Kinsner: New Systems: 1999 October 25, vol. 1.06

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1999 New Systems

Week of 99 Oct. 25

REPOSITORY OF NEW SYSTEMS:
1999 OCTOBER 25; VOL. 1.06

The Anatomy of an Airbag

This short article describes the anatomy of an airbag in a car. As an input device, it includes the MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) accelerometer, such as the dual-axis ADXL 150/250 from Analog Devices. A squib igniter such as the Toshiba TPD2004F acts as an output device. The device activates a chemical reaction to release gasses to inflate the airbag quickly. The power supply must work over all voltages and even when the battery cable is severed. The TEMIC U6229B provides three voltages: 28.4V, 7V, and 5V. The collision severity, vehicle conditions (such as seat belt usage), and diagnostics are perfomed by a microprocessor such as the 32-bit RISC, M-CORE from Motorola, as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Motorola's M-Core architecture.

A vehicle with several airbags requires a reliable, fault tolerant, high-speed, safety-critical-communication bus, such as the PLANET (Phillips Lite Automotive NETwork). It uses only two wires for power, data and clock signals, and works over unshielded cables to reduce cost.

A High-Performance DSP

The new Texas Instrument's 1600 MIPS, 200 MHz TMS320C6205 is the first fixed-point DSP to integrate an industry standard PCI master-slave bus controller for glueless interface to a wide range of systems. The device is fully object code compatible with the 'C6000 platform's broad range of high-performance DSPs, offering a roadmap to 5000 MIPS and beyond. There is much more information on the device.

Consumer Home Nets

EE Times has described a group of eight consumer electronics companies planning to release software by the end of 1999 that could form the technical underpinnings of consumer home networks, based on the IEEE 1394 interface. They also provide details of how the Home Audio-Video interoperability (HAVi) software will work.

8-Mbit Smart ZBT SRAM

Micron Technology started sampling of an 8-megabit Smart Zero Bus Turnaround (ZBT) SyncBurst SRAM, which follows the earlier introduction of a 4-Mbit version of this fast SRAM architecture. Smart ZBT SRAM, developed by Integrated Device Technology Inc., has a "smart" timing feature that adapts the chip's clock time to the user's system. Both Micron and IDT released 4-Mbit Smart ZBT SRAMs in August. IDT has yet to release an 8-Mbit version.

733 MHz Pentium III

On October 25, Intel announced the 0.18-micron Coppermine chip to compete with AMD's (Advanced Micro Devices) 700-MHz Athlon.

Follow up on Britannica Online

Encyclopaedia Britannica's Web site crashed on October 21 when more than 10 times the expected number of people tried to visit the site after the company announced that it was providing a free online version of its entire encyclopaedia, as announced here (vol. 1.05).

Field Programmable System On Chip (FPSOC)

Atmel of San Jose introduced the world's first SRAM-based field programmable system on a chip (FPSOC^TM). The AT94K has 40,000 gates of with FreeRAMTM, 30+ MIPS AVR^TM RISC processor, 32 Kbytes of program SRAM memory, and frequently used on chip peripherals such as SPI, UARTs, timer/counters and a hardware multiplier. It will cost $19.90 in volumes of 20,000 or more in January 2000.

Source Electronic Components

The PartMiner (tm) helps in sourcing over 15 million electronic components.

Analog Devices Directory

The ChipCenter promotes direct contact with companies offering analog products and services as a service to more than 40,000 registered readers.

NAISO & Dr. Pedrycz

The Natural and Artificial Intelligence Systems Organization, NAISO is a new non-profit organization, presided by Professor Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Canada, to encourage efficient communication between scientists, researchers, engineers and practitioners in the field of natural & artificial intelligence systems.

Picture credits:

Fig.1: http://www.mot.com/SPS/MCORE/images/auto_disti_architecture.gif

Thanks for the visit. Your suggestions and questions are always welcome (v.1.68)