going through serialization conversions or decoding.

Wireless USB Chip Aims for Gaming, Interface Apps
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. will stake out turf in wireless human-interface devices and gaming consoles with the announcement this week of the CY694X WirelessUSB chip. With a target price of less than $3.50 and operating in the 2.45-GHz band, the chip is going up against more-established technologies such as Bluetooth and 27/433/900-MHz devices for wireless keyboard and mouse applications.

Know Where Your Data Goes Before You Make USB Go Fast
By Steve Kolokowsky, Principal Software Engineer and Steven Larky, Design Engineering Director, Cypress Semiconductor, San Jose, Calif. USB provides peripherals with both power and data interfaces. This means that customers only have to plug in one connector to power most peripherals, reducing the forest of cables behind most PCs. This free external power source reduces the BOM cost for most peripherals, since they can ship external peripherals without having to provide a separate power supply. USB is hot pluggable, so new peripherals can be added to the bus at any time.

Cypress Chief Advocates Customer-Supplier Collaboration
Semiconductor and systems vendors can both climb the food chain and develop higher-margin products if they collaborate on chip designs, Cypress Semiconductor Corp. founder T.J. Rodgers said in a keynote speech at the Communications Design Conference.

Interconnect Standards Tie Embedded Networks Together
by Bruce Rosenkrantz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Motorola Computer Group, Tempe, Ariz., Chairman PICMG 2.20 Subcommittee. For more than a decade, Ethernet has been the computer interconnect of choice. It is used to connect computer servers to client's applications or users.

A Look at Standard Interfaces for Carrier-Grade Applications/Platforms
by Jeff Hirschl, Motorola Computer Group Representative, Service Availability Forum, Tempe, Ariz. In regard to embedded systems for networking and telecom, the term carrier grade availability refers to high probability that a system service, such as a database or telecommunications services gateway, will be operational when required by a client.

VXS Offers Switched Serial Fabric Path
by Jeffrey M. Harris, Director, Research and System Architecture, Motorola Computer Group, Tempe, Ariz. Bused embedded compute platforms based on VMEbus and CompactPCI have served the industry well and have built up extensive ecosystems of complementary and competing products.

I/O Buffer Timing Ensures Board Signal Integrity
by Rob Hinz, Principal Engineer, SiQual Inc., Tualatin, Ore. As the speed of modern high-performance buses increases to 400 MHz and beyond, signal integrity concerns have a large and increasing effect on timing closure.

Serial RapidIO Spec Released to All
The RapidIO Trade Association has released full details of its serial chip- and board-level interconnect specification. Combined with the parallel specification completed last year, full availability of Serial RapidIO allows designers to standardize on a single interconnect technology.

Intel Drops Plans for Inifiniband Silicon
Intel Corp. has abandoned plans to provide Infiniband silicon and will instead rely on third-party host control adapters that will be tied to future Intel server chip sets using the I/O standard.

USB 2.0 Disk Drives -- Technical Challenges to Ease of Use
Mass storage applications, including hard-disk drives, CD-RW drives, DVD drives, and flash cards are ideal applications for USB 2.0. The half-gigabit speed of the new 2.0 standard removes any speed bottleneck at the USB interface. Copying files from an internal drive to a USB drive is actually faster than copying between two internal drives sharing a UDMA interface.

Association comes out fighting for FireWire
Eager to make its high-speed digital interface the backbone of tomorrow's home networks, the 1394 Trade Association announced several initiatives at a meeting in Barcelona, Spain to hasten the interface's adoption and settle its longstanding name-recognition problems.

Interfacing the User
Good software engineers don't always make good interface designers. Sometimes they trust the user too much.

Todays Feature Archives

News

Tundra Pays $10 million for IBM's PCI-X Bus Bridge Product Line
Motorola licenses USB for its iA App Processors
Card Serves Intensive-I/O Applications in Harsh Environments
Cypress, Motorola Add USB-On-The-Go Silicon
Bluetooth Interconnect to HID Standard
Trio Work to Boost InfiniBand in Embedded
FPGA Vendors Position for Serial I/O Battle
Cisco Exec Says Standards Can Bust I/O Bottleneck
Competing interconnects all claim gains at comms OEMs
Interface solution ready for DDR FCRAM
Innovativeýs USB2.0 cores available to eSilicon users
Cypress delivers USB driver for VxWorks
PCI Express may alter PC interconnect landscape
SCSI terminator touts 5 percent accuracy
HyperTransport layers on extensions for comms equipment
Standard Microsystems Acquires Gain Technology
RJ45/Dual USB Connector Module With Integrated Magnetics
IrDA Software Module For SoC-based Microcontroller
Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Scanner Solution
Jungo/Cypress Collaborate on EZ-USB Development Solutions

Product Reviews

Fusion of Bluetooth and FireWire May Revolutionize More than Car Radios
Industry's First Complete Multimedia IDB-1394 and Bluetooth Technologies is introduced for Automotive Market

Bluetooth Embedded Stacks for Headset and Cellular Applications
Alcatel's Bluetooth Chip, the MTC-60180, and TTPCom's embedded software stacks combine to provide a complete Bluetooth reference design for headset and cellular applications. With two Mbits of flash memory and an on-chip ARM7 processor, the MTC-60180 can store all software to run a headset or cellular phone application in the embedded memory of the Bluetooth baseband.