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Electronix Express Newsletter
May 2006 Issue
Welcome to the May 2006 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
1. Implanted Chips to Deliver Drugs
A new study has demonstrated that drugs can be delivered to patients over a period of time by using an implanted microchip device. The study was conducted by researchers at a Bedford, Massachusetts based start up, MicroChips, and relied on the implanted chips and wireless technology to control the release of drugs in the body over a period of time.
The chip uses a wireless signaling and system of reservoirs that allow precise, efficient delivery of solids, liquids or gels. MicroChips said the device, about the size of a postage stamp, is not expected to replace all pills or other forms of drug delivery. Rather, it will deliver proteins, small molecules and other drugs that are highly potent, have limited stability, and must be delivered in precise doses at specific times.
President of Microchips, John Santini, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professors Robert Langer and Michael J. Cima, began work on the concept of intelligent drug delivery devices more than a decade ago.
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2. Bluetooth 2005: The Future is Here
Bluetooth has firmly established itself as a short-range wireless solution for voice and data transmission. Bluetooth-enabled product shipments more than doubled in 2005. This represents the fourth consecutive year to for such growth. Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones dominated Bluetooth-enabled product shipments in 2004. They are in turn helping Bluetooth penetration into other products, including notebook PCs, mono and stereo headsets, automobiles, and portable digital music players. New Bluetooth standards are emerging to meet increasing requirements. Chips complying with Bluetooth 2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) are beginning to hit the market in 2005, providing both greater bandwidth and lower power consumption. In May 2005, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced that the Ultra-Wideband standard would become the foundation for an even higher data rate Bluetooth standard. Bluetooth will need to constantly adapt in the face of competition that includes Wireless USB, Wireless 1394 and Wi-Fi.
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3. Bluetooth Market to Exceed 500M Radios in 2006
After an explosive year of growth in 2005 that has seen the Bluetooth market more than double, 2006 looks set to provide another healthy year of sales for Bluetooth vendors.
In a new study ABI Research concludes that the market for Bluetooth radios will grow by 71 percent to a level just exceeding 500 million radio shipments in 2006.
ABI forecasts that the market will grow at a compound annual rate of more than 40 percent between 2004 and 2011, and equipment shipments are expected to break the 1 billion mark by 2009. Several new applications for Bluetooth are spurring growth, most notably in the gaming market, with the releases of the Nintendo Revolution and Sony's Playstation 3. An ABI spokesperson noted, "The importance of the stereo headset cannot be discounted. This product provides one half of a match made in heaven with music-enabled cellular handsets." It is expected that this type of product will drag Bluetooth into myriad other use cases, such as rear seat entertainment in the vehicle and the long-awaited Bluetooth MP3 player.
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4. Power-Management Techniques For Multimedia Mobile Phones
Now that Asia and other markets race to deploy portable-media technology in the form of multimedia phones, designers must take a step back and consider power-management issues for these handheld devices. Consumers have come to expect the small form factor and the long battery life on the 2G and 2.5G Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) or code-division multiple-access (CDMA) phones available today. The major challenge to mobile-phone designers now are to include the new multimedia functions and still maintain the small, low-profile form factor of the handsets, as well as their long battery life. No one wants to deploy a handset that users would have to recharge after two hours of operation. New application processors can deliver the necessary media-processing functions, but it comes at the price of higher power consumption. In addition, the new devices change the users' profiles. New audio and video functions mean longer audio-playback time, so audio amplification needs to be more efficient. Moreover, as audio and video functions on mobile phones mature, competition will increase the standard of audio quality and output power. All of these added power drains must somehow fit into an already-constrained power budget. Designers must tackle these challenges at all levels of system design, and, although the industry has focused on the digital systems on chips that form the hearts of these handsets, the analog portion of the handset can also help solve these design problems.
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5. Tackle Noise From Three Perspectives
You've got noise in your circuit? Where do you look to find it? What source do you consider as the culprit? You can assign your noise to three fundamental categories, each with its own set of noise-reduction methods: device noise, emitted or radiated noise, and conducted noise.
Device noise is just what you would assume. Passive components and IC chips generate noise in this category. For instance, passive resistors, whether they are components or within the IC chip, generate a minimum noise that equals 
, where K is Boltzmann's constant (1.38x10-23), R is the resistance that you are evaluating, T is the temperature in Kelvin, and BW is the bandwidth in your evaluation. Generally, capacitors and inductors are not noise generators of any consequence, unless you embed them in a switching network.
Next examine the origins of radiated or emitted noise. Radiating sources, such as inductive switching transformers or motors are prime noise-generating suspects. Once you understand the source of radiated noise, the solution to your noise-reduction problem will become apparent.
Conducted noise is simply noise that resides in your traces as a consequence of device noise or radiated noise. Sometimes, the only approach to this type of noise is to implement noise-reduction filters. You also need to examine all ground and power return paths and, once again, a continuous ground plane is preferable. And, by all means, make sure that you are using appropriate bypass capacitors on your active devices.
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6. Getting Better Software Into Manufactured Products
Software development in consumer and industrial products as small as cell phones, as commonplace as washing machines and automobiles, and as large as farm equipment, mining tools, and airplanes are increasingly dominating the engineering process. At companies that once focused largely on the mechanics of hardware, the primary challenge today is developing high-quality, reliable software to embed in these products. Siemens, for example, now employs more software engineers in its high-tech businesses than do large software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP. The focus and value in engineered products is shifting from chips to code.
As the focus shifts, companies accustomed to managing the development of their hardware need to learn new processes and metrics for managing the development of software. Doing so will make the process more productive and the software more reliable. Hardware typically involves much less uncertainty about how the elements of a system work together. With hardware systems either something connects or it doesn't. However, software development involves shades of gray. With software systems there are more levels of connectivity and greater integration with other systems. As a result, it's often hard to uncover all of the side effects during the testing stage. These are just some the issues engineers face in getting better software into manufactured products.
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7. Scientists Boast About Their Small Measurements
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed new laser-based methods for measuring distance with mind-boggling precision. The NASA scientists designed a laser-based heterodyne interferometer that can precisely measure a range as great as 100 km with resolution of 1 nm. Multiple wavelengths generated as sidebands of phase modulation of the light from a single laser rely on what is called modulation-sideband technology for absolute range (MSTAR). The research done by NIST reported the development of a technique that can measure millimeter distances with uncertainty of 10 pm. The technology, which focuses on measuring the frequency, rather than the wavelength, of the light, could have applications in nanotechnology, remote sensing, and semiconductor fabrication.
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