Pin-compatible MPUs simplify product variants

Renesas offers the RZ/G3L and RZ/G3SE series of 64-bit general-purpose microprocessors for consumer and industrial HMI and IoT edge systems. Expanding the company’s RZ/G portfolio, the pin-compatible MPUs allow developers to reuse a PCB design…

FPGA architecture: Radiation particle types and single event upsets (SEUs)

As FPGA manufacturing migrates to smaller geometries, the process change has delivered extraordinary gains in density, speed, and power efficiency. However, these gains have come at a cost in terms of single event upset (SEU) sensitivity. Starting…

Digital pot programming with a twist

This circuit exemplifies the thesis that the 555 is to analog timing what the opamp is to analog “everything else”! In any contest to see which is easier to manually program, digital potentiometers (dpots) suffer a big handicap when compared…

A design path to success exists for ultra-low-voltage SoCs

Beyond low-power design and beyond multi-threshold-voltage libraries, clock and power gating, and voltage-frequency scaling lies the strange land of ultra-low-power systems. Here, power comes from tiny, semi-permanent batteries or energy scavenging,…

DAC implementations: The spread-bit PWM strikes back

Taking various considerations into account, the theoretical advantage of the spread bit PWM can be challenging to translate into practice. A recent Design Idea (Reference 1) addressed the implementation of digital-to-analog converters using…

Caliptra-enabled hardware security solution eyes AI SoCs

A production-ready root-of-trust and security orchestration solution provides dedicated hardware-level security for mission-critical data center and AI system-on-chips (SoCs). This enterprise-grade solution also accelerates design deployment…

Radon sensor embeds sizeable alpha particle detector

PIN photodiode collects, counts, and discriminates alpha energies to determine residences’ radon gas-caused cancer danger degrees. Back in late July, when I was working on last month’s published piece on radon gas analysis, I longed to see…

Beyond the port: Fundamentals of passive radiators

When enclosure size and airflow constraints limit traditional bass‑reflex designs, passive radiators offer a smarter path to deep, controlled low‑frequency performance. Audio engineers face a persistent challenge—delivering deep bass extension…

Electron beam energy

Goldilocks and the Three Bears (and their porridge, beds and chairs) have got nothing on this high voltage design challenge. Sometimes a client gets into areas of technology that go way over my head, but I manage to pick up a snippet here or…

You just Inherited a Simulink model you have never seen before. Now what?

As systems grow, the knowledge needed to safely change them becomes harder to retrieve quickly, even when the design itself is sound. Models increasingly encode not just algorithms, but also assumptions, trade-offs, and system-level intent that…

Debugging intermittent Comcast, part 4: Broadband diagnostics

There’s a lot you can potentially do to boost your WAN’s downstream and upload speeds, as well as to minimize its latency. But only if your service provider lets you. This is my final post in this series. Really. I promise! Like I’ve said…

The Microsoft-reminiscent iPhone Duo: How much customer holding-and-folding is necessary to keep Apple from folding on the experiment?

New smart phones, earbuds and watches, this year with an added dash of memory price increases. It’s September in Cupertino again. September 1 was Tim Cook’s last day as Apple’s CEO, after a 15-year tenure with that title. Hereafter he’ll…