Electronic Components

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Fundamentals of Metamaterials for High-Power RF Applications

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the physics and applications of metamaterials. Briefly, metamaterials consist of a periodic array of subwavelength structures that...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

VPX: The State of the Ecosystem

You can never have too much bandwidth. High-speed processing and growing amounts of data to be communicated require generous bandwidth from the board level to the I/O. VPX, with a backplane connector system...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Thin Cavity Cooling of Electronic Circuitry

Anovel tested technology for cooling electronic circuitry is also useful in many other industries. The method is called “Thin Cavity Fluidic Heat Exchanger”(TCFHE). Technology details can be...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Embedded Video Requirements Drive New Mezzanine Card Format

Sophisticated graphics have hit the embedded systems world and are increasingly demanded by military, aerospace, industrial, and medical applications. The problem, of course, is...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Using High-Level Language to Implement Floating-Point Calculations on FPGAs

The scientific community is interested in using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for scientific computations because they can be targeted for specific...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Managing Security in FPGA-Based Embedded Systems

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) combine the programmability of processors with the performance of custom hardware. As they become more common in critical embedded systems, new...

Products: Electronics & Computers

32-Bit Microcontrollers

Microchip Technology (Chandler, AZ) has announced low-pincount, 32-bit PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs) that provide 61 DMIPS of performance in packages 5 × 5 mm. The PIC32 “MX1” and “MX2” MCUs feature dedicated...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Data Review Tool

The PeerReview Complete™ tool from SmartBear Software (Beverly, MA) allows engineers to share, review, and annotate schematics, 2D drawings, diagrams, images, HTML, and other digital content. PeerReview Complete features...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Evaluation Boards

Bourns (Riverside, CA) offers two evaluation boards for RS-485-port interfaces. The boards use Bourns® TBU® High-Speed Protectors (HSPs), GDTs, TVS diodes, and MOV products. The Bourns RS-485EVALBOARD1 includes two...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Membrane Switches

APEM Components (Haverhill, MA) has announced a range of customized, ergonomic, low-power membrane switches. The switches can be made with either non-tactile or tactile feedback through sound and light indication. The...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Designing High-Speed, Rugged Data Recorders

High-speed recorders represent a major share of electronic instrumentation found in commercial, industrial, scientific research, government, and defense applications. Each system captures specific...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Improving Software Reliability in Satellite and Spacecraft Applications

In the space industry, much of the effort to refine system engineering processes has been done by hand using tools as divergent as Microsoft PowerPoint to IBM Rational...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Prognostic Health Management for Avionics System Power Supplies

Electronic systems such as electronic controls, onboard computers, communications, navigation, and radar perform many critical functions onboard military and commercial...

Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition

Energy-Scalable Protocols for Battery Operated Micro Sensor Networks

Networks of microsensors can greatly improve environment monitoring for many civil and military applications. Multiple sensors provide fault tolerance and can provide...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Wide-Field Imaging System and Rapid Direction of Optical Zoom

A breadboard system has been developed for demonstrating nonmechanical zoom using flexible thin films. The project consists of three major task areas: material characterization,...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Rad-Hard FPGAs

The rad-hard and rad-tolerant reprogrammable Virtex®- 5QV FPGA from Xilinx (San Jose, CA) supports specified Total Ionizing Dose (TID) and characterized Single-Event Effects (SEE). The space-grade field programmable gate...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Graphics Processor

AMD (Sunnyvale, CA) has introduced the AMD Radeon™ E6460 discrete graphics processor. With support for up to four simultaneous displays, the E6460 GPU enables an immersive experience with desktop-level 3D graphics and...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Choosing a Capacitor for Use as a Switch-Mode Power Supply Filter

Input filter caps need to be able to supply a quick burst of energy and to suppress noise generated in the switch circuit. Important considerations for the input filter cap...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Event-Driven Processor Programming

Almost since computers were invented, interrupts have been a common programming method to deal with real-time tasks. An interrupt causes a processor to stop the running task, and to execute an interrupt...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Extensible Processing Platforms: Giving Designers the Best of Both Worlds

Creating a new field programmable gate array is no small feat. FPGA vendors spend tens-of-thousands of man-hours simply researching markets to determine the feature...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Encryption Processor

Enova Technology Corp. (San Jose, CA) has announced its ninth-generation X-Wall DX processor, a real-time hardware encryption device. The processor encrypts all USB mass storage class (MSC) devices at USB 2.0 wire speed...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Sensor Signal Conditioner

The ZSSC3008 signal conditioner integrated circuit (IC) from ZMD AG (Dresden, Germany) features enhanced onboard diagnostics and second-order linearity correction. The calibrated ZSSC3008 and a specific sensor are...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Timing Design & Verification Tool Suite

Symtavision (Braunschweig, Germany) has launched SymTA/S 2.4, a major new version of its tools suite for system-level timing design and timing verification. SymTA/S2.4 incorporates a wealth of new and...

Products: Electronics & Computers

Power Supplies

XP Power (Sunnyvale, CA) has announced two additions to its AC-DC power supplies: an encapsulated singleoutput ECE series, and multiple output models of the existing ECL product line.

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Graphics Performance vs. Power Consumption in Embedded Systems Design

The rapid evolution of technology has given embedded developers more options than ever before in designing embedded graphics systems. The consumer electronics market, most...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

From Reference Board to Rugged Military SBC

Intel processor reference designs are developed by Intel to assist engineers in the design of Intel processor-based products. The less a design deviates from the reference design, the easier the...

Articles: Electronics & Computers

Prototyping with Multi-Layer Boards

As electronic components continue to move increasingly into surface- mount packages exclusively, prototype manufacturing firms are seeing a shift in the fabrication and assembly work needed to implement...