Digital to Analog and Back Again
This week’s Fish Fry is all about those persistent pesky power problems that plague our designs and what we can do to solve them. If you’re a digital guy or gal struggling to get into the analog game, or even if you’re an analog person trying your hand at digital design, this Fish Fry is for you. First, I interview Steve Logan (Xilinx) about how Xilinx has added analog ADCs to their recent development kits and how you can start designing with one. I also chat with Rob Chiacchia (Linear Technology) about the state of the art in digital power management.
The Perils of Performance
Mentor HyperLynx Helps Handle the Hot Spots
Is it just me, or is digital design getting a lot trickier? We were all going along just fine, flipping our little zeroes and ones happily back and forth, and then somebody comes up with the brilliant idea to replace our nice, simple parallel busses with serial IO. OK, so maybe those parallel busses were not quite so simple by that time; it was starting to be nearly impossible to do the board layout so that all those signals arrived at somewhat the same time. To make matters worse, we kept raising the clock frequencies until “somewhat the same time” wasn’t even close to good enough anymore.
That Old Rock and Roll
Universal Audio Engineers Create Old Sounds with New Tools
The 50s and 60s were an amazing time for popular music. Everything felt fresh, everyone wanted to try new things, and – best of all – the people that funded these ventures were willing to take risks and nurture innovation. It was a democracy that held that, if you had the skills and wanted to work hard, you could take a reasonable stab at the music business. It was indeed a business, but, importantly, it was about music, and the people in the business were, by and large, musicians.
Off Script
Springsoft Provides Access to More Data
At times it’s seemed a sotto-voce religious war.
One side says that a clean user interface aids productivity. The other side says that, well, quite frankly, a graphic user interface (GUI) is a toy, not meant for serious work.
One side says that command-line work is the only real way to do things; the other makes the accusation of engineers trying to keep things obscure and difficult as a form of job security.
A Little Extra Power on the Side
With a Little Guy Trying to Exert Some Power of His Own
It was a bit after 5, right around time to go home. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the time when people actually go home in Silicon Valley.
Except this one particular day.
It was Loma Prieta day. The earthquake that interrupted the World Series. I seem to recall finding myself under my desk, trying to grip the carpet to keep from going airborne due to the shaking. Books tumbled from my bookcase onto the chair where I had been sitting seconds before. This one was definitely different.
Minding the Gap
A Look at Wide-Bandgap Materials
Assumptions are always dangerous, but there’s one reasonably safe assumption you can make about our IC-related topics: the underlying material is most likely silicon. Silicon is so dominant that anything else is considered fringe or boutique.
But if you keep your eyes open at technology conferences, the phrase “wide-bandgap materials” is becoming increasingly evident, with two compounds, GaN and SiC, dominating that discussion. These two substances tend to be treated separately and in isolation, whether in conference sessions or articles or papers. Which leaves unanswered the obvious big-picture questions: why two materials? Do they compete with or complement each other? And are there other wide-bandgap materials in the offing? And, at an even more basic level, why are we doing this at all?
