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Low-Power Wireless

Welcome to Low-Power Wireless, your resource for RF design. In these pages we'll bring the latest news, views, products and prognostications for engineers involved in designing state of the art low-power RF devices.

Check out our newly launched Hands On section, where be doing hands-on evaluations of RF development kits from leading vendors. First up is Silicon Labs' Si1000DK for their low-power wireless MCU. Next up: kits from Microchip, TI, Atmel, Lattice, Redpine Signals, Xilinx and who knows who else. We're also planning to test run RF EDA tools if that's of interest to you (RSVP).
Meanwhile enjoy, and have a great 4th of July weekend!
 
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Low-Power Design
Welcome to the combined Low-Power Design/Low-Power Wireless newsletter. This newsletter is designed to introduce readers of Low-Power Design to our sister site, whose focus is just what the name implies.
 
We chose to build a new site as the best way to focus on just those design issues, trends, news and products directly relevant to RF engineers. Like LPD, LPW is intended to primarily be a design site and not a news desk or water cooler, though we'll provide those resources, too.

The design stories highlighted in this newsletter are drawn from both sites, so just click on what interests you and you'll find other relevant resources nearby.

Please check out the Low-Power Wireless news in this newsletter and the growing number of design articles and other resources at www.low-powerwireless.com.
John Donovan
John DonovanSynopsys Acquires Virage Logic
Acquiring Virage's IP libraries complements Synopsys' emphasis on electronic system-level (ESL) design. Synopsys' recent acquisition of CoWare, whose software is focused on ESL, works hand in hand with expanding their IP offerings. If you're pushing system-level design, the more of the system you can provide the stronger your position. Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence are all taking different paths to the same place. More...
Brian Fuller
Brian Fuller
Why semiconductors matter
I'm not a big fan of replay technology in general, but for big-time, high-stakes events like the World Cup, it has to be considered. Once we solve that problem, then we can turn our attention to more important things, like stopping the French, Italians, Brazilians, etc. from faking fouls with outrageous flops. More...
Steve Leibson
Steve LeibsonSPMT engulfs LPDDR2 standard
While most of us were firmly focused on the power dissipation of our ever-expanding logic designs with their increasing number of processor cores in multicore designs, we mostly ignored the huge leaps in power consumption being caused by the rapid growth in memory size and big jumps in memory-access speeds and memory bandwidth. More...
Robert Cravotta
Robert CravottaSubtle trade-off complexity
As I engage with more touch providers, I have started to notice an interesting and initially non-obvious set of trade-offs that each company must make to support this project. On the one hand, vendors want to show how well their technology works and how easy it is to use. On the other hand, there are layers of complexity to using touch that means the touch supplier often offers significant engineering field support.More...
Global Technology Congress
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Challenges with Measuring Current when Developing of Power Management Schemes for Battery-Powered Devices (Part 1)
ARM adIn order to understand if a design has achieved an improvement in runtime, an engineer needs to be able to measure current being consumed by the device and determine if his optimized design has indeed lowered overall current consumption. In this article, we will cover methods used to measure current flowing from the battery into the electronic device (or within sub-circuits of the device) and how modern power management schemes create challenges for measuring these currents. More...
Challenges with Measuring Current when Developing Power Management Schemes for Battery-Powered Devices (Part 2)
ARM adIn order to optimize power consumption and maximize battery life, engineers typically utilize advanced power-management schemes that rapidly turn on/off sub-circuits as necessary, creating dynamic current consumption typically from uA to A. Unfortunately, traditional test instruments are not well suited for this type of measurement requirement. More...
Ultra Low Power 802.11n Wi-Fi--Wireless Connectivity for "The Internet of Things"
802.11nThe IEEE 802.11n standard was proposed through a 'High Throughput Study Group' effort at the IEEE. Although the major focus of the standard has been on deriving high user throughputs in a WLAN environment using multi-stream MIMO techniques, the standard's benefits are not limited to devices with multiple antennas. There are a plethora of devices that require ultra-low power connectivity. More...
Designing RF Mixed Technology Boards
 
ARM adFor most of the century-plus that RF circuits have been designed and built, RF has been treated as a highly specialized task, and as such has been more-or-less been isolated, both in design and on the printed circuit board (PCB). With the advent of the handheld cell phone, there was no longer the luxury of having an isolated PCB just for the radio components. More...
Frequency Hopping Diversity Improves Low-Power Wireless System Performance
ARM adThe motivation for the article is to present methods of enhancing a wireless link in a typical environment of simple low-power wireless transceivers. This article focuses on maximizing the reliability of a wireless link, while keeping the overall hardware costs down. For many simple transceivers the added overhead of using frequency-hopping diversity hardly seems worth while, however, this article presents strong technical reasons why this should be considered even for simple applications. More...
That's a brief look at what we have to offer--and we're adding more every day. Please check back with us regularly to get the latest news, tips and techniques for implementing green/low-power/RF designs.

Sincerely,
John Donovan
Editor/Publisher, Low-Power Design & Low-Power Wireless