Ever ask the Great Pumpkin for a reconfigurable printed circuit board (PCB) on a chip? Well, unlike Linus in the pumpkin path. Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector (Phoenix, AZ) developed a reconfigurable embedded system process. Its new CORE+ technology, according to company officials, is the world's first--combining standard, diffused components, and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) on a single silicon substrate. "We've identified a niche opportunity for this advanced product," says Ron Lipinski, director of operations. Motorola took their in-house know how of microprocessors, microcontrollers, and digital signal processors and merged this with their FPGA ingenuity. "We can put whatever a customer wants on silicon," Lipinski adds. Existing processes require at least two chips. This not only means more money, but you lose performance because electrons take longer to move between them. The first product, expected out by the third quarter of 1998, will be "the industry's first hard diffused core." The MPACF250, designed with Motorola's 68K-compatible Cold-Fire architecture, combines 32-bit RISC with a memory-saving, variable-length instruction set. The CORE+ family will be supported by schematic capture, sim-ulation, logic synthesis, compiler, code debuggingand in-circuit emulation tools from several vendors. Contact Connie Schultejans at (602) 732-2852.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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