Comments Off on Pulsonix – Schematic and PCB Design
A totally integrated Schematic and PCB design editor. Add Spice based A/D mixed-mode simulation, shape-based autorouting, or technology features including High Speed design, chip-on-board, embedded component capabilities and connection to your corporate database.
Quickly and easily create Schematic designs using the feature rich toolset within the Pulsonix Schematic editor. Using the fully integrated Spice Simulation package you can ensure electrical correctness in your designs.
Powerful High-Speed design tools including differential pairing, dynamic serpentining, pin package lengths, intelligent path definition and online length displays to help with DDR, PCI Express and USB designs.
Pulsonix
20 Miller Court, Severn Drive, Tewkesbury, GL20 8DN, UK
Comments Off on ADS7816 – 12-Bit High Speed Sampling AD
The ADS7816 is a 12-bit, 200kHz sampling analog to- digital converter. It features low power operation with automatic power down, a synchronous serial interface, and a differential input. The reference voltage can be varied from 100mV to 5V, with a corresponding resolution from 24mV to 1.22mV. – From TI Applications
Low power, automatic power down, and small size make the ADS7816 ideal for battery operated systems or for systems where a large number of signals must be acquired simultaneously. It is also ideal for remote and/or isolated data acquisition.
The ADS7816 is a classic successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital (A/D) converter. The architecture is based on capacitive redistribution which inherently includes a sample/hold function.
The converter is fabricated on a 0.6µ CMOS process. The architecture and process allow the ADS7816 to acquire and convert an analog signal at up to 200,000 conversions per second while consuming very little power
Comments Off on National Semiconductor is part of TI
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer, that specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The products of National Semiconductor included power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions.
National’s key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial, and test and measurement applications.
On September 23, 2011, the company formally became part of Texas Instruments as the “Silicon Valley” division.
An Exquisite Evaluation Board from National Semiconductor
The LMH0356 Serial Digital Interface (SDI) reclocker is designed to recover a clean clock from a serial digital video signal which may be contaminated by jitter and to resynchronize the input video data to the recovered clean clock. The LMH0356 SDI reclocker accepts signals conforming to standards SMPTE 259M (C), SMPTE 292M, and SMPTE 424M.
Texas Instruments, better known in the electronics industry (and popularly) as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, USA, renowned for developing and commercializing semiconductor and computer technology.
Chip IC Products include Solutions in Analog, DSP- Digital Signal Processing, Power Management, A/D Converter, Microcontroller based Systems, Mixed Signal Designs, Multiplexers and Thermal Management Solutions.
TI produced the world’s first commercial silicon transistor in 1950, and designed and manufactured the first transistor radio in 1954. Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TI’s Central Research Labs.
TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller (MCU) in 1970, which combined all the elements of computing onto one piece of silicon.
A Developer Evaluation Embedded System
Texas Instruments Embedded Portfolio Overview is made up of three sub-divisions: Wireless, Microcontrollers, and Processors
Embedded processors are the processing brains of electronics that gather inputs from analog chips and perform computational processing to operate a system.
The gEDA project is working on producing a full GPL’d suite of Electronic Design Automation tools. These tools are used for electrical circuit design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and production.
Currently, the gEDA project offers a mature suite of free software applications for electronics design, including schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation, netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout.
gschem is the schematic capture program/tool which is part of gEDA. Its sole purpose is to facilitate the graphical input of components/circuits.
PCB is an interactive printed circuit board editor. PCB offers high end features such as an autorouter and trace optimizer which can tremendously reduce layout time. For custom requirements,
Icarus Verilog is a Verilog simulation and synthesis tool. It operates as a compiler, compiling source code written in Verilog (IEEE-1364) into some target format. For batch simulation, the compiler can generate an intermediate form called vvp assembly.
GTKWave is a fully featured GTK+ based waveform viewer. GTKWave is designed to handle many signals at once, it has three signal searching modes (Regular Expressions, Hierarchy, and Tree) as well as the ability to display data in many different formats.
Cars should be aware of their environment and display status in the dashboard. It is like having cameras all around. The objects around and their direction of movement and acceleration.
Simple Automobile Safety Radar
There must be a very affordable automobile radar with just a 10-20 feet radius around the vehicle. This should display as a graphic on the dashboard as some of the very old 2D car games. This radar must be based on sonar or infra red to avoid additional EMI-RFI pollution and confusion. The display should show all objects which include people, small animals, kerb and wall.
The sensor has to be a multiple sensor, static belt one near wheels and one at the roof of automobile. The display device on car should be TCP-IP so that you can monitor your vehicle with your cellphone, PDA or any browser.
Cars can have multiple skins like Winamp
If you use organic flexible LEDs, encapsulated in transparent poly-sulphone or some silicones. And the RGB triad matrix of LEDs are driven by a computer system to make it work like a flexible LCD screen. It can be used to form a skin for a car. Only there will be no high resolution, but it will do.
This flexible layer is fixed on the car like a permanent cap. Now with the onboard graphics synthesis embedded car computer you can choose any jpg, png or gif textured tile or make your own. Then output the tile or wallpaper to the car exterior LED matrix skin. Now the Car has become skinnable. Not just colors but fine textures are possible.
Now with a Bluetooth enabled Human Mood Monitor plugin you can make the car exterior to reflect the mood of the life-forms inside. This will make a road alive and traffic jams very colorful.
Some things i had written online around 2002 on cars.
Comments Off on Storage Tripod Hybrid for Reliability Speed
The wear and tear, fragmentation on HDD can be reduced using a Tripod Hybrid. Access Speed improves too…
Top Layer is RAM Drive with Li-ion Battery. Second layer is Flash. Third is the Spinner HDD.
All active files of user are on RAM drive and backed up on Flash by intelligent Drive (not CPU). The files go into HDD after they have been stable for over an hour. As HDD sizes are increasing. The files and file system can be like svn and maintain 3 versions of all dynamic files. This is useful for user also and HDD too.
Static files like Binaries can be on one area of HDD. Frequently accessed binaries are promoted to flash layer. Extremely frequent to Ram Layer. The HDD now is less stressed and lasts longer and is a stable backup. Power failures immune.
Bare Essentials
A supercap built into a HDD. On Brownout OR Power Fail. The falling ramp is detected beyond an isolating diode. It says to HDD uC … Look there is something funny with power now. The HDD uC at once finishes the work at hand, drawing its juice from the stable supercap, parks its heads and goes to sleep.
When power is stable again, it wakes up and the supercap is replenished too. This way damage to HDD is avoided, these happen when .. battery connection problems in laptop or mains power fluctuations or switching power systems carelessly. It makes HDD idiot proof at least electrically.
