Another Dimension: Special Report

Cover.
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CYCLE
FORTNIGHTLY
W W W. N E W E L E C T R O N I C S . C O . U K
AY
22
4 2AM
PR
IL 2007
Another dimension
Holography is set to enter the mass
market, targeting such applications as
storage and even volumetric projection
Special Report:
Research Europe
Plus: Stemming the leaks in 45nm Getting the most from green power sources
Customisable micro brings asic like benefits Femtocells right by design!
Tomorrows data rates; todays prices Mono lcds alive and kicking!
A PROPRIETARY VERIFICATION SOLUTION IS LIKE A RUNAWAY MERRY-GO-ROUND.
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Go to www.mentor.com/products/fv/_3b715c/ or call us at +44 1635 811411.
Find out more at the EDA Tech Forum on 19th June

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CONTENTS
DebutArt: Barry Downard
22 MAY 2007 VOL 40 NO 10
COVER STORY
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Theres a hologram in
your wallet, but how
soon will holography
make it to the
mainstream?
14
ADVANCED PROCESSES
Stem the tide
Can new technology stem the gate leakage
tide at the 45nm process node?
REGULARS
INTRA DESIGN
Comment
The UK electronics
industry still needs one
strong voice.
5
News
TSMC says it will roll
out all of its 45nm
versions in a year. 6
Breakthrough could
double the capacity of
Li ion batteries.
8
UK IP centre to drive
global image sensor
design.
10
ST set to align with
industry leader for
future fab needs.
12
SYSTEM DESIGN
DISPLAYS
Alive and kicking
Despite appearances to the contrary, the mono
lcd is the best solution in many applications. 45
22
SPECIAL REPORT
POWER
Keen on green
Could solar and fuel cell technology power
tomorrows feature rich handsets?
25
MICROS
If the CAP fits ...
A customisable microprocessor is set to offer
asic like costs, but at much lower risk.
29
INTER DESIGN
COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE
World your oyster?
Outsourcing software design is helping to
make femtocells right by design.
51
19
SPONSORED TUTORIAL
Video goes digital
Texas Instruments discusses video
compression and data flow requirements
for the latest surveillance systems.
32
MARKETWATCH
Logical developments
Interest in programmable logic is growing in
a range of industries, says Avnet.
49
PRODUCT NEWS
Intra Design
Inter Design
34
42
37
PACKET PROCESSING
Appointments
RESEARCH EUROPE
Investing in the future
Frances R&D spend of 3% of GDP is
helping to support its technopole network
and, increasingly, Poles de Comptitivit
Pass the packet

Market demands mean tomorrows data rates
need to be provided at todays prices.
40
Is your company producing

innovative designs? If so, why not
enter the Innovation and Design
Excellence Awards?
For more information, go to:
www.ideawards.co.uk
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Page 5
COMMENT
THE FUTURE AHEAD
Forward
thinking
UK electronics needs a champion to show it the way forward.
n its heyday, Nepcon was the leading electronics show in the

UK. The event more social than business attracted large
numbers of exhibitors and visitors to Brighton. Times change
and so too did Nepcons fortunes. But it still takes place,
smaller than before and now in Birminghams NEC. The event
provided the ideal opportunity for some industry leaders to meet
last week to discuss the next five years of UK electronics.
The discussion, organised by distribution trade body afdec,
was to some extent predictable, as were some of the
conclusions. Panellists, for example, urged UK companies to go
after such opportunities as plastic electronics, flexible displays,
nanotechnology and alternative energy sources.
Yet the UK is already exploiting these opportunities. Plastic
Logic captured 100million worth of investment recently,
CDT remains a leader in flexible display technology, Icera is
exploing HSDPA and so on.
What is missing is inspiration for what may be termed the
foot soldiers. Its fine talking about the leading edge, but
where are the opportunities for the small companies that
comprise the majority of UK electronics? What should they
concentrate on and, importantly, how can they protect and
Graham Pitcher, Editor gpitcher@findlay.co.uk
grow their businesses in the face of growing globalisation?

The Electronics Innovation and Growth Team concluded in
2004 that the UK electronics industry was fragmented and
needed a single voice. That issue was raised again during the
discussion. What is needed is one body even one person to
provide the lead. Until we get that champion along with a grasp
at the highest level of the importance of electronics to the UK
discussions like those at Birmingham last week will continue.
Editor Graham Pitcher Associate Editor Mike Richardson US Correspondent Paul Dempsey (newelectronics.usa@cox.net)
Contributing Editors David Boothroyd, Louise Joselyn, Vanessa Knivett, Roy Rubenstein Art Editor David Walters Illustrator Phil Holmes
Sales Director Tricia Bodsworth Business Development Director Lee Nye Circulation Manager Chris Jones (circulation@findlay.co.uk)
Production Controller Derek Gill Publisher Peter Ring
Represented in North America by Huson International Media (www.husonusa.com)
West Coast: Matt Lane (matt@husonusa.com), 1999 South Bascom Ave, Suite 1000, Campbell CA 95008 Tel: 408 879 6666
East Coast: Michael Andrews (michael@husonusa.com), 350 5th Avenue, Suite 2719, New York NY 10018 Tel: 212 268 3344
Represented in Japan by Shinano International: Kazuhiko Tanaka, Akasaka Kyowa Bldg, 1-6-14 Akasaka, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 107-0052
Tel: +81(0)3 3584 6420
New Electronics Tel: 01322 221144 Fax: 01322 221188 www.newelectronics.co.uk email: ne@findlay.co.uk
ISSN 0047-9624
New Electronics, incorporating Electronic Equipment News and Electronics News, is published0 twice monthly by Findlay Publications Ltd, Hawley Mill, Hawley Road, Dartford, Kent, DA2 7TJ
Copyright 2007 Findlay Publications. Annual subscription (22 issues) for readers in the UK is 105, overseas is 160, and airmail is 196.
Composition by JJays, Unit 4, Baron Ct, Chandlers Way, Temple Farm Ind. Est., Southend on Sea, SS2 5SE. Printed in England by Wyndeham Heron Ltd, Heybridge, CM9 4NW.
Moving on? If you change jobs or your company moves, please contact
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N e w E l e c t r o n i c s w w w. n e w e l e c t r o n i c s . c o . u k 2 2 M a y 2 0 0 7
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Page 6
FRONT PAGE NEWS
45NM DEVELOPMENTS
Shrinking roll out

45nm roll out will be fastest yet says TSMC. Graham Pitcher reports.
SMC expects to complete its roll

out of 45nm technology in just one
year, once the processes enter production in September. Highlighting the
speed, Chuck Byers, director of worldwide brand marketing, said the 90nm
roll out took 30 months, whilst 65nm
took 18 months. With this node, he
claimed, well be rolling out 15 different advanced processes within a year.
In Byers opinion, this accelerated
roll out program is being driven solely by
demand. The real picture is the shrinking time to market for our customers.
The first process to go live will be

the CL45LP low power variant, followed
closely by the CLN45LP embedded
dram process. This hasnt happened
before, Byers contended, and is clearly
driven by demand for SoCs. These
processes will be followed by CMN45LP
mixed signal and rf option.
All processes will use 193nm
immersion lithography not a risk,
said Byers with an extreme low K
intermetal dielectric. Although the
processes will initially use a conventional gate dielectric, they will go
metal at a later date.

Interest is said to be growing in
TSMCs
45nm
CyberShuttle
process. The multiproject wafer
approach will be run in June and
December on the low power and mixed
signal and rf processes, and in September on low power and embedded dram.
Meanwhile, TSMC is continuing
to expand its 0.13m and 90nm capacity on 12in wafers and expects its 2007
to be in excess of 8.3billion 8in wafer
equivalents.
For more, see page 22 of this issue.
PCB design suites

upgraded
The latest enhancements to the Allegro
pcb design platform are said by
Cadence to improve constraint driven
design, as well as productivity and
design team collaboration.
Being our most significant pcb
release in many years, we have worked
with many customers to meet their
requirements so they can solve their
most challenging design problems,
said Charlie Giorgetti, corporate vice
president, product marketing at
Cadence.
Allegro has been updated to
include the latest routing technology
and a new methodology for physical
and spacing constraints. Other updates
include support for algorithmic modeling for advanced serial link design,
improved circuit simulation, seamless
scalability with OrCAD products,
enhanced collaboration, and a new user
interface for improved productivity
and usability. Additional signal
integrity and power integrity functionality is also included.
Meanwhile, Zuken has launched version 10.0 of CR-5000, its enterprise
wide pcb design software. Upgrades
include advanced methodologies to
support high speed differential pairs,
further developments related to routing technology and enhancements to
integration and design flow.
Largest e-paper screen yet

LG Philips LCD has developed a 14.1in flexible colour display,
based on E-Inks technology. The move follows last years
announcement of a 14.1in monochrome version.
The 300m thick screen printed on a metal foil and plastic
substrate can show 4096 colours and images are said to be
remain crisp, even when display is flexed. Quality is said to be
similar to that obtained from printed images.
LG Philips LCD is the first company to develop a flexible e-paper
display of this size, said In-Jae Chung, the companys cto. The
potential applications are incredible and will allow our customers
to create products that are not only convenient to use, but which
also save natural resources.
Express delivery
A range of PXI Express high speed
instruments claimed to be the industrys first has been announced by
National Instruments.
The new modular instruments
include the NI PXIe-5122 100MS/s
100MHz dual channel digitiser, the NI
PXIe-6537, and the NI PXIe-6536
50MHz and 25MHz 32 channel digital I/O modules.
Also an industry first is NIs PXIe1065 18 slot chassis, offering a dedicated bandwidth of up to 1Gbyte/s per
slot whilst combining both PXI and
PXI Express slots.
A frank exchange
of views
A panel of experts assembled by distribution trade body afdec suggests there
still remains a tremendous amount of
opportunity for UK electronics, writes
Mike Richardson.
Moderating the panel, afdec chairman Adam Fletcher noted: The conclusions derived from the panel in one
hour would have normally taken many
days of government lobbying and
activity.
Held at the Metropole Hotel, Birmingham to coincide with the first day of
Nepcon 2007, the discussion provided
an insight into the thinking of some the
UKs electronics industry leaders.
Addressing the topic The next five
years in the UK Electronics Components industry, the panel touched on
the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and the threats to the electronics
industry and to the UK.
Truly innovative companies are
prepared to look beyond the UK for
opportunities, Fletcher claimed. To
really engage, we need to go after the
bigger Far Eastern markets.
New host improves

display performance
OLED materials pioneer OLED-T has
unveiled a new host material that is
said to bring significant benefits over
existing materials.
According to the company, the latest material E746 is intended as a
direct replacement for aluminium
quinolate. It is said to bring an increase
in current efficiency of between 30%
and 50% and a power efficiency
improvement of up to 80%.
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1/5/07 16:10:23
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Page 8
US NEWS
BATTERY TECHNOLOGY
Charging ahead!
U
S researchers may have discovered a

technique that greatly improves the
performance of lithium ion batteries,
although the development is unlikely to
be mature enough for inclusion in the
forthcoming revision of an important
IEEE standard.
A team from the Argonne National
Laboratory, part of the US Department
of Energy, has unveiled laptop type batteries with storage capacities of
250mAh/g and better more than twice
Breakthrough could
double Li-ion battery
capacity. Paul
Dempsey reports.
the capacity of comparable batteries
available today.
The performance boost was primarily achieved by simply changing the

material for the positive electrode to a
proprietary nano crystalline, layered
composite rich in manganese. These electrodes are also cheaper to produce than
the cobalt and nickel based versions currently used.
However, in presenting the research,
Chris Johnson from the Argonne team,
cautioned that the performance was
anomalous in that it
UPenn team makes

10nm features
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have successfully fabricated a
range of wires, gaps, holes, discs and
other metal devices with sub 10nm features using a novel lithograpy technique called TEBAL transmission
electron beam ablation lithography.
TEBAL ablates evaporated metal
films that have been pre patterned with
electron beam lithography on silicon
nitride substrates. Devices were fabricated in nickel, gold, sliver, aluminium
and chromium.
The resulting devices can be integrated into large scale circuitry without
contact resistance. The technique also
does not require the use of any resist or
a lift off step. Devices have surface
roughness of less than 5 and the
resulting nanostructures are highly
reproducible, the UPenn teams says.
The fabrication method may prove
attractive for such applications as nanoelectronics, nanofluidics and nanoparticle or atomic manipulation on a chip.
US set to address
patent abuse
The US is making another bid to stamp
out what many electronics companies
regard as abuses of its patent system.
Industrialists from the US and elsewhere have long bemoaned the activities
of patent trolls. These organisations buy
up patents originally granted to failed
companies, then wait for another innovation to emerge that looks similar, but
exceeded expectations for reasons that

could not yet be fully explained.
He further noted that the capacity of
the current prototype batteries fell too
rapidly for the technology to be available
for short term commercial deployment.
A decline from 311mAh/g to 261mAh/g
occurred in just nine charge/discharge/
recharge cycles, followed by further
decreases for subsequent cycles.
Finally, extra innovation is required
to control the impact of decay in the
manganese rich layers over a batterys lifetime.
Argonne will continue its work, but
these issues mean the new battery is
unlikely to influence the next version of
IEEE1625, the Standard for Rechargeable Batteries for Portable Computing.
Thats the Spirit!
Lab system on a chip

Printed electronics start up Bioident has married a low cost reader to
proprietary fabrication technology and delivered the first portable
lab on a chip system in its market.
The 1 x 3in multiwell chip, which can be deposited on most
surfaces, features a printed photodetector array with a dedicated
pixel under each well. It converts light using the PhotonicFlow system
to analyse multiple substances.
which is more successful. Investors are

also tiring of intra industry litigation.
There is a strong international component to the changes. US patent actions
cost defendants, on average, $2million.
Smaller European companies have felt
forced to withdraw from or to ignore
the US market when sued by a troll or
where the threat was likely.
The proposed 2007 Patent Reform
Act caps damages for patent infringement, streamlines procedures for challenging a patent and switches the US
The Spirit Consortium is to expand its

toolset by adding a specification aimed
at companies that create their own IP.
It will be based on the SystemRDL
format, donated by Denali Software.
This C/Verilog lookalike language
describes control registers and is already
in use at more than 120 companies.
SystemRDL allows engineers to
describe fields, registers, register files
and address maps. Extended features
cover signals and enumerations.
It complements Spirit's IP-XACT
standard that, by comparison, is aimed
at higher level identification of IP.
The existing SystemRDL will be
available during its integration with IPXACT, although SPIRIT will also offer
'candidate' versions of the technology
to members. The development of SystemRDL will be driven by a working
group composed of MIPS Technologies, LSI Logic, NXP Semiconductors
and Denali.
No timescale for the final release is
yet available.
from first to invent to first to file.

A key sponsor is Democratic Senator
Patrick Leahy, pictured right, chairman
of the Senates Judiciary Committee.
According to Sen. Leahy: If (the US
is) to maintain its position at the forefront of the worlds economy and continue to lead the globe in innovation and
production, then we must have an efficient and streamlined patent system to
allow for high quality patents that limits
counterproductive litigation. This bill is
an important step towards that goal.
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Page 10
NEWS
IMAGING DESIGN
Micron taps UK IP
UK IP expertise to play central development role. Graham Pitcher reports.
D sumer
riven by demand from the conelectronics market for

image sensors with greater pixel counts
and higher frame rates, Micron has
expanded its Japan Image Design Centre (JIDC) in Tokyo.
According to JIDC head Junichi
Nakamura, the centre has more than 20
engineers designing image sensors,
aimed predominantly at high end digital still cameras and digital camcorders.
The market is demanding higher pixel
counts and higher frame rates, he confirmed. The pixel war is continuing.
In a move to bring these develop-
Labs get leading kit

Three laboratories at Northumbria
University have been refurbished with
the latest technology from Agilent.
Professor Alistair Sambell, Dean of
the Universitys School of Computing,
Engineering and Information Sciences,
said: The microwave imaging technology we have will position Northumbria
as one of the leading universities, in
terms of facilities, in this field.
The University is developing
microwave based techniques to detect
objects such as breast cancer tumours
and believes the new labs will help the
approach get to clinical trials more
quickly.
ments to market more quickly, Microns

UK Image Design Centre in Bracknell
is collaborating closely with its Japanese
counterpart. Director Dr David Burrows said his centre has teams developing circuit IP and logic IP. They are
developing reusable libraries, he
noted, and this IP can be used by
Japan. In fact, Bracknell developed IP
has been used by Micron teams around
the world.
One area the Bracknell team is
working on is high speed data transfer.
Image sensors are sensitive to noise
and so on, Dr Burrows explained. If
you drive high frame rate data off chip

over a parallel cmos interface, youll get
picture degradation. What weve done
is to develop a high speed interface
which gets data off the chip at Gbit/s
rates with very little degradation.
Having developed sensors with
1.4m pixels, Micron is now researching smaller dimensions. Our challenge
is to maintain picture quality, Dr Burrows continued, as we approach optical limits where you can almost count
the number of electrons in a pixel.
In a move aimed at improving audio

quality in a wide range of applications,
Wolfson Microelectronics has developed an audio transceiver family
which features a 100Hz jitter rejection
frequency.
According to the company, the
S/PDIF transceivers used in lcd tvs,
hifis and other audio applications only
suppress jitter at frequencies in excess
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The WM8804 has one input and
one output, whilst the WM8805 has
eight inputs and one output.
LynxOS goes
multicore
P-OLEDs on
the move
Scottish polymer OLED specialist
Micro Emissive Displays is
hoping to exploit emerging
interest in wearable headsets for
tv and video on the move.
According to Prof Ian
Underwood, the companys cto:
Were focusing on priming the
headset market, but the
viewfinder market is still one in
INNOVATION
Sounds good!
which were interested.

MED is showcasing its display
expertise at this weeks SID
event in the US.
SOLUTIONS
LynuxWorks has updated its flagship

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Amongst new features available in
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tasks between processors dynamically
to balance workloads efficiently, using
whatever processor is available.
According to ceo Gurjot Singh:
By creating an rtos that enables our
customers to leverage the latest in multicore hardware, LynxOS 5 enables
embedded developers to bring new features to market faster.
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Page 12
NEWS
GROWTH PLANS
ST opts for foundries

S
TMicroelectronics plans to deliver

micro fuel cells to the market in
2009, as well as samples of plastic electronics devices next year.
Addressing a recent investors and
analysts meeting, Carlo Papa, executive
vp of STs industrial and multisegment
sector which is working on fuel cells
and plastic electronics claimed his
group would grow at three times the rate
of the market this year through changing
from being a supplier of standard products to a group capable of producing
devices with more technical content.
Alongside fuel cells and plastic electron-
... and plans to bring

fuel cells to market in
2009. Graham
Pitcher reports.
ics, Papa sees great potential for sales
growth from microcontrollers, medical
imaging and ZigBee.
The shining star over the last two
years, he claimed, has been MEMS.
This has shown tremendous growth
and these products go anywhere you

want to track force.
Meanwhile, ceo Alain Dutheil said
the company is to abandon developing
its own cmos technology in favour of
accessing 32nm technology through an
alliance with an industry leader.
However, he noted ST would continue to develop proprietary cmos
process derivatives including mixed signal and image processing where they
offered an advantage. This will move
our focus, he noted, to product development and a new strategy in which we
will increase the use of foundries.
Personal
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nele-may-22-07-p013 1
18/5/07 09:46:38
Cover story.qxd
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Page 14
Holography is set to enter

the mass market, enabling
high density storage and
even volumetric projection.
By David Boothroyd.
14
retty well every time we buy anything

today at least using credit cards or bank
notes we are handling one of the most
extraordinary, futuristic pieces of technology: a
hologram. This would surprise Hungarian
physicist Dennis Gabor, who invented it almost
fortuitously when working on electron microscopes at the Thomson-Houston company in
Rugby in 1947. Gabor developed the theory of
how it was possible to capture objects in 3d and
used a mercury arc lamp to produce a tiny hologram showing the names of famous scientists.
The importance of Gabors work was recognised
with the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physics.
To fully capture a real 3d scene you need to
record not only the lights amplitude and wavelength, as a photograph does, but also its phase
(essentially, a stage in the period of a periodic motion, in this case the wave of
light). Photography
does not capture
this, but holograms do. If the
hologram is illuminated with the
appropriate light, it
diffracts part of it into
exactly the same wave that
emanated from the original scene, thus recreating it completely.

To capture the phase of the light wave at each
point in an image, holography uses a reference
beam, which is combined with the light from
the object, the object beam. If these two beams
are coherent, optical interference between the
reference and object beams generates intensity
fringes that can be recorded on ordinary photographic film. The fringes form a kind of diffraction grating on the film, which is the
hologram. The central miracle of holography is
that when the recorded grating is later illuminated by a substitute reference beam, the original object beam is completely reconstructed,
producing a 3d image.
However, it wasnt until the invention of the
laser in 1960, and the coherent light can lasers
provide, that it became possible to create holograms with the size, brightness and depth that
made them impressive to look at and potentially
useful. And it was only when solid state lasers
emerged a couple of decades later that holograms became easy to manufacture and cheap
enough to turn into a huge market.
Today, there are many different kinds of
holograms. Transmission holograms are viewed
with the light source on the opposite side of the
Illustration: Barry Downard
Another dimension
Cover story.qxd
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10:11 am
Page 15
COVER STORY
HOLOGRAPHY
hologram from the viewer, with light transmitted

through the hologram, while reflection holograms
are viewed with the light source on the same side as
the viewer. Embossed holograms, as seen on credit
cards, are made by using a metal replica of a master
hologram to print the relief pattern onto plastic.
The different kinds of holograms are matched
by the range of applications Sony uses a hologram in its digital cameras for focusing in low
light, a holographic lens is used for a headup display in fighter planes and we see them every day
on credit cards and bank notes.
But two applications have yet to appear: mass
storage and 3d projectors. However, at least for
the former, that is about to change.
Several companies have been working for years
on commercial holographic mass storage systems,
including DCE Aprilis and InPhase Technologies.
InPhase, a Bell Labs spin off based in Colorado, has
developed a holographic disk drive called Tapestry
that is already being used by several companies and
will be available commercially later this year.
The technique for recording a holographic
image requires a laser beam to be split in two. One
beam, the signal beam, carries the data while the
other, the reference beam, determines where the
data is written. Data is arranged on the media
in the case of InPhases Tapestry, a 300Gbyte disk
in a checkerboard pattern of light and dark pixels. Each pixel is formed by the intersection of the
signal and reference beam. A 300Gbyte disk can
hold the equivalent of 64 DVDs.
The great potential advantage of holographic
storage over more conventional optical or magnetic approaches is its greater data density, InPhase
cofounder and chief technology officer Kevin
Curtis explains. Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure because it takes advantage of
volumetric efficiencies, rather than only recording
on the surface of the material. Densities in holography are achieved by factors different from magnetic storage. Density depends on the number of
pixels/bits in a page of data; the number of pages
that are stored in a particular volumetric location;
the dynamic range of the recording material; the
thickness of the material; and the wavelength of the recording
laser.
Crucially,
by
changing the angle of
the reference beam, it
is possible to effectively
superimpose
huge
amounts of data in the
same location. Lots of
pages can be recorded
with slightly different
angles and then read back by ensuring precisely the

same angle is used for playback. Last year, InPhase
demonstrated what it claims is the highest data
density of any commercial technology by recording 515Gbit of data per square inch. For comparison, conventional magnetic disk drives provide a
typical data density of 300Gbit/sq in. Ultimately,
a single disk will store from 800Gbyte to 1.6Tbyte.
InPhase has already established an impressive
customer base. Last October, Turner Network
TV became the first company to broadcast holographically stored content, using a prototype of
the Tapestry drive. In April, at this years National
Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in
Las Vegas, InPhase announced that Panasonics
P2 line of solid state camcorders will support
Tapestry as its preferred archive solution.
Also at NAB, Ikegami Tsushinki, a Japanese
maker of HDTV cameras and production equipment, said it will introduce a version of Tapestry
under its Ikegami brand name. InPhase itself
demonstrated the first HD video recording and
playback using the Tapestry drive and its holographic media, made by Maxell, as
well as a holographic optical jukebox system from German manufacturer DSM. This can archive
more than 6000 hours of SD or
1560 hours of HD video in one
library cabinet.
Tapestry is a specialised product, costing around $18,000, with
disks costing $180, so is clearly targeted at mass storage in the corporate world. But
Curtis is confident that InPhases holographic technology will soon reach the ordinary consumer.
Most people have decided that holography
will be the basis for the next generation of optical
storage, Curtis says. Its increased data density
and simpler media structure, compared with
multi layered DVDs, make it superior.
Curtis says InPhase is consulting for several
leading companies and, in particular, for one
client looking to develop a
holographic rom device. Such
a product could be postage
stamp sized, yet store up to
50Gbyte, he says, or a
credit card sized unit
storing hundreds of
Gbyte.
DCE Aprilis has also
been developing
holographic storage
technology for several years, having been
founded in 1999 by a team of scientists
Above: Hungarian physicist

Dennis Gabor invented
holography almost fortuitously
when working on electron
microscopy in 1947. He won
the 1971 Nobel Prize for
Physics.
Above: (Inset) A hologram

displayed on an LCoS
microdisplay from the CAPE
Video Holographic Projection
Display System (ViHPS) Project.
The black and white pixels
represent different phase values.
(Main picture) Replaying the
hologram shown in the inset
produces this picture.
Left: Every time we use a credit
card, we hold a piece of
holographic technology in our
hands.
Courtesy: Visa International
15
Cover story.qxd
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10:12 am
Page 16
COVER STORY
HOLOGRAPHY
Above: Professor Bill

Crossland, Dr Neil Collings
and Dr Tim Wilkinson from
Cambridge University are
working with Alps on the
ViHPS project.
Above: Kevin Curtis:

Holographic storage is a
revolutionary departure
because it takes advantage of
volumetric efficiencies.
Right: InPhases Tapestry
system can store 300Gbyte
on one disk using a
checkerboard pattern of light
and dark pixels. A 300Gbyte
disk can hold the equivalent of
64 DVDs.
16
from Polaroid. DCE Aprilis was involved with

two DARPA funded consortia PRISM (Photorefractive Information Storage Materials) and
HDSS (Holographic Data Storage Systems)
which developed critical technologies for holographic data storage.
PRISMs goal was to identify, evaluate and
develop promising holographic storage materials
and it selected DCE Aprilis technology as the
best from 57 possible candidates. After further
media developments, DCE Aprilis provided
HDSS with disk holographic media that formed
the basis for a 1Gbit/s holographic storage application with real time recording and reading from
a continuously spinning disk.
The company says leading optical storage developers are using its media technology in their test
and evaluation systems for holographic data storage. DCE Aprilis uses a different polymerisation
chemistry for holographic recording than InPhase.
CROP cationic ring opening polymerisation
holds the potential for extremely fast read and
record times, perhaps more than 1Gbyte/s.
This could make it a powerful candidate to succeed todays high definition DVD systems, HD
DVD and Blu-ray, according to DCE Aprilis chief
scientist David Waldman, who says major consumer electronics company in Japan and South
Korea are testing and evaluating the companys
materials. Based on this work, he anticipates that a
blueprint for a fully commercialised
product will emerge in 2008 and
be developed soon
afterwards.
Major potential
developments
in
holography are not
just about data storage. Cambridge Universitys Engineering
Department is working with Alps Elec-
tric to develop a video projector based on holography. This 2d projector will be different to anything available today.
The technology works by converting the
image to be projected into a phase only holographic pattern. This pattern is displayed inside
the projector on a small, fast high definition liquid crystal on silicon panel. When a laser is
trained on to the panel, the light bouncing off
each of the patterns millions of points interferes
to reconstruct the original picture, which is projected on a conventional screen.
Such projectors will be tiny perhaps credit
card sized as well as highly energy efficient and
robust. The team says this could be the first mass
market application of real time holography and, in
the future, the technology could even be used for
true volumetric 3d projection, although tremendous levels of computing power would be needed.
The deal between Cambridge University and
Alps was announced at the end of 2006, since
when substantial progress has been made, according to Alps chief engineer in the UK Jamieson
Christmas, who says a further announcement will
be made within the next few months. Christmas is
the inventor of a patented algorithm that produces
a high quality image from phase only projection.
Studying living tissue

Real time holography is also being used at Purdue
University in the US to observe the response of
tumours to anti cancer drugs the first time
holography has been used to study the effects of
a drug on living tissue, according to team leader
Professor David Nolte. By shining a laser on the
object and on a digital cameras CCD, detailed
information can be recorded, including depth
and motion on a scale of microns.
The system detects the motion of organelles
inside cancer cells structures that perform internal cell functions. Organelles are a common target of anticancer drugs because they play a key
role in the uncontrolled cell division that makes
cancer lethal. The performance of a drug that limits organelles ability to travel through the cell and
perform their functions can thus be analysed
quantitatively.
Despite their success, it could be that
applications of holograms are still in their
early stages. Even more
important discoveries
may be out there waiting: one intriguing idea
that has holographic theory at its heart claims it is
how we or at least our
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nele-may-08-07-p011 1
27/4/07 12:35:12
Rennies.qxd
16/5/07
3:05 pm
Page 19
RESEARCH EUROPE
Frances R&D spend supports

its technopole network.
By Vanessa Knivett.
rench R&D has recently come

under the spotlight as a result of
the presidential elections. With all
main parties pledging more money for
national research, there was general
agreement that further reform of the
nations science and technology research
interests was needed.
Despite frequent accusations of excessive centralisation and inefficiency,
Frances research base has much to be
SPECIAL REPORT
vide the foundations for expanding existing businesses and encourage the creation of new ones. Of the 47
technopoles, possibly the best
known are Sophia Antipolis and
Grenoble in Southern France.
Like the UKs clusters, many
owe their foundation to the proximity of a university or a corporate
R&D centre. However, true to
Frances egalitarian roots, a programme in the 1950s and 1960s dispersed the national research
institutions and public laboratories that
had, until then, been located in Paris, to
further strengthen the technopole
model.
The path towards creating a techno-
proud of. In 2003, French gross domestic expenditure on R&D was 2.18% of
GDP, compared to 1.88% for the UK.
Under president Jacques Chirac, France
was amongst the countries that committed to increasing its R&D expenditure to
3% of GDP by 2010 and, thanks to
favourable tax status, France is home to
half of all European research centres.
At the heart of Frances research strategy is a network of regional clusters
concentrations of research, technology
and innovation known as technopoles.
Providing scientific expertise, technical
support and business networks, they pro-
pole in the university town of Rennes was

set long before it was officially designated
in 1984. During the 1960s, Rennes
mayor wanted to bring the universitys
work closer to industry. Under his guidance, the university split into two,
increasing the number of students significantly in the process. At the same time,
large enterprises like SGS-Thomson set
up in the area. In the 1970s, the subsequent mayor accelerated the development of the universitys research in three
commercial domains: electronics; agriculture/biotech; and pharmaceuticals.
This brought a new generation of companies to Rennes, including remote control specialists Sofrel and building
automation company Delta Dore.
In the early 1980s, INRIA (Institut
National de Recherche en Informatique
et Automatique), part of the French
National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automatic Control,
arrived and the university established its
Computer Science department to capitalise on the strong base of lecturers from
research and industry now in the area.

By 1985, Rennes Atalante was considered one of Frances principal
technopoles, with a Silicon Valley like
reputation for its 36,000 students, 2500
researchers, and a ppinire, or incubator facility named Gallium. A second
incubator called Germanium opened
two years.
Since then, the technopole has
expanded to occupy two other sites in
Rennes and attracted substantial foreign
investment from Mitsubishi Electric (car
telephone factory and R&D), Canon
DebutArt: Jrgen Ziewe
Investing in the future
19
Rennies.qxd
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3:06 pm
Page 20
RESEARCH EUROPE
Bernard Pruniaux, ceo of Atmels Rousset

facility, supports the various European
cooperation initiatives
(research centre), Bell Labs and even an

antenna of the American consulate.
Recounts Herv Dias, vice president and
general manager of Canon Research
Centre France: For telecoms, or more
precisely datacoms, Rennes was immediately essential to us. Research at Rennes
is focused principally on home multimedia and our objective was to create a true
multimedia network for the home.
Home to 220 companies

By the time of its 20th anniversary in
2004, the Rennes technopole was home
to 220 companies, some 60% of which
participate in the electronics and information and communications sectors.
Despite difficult times during the
telecoms downturn, Rennes Atalantes
fortunes have recovered. Almost 1000
new jobs were created in 2006 and the
university now hosts some 60,000 students a year. Recent arrivals include
R&D centres for Silicon Labs and Texas
20
SPECIAL REPORT
Instruments. Notably, TI is working with

INRIA on a five year research program,
developing technology that will optimise
the performance of Java applications
when running on cell phones and other
portable, converged devices.
Other technopoles were being created
throughout France at the same time as
Rennes development. Though hardly
evident today, Rousset and the area
around Gardanne in the Aix-en-Provence
region of Southern France, is a former
coal mining district. After World War II,
there was the general realisation that the
coal mining industry was in decline and
something was needed to regenerate the
area and create employment.
A Zone Industriel (ZI) was created to
attract businesses to the region: the first
being a semiconductor fabrication plant
for Eurotechnique, which was later taken
over by SGS-Thomson and is now
STMicroelectronics as coal
mining declined, semiconductor
production
ramped up.
Now known as
Technople Rousset/
Haute Valle de lArc,
the ZI today encompasses three districts
Rousset, Peynier and
Fuveau and includes
some major microelectronics names. One is Atmel, which
owes its presence in the area to its acquisition of ES2. Atmel has since invested
heavily in the area, attracting numerous
partners and suppliers to the region.
In parallel, the Sophia Antipolis
technopole was created in Nice with a
focus on telecoms, semiconductor design
and applications. The Association pour la
Recherche sur les Composants et les Systmes (ARCSIS), which promotes the
common interest of the industry around
Rousset, includes Atmel, Gemplus and ST.
ARCSIS often collaborates with the
Sophia Antipolis MicroElectronics Association (SAME), notably under the
Centre Integre de la Microelectronique
Provence Alpes Cote dAzur (CIMPACA) research programme. With the
objective of sharing local industrial and
academic equipment and capabilities to

explore future microelectronics applications, CIMPACA is largely state funded.
Like other research initiatives, CIMPACA can access grants at the commune
and department level, plus regional, State
and European funding prompting concern about how coordinated public
financial support is and whether all companies have the resources to make the
most of the opportunities on offer.
Bernard Pruniaux, ceo of Atmels
Rousset manufacturing plant, acknowledges that Atmel employs staff with the
necessary expertise to exploit these funding avenues and that it dedicates much
time and effort to supporting the various
cooperation initiatives.
The French government has addressed
the fragmented nature of public research
by making a number of changes at a
national level, including the creation of a National Research
Agency. Meanwhile, the
French Research and
Higher Education ministries have merged in
an attempt to remove
barriers between fundamental
research,
applied research and
exploitation. A Research
Bill agreed in April 2006
aims to overcome the dispersion of resources in French public
sector research. However, the main
changes will be seen at a local level.
Technopoles work together

The National Research Agency committed 205million to R&D projects presented by a network of Poles de
Comptitivit typically technopoles
working in cooperation. One example is
the Solutions Communicantes Scurises
(SCS) Ple de comptitivit, of which
Pruniaux is president. SCS expands
CIMPACAs work to encompass those
involved in telecommunications, software and multimedia.
More simply, Poles de Comptitivit
can be regarded as the next stage in the
development of the technopoles it is
time to work together.
nele-may-22-07-p021 1
14/5/07 10:03:37
Process.qxd
15/5/07
4:30 pm
Page 22
Stem the tide

Illustration: Don Seed
rom September this year, the

launch of TSMCs 45nm process
will accelerate the adoption of new
technologies. End products are expected
to achieve 40% greater functionality or
40% smaller die size, with reduced power
consumption, depending on customer
requirements. These factors are crucial for
SoC designs with ever smaller footprints
for mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs and other handheld devices.
TSMCs 45nm process employs a
combination of 193nm immersion photolithography and low-k material. With
a high gate density
and a high density 6T sram cell, more

than 500million transistors will fit into
a 70mm die area. TSMCs low power
(LP) 45nm process is expected to be
available first, followed soon after by the
general purpose and high performance
(GS) process.
Primarily, the move to 45nm is to satisfy the industry requirements for cost
effective solutions, explained Gareth
Jones, director of business operations,
Europe, for TSMC. TSMC recognises
that low power is becoming ever more
critical and the number of battery powered applications requiring longer lifetimes without having to replace or
recharge batteries particularly in
consumer applications is becoming the dominating feature.
He goes on to suggest that
the significant change in the
45nm process is the use of
immersion lithography.
TSMCs 45nm process could

see the topic of gate leakage
spring up, but can the new
technology stem the tide?
By Mike Richardson.
The idea behind it is pretty clever, he

enthused. This process uses water to act
as a natural focus or lens and due to the
optical performance of water, you are
able to get much smaller dimensions
defined on silicon. This means that we
can cut a smaller dimensional profile
than the 65nm for a greater logical density twice as much as youd get on
65nm per square millimetre.
Another important difference is in the
chemistry of the inter-metal dielectric.
TSMC uses a low K material with a lower
dielectric constant than that used on
65nm. Its a K of 2.5 instead of the previous generations 2.9, he explained.
The process technology, the basic gate
material and silicide, is identical to that
of the 65nm process. Its the same copper
metal scheme that we used on 65nm, just
tighter. The main difference is the
photolithography being wet on each of
these critical layers.
Stop the leak

However, as you shrink, so the risk of
getting more leakage grows. Its a physical feature: the gate thickness is becoming so thin that it is starting to leak more
and more. TSCM claims there are methods to minimise this by selecting the
right choice of inter metal dielectric.
22
Process.qxd
15/5/07
5:32 pm
Page 31
ADVANCED PROCESSES
Clearly, there is a
lot of research still
going on amongst
many companies.
What TSMC
has focused on is
getting a technique that can be
used repeatedly,
Jones continued. So weve selected a
material for the inter metal dielectric
which has got a lower K dielectric constant. This means we can offer a better
performance in capacitive values from the
choice of material. Weve done a joint
development with our supplier to create
an improved version of its existing inter
metal dielectric, but the technique we use
is something that is repeatable and manufacturable. Other companies have their
strategies, but have yet to prove they are
repeatedly manufacturable.
In Jones mind, Moores Law is only
one factor and what is really driving the
45nm process is the commercial reality of
providing cost effective solutions into the
market place. You can try and make your
design as small as possible, but it doesnt
necessarily come easily as it affects
TSMCs equipment set and hence the
manufacturing cost of making any node.
You cant get away from the commer-
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
cial reality of pricing, said Jones, but

equally important is that we ensure the
customer gets their design right, gets time
to market and also implements it in the
most efficient way possible. And, ideally,
we can give them some performance
improvement that they can use to outsell
their competitors. Equally, designers need
to look at the total cost of design; its no
longer just the cost of the silicon, but also
the cost of the IP and the business implementation theyre going to use.
And its no longer acceptable just to
get the design working first time companies now have to make it dependably
repeatable
to
manufacture.
This means keeping the yields
high and delivering wafers on
time repeatedly.
Its one step to get
your prototype
working, but the
important thing
is to get it into
mass production
and then to perform against this
requirement.
These are the areas in which TSMC really
excels, he affirms.
Jones envisages the 45nm process will
be adopted by handheld chipset manufacturers. There seems to be a crossover
point where people are integrating digital
with rf at 45nm, he notes. Applications
that will quickly adopt 45nm for performance include graphics processor chips,
which always push the envelope. Weve
seen the move from desktop to laptop and
now from laptop to handheld. Handhelds
also need graphics, but they are battery
powered. So, we have this trade off
between performance and power, which
provides an interesting challenge. The traditional desktop/laptop type graphics
chips will definitely be adopting 45nm for
performance to give consumers improved
graphics capabilities.
What is significant is the emergence of
half nodes. Its not a new idea; its essentially taking a halfway house between
65nm and 45nm and shrink it optically

to 55nm, he remarked. You dont need
to redesign; you just take the existing
design in 65nm and take the dimensions
down by 10% for a 55nm process. Its not
applicable for all designs as it only works
on the parts that can be shrunk proportionally. Once again, it is a cost driven
solution for more die per wafer.
According to TSCM, the future
involves as much integration on chip as
possible and its a target for 45nm. Its
already started on 65nm and were beginning to see system SoC solutions, where
manufacturers are integrating multiple features and multiple systems that were previously discrete devices. For example, there
is still a huge market potential for mobile
phones. One of the drivers for ultra low
Applications that will quickly

adopt 45nm ... include graphics chips,
which always push the envelope.
Gareth Jones, TSMC
cost handsets is integration and if you can

design a chip that does all the phone functions in one single chip and get the cost
down to single figure dollars, potentially
you have a huge end market. Were not
there yet, but the goal is to try and get a
solution which could open up all kinds of
possibilities even disposable phones, he
concluded.
23
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semis.info@meg.mee.com www.mitsubishichips.com
Please visit us at the PCIM 2007, Hall 12, Stand 421

nele-may-22-07-p024 1
11/5/07 12:30:34
Power.qxd
15/5/07
4:40 pm
Page 25
INTRA DESIGN
POWER
hen it comes to renewable

power whether it is solar
power, wind turbines, or
even motion of the ocean hydroelectric
machines the question is how to harness it and turn it into electrical energy
for the power hungry electronic equipment we cant live without.
Recent product innovations have led
portable equipment designers to consider integrating solar and fuel cell technology into their devices to minimising
recharges and extend battery life.
The emphasis on green power is
gaining momentum, Linear Technologys product marketing manager, Power
Products Group, Tony Armstrong
explained. Green power is all about how
we use the available energy regardless of
what that energy source is by maximising the usefulness of that energy and
minimising how much we actually need
to take for correct operation of the end
product.
According to Texas Instruments
director of portable power management,
Uwe Mengelkamp, mobile phone manufacturers are exploring design techniques
for miniature solar panels working in
parallel with battery cells to extend the
time between recharges.
Weve put forward the concept
that portable devices can take
energy from light and translate it
into charge for batteries, he said.
If you compare this to the vast
numbers of Li-Ion batteries
being sold, then there is a huge
market potential. Were also
exploring using thermocouple
technology to drive leds,
for example.
Texas Instruments
Could solar and fuel cell technology

power the feature rich handsets of the
future? By Mike Richardson.
recently launched its TPS61200 dc/dc
boost converter which, Mengelkamp says,
enables portable electronic equipment to
draw power from solar and micro fuel
cells. The miniature power circuit operates
with input voltages lower
than 0.3V with high efficiency to overcome the low
voltage design barrier of incorporating these alternative energy
sources in applications. By operating from a single solar cell, the
TPS61200 opens the door to
potentially
innovative
designs, such as a built in
solar powered mobile phone
charger that uses indoor ambient lighting.
Mostly idle
Linears Armstrong says its
worth remembering that
a phone spends 90% of
its time in standby,
waiting to make or receive a call. The rest

of the time it idles away, but how much
power is it drawing during this time?
Manufacturers need to optimise the
handsets circuits while in standby
mode, he explained. During use, the
internal processors are working hard, so
you need to ensure the energy being used
is as efficiently as it can be for two reasons. Firstly, the higher the energy conversion from the power source to the sub
circuits, the longer the battery life.
Secondly, high efficiency operation minimises the amount of
heat generated, so thermal management is crucial. These examples
highlight the reasons why renewable
power has to be optimised. You need to
ensure that in a light load or standby
environment, the current draw is as
low as possible as it enhances
longevity at the power source.
Linear Technologys dc/dc
converters operate with low quiescent
current in standby mode, so instead of
drawing milliamps, they only draw
microamps. Minimising the quiescent
current enhances the longevity between
battery charge cycles. Ultimately, this
minimises current draw from a home
Henning Lhlein
Keen on green
25
Power.qxd
15/5/07
4:41 pm
Page 26
INTRA DESIGN
POWER
... portable devices can take

energy from light and translate
it into charge for batteries.
Uwe Mengelkamp, Texas Instruments
appliance which, in turn, reduces the

amount of energy the utility companies
need to supply.
The companys LT3800 high voltage,
low quiescent controller has an input range
from 4 to 60V, making it suitable for many
types of power sources, such as cold crank
and load dumps in automotive applications and medical industry equipment
where multiple battery configurations predominate and input voltage ranges anywhere between 8 to 18V are common.
Much of the power management
design centres on the ability to deal with
multiple voltages in an application. Mengelkamp remarked: The demand on
power management design when using
solar or micro fuel cells is a need to start
from low voltages. This presents a challenge to the physical power design, as
you have to consider high impedance
energy sources and low voltages. It also
makes it difficult to convert energy into
different voltages. Distinguishing
26
whether or not your equipment is able to

run from very low voltages is the challenge we share with our customers, so we
need to provide these solutions in our
chip design.
TI has chosen renewable
energy sources because it sees
them occurring regularly at
the forefront of environmental
technology
demands. The efficiency were getting from fuel
cells is improving all the time,
so it makes
sense to use solar cells
because of their ability to provide energy from medium light
sources, he added. TI enables applications to run from these new energy
sources; its something weve achieved
with the design of the TPS61200.
Low quiescent current

For some time, Linear Technology has
been developing regulators with very low
quiescent currents: one recently launched
regulator product has a quiescent current
of 3A. We have many different controllers where quiescent currents are anywhere from 10 to 100A in a dual output
controller, claimed Armstrong (pictured
below). This is how Linear is enabling
the continuous adoption of these types of
systems. Were being green by minimis-
ing the current draw in a standby mode

whether it is handheld, automobile, medical or consumer products. Linear is
proud to be one of the companies that has
enabled this type of new energy efficient
design.
Armstrong notes that many
handheld products use a single cell Li-Ion battery with a
discharge profile of 4.2V
down to 2.7V.
However,
the
energy available on
the battery is virtually nonexistent after
3V, so most companies
manufacturing end equipment use an algorithm to
turn it off anywhere between
3.1 and 3.3V and recharge.
There are newer cathode chemistries
in these Li-Ion batteries that extend the
range down to 2.5V and still have a significant amount of energy left as it goes
through 3V down to 2.5V, he stated.
Why is this a big deal? The answer is
that if you look at many dc/dc controllers, the input voltage ranges are 2.75
to 6V which accommodates the existing
Li-Ion chemistries. However, for new
chemistries, these controllers will not be
able to use the full energy available in the
discharge profile of Li-Ion batteries that
do go down to 2.5V.
You need to generate enough gate
drive for your mosfets in order to have efficient ac/dc regulator. This is where Linear
comes in because a lot of our newer products have input voltage ranges anywhere
from as low as 1.8 to 2.25V in anticipation
of these new Li-Ion batteries becoming
more mainstream.
And yet it seems that industry imagination is yet to be caught by the potential that
solar and micro fuel cell technology can
offer. Its very exciting that weve enabled
new markets, Mengelkamp enthused.
We are at the forefront of some potential
applications and believe that renewable
energy using solar cells will become a dominating industry trend. This is our belief
and its why weve designed this chip.
nele-mar-13-07-p024 7/3/07 5:49 PM Page 24
Everything you need to save

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Improving energy efficiency is one of many ways Fairchild

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nele-may-22-07-p028 18/5/07 1:41 pm Page 28
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N e w E l e c t r o n i c s w w w. n e o n . c o . u k 2 2 M a y 2 0 0 7
Micro.qxd
15/5/07
4:48 pm
Page 29
INTRA DESIGN
MICROS
If the CAP fits

T
odays system designers face many

challenges. Designs are becoming
more complex incorporating, for
example, 32bit risc microprocessors,
256kbyte of sram, DDR2 memory and
so on. That complexity brings greater
risk of design iterations and delays during the product development phase that
can lead to missing market windows and
impacting profitability.
Given these trends, many companies
have mandated that designs should be
implemented using standard products
wherever possible to mitigate risk. Standard products minimise the design risk,
since they are available off the shelf. However, there are drawbacks. Standard products do not allow customisation and, as
there is no way to build company secrets
into a standard product, designers need
some means to provide custom features.
FPGAs are one approach; they have
low upfront costs, but require RTL logic
design, synthesis and verification. Verification can be onerous, with numerous
detailed test benches required
to validate all test cases.
Another option is an asic.
Standard cell asics offer highly
customised, very low unit cost solutions, but have high upfront development costs more than $1million
for a 90nm design with sophisticated IP content and development time can be 12 months
or more for a complex design.
It is clear that designers
want a solution that has low
upfront costs and low risk.
They want the ability to customise the design and to turn it
quickly. Atmel believes it can meet
these needs with the CAP product line.
CAP is a customisable microcon-
Customisable microprocessor
offers asic costs, but lower risk.
By Tim Kubitschek.
troller platform a microprocessor based
solution with fast local memory, a wide
range of peripherals and a metal programmable (MP) block, which allows
custom IP to be added.
Low risk, but customisable

CAP can be thought of as the integration
of a low risk standard product micro with
customisable logic to produce a single
chip device with a unit cost comparable
to that of a standard cell asic.
CAP is enabled by Atmels Metal Programmable Cell Fabric (MPCF). With
nearly identical routed gate densities to
those of standard cells in the same
process, the technology makes CAP cost
competitive with standard cell asics and
easier to design, rivalling fpgas.
The custom designed MPCF library

contains more 400 cells. It has an eight
transistor core cell measuring 3.2 x
2m and uses two metal layers for
interconnect.
Because CAP is based on standard
cell asic technology, it offers higher performance, lower power consumption
and a lower unit price when compared
to a microcontroller in combination
with an fpga.
The first CAP products are ARM
based, with the core, local memory, the
internal bus interface and peripherals
already designed, laid out and verified in
silicon.
There are a number of advantages
with this approach. Risk is reduced since
the ARM IP is fully verified in silicon.
Development time has been reduced,
since the designer only has to focus on
the portion of logic that would typically
be in an fpga. Design turnaround times
of less than six months are achievable and
fabrication time is reduced since wafers
are part processed. Designers save NRE
costs and CAP unit costs are comparable
to those of standard cell asics. Meanwhile, a range of design tools and
support is available.
So where does CAP
fit in the market?
From a functionality
standpoint, CAP is
suited to products that have an
fpga sitting alongside an ARM
microcontroller. From a volume
standpoint, CAP addresses the economics of products with volumes of more
than 25k units per year whilst, from
a cost standpoint, CAP lowers
BoM costs dramatically.
There are two CAP architectures
CAP7 and CAP9 both
29
Micro.qxd
15/5/07
4:49 pm
Page 30
INTRA DESIGN
MICROS
Figure
g
1: The CAP7 architecture
main
OSC
PMC
AIC
JTAG
TA
PLL
PLL
WDT
PIT
ICE
ARM7TDMI
sram sram
96k 64k
32k OSC
RT
RTT
RC OSC
POR
SHWDC GPBREG
six layer AHB
POR
rom (256k)
peripheral dma
controller
AMBA bridge
APB
CAP7L
USB FS
device
SPI
PIO
x64
designed to cover a broad range of ARM

based applications.
The first CAP products are the
AT91CAP7S, based on the ARM7TDMI
processor core, and AT91CAP9S, based
on the ARM926EJ-S. The AT91CAP7S
has 160k of on chip sram and a 450k asic
gate MP Block. Some ARM peripherals
are instantiated in the fixed portion of
It is clear that designers want a

solution that has low upfront costs,
low risk and which can be customised.
Tim Kubitschek, Atmel
the design to address low cost applications. Additionally, other peripherals can
be designed in the MP block.
The AT91CAP9S, which can run at
up to 200MHz, has a 500k asic gate MP
Block and a number of standard
interfaces and high performance peripherals.
These are connected via
a parallel bus structure
that, together with a distributed DMA architecture,
delivers the high internal
data bandwidth required by
deeply embedded applications.
CAP has a number of advan-
30
EBI
static memory
compact flash
Nand flash
sdram
MLPI
300k
asic
gates
timer USART
RT USART
RT
x3
ADC
tages over standard cell asics, including

lower design costs since the predefined IP
blocks including ARM processor,
memory, analogue and I/O have been
designed and verified in silicon. With the
timing analysis, clock tree generation,
Jtag, BIST and scan logic already implemented for the fixed portion of CAP
devices, design time is reduced. Design
NREs are also reduced, since only metal
masks must be generated the lower
layer masks are unchanged and reused.
Less time, less NRE

An important point is that there are two
components to development cost savings
when using CAP. One is less engineering
time, the other is the lower NRE to
implement the design in silicon.
Another advantage of CAP compared
to standard cell asic is that fab processing
time is halved, since wafers are staged prior
to metal and completed when the metal
masks are ready.
CAP offers performance and unit

costs comparable to those of standard cell
asics, but at a fraction of the overall cost.
Perhaps the most important benefit is
unit cost. Integrating fpga logic within
the MP block replaces the fpga at a fraction of the cost (less than 20% of the cost
of an fpga, depending upon the size of
the device it replaces). The reason is gate
density; the MP Blocks gate density is
comparable to that of a standard cell asic
(210k gate/mm), more than 20 times
that of an fpga (10k gates/mm).
CAP can also support five times the
performance of fpga and can reduce
power consumption by a factor of five.
CAP provides an alternative to placing an fpga alongside an ARM standard
product and is suitable for volumes in
excess of 25k a year.
Atmel will be introducing a family of
devices to provide flexibility in the development of CAP based end products.
That flexibility will be provided with a
number of options in predefined ARM
peripherals, as well as a variety of MP
Block sizes and on chip sram sizes.
Future devices will expand to include
flash memory and additional processor
options, including ARM11 and AVR32.
In summary, CAP allows companies
to take on a larger number of development projects, since the design resource
for each product is reduced compared to
that of a full custom standard cell asic.
And, with more than 70% of the design
already completed, CAP allows companies to lower risk. Product development
time is accelerated and design costs are
reduced. CAP devices enable sophisticated ARM based designs to be developed that allow companies to launch a
product families based on the CAP
architecture.
Apart from being an ideal solution
for emerging businesses, CAP is an
ideal solution for a medium volume
business, offering a more commercially optimised solution
than fpgas.
Author profile:
Tim Kubitschek is
Atmels marketing manager.
nele-may-22-07-p031 18/5/07 11:53 am Page 31
WiMAX, WLAN and

Cellular test all in one
instrument
It is now possible to test 2G & 3G cellular, WLAN and

WiMAX to 6 GHz all in one instrument with the Aeroflex 3000
Series of PXI Modules. It is the perfect solution for your
growing test requirements.
The inherent flexibility of this compact modular RF test
platform allows you to use a single common set of modules
for all your RF signal generation and RF signal analysis needs.
All you need to do is select the appropriate software for the
communications standard you require to test and the
hardware stays the same.
Aeroflexs commitment to extend the capabilities of RF
test ensures that you get all this future-proof, modular
flexibility without sacrificing performance. Youll get all the
building blocks you need for the accuracy and
repeatability you demand. Plus the
inherent cost savings of PXI.
To learn more about
Aeroflex PXI and receive
your FREE build-it-yourself
kit go to
www.aeroflex.com/3000one
31
TI tut.qxd
17/5/07
11:31 am
Page 32
ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
Video goes
In a VSIP system
a heterogeneous
processor
architecture such
as DSP/GPP is
digital
desirable to achieve
maximum system
performance.
Video compression and data flow for surveillance systems. By Cyril Clocher.
demand for network video surveillance products increased by 41.9% in 2006 and is forecast to exceed $2.6billion by 2010.
Meanwhile, the video server market is forecast
to quadruple in size over the next five years.
And market researcher iSuppli says the market
for surveillance camera chips should hit
$1.25bn in 2011 more than double the
$525million reported for 2006.
In a Video Surveillance over Internet Protocol (VSIP) system, hardware handling the network traffic is an integral part of the camera.
he desire for greater security has boosted

the popularity of video surveillance systems, which are now deployed widely
even in homes. But problems with traditional
analogue based systems are influencing a push
for digital based systems. The growing popularity of computer network, semiconductor and
video compression technologies means next
generation video surveillance systems will
undoubtedly be digital and based on standard
technologies and IP networking.
According to IMS Research, global
Figure 1: H.264 encoder block diagram

F(n)
current
For more information, go to

www.ti.com/
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reorder
M
pick intra
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TI tut.qxd
15/5/07
4:39 pm
Page 33
SPONSORED TUTORIAL
VIDEO SECURITY
This is because video signals are digitised by the

camera and compressed before being transmitted to the video server, overcoming network
bandwidth limitations. A heterogeneous
processor architecture such as DSP/GPP is
desirable to achieve maximum system performance. Here, interrupt intensive tasks, such as
video capturing, storing and streaming, can be
partitioned to the GPP, whilst MIPS intensive
video compression is implemented on the DSP.
After the data is transferred, the video
server stores the compressed video streams as
files on a hard disk, overcoming quality issues
associated with analogue storage.
Two standards categories have been developed for digital video compression:
Motion estimation (ME). Every N frames are
defined as a group of pictures (GOP) in which
the first frame is encoded independently as a reference. Only the difference between subsequent
frames and the reference frame is encoded. Typical standards are MPEG2, MPEG4, H.263
and H.264.
Still image compression. Each video frame is
encoded independently as a still image. The
best known standard is JPEG and the MJPEG
standard encodes each frame using the JPEG
algorithm.
ME or still image?
Figure 1 shows the block diagram of an H.264
encoder. This processes each frame using 16 x
16 pixel macroblocks (MB). It has a forward
path, which encodes a frame into bits, and
reconstruction path, which generates a reference frame from the encoded bits.
In the forward path discrete cosine transform (DCT) to quantizer(Q) each MB can
be encoded in intra or inter modes. In inter
mode, the reference MB is found in previously
encoded frame(s) by the motion estimation
(ME) module. In intra mode, M is formed
from samples in the current frame.
The reconstruction path (inverse Q to
inverse DCT) ensures the encoder and decoder
use the identical reference frame to create the

image, otherwise errors will accumulate.
A JPEG encoder divides the input image
into multiple 8 x 8 pixel blocks and processes
them one by one. Each block passes through the
DCT module first. Then the quantizer rounds
off the DCT coefficients according to the quantization matrix. The encoding quality and compression ratio is adjustable depending on the
quantization step. The output from the quantizer is encoded by the entropy encoder to generate the JPEG image.
Since sequential video frames often contain
a lot of correlated information, ME based
approaches can achieve a higher compression
ratio. For example, for NTSC standard resolution at 30frame/s the H.264 encoder can
encode video at 2Mbit/s to achieve average
image quality with a compression ratio of
60:1. To achieve similar quality, MJPEGs
compression ratio is about 10:1 to 15:1.
MJPEG has several advantages over the ME
based approach. JPEG requires significantly less
computation and power consumption and most
PCs can decode and display JPEG images.
MJPEG is also more effective when a single
image or a few images record a specific event,
such as a person walking across a door entrance.
If network bandwidth cannot be guaranteed,
MJPEG is preferred since the loss or delay of
one frame will not affect other frames. With the
ME based method, the delay/loss of one frame
will cause the delay/loss of the entire GOP, since
the next frame will not be decoded until the previous reference frame is available.
Since many VSIP cameras have multiple
video encoders, users can select to run the most
appropriate one, based on the specific application. Some cameras have the ability to execute
multiple codecs simultaneously. MJPEG is typically considered to be the minimal requirement
and most VSIP cameras have a JPEG encoder.
In a typical digital surveillance system,
video is captured from sensor, compressed and
then streamed to the video server. It is unde-
DDR2 memory
Figure 2: Example DSP/GPP video surveillance architecture

external memory interface
DSP subsystem
v in port
DSP core
594MHz
DSP/BIOS
EMAC
ATA interface
heterogeneous processor architecture

h
camera
network router
hard disk
IRAM
ARM core
297MHz
Linux
IRAM
ARM subsystem
sirable to interrupt the video encoder task

implemented on modern DSP architectures
since each context switch may involve large
amounts of register saving and cache throwing.
A heterogeneous architecture is well suited to
this application as video capture and streaming
tasks can be offloaded from the DSP.
When implementing digital video compression on a DSP/GPP SoC based system,
developers should first partition the function
modules to achieve better system performance.
The EMAC driver, TCP/IP network stack
and HTTP server which work together to
stream compressed video signals to the outside
and the video capture driver and ATA driver,
should all be implemented on the ARM processor to help offload DSP processing. Compression should be implemented on the DSP core
since its VLIW architecture is particularly good
at computationally intensive processing.
Once the video frames are captured, raw
video is compressed by exercising video
encoder task and compressed video is saved to
the hard disk.
In current systems, PCs can be used to
monitor a video scene in real time by retrieving the streams from the video server, then
decoding and displaying them. Encoded JPEG
image files can also be retrieved via the Internet, allowing multiple streams can be monitored by one PC. The streams can be also
watched simultaneously from multiple points
in the network.
A huge benefit over analogue systems, the
VSIP central office can contact the video server
through the TCP/IP network and can be
located anywhere in the network. The single
point of failure then becomes the digital camera, not the central office. The quality of JPEG
images can also be configured dynamically to
meet varying quality specifications.
Whilst the market for digital video surveillance systems is set to grow, new technologies
generally take a while to gain acceptance by the
security industry. Therefore understanding
video compression, system partitioning and
codec optimization are key to developing next
generation video surveillance systems.
TI has addressed this challenge by educating the market on the benefits of network
video surveillance with the introduction of
DaVinci technology.
By leveraging TI DSP programmability,
power efficient performance, code compatible
roadmap and a comprehensive development
eco system, and with the assurance of long term
supply and reliability of a top tier semiconductor supplier, video security customers will ease
their move to digital video surveillance systems,
improve their time to market and will add value
to their product portfolio.
Author profile:
Cyril Clocher is EMEA business development
manager, digital media dsp platforms/emerging
end equipments, for Texas Instruments.
33
Intra prod.qxd
17/5/07
10:22 am
Page 34
Mini board supports drag and drop
MIXED SIGNAL &

ANALOGUE
BOARD LEVEL DESIGN

Abacus has announced a miniature
embedded mcu board supporting pen
drive style drag and drop of files such as
executable routines, .wav sounds or data.
This capability is enabled by a low
footprint, power-safe embedded file
system for applications requiring low cost
and complexity.
Hardware is based on a TI MSP430
16bit mcu with 64Mbit of serial flash. A
plug and play COM port driver is also
provided, allowing the board to be
managed using standard Windows pc
interfaces. A 3.5mm audio jack, allowing
direct playback of sounds dropped onto
the device simply by connecting an
external speaker.
The design features the HCCEmbedded TINY file system and takes
advantage of HCC-Embeddeds UC-Sync
software to enable easy connection

to a pc.
Abacus Embedded: visit
www.abacus-group.co.uk
A high precision op amp from ST is said

to guarantee an ultra low input offset
voltage over a wide common mode
voltage range. This feature, added to the
parts competitive cost, makes it the ideal
for automotive and industrial applications.
An ST patented trimming technique
adjusts the input offset voltage of the
TS507 at 100V maximum. This digital
method is done after packaging and has
the advantage of reducing the devices
overall cost by avoiding the use of
external components.
The TS507 also offers a good precision
over the full temperature range through a
low input offset voltage drift (250V
maximum over 0 to 85C). In addition,
the TS507 features high open loop gain
(131dB typical at 5V) and a high
common mode rejection ratio of 115 dB
typical at 5V).
STMicroelectronics:
visit ww.st.com
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34
Intra prod.qxd
17/5/07
10:21 am
Page 35
INTRA DESIGN
PRODUCT NEWS
Single and dual comparators from

National Semiconductor are said to
feature the industrys lowest power (21mA
typical) with a propagation delay of
700ps.
The LMH7322 joins the LMH7220 single
comparator as part of a new family of
single, dual and quad high-speed
comparators that feature low voltage
differential signalling and reduced swing
positive emitter coupled logic outputs.
The comparators are suited to a range of
industrial, medical, and test and
measurement applications.
The LMH7322 features a 700ps
propagation delay and dispersion of 5ps
at an overdrive of greater than 100mV,
which allows fast and accurate delay
control. Separate input and output supply
pins enable level shifting applications.
Meanwhile, the LMH7220s typical
propagation delay of 2.9ns and its
0.6ns rise and fall times consume only
6.8mA at 5V.
Both parts offer guaranteed performance
from -40 to 125C.
National Semiconductor:
visit www.national.com
POWER
Vicor has announced a high voltage VI
Chip bus converter with a power density
of greater than 1kW/in. The
B384F120T30 is a high efficiency Sine
Amplitude Converter operating from a
360 to 400V dc primary bus to deliver
an isolated low voltage secondary.
The 12V (nominal) output can be
paralleled for high current outputs or
connected in series to create a 48V bus,
making the converter suitable for use in
high performance server and telecom
ac/dc switch mode power supplies.
The BCM converter may also be used to
power individual cards or blades directly
from the HV distribution bus.
Vicor: visit www.vicr.com
MICROS
Nu Horizons is now stocking the
AT91SAM7S, SAM7X and SAM7XC
processors from Atmel. These ARM7TDMI
processors are now available with 512k
of flash, which means software engineers
can integrate new features through in

application programming.
The flash is arranged in two separate
banks, enabling programming to be
carried out at the same time as
application execution. The dual bank
implementation also protects against
failures from power outages during
firmware updates.
Atmel has doubled the density of the zero
wait state, 32bit wide sram to 128k and
the latest devices have up to 13 dedicated
peripheral DMA channels that increase on
chip bandwidth to 25Mbit/s or more.
Nu Horizons:
visit www.nuhorizons.com
Find the cure.
High Variety of Pitches, Signal Routing, Stack Heights and Terminations
www.samtec.com/signal_integrity
SAMTEC UNITED KINGDOM
117 Deerdykes View Westeld, Cumbernauld Scotland G68 9HN
Tel: 01236 739292 Fax: 01236 727113 E-mail: scotland@samtec.com
35
We were delighted to be named as a finalist in the 2006 Innovation

& Design Excellence Awards. It was an excellent opportunity to gain
national recognition, as well as celebrating the expertise and hard
work of our team. Being named amongst the industrys leading
companies is a great honour in itself.
you win!
Win or lose
Paul Marsh, managing director, GSPK Design
The 2007 Innovation & Design Excellence Awards

(iDEAs) reward creativity, innovation and excellence in
engineering design. They celebrate the critical role
played by engineering design teams. These can be an
in-house team or external design house.
Whats more, the awards provide a key benchmark of

your performance against the best in the field.
If you think your design team can compete with the
best, this is your chance to prove it. This years
categories are:
Design Collaboration
B2B Product
Consumer Product
Green Innovation
Small Company
Design Cycle Reduction, and
The prestigious Innovation & Design Excellence
of the Year Award.
It all starts with an entry form (details below), in which
you describe how you apply innovation in design. If this
looks good, an iDEA judging team will visit you for a day
and make a rigorous assessment.
Many companies see this visit and
subsequent feedback as the most
compelling reason to enter.
The highlight of the programme is the prestigious
Awards Luncheon, where more than 500 guests will
gather at the Park Lane Hilton in London in September.
Entry to the awards is free, but entry forms must be
completed by 31 May 2007.
You can only gain from entering

the 2007 Innovation & Design
Excellence Awards
To request an entry form, contact:

Maggie Bridge, Awards Co-ordinator, Cranfield School of Management, Bedford, MK43 0AL
Email: m.bridge@cranfield.ac.uk Tel: 01234 754498 Fax: 01234 751806
www.ideawards.co.uk
Organised by
nele-may-08-07-p030 1
In partnership with
Sponsored by
3/5/07 13:34:32
Soft.qxd
15/5/07
4:45 pm
Page 37
INTER DESIGN
Outsourcing helps to make

femtocells right by design.
By Philip Ling.
oftware development is not only

recognised by the electronics
industry as being the biggest challenge it faces, but also by all those
enabled by it.
At so many levels, software defines the
world around us. It is hard to find any
modern day phenomenon that isnt, in
some way, characterised by bits and bytes.
But software is only an artefact; created
by the widening use of microprocessors
and microcontrollers instead of hardwired
circuits. Ironically, replacing hardwired
elements with software defined computers
has only motivated the industry to create
programmable devices with evermore
transistors and hence greater propensity to
be programmed.
There is a rapidly aging adage within
the embedded world that goes something
like transistors are cheap, software is
expensive. The essence of this dichotomy
is undeniable and its impact far reaching.
But this explosion in software complexity is accompanied by a dearth of software engineering resource. For some, this
presents an opportunity; to provide software design services.
To be a successful provider of design
services, it would seem reasonable to specialise in an area seeing rapid and continued growth, such as telecommunications.
This is exactly what Aricent offers to
device and infrastructure manufacturers
worldwide. With a customer list which
includes Nokia, Samsung, Alcatel-Lucent,
Infineon and Cisco, there are few companies in the communications business with
whom it doesnt engage. In fact, all of the
top ten handset and communications
infrastructure manufacturers are Aricent
customers.
Sanjay Dhawan, Aricents executive
vice president, explained the companys
focus: Aricent is a pure play provider; we
dont provide software for all verticals, just
communications.
World your oyster?

This is apparent from the headline figures, such as: 95% of its business is in
software; 90% of its approximately 7000
employees are in engineering (and its
looking to add another 4000 this year);
80% of revenue comes from software services (the remainder from licensing software products), with engineering teams
spread across 13 countries.
You may be wondering why you
havent heard of such a large organisation
before. Aricent was formed in 2004 from
the consolidated resources of around
seven other companies acquired in recent
years by Flextronics. This close affiliation

with contract manufacturers also helps in
providing total turnkey services, from
design to manufacturer, claims Dhawan.
Despite its impressive and expansive
engineering resources, Aricent still has to
compete for business. The companys
structure revolves around the services side
of the business, complemented by the
development of software products. Those
products may also be licensed to competitors and likewise the services department
may source software products from outside the company.
37
Soft.qxd
15/5/07
4:46 pm
Page 38
INTER DESIGN
Figure 1: IMS client framework overview

application
client
PTT
PTV
application server
messaging
PTT
PTV
messaging
HHigh
gh llevel
APIs
API
IMS
engine
media
access
handset
platforms
Symbian
IMS
signalling
WinCE
Linux
device
management
Brew
Although Dhawan believes there is no

other company offering the same level of
design services, he does see competition
from design companies servicing a
broader range of vertical markets, or from
niche players providing specific technical
experience.
According to Dhawan, the major challenges facing the telecommunications
industry today can be summarised by one
word; convergence. In several words, that
represents the provision of voice, video
and data, anywhere, anytime, over wired
or wireless systems, seamlessly.
For example, said Dhawan, I want
to be able to continue a call on my cellular phone when I get home, but switch to
my home wireless network because its
more cost effective. That handover needs
to be automatic and transparent.
Within this utopian topology, the hot
topics are WiMax, IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) and femtocells. Whilst
WiMax can be thought of as a natural
extension to WiFi, IMS and femtocells
may not be so readily identifiable.
In reality, IMS is the new backbone
for delivering the seamless experience.
Enabled by the now ubiquitous internet
protocol (IP), it can deliver voice, video
and data services over any access type
fixed or mobile and creates one consistent user experience that is independent of
the access device (see figure 1).
Femtocells, like the name may suggest,
are localised extensions to an existing cellular network, in this case the 3G network.
A leading UK based developer of pico and
38
IMS core
femtocell technology, ip.access, recently

announced its latest range of 3G femtocell,
the Oyster 3G, and Aricent played an
important role in its development.
According to ip.access, there is an elephant in the 3G room, in the form of
power. Penetration of 3G signals within
buildings is a real problem, both for the
handset and the cell. As little as 2.5% of a
signals strength may actually make it
through a buildings walls and what little
does get through is then scattered across
multiple paths. The compounding effect
is that more of the basestations resources
are spent servicing the hard to get to
handsets, lowering the overall quality of
the cell in question.
This is where the femtocell comes in,
by providing localised wireless access to
standard 3G enabled handsets, routed
back through a wired connection.
Dr Nick Johnson, chief technology
officer for ip.access, said Aricent was
selected for its deep domain expertise in
communications software.
Weve worked with Aricent for some

time now, mostly as a customer for their
software stacks, said Johnson.
The funding for Oyster 3G was
secured following an investment round, in
March 2006. During 2005, ip.access was
already looking for partners to help it with
the project. Aricent was chosen partly
because of the existing relationship, but
also because due diligence showed it was
the right partner.
Aricent provided stacks (ATM, 3G
access network) as well as some glue logic
software, according to Dr Johnson. Aricent was also involved with the development of the radio resources management
layer, a crucial element of the femtocell
that determines which handsets get the
lions share of available resources, without
impacting the overall quality of service.
Dr Johnson believes outsourcing was
necessary in this case. We could have
done the development in house, but our
main issue was time to ramp up. The
timescales made it unfeasible.
Although there has been some knowledge transfer during this project, Dr
Johnson believes there is a fine balance to
be struck between outsourcing and in
house development. There is a danger
that our internal resources could feel left
out if all the interesting software is
sourced externally.
Oyster 3G is about half way through
its design lifecycle, according to Dr Johnson. Although capable of providing a
packet service over which IMS could be
deployed, ip.access is currently looking at
attaching the Oyster 3G directly to an
IMS, without using a 3G network.
The drive to deploy femtocells within
domestic and commercial buildings
clearly represents a huge opportunity for
companies such as ip.access. Just as the so
called triple play created a battleground
for set top box manufacturers, what is now
being referred to as quad play adding
IPTV and IMS could rapidly usurp that
campaign, seeing femtocells working with
or perhaps even displacing STBs, and
providing the fillip 3G seems to need.
Author profile:
Philip Ling is a freelance technical writer.
NI LabVIEW SignalExpress
Plug. Play.
Step 1. Plug in USB Cable
USB Data Logging as Easy as Plug and Play.

Introducing National Instruments LabVIEW SignalExpress
software, a new interactive tool for quickly acquiring,
analysing and presenting data with no programming.
Combine it with the widest assortment of USB data
acquisition modules for a truly plug-and-play datalogging solution.
Step 2. Log Data
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More than 30 measurement modules
01635 523545
View demos and download FREE software at ni.com/datalogging
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info.uk@ni.com
2007 National Instruments Corporation. All rights reserved. LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI, ni.com, NI CompactDAQ, and SignalExpress are trademarks
of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
nele-apr-24-07-p029 1
11/4/07 15:49:04
Packet.qxd
15/5/07
4:28 pm
Page 40
Pass the packet

Supporting tomorrows data
rates at todays prices.
By Graham Pitcher.
n the early days of the internet, access

was via dial up modems. Data rates
were slow, but the information was predominantly text based.
As the web developed, content became
more complex and users demanded and
have become accustomed to much
higher data rates, courtesy of the various
flavours of dsl.
But now new communications buzzwords are appearing triple play and fibre
to the home (ftth). Triple play the combination of voice, video and data over the
same line is placing increasingly rigorous
demands on developers of communications systems and on those developing the
packet processors which move data around
the world.
Dror Salee has been involved in developing ftth technology with Passave Technologies. Now, following its recent
acquisition by PMC-Sierra, hes the latters
director of strategic marketing. He pointed
out that communications is all about data.
Even voice calls sit on top of data communications, he continued. And that
means its become an Ethernet IP world.
Salee highlighted an apparent conflict
in the Ethernet gigabit passive optical networks GPONs which are emerging as
40
the favourite method of delivering this

next generation of high speed data access.
Ethernet is an IEEE standard, he noted,
but the GPON standard has been developed by the ITU, which is responsible for
ATM and telephone standards. But if you
look at whats happening in the real world,
its Ethernet because Ethernet is ruling the
comms world. Look at new access devices
and youll see they are built around Ethernet switches and these are very different
animals to dsl modems.
But there is one similarity with dsl
modems the technology which is being

developed to replace them. According to
Salee: This technology has to be very cost
effective. The target is to replace copper
based communications and we have to follow the cost structure of dsl. The market
needs gigabit processing and dsl cost.
Yet GPONs (for more, see New Electronics 8 May pp42/43) dont necessarily
deliver gigabit processing to the end user.
But you have to consider it as gigabit
technology, Salee observed, even though
the bandwidth is shared between users.
Figure 1: PAS6301 block diagram
GigaPASS wirespread data path

EPON MAC
SERDES
MAC
optics control
security
engine
sdram
controller
PAS6301
packet processor
classifier
limiters
VLAN
10/100/
100BaseT
MAC
ARM subsystem
local bus and peripheral controller
Packet.qxd
15/5/07
4:29 pm
Page 41
INTER DESIGN
PACKET PROCESSING
And this, he contends, is something which

not every developer understands.
Passave had already started working
closely with Japanese company NTT on
the provision of GPONs. Now, new owner
PMC-Sierra is beginning to deploy its
technology in Korea.
Salee said part of the roll out process
involves rigorous testing. The carriers
connect packet processors to a tester and
run 64byte packets at full rate to see how
they cope.
This may seem obvious, even trivial,
but Salee explains its significance. With
Ethernet, the smallest available packet is
64byte and so this is the ultimate test for a
router. Big packets are easy to handle
because the processor has less to do.
Handling 64byte packets at full rate,
said Salee, is quite complicated. Theres a
number of functions involved, including
classification and quality of service queuing. And the device needs to be able to
cope with flooding large numbers of low
priority packets without dropping high
priority packets, such as voice.
So how does PMC-Sierras approach
differ from others? Salee explained: A dsl
modem tends to have a PHY front end,
but then to process in software. This
approach doesnt work at gigabit rates.
That made us develop an architecture with
a fully hardware based data path.
This new approach is the GigaPASS
architecture, which integrates three high
performance functional platforms in a single chip: a bidirectional gigabit PON to
gigabit Ethernet channel; a multistage
packet protocol processing engine that
operates at line speeds; and a programmable embedded 32bit processor with operating system, middleware and application
specific firmware that provides ftth terminal feature sets and which is field programmable by the service provider.
This latter feature offers a degree of
future proofing. Because GigaPASS supports reprogramming, carriers can tune
their optical line terminals and optical network units (OLT/ONU) for todays services, but can redefine performance
parameters to support future applications.
An example is support for dynamic
bandwidth allocation (DBA). Defined in
the GPON specification, programmable

DBA offers the ability to provide different
bandwidth priorities to subscribers, to support different application service requirements.
However, there are many bandwidth
allocation algorithms and each carrier has
its preference. GigaPASS permits OLTs
and ONUs to be reprogrammed with different programmable DBA options in the
field.
Separate data path

A critical aspect of the GigaPASS architecture is that the data path is separate from
the control path processor system. The
media interface, queuing, packet processing, classification, encryption/decryption
and other data payload processing is done
in the wire speed channel, passing data
payloads to the Ethernet media interface
on the customer side and the PON on the
central office side.
Its a programmable hardware
machine, Salee explained, which can
handle packets from the moment they get
to the device, through it and out the other
side. This is a different approach to that
found in dsl modems and lower speed
access architectures.
He noted that it wasnt easy to do high
speed packet processing on a processor. If
you dont get it right, he claimed, the
process can evolve to you creating some
kind of expensive packet coprocessor.
Thats not good because of the cost.
Meeting these cost targets requires, in
Salees opinion, a targeted architecture

with packets processed completely in hardware. Only exceptions would need to be
handled differently, he added. Exceptions
are handled by a risc processor which sits
on top of the programmable hardware
machines.
The hardware machines can be programmed to look at particular fields the
queuing engine, for example, puts everything in the right queue, whilst the vlan
manipulation engine is very important,
allowing vlan information to be inserted
and deleted. All of this is done by dedicated hardware, with the performance levels expected from a network processor.
He said network processors consume
lots of power, cost tens of dollars and have
a lot of memory associated with them.
We need to do all of that, but at a cost
associated with a dsl modem.
Yet Salee is eager to point out that GigaPASS based devices such as the PAS6301
are not processors. They are designed to
do one thing, he explained. Its a set of
pipelined hardware machines, with each
one doing what it is supposed to.
According to Salee, GigaPASS encompasses lessons learned from working with
carriers who have done what he calls real
deployment. If you look at the GPON
market, theres a lot of devices trying to
take the existing packet processing architecture you see in dsl and put it on
steroids. But it breaks down. It needs a
new paradigm and thats why were proud
of our achievement, he concluded.
Figure 2: Multiport ONU block diagram

Multi-port ONU
sdram packet buffer

4 x 10/100BaseT
PAS6301
GE-PON
EPON
PHY
EPON
MAC
L2 bridge
VLAN engine
10/100/1000
MAC
Marvell
6045 4 x FE
switch
CPU subsystem
includes multiport ONU software
stack run by an internal ARM9
flash
sdram
41
Inter prod.qxd
17/5/07
10:13 am
Page 42
INTER DESIGN
PRODUCT NEWS
New URT signals improved platforms
HARDWARE
COMMUNICATIONS TEST
Aimed at improving platforms for
generating analogue and digital radio
signals, Mindready has announced the
latest software defined radio toolkit release,
the universal radio tester (URT) Version 3.0.
The URT is a flexible, compact and
affordable solution used for generating
analogue and digital radio frequency
signals based on National Instruments
PXI hardware and NI LabVIEW and NI
TestStand software.
The URT hardware consists of a PXI
chassis, an embedded PXI dual core
COMMUNICATIONS
The WinArrow2 IP-DSLAM processor is
software compatible with the previous
WinArrow devices, enabling users to take
advantage of the benefits of the new
product.
These parts can support sustained
throughput in excess of 3Gbit/s and can
achieve the data rates required in high
controller and the National Instruments

PXI-5671 2.7 GHz RF vector signal
generator.
National Instruments: visit
www.ni.com/uk
RF & MICROWAVE
OPTOELECTRONICS
A range of rf microwave and millimetre

wave amplifiers manufactured by B&Z
Technologies is now available from Aspen.
All B&Z microwave and millimetre wave
amplifiers fit into a single common
housing, giving design engineers the
flexibility to upgrade their systems easily.
The B&Z Technologies top range
amplifiers complement Aspens existing
line up of rf, microwave and millimetre
wave offerings, and are suitable for
defence, avionics, satellite
communications and instrumentation .
Aspen Electronics: visit
www.aspen-electronics.co.uk
Sanyos DL-8142-201 830nm high

power, infrared wavelength laser diode
now comes with an optical output power
of 150mW. The diode comes in a 5.6mm
package, which is easier to manufacture
than the 9mm package diode it replaces.
The device also has a lower aspect ratio
than its predecessor to offer improved
typical beam divergence of 16 suitable
for use in night vision, measurement and
printing and as a light source in
applications where high optical power
output and small package size is critical.
Photonic Products: visit
www.photonic-products.com
end ADSL2+ and/or VDSL2 line cards.

WinArrow2 runs the same software suite
as the existing WinArrow solution which
comprises the essential building blocks for
IP DSLAMs. The data path software and
control plane stacks are supplied by
Wintegra.
Wintegra:
visit www.wintegra.com
True Industrial Grade Design with Rugged Metal Case for Harsh Factory Floor Environments
6 Standard Models available for 12V/6.5A,12V/13A, 24V/3.8A, 24V/7.5 A, 24V/15A and 24V/25A
Power Good Signal and Remote On/Off
Short Circuit, Overvoltage and Overtemperature Protection
Autoselect Input 115/230VAC and International Safety Approval Package
ATEX and ANSI/UL 60079-15 Certification for Hazardous Locations
True Redundancy Operation (optional)
Output Buffer for Power Back-up (optional)
Battery Controller (optional)
Easy Installation with detachable Screw Terminal Block
3 Year Product Warranty
42
nele-may-22-07-p043 18/5/07 11:48 am Page 43
REVIEW DISPLAY SYSTEMS
Arbitrary Generators
high speed, long memory,
variable clock architecture
TFT PANELS
wST-NLT TFT
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For Superior Display Performance
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Screen sizes from 5.5 to 12.1
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Wide operating temperature
and up to four channels

The new TGA12102 and TGA12104 universal generators from
TTi incorporate a true 100MS/s, 1M word variable-clock arbitrary
waveform generator, 10ns resolution pulse train generator or
40MHz DDS function generator on each channel.
Variable clock ARB architecture offers much higher performance
than other generators that use modified DDS techniques. Waveforms are free of sampling jitter, and multiple waveform segments
can be sequenced and looped. Plus, unlike a DDS generator, an
external clock can be used to drive the ARB in synchronism with a
varying frequency signal.
For the user, this means being able to solve more real-world problems - and thats what an arbitrary/function generator is for !
1M word, 0.1Hz to 100MHz variable-clock ARB capability.
Two or four channels, fully independent or linked operation.
Compatible touchscreens and driver

boards are also available for these panels
www.review-displays.co.uk
info@review-displays.co.uk
Tel:01959 563345 Fax:01959 564452
REVIEW DISPLAY SYSTEMS

TOUCH SCREENS & CONTROLLERS
External ARB clock input; additional master-clock channel.

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Sequences of up to 1024 waveform segments with looping.
40MHz DDS function generators with ten digit resolution.
Pulse train generators for up to 10 variable amplitude pulses.
CLEAR PERFORMANCE GAINS
Removable CF card storage for up to 500 waveforms/card.

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- the best waveform creation/editing software available.

These new models complete a range of six universal generators
offering 40MS/s or 100MS/s sampling with 1, 2 or 4 channels.
Contact us or visit the website for full technical details and pricing.
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Glebe Road, Huntingdon, Cambs. PE29 7DR
Tel: 01480 412451, Fax: 01480 450409, e-mail: sales@tti.co.uk
Web: www.tti.co.uk or www.tti.co.uk/generator
THURLBY THANDAR INSTRUMENTS

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Tel:01959 563345 Fax:01959 564452

43
nele-may-22-07-p044 16/5/07 12:49 pm Page 44
Need an INDUSTRIAL-spec
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MSC UK Ltd
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www.msc-ge.com
Looking to optimise the end-user experience?

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inspiration in displays
Display.qxd
15/5/07
4:42 pm
Page 45
SYSTEM DESIGN
DISPLAYS
Alive and kicking

Despite appearances to the
contrary, the mono lcd is still
the best solution in many
applications. By Jim Hemsley.
here is no doubting the impact of

the liquid crystal display; lcd flat
panel monitors are the norm and
small footprint lcd tvs are quickly taking
over in the home. PDAs, laptops, mobile
phones and satellite navigation systems
are all enabled by the full colour tft lcd.
So where does that leave the humble
mono lcd? Far from being on its last legs,
the technology is more than holding its
own. Everyday applications clocks,
timers, petrol pumps and the like continue to be its bread and butter and the
mono display addresses a growing percentage of business opportunities. Some
of the greatest growth is in industrial and
professional systems, such as test and
measurement, medical, marine and
broadcast equipment.
Industrial and professional applications benefit particularly from the mono
lcds inherent advantages of wider operational temperature range, simpler interfacing and readability in all light
conditions. Very often, the displays simple nature offers an advantage in applications where colour displays would
confuse the user. Here, a clear concise
message is the most important factor.

Commercially, unit cost is a major
factor. This, and the ability to customise
mono technology even for small quantities makes for savings in overall cost
and time to market.
These types of application typically
have a long life cycle. By contrast, colour
displays are often obsolete before UK production has started. Displays designed for
high volume products suffer from consumer market volatility, where mass production switches from one product to the
next. Copying and customising an alternative is generally not an option, with
minimum order quantities for colour tfts
typically 25,000 units or more. TFT panels are frequently proprietary and therefore not instantly interchangeable.
OEMs seeking a mono lcd solution

have a number of routes, depending on
requirements. At one end of the spectrum lies the custom lcd; at the other is
a complete design to manufacture solution. In between are options such as custom backlighting and small pcb redesign.
With no minimum order quantities
and low cost tooling charges, a custom
lcd is the best investment for any development programme, as the end product
benefits from a clear display.
A specialist vendor will have experience of supplying custom displays and
knowledge of most types of application
requirements from harsh marine environments to the equally challenging high
volume domestic applications.
Custom lcds can range from simple
segmented displays with special icons,
through character modules with differing
language character sets, to top of the
range displays using graphics controllers
to drive individual pixels. Across the
board, mono lcds will be easier to design,
customise and integrate. An in house
design facility typically works from verbal descriptions to produce approval
45
Display.qxd
15/5/07
4:43 pm
Page 46
DISPLAYS
drawings and specifications within a few

days. Once drawings are approved, prototypes are generally available in less than
three weeks and even faster turnaround
times can be attained.
Many standard and custom display
applications require legibility in varying
light conditions. On top of this, different
applications will have different needs in
order to provide the most suitable and
cost effective solution. Fitting a backlight
is the simple part but, for maximum aes-
Far from being on its last

legs, (mono ldd technology)
is more than holding its own.
Jim Hemsley, Trident Displays
thetic output, the display viewing mode

also needs to be considered. In many
applications, the lcd has to be tuned in
order to offer the best solution.
Designing backlit displays means factoring in not only the displays power
consumption and size; it also requires a
thorough understanding of the properties
of light in order to maximise efficiency.
All types of backlight solutions should be
considered, although led and cold cathode fluorescent light are the most popu-
46
SYSTEM DESIGN
lar. A custom design

will try and use existing standard backlights to reduce
tooling costs.
Mono lcds cannot, by definition, display information in more than one
colour. Custom backlighting can overcome this; for example, to provide alerts
or status indications. A variety of colours
is available, including multicolour leds.
Tricolour backlights allow different wavelengths to be mixed, enabling the display
to offer up to seven colours within a single unit. This is popular where an instant
visual representation is required to indicate a change of equipment status.
Rather than commissioning a design
for the display and the backlight, many
OEMs are looking for a complete electronic and mechanical design function for
mono lcds. Design houses can work from
either customer product concept ideas, or
take completed designs and convert them
into production items. By involving vendors at the earliest stages, customers can
draw on their experience to recommend
solutions that balance cost and availability
of components for prototypes and mass
production, as well as the product lifetime.
Consideration needs to be given to final
product manufacture. During initial
development and prototyping, this can
often be overlooked in the race to create a
product quickly and gain market feedback.
Even where third parties are not involved

until later, design solution providers can
offer production engineering expertise and
suggest cost reduction measures.
A natural progression is to source a
complete solution for display sub assemblies and products from a preferred vendor. Again, the best policy is to involve the
vendor from the initial product concept.
With projects where the display is the focal
point of a systems man machine interface,
most of the other design functions will fit
together once the display format has been
finalised. The end result is a total package
display and backlight drawings, circuit
schematic
diagrams, pcb plots,
mechanical layouts
and
housings,
together with 3d
modelling.
Conventionally,
this is sub contract
assembly territory, but most sub contractors will outsource the display element,
rather than handling it in house. The
alternative is to use a display company
for assembly.
Chip on glass (COG) is widely used
in both standard and custom products,
offering a complete module approach.
The customer gains pcb space and
receives an easily assembled package.
Most standard character modules are
assembled using chip on board (COB)
methods. This process offers a cost saving solution for pcb assembly when several driver devices are required.
Tape automated bonding (TAB) is
suited to high volume manufacture where
complex driver devices, such as graphic
display controllers, are required. Following the COG, COB or TAB process, lcd
sub assemblies are normally added to a
conventional surface mount pcb.
With advantages like these, mono displays still play a significant role. The future
is bright, the future is mono with perhaps some colours from the backlight.
Author profile:
Jim Hemsley is a product manager with
Trident Displays.
nele-may-22-07-p047 17/5/07 3:09 pm Page 47
Varitronix understands LCD

We were one of the first to manufacture LCDs 30 years ago
TFT-LCD, mono LCD or our progressive new technologies
like IBN - we provide full customisation with pioneering R&D
for industrial, consumer, telecommunications and
automotive applications
Your best choice for

display solutions
t 01344 303077 e sales@varitronixuk.ltd.uk
www.varitro nix.com
TFT Panels
Electro-Luminescent
Colour and Mono STD LCD
Touchscreens
Graphic & character modules
Drivers and accessories
08457 201201
rswww.com/electronics
47
nele-apr-10-07-p007 03/04/2007 12:54 PM Page 1
>IHI6GIH=:G:
;>C9L=6INDJC::96IJ@#9><>@:N#8DB
Access to more than

a million products now
available online!*
uk.digikey.com
0.800.587.0991 0.800.904.7786
*New product added daily.

2007 Digi-Key Corporation
701 Brooks Ave. South Thief River Falls, MN 56701 USA
FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER 100!
ALL PRICES ARE IN BRITISH

POUND STERLING AND
INCLUDE DUTIES.
MARKETWATCH2205.qxd
16/5/07
2:50 pm
Page 49
MARKET WATCH
PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC
Logical developments
XFests success shows a growing
interest in programmable logic
amongst a wide range of
potential users of the technology.
By Georg Steinberger.
here are product groups in

the semiconductor world
which are far bigger than
programmable logic. But very
few draw the same level of attention from the engineering community. Having become prevalent
across many industries, fpgas in
many instances define complete
system structures, as did mcus or
dsps many years ago.
Interestingly enough, industrial electronics the heart and
soul of European components distribution is the second biggest
application market for fpgas,
according to Garter Dataquest.
Thats why distributors by far the
biggest channel to market for programmable logic apply extra
effort to fpga demand creation, in
order to get their customers
acquainted with the latest technology, products and software.
Together with programmable
logic market leader Xilinx, Avnet
Electronics Marketing has organ-
ised XFest probably the biggest

series of programmable logic
seminars the electronics world
has yet seen. This series of technical seminars offers practical
how to system level design training for fpga, dsp and embedded
systems designers.
XFest is running worldwide
until 13 July. It will visit 90 locations throughout Europe, Asia,
Japan and North America. Silica,
Avnet's European distribution
channel for Xilinx, is organising
24 of them across Europe.
Halfway through the European XFest schedule, the results
and feedback are positive: 2000
engineers have signed up to
attend, 1000 have been trained
in the first seminars and 20% of
The iSuppli mission is to reduce

the overall cost of acquisition for
electronic components, whilst
improving the continuity of supply
and simplifying supply chain
processes for ems, oem and
supplier communities. Market
Intelligence Services provide critical information designed to enrich
tactical decisions and strategic plans. Visit www.isuppli.com
those have never worked with

fpgas before.
The intensive one day agenda
was packed with update presentations and demonstrations on
general fpga design based on the
Virtex 5 family; it offered embedded processor and dsp courses.
And last, but not least, other semiconductor partners of Silica
Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Sharp and Micron
joined XFest with support sessions, presentations and table top
exhibitions.
What makes XFest unique in
the eyes of the attendees?
Todays fpga designers are
required to expand their knowledge beyond the boundaries of
the fpga itself. They must concern
themselves with the various interfaces and with system level

design issues such as power,
memory performance, analogue
interfaces and high speed serial
I/O standards.
Likewise, system architects, dsp
developers and software engineers see the fpga becoming a
more important part of their coprocessing and embedded system.
For this reason, XFest is bringing industry leading suppliers
together to help promote these
system level design solutions for
the fpga and system designers.
A lesson learned from XFest is
that whilst the quality of technology and product make a difference to some, the quality of the
event makes the difference to all.
The levels of attendance and
satisfaction show that breadth
and depth of information are
what counts to engineers who
have to spend their time wisely.
Author profile:
Georg Steinberger is vice president communications for Avnet
Electronics Marketing EMEA.
Find out more
If youre interested in seeing
the XFest presentations, you
can order them by email at:
silica.xfest@avnet.com.
Avnet Electronics Marketing EMEA is a

group of specialised pan European
electronic components distributors and
service organisations. The groups distribution divisions Avnet Memec,
Avnet Time, Silica and EBV offer customers specific technology and market know how, complemented with
cross functional and synergistic services, such as logistics, product modification and supply chain consulting. For more, see www.avnet.com
49
MARKETWATCH2205.qxd
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2:50 pm
Page 50
MARKET WATCH
PRICE TRACKER
Category
Description
Feb
Mar
Apr
ANALYSIS
Analogue Monolithic
Amplifiers and comparators
97.7
97.1
96.7
Analogue Monolithic
Analogue interface ics
89.3
88.7
88.5
Analogue Monolithic
Voltage regulators and references
Capacitors
Aluminium
63.7
63.3
62.8
Capacitors
Ceramic
25.3
24.2
23.2
Capacitors
Tantalum
41.9
41.1
40.6
55.7
55.2
54.9
Bipolar transistors
Bipolar pricing increased slightly
in April and is likely to continue
its upward trend in Q2 and Q3.
Although losing market share to
mosfets and igbts, demand for
bipolar power transistors is keeping prices stable. iSuppli expects
strong demand for power management technology this year
and bipolar lead times are likely
to extend, with capacity constraints for certain packages.
34.1
32.5
31.0
36.4
32.5
32.5
Connectors
Resistors
SMD flat chips
Filters
104.5
103.8 103.5
Crystal
kHz
42.2
39.0
39.0
Crystal
MHz
50.0
47.8
47.1
Oscillator
TCXO
41.7
41.7
44.3
Oscillator
VCXO
51.6
51.6
55.3
Oscillator
XO
50.5
50.5
57.3
Magnetics
Ferrite beads
29.5
26.9
26.6
Magnetics
Fixed inductors
64.4
63.8
62.4
Standard Logic
General purpose cmos
77.4
76.3
75.7
Standard Logic
General purpose bicmos
77.9
76.1
75.7
Standard Logic
General purpose bipolar
90.5
89.6
89.1
Rectifier
Schottky and ultrafast
89.4
89.1
88.7
Transistor
Bipolar power
93.5
93.4
93.4
Transistor
Power mosfet
107.3
Transistor
Small signal
87.5
87.0
86.3
Memory
Dram
56.2
45.4
40.6
Memory
Eprom/eeprom
29.4
29.3
30.1
Memory
sram
42.0
40.3
41.9
Memory
flash NAND
0.6
0.3
2.2
Memory
flash NOR
12.9
8.9
6.1
50
107.1 107.0
NOR flash
Q1 2007 proved to be a tough
quarter for NOR flash suppliers.
Of the top five suppliers, only
Samsung reported increased
revenues, while the other four
reported declines over Q4
2006 of up to 20% more than
the normal seasonal slowdown.
The tough times have been
attributed to severe ASP erosion, mainly for high density
devices used in mobile handsets and some high end consumer products.
Interface ics
The stronger pc and industrial
markets increased interface
product lead times in the second
half of 2006, and this growth
surge continued into 2007.
However, supply has caught up
with demand and lead times
have dropped dramatically.
With demand from the pc industrial markets, the interface ic
market is expected to grow by
more than 10% in 2007, but
availability should remain high.
Note:
Component prices were set at
a base index of 100 in June
2002. Increasing prices are
shown in red.
NE 22 May 2007.qxd
16/5/07
11:08 am
Page 66
Electronic and Engineering Design vacancies
Consultancies in this sector

www.vrl.co.uk
T: 01234 436136
E: post@vrl.co.uk
Vector - the High Technology Specialists. We are all Engineers
and we find jobs for Engineers. We speak your language,
we understand your needs and we get it right. Whether you are job
hunting or recruiting staff for your company, talk to the experts!
www.webrecruit.co.uk
T: 0845 0707337
E: mail@webrecruit.co.uk
Looking to recruit? We fill 9 out of 10 vacancies, guaranteed by
our unique 100% money back promise.
Job seekers? We can help you find the next job, sign up for our job
alert service on our website.
www.technicalfutures.co.uk
T: 01442 871676
E: info@technicalfutures.co.uk
Specialists in permanent recruitment. We have secured a leading
reputation and recognised name in the supply of high quality
candidates, across all disciplines and levels, targeting the
electronics and engineering sectors.
Electronics Design Engineer

Location: North West
Salary: Negotiable
To join award winning leading edge instrumentation manufacturer. This is a senior
position applicants must be fully proficient. The ideal candidate must be fully
experienced in: Signal processing and conditioning High resolution A-to-D systems
The design of analogue and digital circuits PC design tools: Schematic Capture,
Artwork Generation, DOS, Windows. Embedded controllers for real-time control and be
able to program in C, C++ and preferably Java, with experience in assembler PC
architecture, expansion buses.
The immediate task will be to design hardware and produce software for an interface
card to a PC. This will involve an embedded controller reading and controlling a bank of
ADCs storing results in memory and acting as a DMA to a PC bus.
You must be self-motivated, able to work to tight deadlines under your own initiative
and able to work within a small team environment.
Excellent prospects for the successful candidate
Please send CV of any interested applicants and state current / desired salary to:
Mrs Louise Bullock, General Manager, Magus Electronics,
462 Crewe Road, Wheelock,
Sandbach, Cheshire, CW11 4QD
Closing date for applications: Friday 8th June 2007
Contact Name: Louise Bullock

Email: louise@maguselectronics.co.uk
C++ Software Engineers

Location: South East
Salary: Negotiable
www.jonlee.co.uk/
T: 01384 397555
E: consult@jonlee.co.uk
Established in 1978, Jonathan Lee Recruitment is a leading recruitment
consultancy specialising in engineering recruitment and manufacturing
recruitment in a number of industries. We recruit high quality staff into
high profile positions for a variety of UK and European clients from
large blue chip companies to smaller privately owned businesses.
Our client is looking for C++ Software Engineers to join its user interface development
team. These are excellent opportunities for bright engineers wishing to combine
interests in both engineering and computing. You should have a first or second class
degree in Computer Science, and a minimum of three years' C++ programming
experience.
Applicants with an interest in engineering would be welcome, particularly from
Civil/Structural engineers with Bridge Engineering experience.
www.lmr.co.uk
T: 0191 566 4299
E: engineering@lmr.co.uk
We offer the full recruitment solution.
LMR Limited incorporates LMR Industrial and LMR Engineering. As an
independent specialist recruitment company, we are able to provide a
flexible and bespoke service, for all your staffing requirements.
Contact Name: Sue Dawson

Tel: 0118 9828 500
Email: Sue@teambuilder.co.uk
A-Z Recruitment Agencies

www.abatec.co.uk
www.bpasearch.co.uk
www.electusrecruitment.co.uk
www.futurestep.co.uk
www.abatec.co.uk/intlApp.asp
www.cbsbutler.com
www.epcglobal.co.uk
www.g2technologies.co.uk
www.arvsolutions.co.uk
www.colbernlimited.co.uk
www.encore-solutions.co.uk
Genesis Technical Recruitment Ltd
www.networxrecruitment.com
www.ets-technical-sales.co.uk
www.hartland.uk.com
www.debelder.co.uk
www.ocus-management.co.uk
www.pertemps.co.uk
www.ata-selection.co.uk
www.beechwoodrecruit.com
appointments
Powered by
HIGHEST INTEGRATION TRIPLEBAND TUNERS FOR DAB, T-DMB,

AND FM APPLICATIONS
Eliminate the Need for External LNAs and VHF/FM Filters
The MAX2170/MAX2171 are fully integrated, RF-broadcast receiver chips for DAB, T-DMB, and FM applications. The
integrated low-noise amplifier (LNA) achieves an L-band sensitivity of -100dBm, thereby eliminating the need for external
amplifiers. At VHF frequencies, the integrated channel-selection filter achieves an adjacent-channel protection ratio of
better than 35dBc. It also increases performance in high-interference environments, while doubling as an
FM-band-select filter.
LOW-NOISE, HIGH-LINEARITY
L-BAND FRONT-END
ELIMINATES EXTERNAL LNA
MAX2170
div/N
L-BAND
0
90
TRACKING
FILTER
TQF
40- N
INTEGRATED VHF-TRACKING
AND FM-BAND-SELECT FILTER
ELIMINATES EXTERNAL VHF
AND FM FILTERS
2.7V to 3.5V Power Supply

Integrated Closed-Loop RF AGC
6mm x 6mm, 40-Pin TQFN Package
Sigma-Delta Fractional-N Synthesizer
m x 6mm
Universal Low-IF Interface

Low Power Consumption (170mW in
L-Band Mode, Continuous Operation)
Divide-by-Three on-Crystal Reference
Output (MAX2171)
www.maxim-ic.com/MAX2170-info
FREE Wireless Design GuideSent Within 24 Hours!
CALL TOLL FREE 0800 585048 for a Design Guide or Free Sample
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DIRECT
D I S T R I B U T I O N
Telesales: 0800 585048 (toll free)

Tel: +44 (0) 118 900 6300
Fax: +44 (0)118 900 6400
Email: MaximDallasDirect_Sales@maximhq.com
U.K.
Tel: +44 (0) 1628 512900
Fax: +44 (0) 1628 512999
Email: sales@micromark.net
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Tel: +353 (0)56 7764002
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Email: sales@fmgelectronics.ie
Website: www.fmgelectronics.ie
The Maxim logo is a registered trademark of Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.

2007 Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Cover.

A PROPRIETARY VERIFICATION SOLUTION IS LIKE A RUNAWAY MERRY-GO-ROUND.

YOU CAN GET ON BUT YOU CANT GET OFF.

Advanced Verification Methodology If youre using a proprietary verification solution,

Find out more at the EDA Tech Forum on 19th June

DebutArt: Barry Downard

22 MAY 2007 VOL 40 NO 10

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Pass the packet

Is your company producing

Compact Power Supplies

Tiny ModuleTM Power Supplies Fit on Both Sides of PC Board

Info and Purchase Direct at

VIN: 4.5V-28V; VOUT: 0.6V-5V

Linear Technology (UK) Ltd.,

Franchised Distributors, UK and Ireland

Linear Technology (UK) Ltd.

Acal Technology UK Ltd

0118 902 9702

Note: Eltek stock only die/wafer products

THE FUTURE AHEAD

n its heyday, Nepcon was the leading electronics show in the

Graham Pitcher, Editor gpitcher@findlay.co.uk

grow their businesses in the face of growing globalisation?

FRONT PAGE NEWS

Shrinking roll out

SMC expects to complete its roll

The first process to go live will be

metal at a later date.

PCB design suites

Largest e-paper screen yet

New host improves

Access to more than

*New product added daily.

701 Brooks Ave. South Thief River Falls, MN 56701 USA

FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER 100!

ALL PRICES ARE IN BRITISH

S researchers may have discovered a

The performance boost was primarily achieved by simply changing the

UPenn team makes

exceeded expectations for reasons that

Thats the Spirit!

Lab system on a chip

which is more successful. Investors are

The Spirit Consortium is to expand its

from first to invent to first to file.

5 million reasons why SAR ADCs mean ADI.

At 5 MSPS and 35 mW power, this

riven by demand from the conelectronics market for

Labs get leading kit

ments to market more quickly, Microns

you drive high frame rate data off chip

In a move aimed at improving audio

which were interested.

LynuxWorks has updated its flagship

NEW! 2007 Shortform Brochure

AC/DC power supplies

High-Performance Analog >>Your Way

For Data Sheets, Samples, Evaluation

ST opts for foundries

TMicroelectronics plans to deliver

... and plans to bring

and these products go anywhere you