November 2005[Cover Feature] Turning Hot Ideas Into Cool Designs
Thanks to growing component counts, falling board space, and increasing current requirements, effective thermal management has become one of the key challenges facing designers of distributed power architectures in applications ranging from telecommunications base stations to industrial control systems. In particular, a key goal for the designer is to ensure high-efficiency power conversion while achieving a balanced temperature across the PCB. The advent of intermediate bus...
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Carl Blake
, et al.
August 11, 2005
[Web Exclusive] Blue Whale Surfaces With Chip Size Wafer-Scale Packaging For Handheld SoCs
Members of the Blue Whale Consortium, a project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the Fifth Framework Programme of the EC, have announced in Munich the successful completion of its mission to develop high-performance, cost-effective chip size wafer-scale packaging for System-on-Chips (SoC) for handheld devices...
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Paul Whytock
Power Design Europe May 2004[Direct Feature] SoI Smartens Motor Management
Consumers want their domestic appliances to be cheap to run, quiet, vibration free and to have all the latest features and controls. When it comes to motor control these customer demands are more likely to met by the implementation of inverter-based designs. This growing demand for inverter controls makes it even more important to simplify the relatively complex design processes, to reduce time to market and per-unit cost. Designers have several choices, including discrete MOSFETs...
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Josef Abels
June 2005[Upfront] RF Transistor Milestone
Freescale Semiconductor, supplier of high-power radio-frequency (RF) power transistors for 2.5G and 3G wireless base-station amplifiers, has shipped more than 10 million high-power, high-frequency RF power transistors in plastic packages. Freescale's TO Series RF power plastic-packaging technology provides an economic solution for RF applications such as cellular base-station amplifiers that support GSM, EDGE, CDMA, and W-CDMA...
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Paul Whytock
June 2004[Upfront] Backplane Investment
HARTING Integrated Solutions has expanded its backplane facility in Northampton. Investment in the production area includes a RoBAT robotic backplane tester and a second HARTING CPM2001/S semi-automatic press-in machine to add to the existing semi-automatic and fully automatic units. These new units join surface-mount, pin-in-hole intrusive reflow and wave-soldering machines and four Terotest Lynx backplane testers. All this equipment is housed in a static-safe environment....
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Paul Whytock
June 2004[Upfront] Board Appointments
Concurrent Technologies has added the PP 312/01x to its range of CompactPCI boards. The board has the low power 1.8GHz Intel Pentium M processor 745 (formerly codenamed Dothan) that increases the L2 cache size from 1 to 2 Mbytes and also provides an improved performance to power dissipation ratio. It supports up to 2Gbytes DDR ECC SDRAM. In addition to two PMC sites with front and rear I/O, the PP 312/01x supports dual Gigabit Ethernet, PICMG 2.16 (packet switching backplane), PICMG 2.9...
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Paul Whytock
June 2004[Upfront] SPI Design Takes An Integrated Approach
Communications IC company Integrated Device Technology (IDT) has expanded its portfolio of flow-control management (FCM) products with a family of packet-exchange devices. The new family includes the IDT88P8344, which the company claims is the industry's first system packet interface (SPI) exchange product that integrates switching, aggregation and rate adaptation of four lower rate SPI-3 interfaces to the higher rate SPI-4 interface in VPN firewall cards, Ethernet transport and...
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Paul Whytock
July/August 2004[Cover Feature] Testing Times—Clearing The Validation Hurdles
Motorola's MVME6100 embodies the complete collection of technologies in the first wave of the VME Renaissance, namely PCI-X onboard interconnects, PCI-X mezzanine sites and the very fast 2eSST protocol across the backplane. All of this is how it should be, but there is a 'but'. Having a product with such a large number of new technologies imposes special challenges at the test and validation stage of the development cycle. By far the most challenging new technology on...
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Sally Wolfe
July/August 2004[News Feature] Chip Express
A fast turnaround of prototypes at minimal cost is often a limiting step in the tight schedule for launching new electronic products. In the validation phase of new chip designs, a rapid evaluation of the performance of chips is often needed to check the functionality of the device as a packaged component. However, for the small numbers of devices to be evaluated, the costs, effort and lead times to tool up for production of a new package are often prohibitive. MCE-Tewkesbury is offering its...
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Paul Whytock
July/August 2004[Direct Feature] Volunteering A Long-Term View
Mass-market PC motherboards have traditionally come with a caution for embedded applications because long-term availability of that particular board may not be guaranteed. Some manufacturers like ITOX and Evalue offer 'build-level controlled' boards in the popular formats – ATX and Flex ATX, Mini ITX and LPX . These premium priced boards come with a guarantee of support. But there is a new alternative that offers protection from the short-term vagaries of the volume...
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Mike Caddy
July/August 2004[Direct Feature] Taking The Liability Out Of Reliability
Increasing use of COTS components and subsystems has allowed designers of high-reliability (hi-rel) applications to benefit from the short lead-times, extensive choice, rapid product evolution and lower cost of commercial electronic technologies where the demands of the application and environment will allow. By exploiting these opportunities, designers of space, military and civil aviation applications can configure systems for hi-rel applications under the functionality, performance cost...
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Bryan Rogers
September 2004[Upfront] RadiSys Expands Endura Line
RadiSys has developed a half-size PCI card based on the Intel815E, which can be used in small backplane-based systems or as a standalone controller card without a backplane. In either case, the EPC-2327 card offers OEMs a choice of entry-level or mid-range performance, since it can be configured with Intel Pentium III and Intel...
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Paul Whytock
October 26, 2004[Upfront] Big On Efficiency But Small On Size Claim For Capacitors
AVX has launched the 0402 TACmicrochip series tantalum chip capacitors which it claims is the smallest tantalum device and also offers the highest volumetric efficiency, being capable of delivering 0.47 to 10_F. Key to the capacitance rating of the TACmicrochip capacitors is the construction of these devices which borrows from semiconductor processing. Traditional moulded tantalum devices are based on a leadframe which result in proportionally larger space waste as the size of...
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Paul Whytock
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