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Hands On: Evaluation Kit Eases Lighting Design Starts 

John DonovanNormally you order an evaluation kit to check out whether a particular microcontroller seems appropriate for a design you have in mind; if everything seems OK, you then order a more costly development kit to prototype your design. Cypress' CY3267 PowerPSoC Lighting Evaluation Kit manages to cross that line, enabling a quick out-of-the-box evaluation within a few minutes but including a full suite of tools, circuits, and programmable components to enable developing some sophisticated lighting control systems. More

Generation-jumping 2.5D Xilinx Virtex-7 2000T FPGA delivers 1,954,560 logic cells, consumes only 20W

Steve Leibson

Xilinx announced that it is shipping Virtex-7 2000T FPGAs to customers. This is one monster FPGA. Its 6.8 billion transistors deliver 1,954,560 logic cells, 21.55 Mbits of distributed SRAM, 2160 DSP slices, 46,512Kbits of block RAM, four PCIe ports, 36 12.5Gbps GTX serial transceivers, and 1200 user I/O pins. All in about 20W (!!!). The only fly in the ointment, if you want to call it that, is that no one on this planet can make this FPGA as a monolithic device. The Virtex-7 FPGA is a 2.5D assembly that combines four FPGA tiles on a silicon interposer. The interposer provides 10,000 connections between each of the four FPGA tiles. More
A different kind of touch interface
Robert CravottaAnother way to implement touch interfaces involves marking the touch surface with a non-obvious set of marks that enable a device, such as a pen, equipped with a camera to unambiguously identify where the user is touching the surface with the pen or pointer. An advantage of this approach is that there are no electrical fields or circuits associated with the touch surface. A trade-off for using this approach is that the user must use a device that includes specific circuitry to detect and resolve the markings on a surface. More
Power Conservation: The Windows Edition
Brian DipertHistorically, I've leveraged a Windows Vista Ultimate-based Dell XPS M1330 laptop. It's time, I think, for a Windows 7-based successor. And the candidate I selected is right up the alleys of Low-Power Design readers. Back in early June, Dealnews.com alerted me to a killer deal, on a Gaida Cube N3-D20B mini "barebone" system, for $149.99 with free shipping and $25 Newegg gift certificate tossed in for good measure. The N3-D20B is based on a dual-core 1.6 GHz Atom N330 CPU, mated with a Nvidia Ion chipset containing an embedded graphics core. Last weekend, I finally found time to put my upgrade aspiration into practice. More
October Wireless Update: Cavium Jumps into LTE Picocell Market
Will StraussCavium Networks has announced its new Octeon Fusion™ "Baseband-on-a-Chip" cellular infrastructure family, initially addressing carrier-centric picocells. The small-cell base station family is scalable from 32 users to 300. The initial CNF7120, due to ship next quarter, addresses 10/20 MHz LTE or 3G, is based on 2 MIPS64 cores @1GHz (from its multicore heritage) and 4 baseband cores (from its Wavesat acquisition). Beefing up its Tensilica-based baseband DSP capabilities, multiple accelerators are provided for heavy-lifting tasks (like FFT, Viterbi, Turbocoding, etc.). More
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Featured Articles

Hands On: Evaluation Kit Eases Lighting Design Starts

Challenges with Measuring Current when Developing Power Management Schemes for Battery-Powered Devices (Part 1)

Challenges with Measuring Current when Developing Power Management Schemes for Battery-Powered Devices (Part 2)

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This course covers the fundamentals of off-grid, stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) systems, with the aim of providing engineers with a good overview of the technologies, topologies and electronics that make up such systems. The course content includes: � Introduction to Photovoltaic Systems � Grid-Connected vs. Off-Grid Solar Systems � Solar Energy Storage � Charge Controllers � Power Conditioning � Energy Harvesting � Integration Issue.

 

computerFundamentals of Solar: Grid Connected

Photovoltaic (PV) solar technology is at the heart of the multi-billion dollar clean/green/renewable energy industry, powering everything from road signs to entire cities. This course covers the fundamentals of grid-connected PV systems, with the aim of providing engineers with a good overview of the technologies, topologies and electronics that make up such systems.

 

computerFundamentals of Microcontrollers

EE Times Fundamentals course provides an introduction to microcontrollers (MCUs) including usage and selection of the devices. The course also includes a video explaining showing how to get started with an mbed evaluation kit.

John Donovan
Editor/Publisher, Low-Power Design