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Not every handheld electronic device is a cellphone, a PDA, or even a DMM (digital multimeter). Such devices are made in quantities of 100,000 to tens of millions. Many handheld [...]

The folks at the ZigBee Alliance, the industry organization driving ZigBee WPAN (wireless-personal-area-networking) technology, mean it when they say that they've learned valuable lessons from the miscues of the proponents [...]

People often say that EEs are almost obscenely fortunate to have a tool that provides as much insight into fundamentally invisible processes as do oscilloscopes into the internal workings of [...]

If many of the best-known electronics companies--and a large number of smaller start-ups--get their way, UWB (ultrawideband), the new, short-range, ultrahigh-speed wireless-communication technology, will soon transform communication among computers and [...]

Despite passive components' rather unglamorous image, the only way to do justice in print to the subject of testing the devices would be to write a sizable book or a [...]

PCIexpress (PCIe) is rapidly becoming the dominant standard for high-speed data transmission in PCs, notwithstanding the existence of myriad other high-speed point-to-point serial protocols, most of which predate PCIe. What's [...]

Like old soldiers, instrument-interfacing and -communication standards never die; they just fade away. The reason is that instruments themselves, except for the low-cost, handheld variety, which many managers and engineers [...]

PCIEXPRESS (PCIe) is rapidly becoming the dominant standard for high-speed data transmission in PCs, notwithstanding the existence of myriad other high-speed point-to-point serial protocols, most of which predate PCIe. What's [...]

MODERN HIGH-PERFORMANCE digital oscilloscopes offer a wealth of features for making users' lives easier--so many features, in fact, that their effect can sometimes be the opposite of what the manufacturer [...]

AT A GLANCE Complex digital modulation on RF signals is not simple to understand, generate, or analyze. DSP-intensive OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is part of several communication standards-most notably the [...]

AT A GLANCE * Complex digital modulation on RF signals is not simple to understand, generate, or analyze. * DSP-intensive OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is part of several communication standards--most [...]

THE EXCITEMENT SURROUNDING the debut of fuel cells in portable electronics is less intense than the talk about how the devices will replace internal-combustion engines in motor vehicles. Nevertheless, you [...]

ILLUMINATING THE DARK RECESSES of the lighting industry is no trivial task. For sure, though, equating lighting with incandescent-lamp technology is so 20th century. Even newer forms of lighting, such [...]

IN AN AGE OF MULTIGABIT-PER-SECOND serial interconnects, logic analyzers may seem to be relics of a bygone era in which parallel buses were king. 'Not so,' say engineers who have [...]

AT A GLANCE * Not all vision-related projects require the services of consultants; with the aid of suppliers of the hardware and development tools, developers lacking experience in vision can [...]

Power supplies just may be surrounded by more myths and misconceptions than any other segment of electronics. Within the past year, the very nature of power-system design has changed, and [...]

LIKE THE CHARACTER in the famous Monty Python sketch, IEEE 488 is not dead yet. The decades-old standard's longevity is in question, however, and you probably have good reason to [...]

JITTER HAS BECOME A HOT TOPIC among system designers. Seemingly easy to understand, it provides a quantifiable and--thanks to the now-ubiquitous eye-diagram display--graphical indication of the severity of a host [...]

JITTER HAS BECOME A HOT TOPIC among system designers. Seemingly easy to understand, it provides a quantifiable and--thanks to the now-ubiquitous eye-diagram display--graphical indication of the severity of a host [...]

WITH MULTIGIGAHERTZ SIGNALS, selecting the right probes and ensuring that your pc boards accommodate them can be just as important as picking the right scope. Indeed, your probe choice may [...]

THE PLANS FOR A HANDS-ON SHOOT-OUT between what were then the world's only two 6-GHz-bandwidth real-time-sampling digital oscilloscopes--Tektronix's TDS 6604 (Figure 1) and LeCroy's Wavemaster 8600A (Figure 2)--began to take [...]

THE PLANS FOR A HANDS-ON SHOOT-OUT between what were then the world's only two 6-GHz-bandwidth real-time-sampling digital oscilloscopes--Tektronix's TDS 6604 (Figure 1) and LeCroy's Wavemaster 8600A (Figure 2)--began to take [...]

A LITTLE MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) took a big step in propelling the US radio-broadcasting industry into the age of digital transmissions. The FCC [...]

VERIFYING PRODUCT DESIGNS THAT INCORPORATE TODAY'S SUPERFAST INTERCONNECTS AND BUSES BEGINS WITH MODELING AND SIMULATING THE PHYSICAL LAYER WHEN ONLY COMPONENTS ARE AVAILABLE TO TEST. AND THAT TESTING IS JUST [...]

Among the biggest challenges RF and microwave spectrum analyzers present to users is figuring out the instruments' measurement accuracy. RF AND MICCROWAVE SPECTRUM ANALYZERS aren't even conceptually simple. Calling them [...]

CARS, TRUCKS, AND BUSES are now almost as electronic as they are mechanical. Electronic content will only increase as more and more vehicles incorporate advanced functions, such as stability control [...]

ENGINEERING USERS OF MATH SOFTWARE are a diverse lot. The publishers of some of the more powerful math packages believe that most engineers who need to perform calculations and create [...]

THE ODDS ARE GOOD that the clock rate inside your PC's CPU chip is higher than 1 GHz. Still, in all but a few PCs, the traces that carry information [...]

QUESTION; WHAT ARE SO HOT they're cool and so cool, they're hot? To many board-level designers, the answer is 100W (or greater), isolated-output, dc/dc converters in the (more-or-less) industry-standard quarter-brick [...]

THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN ISN'T DETERRING manufacturers of DSOs (digital-storage oscilloscopes) from introducing models that incorporate exciting features that enhance the instruments' utility and make hardware engineers more productive. Even during [...]

THE ARCHITECTS OF MICROSOFT'S Visual Studio.NET may not have had data-acquisition and instrumentation applications in mind when they created their new environment for software development, deployment, and maintenance, but they [...]

MEMS, WHICH NOT ONLY CONDITION SIGNALS BUT ALSO MOVE, REQUIRE CONSUMMATE CARE IN HANDLING. BUT THE MANUFACTURERS HAVE FIGURED OUT MUCH OF WHAT YOU MUST KNOW TO SUCCESSFULLY APPLY THE [...]

BLUETOOTH MAY NOT BE OVERREACHING, BUT IT IS FORCING DEVELOPERS TO COMBINE DIGITAL LOGIC, SOFTWARE, AND 2.4-GHz RF IN LOW-COST, HIGH-VOLUME PRODUCTS THAT MUST INTEROPERATE. TO DETERMINE WHETHER SUCH PRODUCTS [...]

Spectrum analyzers may not be changing overnight, but, by borrowing technology from the systems whose signals they analyze, today's RF analyzers bear little resemblance to your father's instruments. IT'S HARDLY [...]

DESPITE NEW CHEMISTRIES, IMPROVED MANUFACTURING METHODS, 'SMART'-BATTERY TECHNOLOGIES, AND A HOST OF INFORMATION AGE USES, BATTERIES FOR CONSUMER APPLICATIONS CONTINUE TO RELY HEAVILY ON FUNCTIONAL TESTING FOR CHARACTERIZATION AND EVALUATION. [...]

When you choose a digital instrument for synthesizing analog waveforms, a little time spent learning how the generator works can ensure that you don't regret your choice. All generators that [...]

USB costs less. Firewire can be 50 times as fast and will Get faster. But IEEE 488 still has a lot going for it. Not The least of the reasons [...]

Analog-signal isolation isn't just for preventing injury and damage from high voltages. It can dramatically reduce noise and artifacts that corrupt sensitive measurements. Once upon a time, long, long ago, [...]

For verifying your identity, your physical attributes are better in many ways than a password. But which attributes to use and what mass-market products should be the first to use [...]

Even when digital video cameras do away with frame grabbers' ADCs. capture boards remain vital in real-time Industrial imaging. Video cameras that produce digital rather than analog outputs are here, [...]

Although general-purpose wireless-communication product design, instruments tailored to individual standards are growing in importance. Special-purpose generators now fit more than just manufacturing and field use. Designers of digital wireless-communication products [...]

As the industry prepares to bid farewell to the ISA bus, feuding form factors vie for the title of de facto PC-based-instrumentation standard. ISA is dead; long live PCI! Too [...]

Many people are well-versed in contact temperature sensors. But that doesn't get you off the hook when you need to use one. Then you have to be an expert. It [...]

Designing [µprocessor]-based electromechanical systems is no job for a lone-wolf developer; one person can't possess all the needed expertise. And with today's demanding schedules, even multidisciplinary teams need powerful software [...]

Sometimes, you just can't be too careful. Experience has taught this lesson to many EEs who work with data acquisition. So, it should come as no surprise that these engineers [...]

Although analog network and signal analyzers are a mainstay at RF, microwave, and optical frequencies, the category is broad and also includes products usable in the audio band and below. [...]

The EMC Directive embodies some sound ideas. Unfortunately, it also involves a Byzantine and quintessentially Old World bureaucracy. More than one wag has ruefully quipped that, in the European Union's [...]

EEs need offer no apology for skepticism about built-in self-test (BIST). Disbelief is a natural reaction to a technology that zealots have proclaimed to be on the verge of revolutionizing [...]

Although you can use a digital scope without understanding how it works, doing so isn't wise. If you don't appreciate the complex operations that produce them, the displays can mislead [...]