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Hardware Protection – OverVoltage and OverCurrent

Power Supply Parameters Three major power supply (Figure 1) architectures are defined for any engineer: 1.Linear Regulators. 2.Pulse width modulated switching (PWM). 3.High resonant technology switching. Vin(low), Vin(high) – minimum and maximum allowed input voltages, hence input voltage range. Iin(max) – maximum average input current. Outputs: Vout(min), Vout(max) – minimum and maximum allowed output voltages, …

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Signal Generation with MATLAB. Example of DTMF in telephony

In mathematics a signal is a real function of a real variable f(t). In electronics it represents the evolution of a voltage (or a current) over the time and depends on the performances of the stage of the amplifier. Through a memory buffer, samples move to a digital-to-analog converter that produces a voltage signal, after …

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Power Management Solutions: Battery Chargers

The huge increase of portable devices during the last 10-15 years has lead to numerous companies seeking (and succeeding) to make significant profits in this market. Many consumer applications are now powered by accumulators, ranging from the omnipresent cellular phones to media players, handheld gaming devices, and navigation systems (that is to name only a …

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Energy-harvesting power management ICs for wireless sensor nodes

Cypress Semiconductor has introduced what it believes to be the lowest-available-power PMICs that enable an integrated module size of 1 cm² for solar-powered wireless sensor node (WSN) designs. Intended to manage solar-powered wireless sensors for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, these parts are said to be the lowest-power, single-chip Energy Harvesting PMICs, and can be …

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Current-sense amp integrates precision shunt resistor, in single package

Texas Instruments says it is making, “high-accuracy measurement more attainable with the first current-sense amplifier to integrate a high-precision, low-drift 2 mΩ shunt resistor,” – the device can cut calibration effort, system cost, and footprint for test and measurement, communications load monitoring, and power supplies. For highly accurate measurements over a wide temperature range, TI’s …

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Contactless Infrared Thermometer (Pyrometer) using MLX90614 and MSP430

The device is designed for contactless measuring and monitoring temperature of objects. It is built on Melexis MLX90614 sensor and can measure temperatures in the range from -70°C to +380°C with 0.5°C accuracy and 0.01°C resolution. The period of measurements can be set in the menu from 1 sec to 1 min in 10 sec …

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IBM shows working devices fabricated at 7nm node

An alliance led by IBM Research, together with New York academic institution SUNY Poly tech and with Samsung and Global Foundries, has produced 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. Continuing semiconductor scaling down to feature sizes of 7 nm is expected to yield further gains in performance, and lower power levels, but in …

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The Art of Representing Floating-Point Numbers as Integers

Have you been using float or double variables to perform mathematical operations on embedded systems without a Floating-Point Unit (FPU)? You are doing it wrong! That’s incredibly inefficient. Use fixed-point representation instead. An FPU is an hardware block specially designed to carry on arithmetic operations on floating point numbers. Even though the C/C++ code may work without …

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