Electronic Everything!

The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.

bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power. The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based thin film transistors (TFTs) could be at the core of next-generation flexible electronics – displays, electronic circuits, sensors, memory chips, and other applications that are transitioning from rigid substrates, such as silicon and glass, to flexible substrates. What's holding back commercial applications is that industrial-type manufacturing of large scale SWCNT-based nanoelectronic devices isn't practical yet because controlling the morphology of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still causing headaches for materials engineers.

In traditional short-haul microwave transmission (that is, line-of-sight microwave transmissions operating in the 18 GHz and 23 GHz radio bands),RF design engineers typically are concerned with signal aspects such as fade margins, signal reflections, multipath signals, and so forth. Like an accountant seeking to balance a financial spreadsheet, an RF design engineer normally creates an RF budget table, expressed in decibels (dB), in order to establish a wireless design. Aspects like transmit power and antenna gain are registered in the assets (or plus) column, and free space attenuation, antenna alignment, and atmospheric losses are noted in the liabilities (or minus) column. The goal is to achieve a positive net signal strength adequate to support the wireless path(s) called for in the design.

In earlier articles on intelligent sensor design, we saw how valuable they can be to both end users and those who manufacture and sell them. It’s now time to delve more deeply into what it takes to make intelligent sensors work.   The first step in that journey is to develop a solid, intuitive understanding of the principles of digital signal processing(DSP). Unlike many introductory DSP articles and texts, the focus here will be on presenting and using the important concepts rather than deriving them, for the simple reason that addressing the subject in depth is a book-sized, not a chapter-sized, project.

Imagine that a guest is about to depart from your house. She (or he) pauses to check her appearance in an antique-looking mirror mounted near the front door. Suddenly, the image of your guest undergoes a Matrix-like 'ripple' and is replaced with a strange face saying… …actually, we'll move on to consider what the face might say in a moment, but first let me introduce you to a few underlying concepts. Just a few days ago as I pen these words, I came across about a very cool website that describes a really cunning idea called a Magic Mirror (http://diymagicmirror.com).

A research project will be conducted this week in Linz, Austria, to discover what the ideal interaction between people and humanoid robots ought to be in the future, Honda R&D and Ars Electronica Futurelab announced today. The research, the first of its kind in Europe, will involve members of the public directly interacting with ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot.

This article features an example chapter from a new *Hot-off-the-Press* book on FPGA Design that just recently hit the streets in August 2010. This chapter is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher – Springer. This book -- FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-Based Design -- describes best practices for successful FPGA design. It is the result of the author’s meetings with hundreds of customers on the challenges facing each of their FPGA design teams. By gaining an understanding into their design environments, processes, what works and what does not work, key areas of concern in implementing system designs have been identified and a recommended design methodology to overcome these challenges has been developed.

While the topic of timing has already been raised in previous parts in this series, the discussion here will be expanded to include the execution and response time of the software functions. When discussing timing in embedded software, there are typically two types of timing requirements, rate of execution and response time. Rate of execution deals with the event-to-event timing within a software function. It can be the timing between changes in an output, time between samples of an input, or some combination of both.

Ozmo Devices, the leading provider of low-power Wi-Fi Personal Area Network (Wi-Fi PAN) solutions, announced today that it started sampling its OZMO2000 chip to select peripheral manufacturers.  This is the first Wi-Fi solution to overcome the battery life, cost and compatibility issues that have limited the broad adoption of Wi-Fi for HID (human interface device) applications.  The OZMO2000 is currently available for use in Wi-Fi mouse, keyboard and remote control designs.  Furthermore, the solution is compatible with all Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks and desktops that are compatible with Windows 7.

It is no secret that field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting bigger and more complex all the time. The fabrication process creates smaller transistors and makes more dense chips packing more digital processing per nanometer. Engineers love to see advancement because it means they can do more with modern silicon, and many times NI LabVIEW FPGA Module technology helps by abstracting the complexity to a higher level so that engineers can more smoothly take advantage of these improvements.  Unfortunately, there is one issue with FPGAs that continues to be a time sink and only gets worse with denser FPGAs: compilation time.

We’re all familiar with the general idea of a filter: it removes something that we don’t want from something we do want. Coffee filters that pass the liquid coffee but retain the grounds or air filters that pass clean air but trap the dust and other pollutants are two common examples of mechanical filters in everyday life. That same concept can be applied to noisy electrical signals to pass through the “true” signal of interest while blocking the undesirable noise signal. Looking at Figure 2.5c below, imagine for a moment that the signal of interest is in the lower-frequency region and that the noise signal is in the higher-frequency region. Ideally, we’d like to be able to get rid of that high-frequency noise, leaving just the signal component that we want.

Menta SAS and LIRMM have taped out what they believe is the of worlds first MRAM-based FPGA which has patent-protected circuitry enabling compact integration of MRAM and embedded-FPGA solutions. Researchers at the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM), in France, claimed in October that they had developed a FPGA circuit based on non volatile resistive memory cell.

Given the maturity of MOSFETs, selecting one for your next design may seem deceptively simple. Engineers are familiar with the figures of merit on a MOSFET data sheet. Selecting a MOSFET requires the engineer to use their expertise in scrutinizing different specifications for individual applications. In an application such as a load switch in a server power supply, the switching aspects of a MOSFET matter little because the MOSFET is on almost 100% of the time. The on resistance (RDS(ON)) may be the key figure of merit in such an application. Still other applications, including switching power supplies, use MOSFETs as active switches, and cause the engineer to value other MOSFET performance parameters. Let us consider some applications and their prioritization of MOSFET specifications.

Earlier in this series, we touched on one problem that can arise when sampling an analog signal, namely the problem of aliasing. There are three other issues with signal sampling to which we now turn our attention: digitization effects, finite register length effects, and oversampling. So far, weve assumed that all of the signals were measuring are continuous analog values; i.e., our measurements are completely accurate. Even in the cases in which we have noise, the underlying assumption is that the measurement itself, for example the noisy sensor output voltage, is known precisely.

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

The center piece of our toolset is the software integrated development environment or IDE. MPLAB IDE has enjoyed many years of evolution cracking Microchip’s popular catalogue of micro controllers and digital signal controllers. This presentation will cover these topics. Look at MPLAB and its components. An MPLAB IDE overview, MPLAB’s hardware components including starter kits and demonstration and evaluation kits and finally we attempt to answer the question why use Microchip tools.

Recent advances in the size and performance of FPGAs, coupled with advantages in time-to-market, field-reconfigurability and lower up-front costs, make FPGAs ideally suited to a wide range of commercial and defense applications [6]. In addition, FPGAs generality and reconfigurability provide important protections against the introduction of Trojan horses during semiconductor manufacturing process[8]. As a result, FPGA applications increasingly involve highly-sensitive intellectual property and trade-secrets, as well as cryptographic keys and algorithms [7].

A shielded transformer is a two-winding transformer, usually delta"star connected and serves the following purposes: Voltage transformation from the distribution voltage to the equipment's utilization voltage. Converting a 3-wire input power to a 4-wire output thereby deriving a separate stable neutral for the power supply wiring going to sensitive equipment. Keeping third and its multiple harmonics away from sensitive equipment by allowing their free circulation in the delta winding. Softening of high-frequency noise from the input side by the natural inductance