Design

Product design, circuit design, eda tools.

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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.

Storage Tripod Hybrid for Reliability Speed

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.

Embedded Systems at delabs.org

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.

– delabs 2009

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In: Design, Handheld Portables

I once worked in Tek for a very short period. I got to experience the 2235 and 2465 analog scopes and their controls. The 2465 was a 400 MHz Digitally Controlled Analog Scope.

I also used the Plugin Scopes and Calibration systems that were Tek Culture and Tech contribution to the Instrumentation world, it probably evolved into VXI-PXI as uC systems took over.

delabs designs – The code has been moved from Google Code Hosting to github – delabs-dapj

delabs Web Widget and Application Interface Usability Experiments 2003-2008

I also had a chance to look at DSO/Logic Analyzers and the just developed TDS Series. The older tek analog scopes made me understand about usability and panel layouts. Many controls are inevitable in a Analog Scope with Electromechanical Interface.

In a Digital World that can be largely changed using the Monitor and Trackballs. The older BlackBerry phones are also good study for usability before Touch Screens came.

Read More →

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In: Basic Electronics, Design

Many may already know about these EE Educational pages with Circuits of J. B. Calvert.  These pages are valuable as they are like a summation of Important and Practical Sections in many EE Subjects. If you want to master the basics of EE, these pages will propel you in the right direction.A Welath of Information is at the site – Dr James B. Calvert Associate Professor Emeritus of Engineering, University of Denver and Registered Professional Engineer, State of Colorado. An EE-Encyclopedia Almost.

Engineering and Technology – James B. Calvert
“An extensive series of pages based on experiments that can be done in the personal or home laboratory. The emphasis is on enjoyment and intellectual pleasure, but there is much practical matter as well.”

Electronics Index – Includes vacuum tubes and cathode-ray tubes, with many experiments for the home laboratory. Nixie clocks too.

The Electronics Index of J. B. Calvert

The Atmel AVR microprocessors are very similar functionally to the PIC microprocessors, with the same range in size from 8-bit, 8-pin PDIP to 32-bit processors with 100 pins, and similar features.
Atmel AVR 8-Bit Microcontrollers

The ATtiny13A will operate from a supply voltage as low as 1.8V (maximum clock speed 4 Mhz), and with a full 20 MHz clock speed at 4.5V and above. The current drain is much reduced at the lower supply voltages and clock frequencies.

A Magnetometer
It is easy to measure moderate magnetic fields using a Hall sensor, such as the Allegro A1302 linear Hall sensor, available from Jameco. A PIC12F675 can digitize the output of the sensor and display it on a serial LCD display, such as the Newhaven NHD-0216K3Z-FL-GBW 2 line x 16 digit display. This system is shown breadboarded in the figure at the right, measuring the field between the poles of a horseshoe magnet.

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In: ASIC EDA, 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.

Pulsonix – Schematic and PCB Design

Pulsonix - Schematic and PCB Design

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

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In: Design, Integrated Circuits

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

ADS7816  – 12-Bit High Speed A/D Converter

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.

ADS7816 - 12-Bit High Speed Sampling AD

12-Bit High Speed Micro Power Sampling Analog-to-Digital converter

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

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In: Analog Design, Design, Integrated Circuits

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.

Wiki of National Semiconductor

National’s key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial, and test and measurement applications.

National Semiconductor is part of TI

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.

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In: Design, Integrated Circuits

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.

Texas Instruments – TI Semiconductors

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.

A Vintage Calculator from TI

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments – wiki

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.

Texas Instruments - TI Semiconductors

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.

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In: ASIC EDA, Design

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.

gEDA – Electronic Design Automation

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.

gEDA Project’s Homepage

gEDA - Electronic Design Automation

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,

GTKWave

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.