Embedded system engineering magazine 2005.06

Editorial

Editor:

Dick Selwood

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Martin Whitbread

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E D A

P U B L I C A T I O N S

Embedded System Engineering

June 2005

Editorial

Engineering the future	04
Jack Kilby, engineer.

News

Industry	06
Check for a lead-free update, new market research and other industry news.
Chips	08

Programmable clock generators, tiny op-amps and LED controllers are among this months chips.

Tools

10

Another clutch of reference designs plus tools for graphical programming and FPGA field reconfiguration are this month’s highlights.

Boards

12

New board products include EMC filters, a new board architecture and small fanless SBCs.

Show preview

ESS 2005 14

The highlight of the embedded calendar, ESS will be at Birmingham on October 19th and 20th.

Standards

C is dead

16

As well as trying to certify programmers, our standard man pronounces a death sentence.

Buyer’s Guide

Digital signal processors

17

A roundup of DSP devices, FPGAs and IP cores.

Features

Digital signal processors

25

●Why use an RTOS on DSPs?

●A DSP-free design for VOIP.

●The need for high-level graphical systems design.

In-depth

Multimedia moves ahead

32

New products for the multi-media market.

Feature

Backplanes

36

Moving backplane architecture away from the traditional bus.

Next Issue: Batteries everywhere, in features and our buyers guide, plus tools for battery charging, monitoring and control.

</Contents>

ESE Magazine June 05

03

</Editorial>

ESE Magazine June 05

Editorial comment:

Engineering the future

<Written by> Dick Selwood </W>

WE RARELY WRITE about people in ESE, concentrating instead on the technology that drives the embedded engineering industry. However, just occasionally, people do come on stage. And this is

one of those occasions.

Just as this issue was going to the printers, we heard of the death of Jack Kilby, the man who built the first integrated circuit. It would be unfair to call him, as many seem to be doing, the inventor of the IC: Geoffrey Dummer, at the Royal Radar

The first integrated circuit was an engineering solution to a specific problem, exploiting newly available technology

Establishment in Malvern, proposed in 1952, only four years after Bell Labs announced the transistor, that a electronic components could be connected within a solid block of material and with no connecting wires, but he failed to make prototypes work. Bob Noyce, who later went on to found Intel, developed a working circuit independently at Fairchild, although a little later than Kilby, and Fairchild also developed the planar silicon technology that made volume manufacturing of ICs possible.

However, it was Jack Kilby who, in a hot Dallas summer, created the design of the Cro-Magnon IC, the root of the whole industry. And this prototype (which he later said he would have made more attractive if he realised how often people would reproduce the photograph) was the stimulus to push forward the IC industry, and the development of much of what makes the 21st Century in advanced countries.

Kilby was an engineer. The first integrated circuit was an

engineering solution to a specific problem, exploiting newly available technology. As an engineer, he went on to play important roles in designing the handheld electronic calculator and the thermal printer, again by creating a solution to a problem by exploiting or extending technology. And as an engineer he recognised the work of others, acknowledging that the work of Noyce was of equal importance to his.

So, we are back to technology. ESE, Embedded System Engineering, with engineering in the title, aims to give its readership, (that’s you – the engineers probably skimming this before getting into the more interesting material) information on new technologies that will help you solve the problems that you are set daily.

Engineers don’t normally get a lot of praise, however Kilby received the Nobel Prize for physics, the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology from the US government, and the first international Charles Stark Draper Prize from the US National Academy of Engineering.

Dummer was also an engineer. Before his 1952 paper, he had been working in the hot-house of war time radar development, where, amongst other things, he was credited with developing the now classic circular sweep of the radar display, linked to the rotating radar aerials. He later worked on more general IC development. He is also the author of books on electronics and reliability, both practical and historical, some of which are still in print. He received the USA Medal of Freedom and was awarded MBE, which somehow doesn’t have the same relevance as the National Medal of Technology.

But to return to today: We will continue to ignore the individual, and concentrate on the technology, and instead of a picture of Kilby we are running one of the first implementation of an IC – all three components of it. <Ends>

04

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</News - Industry>

ESE Magazine June 05

Industry

TI is 75

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS is now 75. Founded to provide technology for oil field exploration, the company claims the world’s first commercial silicon transistors, in 1952. Six years later, it was in TI’s labs that Jack Kilby made the first working integrated circuit. Since then the company has been at the heart of the electronics industry.

www.ti.com/75years

Bluetooth and UWB combine expertise

THE BLUETOOTH SIG has announced it will work with UWB developers to combine the strengths of the two technologies. The ultimate goal of the agreement is for the groups to work towards an architecture that allows devices to take advantage of UWB data rates while maintaining backward compatibly with Bluetooth devices.

www.bluetooth.org

MultiMediaCard Association

THE MULTIMEDIACARD Association (MMCA) has signed a cooperation agreement with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). The agreement between the two organizations aims at enabling technical collaboration in order to design secure removable media based on OMA DRM (digital rights management). Also the Mu-Card Alliance has agreed to join the MMCA. The former MuCard Alliance members will create a technical subcommittee under the MMCA umbrella to define the next generation I/O device interface standard based on the MMC specification.

www.mmca.org

UK's biggest innovation prize

CSR, the Cambridge-based wireless silicon company, has won this year's Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for its single chip BlueCore family. A five-strong team of engineers received a tax-free prize of £50,000.

BlueCore features in over 47 per cent of all Bluetooth devices shipped and over 60 per cent of all qualified Bluetooth enabled products and modules listed on the Bluetooth website.

www.raeng.org.uk

www.csr.com

Lead-free update	metallurgy was found to significantly improve
	the solder fatigue life.
With RoSH now a year away, there is a flow
		www.avx.com
of announcements from companies. Recent
		www.goalsemi.com
ones include:
		www.harting.com
		www.imec.be
		www.innovasic.com
		www.national.com/quality/green

Goal’s VERSA microcontroller families of drop-in replacements for industry standard MCUs are now lead free.

Innovasic has released RoHS-compliant versions of its replacements for the AMD Am186/Am188 family of 16-Bit and 8-Bit Embedded Microcontrollers.

HARTING has introduced lead-free versions of all its electronics connector families, incorporating optimised surface finishes for solder, crimp, wire-wrap, IDC and press-fit products.

Nat Semi says that all of the company's integrated circuits (ICs) will be sold in lead-free packages by the end of June 2006. In addition to eliminating lead, National has also significantly reduced bromine and antimony-based flameretardants from its packaging processes.

AVX is using a patented tantalum polymer technology to produce capacitors that will withstand 3 x 260degC reflow. The TCJ devices are available in A, B and T case sizes for use with cell phones, PDAs, cameras and other handheld digital equipment. W and Y case styles are also available.

IMEC has been studying lead-free solder materials and has reported progress in understanding the thermomechanical and electromigration behaviour of various Pb-free alloys for flip-chip and chip-sized package (CSP)/ball-grid array (BGA) applications. In fine-pitch applications, Co as an alternative to Cu for under-bump

Market research

MP3 rips into car audio

IMS RESEARCH'S Automotive Electronics Group forecasts a continuing trend towards incar CD players that play back compressed music files. MP3 is currently the main compression standard but WMA and WAV are also common.

Among the advantages identified by IMS of incar MP3 are the ability to store six times more tracks than on a conventional CD so there is less need for a CD autochanger; users can construct their own music selections before 'ripping' them to CD; and they can label tracks electronically so that information is shown on the head unit's display.

www.imsresearch.com

Wi-Fi units up 9%

DESPITE plummeting ASPs from fierce vendor competition, worldwide wireless LAN equipment revenue rose 20% to $767.6 million between 4Q04 and 1Q05, and 12.2 million units were shipped, the highest quarterly volume to date, according to Infonetics Research. www.infonetics.com

DSL

THERE WERE over 10 million new DSL subscribers worldwide in the first quarter of 2005, according to the DSL Forum. DSL reached a global total of 107 million by 31 March 2005, with an estimated 115 million subscribers worldwide by early June 2005. In terms of market penetration, eight countries have now passed the DSL Forum’s first stage target for a global broadband DSL mass-market (20% of all phone lines).

www.dslforum.org

New research centre in Belfast

A NEW £40 million world class research centre has opened in Belfast. Set up by Queen’s University, Belfast, the Institute for Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) is based at the Northern Ireland Science Park in Titanic Quarter – once the centre of the world’s shipbuilding industry.

At present, the Institute accommodates five teams whose interests cover areas such as broadband wireless communications,

electronic data security, video and image processing, telecommunications software and antenna design for mobile communications.

TDK - the Japanese electronics company - has located a six person R&D unit in the new building, which also houses the International Centre for System-on-Chip and Advanced Microwireless (SoCaM).

www.ecit.qub.ac.uk

06

RTO S

P r o t o t y p i n g

Development Tools

U M L S u i t e

At Accelerated Technology, we provide everything you need to quickly and

easily develop, debug and deploy your embedded device. Our embedded products take you from start to finish with a full suite of Nucleus software including modeling software, prototyping tools, real-time operating system (RTOS), middleware and development tools.

Nucleus BridgePoint software is a sophisticated graphical design tool for embedded systems. Implementing xtUML technology,

Nucleus BridgePoint will allow you to build complete embedded systems directly from a high-level design. With xtUML technology, Nucleus BridgePoint is the easiest and most efficient way to create your device.

Our comprehensive suite of development tools includes a compiler, an

embedded development environment and a multitasking debugger in which you can build, compile and debug your applications quickly and easily. With a complete tool set as well as a prototyping and modeling environment, Nucleus provides everything necessary to develop, debug and deploy your device.

We offer the most comprehensive prototyping suite, with features and functionality that are unmatched in the industry.

Our Nucleus SIM and Nucleus SIMdx software will allow you to develop your ideas into products and get them to market faster, at a lower cost and with higher quality than ever before.You can begin your software projects the day you receive our Nucleus prototyping software without waiting for hardware availability.

Our complete line of source code, royalty-free Nucleus RTOS products includes APIs for C++, micro-ITRON, OSEK and POSIX kernels. All APIs are based on

the robust, reliable Nucleus PLUS kernel, the foundation of all the Nucleus family of products. The Nucleus RTOS has been optimized and supports hundreds of different embedded CPU and development tool combinations.

M i d d l e w a r e	We provide a full suite of Nucleus Middleware products for
	your particular needs. A TCP/IP networking protocol stack,

including IPv6 support and 802.11b or wireless Ethernet support, along with a graphics package, file management software, USB support and Web-enabling software are just a few of the products available.

For a FREE download of Nucleus visit our website:

AcceleratedTechnology.com/bits

Nucleus. Embedded made easy.

Call [phone] or email [e-mail] for more information

©2005 Mentor Graphics Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Mentor Graphics, Accelerated Technology, Nucleus is a registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

</News - Chips>

ESE Magazine June 05

Chips

SATA bridge chips for external storage

OXFORD Semiconductor’s new range of SATA disk interfacing solutions, the ‘92X’ product family, has five new SATA bridge chips, supporting interface

standards including USB2.0, FireWire400, FireWire800 and External SATA.

The chips are designed to allow drive manufacturers to produce external storage products with multiple interfaces and share a common hardware and software platform. They will also offer dual integrated SATA ports and hardware accelerated RAID functionality, including striping, mirroring and spanning. ARM7 processor based, the top-of-the range SATA bridge chips will include transparent data encryption as a standard feature.

www.oxsemi.com

1.7-micron pixel CMOS sensor

MICRON TECHNOLOGY has demonstrated a 1.7-micron (µm) pixel image sensor. The 1.7µm pixel sensor incorporates DigitalClarity technology, for low light performance, colour fidelity, dynamic range, high temperature performance and high frame rates.

www.micron.com

Z8 Encore! extended

ZILOG has extended the Encore! family with the Z8F0823 series of 8KB Flash devices, designed for applications such as power supply, sensor interfacing, user input in set top boxes, and battery charging, as well as small and large home appliances.

www.zilog.com/z8encore

Your pull-out and keep Buyer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing is after page 16

For a more detailed look at these stories please visit

www.esemagazine.co.uk

Programming 18 LEDs

Dialog has launched a new universal LED controller which provides programmability of up to 18 LEDs for the control of lightshows, backlights and signal LEDs in cellular handsets, handheld games, and other portable devices requiring varying light sequences.

Op amps in SOT-23

Microchip’s single-supply, rail-to-rail input/output, low-power op amps are now available in 5-pin SOT-23 packages, operating over a variety of bandwidths ranging from 10kHz to 10MHz.

They are pin-compatible, providing a migration path to select the bandwidth versus supply current. Rail-to-rail inputs/outputs increase the dynamic range and maximise overall performance.

The range also includes an extended temperature range of -40 to +125 degrees Celsius, a low operating voltage (down to 1.4 volts), and a chipselect pin, to reduce power consumption when not in use.

The Microchip FilterLab Active Filter Software Design tool and SPICE simulation models are available at no cost.

www.microchip.com

The new DA9026 IC allows the control of sequences of LED patterns including combined RGB LEDs, with programmable variables such as pattern, repetition rate and intensity of each LED –entirely within the device without dedicated processing power. It is for LED management in applications such as clamshell handsets, lightshows, backlights (keypad and LCD) and signal LEDs, meeting the growing trend for the display or lights to flash in appropriate sequences to ringtones, music or different callers for example.

It can control up to 18 single colour LEDs or six RGB LEDs – or any combination of single and RGB. It can also store and replay (from on-chip memory) 15 light sequences with programmable start and end points, without the need for external components and controlled using a simple 2- wire interface to upload sequence and command data. A comprehensive PC-based development tool allows handset manufacturers to create and program the control code required to generate these sequences. A product demo is available at

www.vegaschip.net

Programmable clock generators

IDT’s new family of clock generators, 5V9885PFGI and 5V9885NLGI is EEPROMbased with a multi phase-locked loop (PLL) architecture. It includes an IEEE 1149.1a compliant JTAG interface for both programming and boundary scan.

The three-PLL architecture includes ultra-high resolution prescalers, multipliers and output dividers with VCO ranges up to 1GHz to enable nearly any combination of clock scaling ratios from a single input frequency. Two of the internal PLLs include selectable spread-spectrum modulators with fully programmable characteristics such as spread frequency and ratio. An I2C compatible interface is available as an alternative to JTAG.

A device programming kit for prototyping and lab testing, and an evaluation board are available.

www.idt.com

Low-power mil-temperature FPGAs

QUICKLOGIC has military-temperature versions of the Eclipse II FPGA. In plastic-pack- ages they are for critical military and aerospace applications including aircraft navigation and flight controls, data recorders, weapons systems and military communications equipment.

Eclipse II products provide the low power, non-volatility, and security required by rugged military applications. Quiescent cur-

rent is as low as 70 microamps at 125 degrees C. Densities range from 47k to 320k system gates. Devices incorporate embedded dual-port SRAM and support a wide range of I/O standards to enable several board-level components to be integrated into a single chip. Packaging choice includes BGA, Micro BGA, TQFP and PQFP.

www.quicklogic.com

08

The Complete Electronics Design System

Schematic &

PCB Layout

Powerful & flexible schematic capture.

Auto-component placement and rip-up/retry PCB routing.

Polygonal gridless ground planes.

Libraries of over 8000 schematic and 1000 PCB parts.

Bill of materials, DRC reports and much more.

Mixed Mode SPICE Circuit Simulation

Berkeley SPICE3F5 simulator with custom extensions for true mixed mode and interactive simulation.

6 virtual instruments and 14 graph based analysis types.

6000 models including TTL, CMOS and PLD digital parts.

Fully compatible with manufacturers’ SPICE models.

Virtual System Modelling

New Features

in Version 6.8

Interactive Design Rule Check.

Mitring / Unmitring.

Enhanced track editing.

Struct/Array expansion.

ELF/DWARF file loader.

Expanded model libraries.

Call Now for Upgrade Pricing

Proteus VSM - Co-simulation and debugging for popular Micro-controllers

Supports PIC, AVR, 8051, ARM7 and BASIC STAMP micro-controllers.

Co-simulate target firmware with your hardware design.

Includes interactive peripheral models for LED and LCD displays, switches, keypads, virtual terminal and much, much more.

Compatible with popular compilers and assemblers from Microchip, Crownhill, IAR, Keil, and others.

NEW

ARM/LPC2000

MODELS FOR

PROTEUS VSM

NOW AVAILABLE

	Tel: [phone]
E l e c t r o n i c s	Fax: [phone]	www.labcenter.co.uk
	Contact us for
53-55 Main Street, Grassington. BD23 5AA	Free Demo CD	[e-mail]

<News - Tools>

ESE Magazine June 05

Tools

Co-simulation for

ARM/LPC2000

LABCENTER has added the ARM7 based LPC2000 family to the range of microcontrollers supported by their Proteus VSM software. Proteus VSM for LPC2000 provides full software debugging facilities for any compiler capable of generating ELF/DWARF2 debugging data and there is direct integration with IDEs such as Keil uVision 3 and IAR Systems Embedded Workbench.

Users can now simulate an LPC2000 device along with external peripherals such as displays and keypads, and also general electronics such as signal processing or power control circuitry. Firmware code running on the target device can be single stepped and debugged as it interacts with the rest of the system.

www.labcenter.co.uk

‘scope software

TEKTRONIX has announced a new Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) module and an update to its existing PCI-Express compliance test modules. The software, part of the RT-Eye Serial Compliance and Analysis Software from Tektronix, runs on the recently announced TDS6000C Series

www.tektronix.com

Debugger support for NEC VR

THE TRACE32 ICD and TRACE32 PowerTools debuggers from Lauterbach, now support NEC VR 64-bit RISC microprocessors.

www.lauterbach.co.uk

Carrier Grade Linux

MONTAVISTA has announced MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 4.0 (CGE). It integrates the latest Linux 2.6 kernel with advanced hard real-time capabilities, new clustering services, and AdvancedTCA hardware support.

www.montavista.com

For a more detailed look at these stories please visit

www.esemagazine.co.uk

FPGAs reconfigure in running system

Lattice has released free ispVM software to support its Transparent Field Reconfiguration (TransFR or TFR) capability. This allows designers to reconfigure LatticeXP nonvolatile FPGAs in the field without interrupting system operation.

Field logic reconfiguration can be achieved in two stages using the ispVM software. First, a “Background” programming command loads new data into the Flash memory of the LatticeXP device transparently without halting FPGA operation. Second, at an appropriate time, device operation can be briefly suspended while an “XFlash TransFR” command updates the SRAM from the Flash block in approximately 1 millisecond. This update can occur while holding the I/Os in user-defined states to avoid disturbing the surrounding system’s operation. The ispVM software can either issue the commands directly via a programming cable (serial or USB) during prototyping, or generate an industry-standard Serial Vector Format (SVF) file for reconfiguration in the field.

ispVM tool is available for download free of charge from the Lattice web site at:

www.latticesemi.com/

products/devtools/ software/ispLEVER-features- ispvm.cfm

Code exposed - by trace technology

Realtime Trace Reconstruction is a new technology developed by iSYSTEM that can reconstruct a full bus from the information produced by on-chip trace ports such as ETM (for ARM based controllers) or Nexus.

On-chip interfaces provide highly compressed data, recorded in a trace buffer for analysis. This can cover a few milliseconds up to a couple of seconds, far short of the hours or even days required to fully stress test an application. On-chip trigger logic is limited in use, often hard to understand, and it differs from chip to chip. iTRACE PRO carries out realtime trace reconstruction on the fly. Since the full execution bus is reconstructed, endless execution coverage and profiling are available too.

www.sdcsystems.com

Graphical programming tools for DSPs

The new NI LabVIEW DSP Module, includes tools for designing, implementing and analyzing DSP-based algorithms and systems and extends the LabVIEW graphical development environment to embedded signal processing applications.

The module can directly program TI’s TMS320C6711 and C6713 DSK evaluation

Sharing designs

ALTIUM has announced two tools to improve sharing design information, the Altium Designer Smart PDF and the Altium Designer Viewer Edition. Smart PDF documents contain a design project's schematic and PCB documents and include sorted tables of components and nets that can be used to navigate to the design objects, allowing distribution of design data across the organization and with third parties.

Altium Designer Viewer Edition is for those in a company who are involved in the wider electronic product development process, but are not directly editing design files. It can be used to view, print, cross probe and explore design projects and documents that have been created using Altium Designer.

www.altium.com

10