Archive: March 2011
Study Gives 4G Data Performance High Marks (2011)
Handsets operating on 4G cellular networks offer significant improvement in data transfer performance compared to their 3G predecessors, according to a study evaluating the performance of smartphones available from U.S. national carriers conducted by consulting firm Metrico Wireless Inc. More Here.
ZTE Claims 10 Tbps Data Transmission Record (2011)
Chinese telecommunications equipment company ZTE Corp. claims to have broken the world record for a single-channel data transmission with a rate of 10 terabits per second over 640-kilometers of optical fiber. This is the equivalent of sending 160 high definition movies every second. More here.
Six Ways to Manage a Side Hustle Without Going Insane
A side hustle is anything you are doing outside of your full-time job (like building a business or a blog around something you are passionate about), and often involves an entrepreneurial enterprise of some sort. In this article Jenny Blake shares some tips with you to help you keep things together during the exciting pursuit of what you love Managing a side hustle while working in the semiconductor industry can be challenging, but it’s not imp…
UK Readies Auction of 4G Spectrum (2011)
Ofcom, the U.K. government's regulatory body for telecommunications, has announced plans for an auction of radio spectrum for 4G mobile services in the U.K. It has announced a consultation procedure as it decides the detailed rules for the auction which is expected to take place in the first quarter of 2012. More here.
Altair and Alcatel-Lucent Complete LTE Chipset Field Trial (2011)
Mobile communications chip company Altair Semiconductor Ltd. has announced that a combination of its FourGee 4G-LTE chipset and Alcatel-Lucent infrastructure has completed a three-month field trial with a U.S. wireless carrier and is now commercially available. More here
Faster Product Development Through Hardware and Software Codevelopment
Rising product complexity and intense market pressures present major challenges to designers of electronic systems. To stay competitive, tight coordination between processes used by hardware and software engineers is critical to optimize product quality. This is especially true while controlling costs and meeting tight timelines. This whitepaper discusses key elements of development and explores how the use of shared processes between hardwar…
Moisture Barriers for Flexible Electronics
Defects on plastic substrates such as pinholes, cracks and grain boundaries cause a 'pore effect', where oxygen and water molecules are able to seep through and penetrate through the plastic barrier and into the active material. For applications such as flexible OLED displays, organic solar cells, or even electrophoretic displays, sensitivity to oxygen and moisture compromises device lifetime significantly. This means that in order to ac…
Modelling Practices for Gigabit Serial Design: EDN Webcast (2011)
This presentation will go over some of the common issues encountered when setting up performing circuit simulation of high speed serial designs. Topics will include s-parameter passivity and causality, frequency sampling and bandwidth and how they relate to simulation accuracy, model concatenation, and correlation between the time and frequency domains. This webcast is Hosted by EDN and Sponsored by ANSYS. Register Now - Click Here Present…
Intel Buys 4G Software Maker Sysdsoft (2011)
Intel has made a purchase to bolster its 4G wireless platform, buying Egypt-based Sysdsoft, a maker of 4G software stacks. Sysdsoft has been more closely associated with MIPS than Intel architectures, having created an LTE protocol stack for the MIPS/Android platform, with which the processor core maker hopes to penetrate the mobile sector. It may have to look for a new ally now, with Intel taking over most of the assets of the privately held …
Printed Electronics: Why Europe Is Different
Printed electronics is one of the most important new enabling technologies. It will have a major impact on most business activities from publishing and security printing to health care, automotive, military and consumer packaged goods sectors. It is now recognized that commercialization can and should take place in very disparate applications, contrasting with the rather narrow view of possibilities in the past. However, the regions of the wo…
Interview Question: Power Analysis of Binary, Gray and One-Hot Counters
Your task is to do power analysis for a circuit that sends out a one-clock-cycle pulse on the done signal once every 16 clock cycles(done is ’0’ for 15 clock cycles, then ’1’ for one cycle, then repeat with 15 cycles of ’0’ followed by a ’1’, etc). You have been asked to consider three different types of counters: 1. Binary counter, 2. Gray-code counter, and 3. One-hot counter. (The table below shows the values from 0 to 15 for the different en…
Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) Part 2: Modulo Two Division
A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is the remainder left when a message, treated as a polynomial with binary coefficients, is divided by a fixed generator polynomial using modulo two arithmetic. In modulo two arithmetic, addition and subtraction are both the exclusive OR (XOR) of the bits, with no carries or borrows, so the whole division reduces to shifts and XORs. That is why a CRC can be built in hardware from a small shift register and a few XO…
Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) Explained: Part 1
Error detection is an important part of communication systems when there is a chance of data getting corrupted. Whether it’s a piece of stored code or a data transmission, you can add a piece of redundant information to validate the data and protect it against corruption. Cyclic redundancy checking is a robust error-checking algorithm, which is commonly used to detect errors either in data transmission or data storage. In this multipart article …