The File - Dec 16, 2008 - (Page 1)

India’s fortnightly focus on electronics design December 16-31, 2008 DSPs integrate automotive bus standards By Aseem Vasudev DSP Applications Manager Analog Devices India Pvt Ltd The automotive industry is growing at a rapid pace globally. In India, European and Japanese car manufacturers are penetrating and influencing the market well, as evident with more and more infotainment and safety features being added to cars sold locally. Based on the latest trends, car features or functions can be classified into three: infotainment, safety and chassis, and body and power train. The main components of car infotainment are handsfree/telematics, rear seat audio/video and navigation head-unit. Tyre pressure monitoring, airbags, adaptive cruise control, advanced driver assistance, night vision, and automatic parking brakes are all safety features. Chas- sis features, meanwhile, include, electronic power steering, suspension controller, remote keyless entry, and vehicle security. With so many features to be managed and controlled, it is im- perative that automotive design adheres to certain standards. The current standards accepted globally are Controller Area Network (CAN) and Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST). Nearly all vehicles today control their interior functions and power transmissions via CANs, while all infotainment is handled by MOST. With these standards in place, the use of microcontrollers and digital signal processors (DSPs) is now necessary for data manipulation and control operations. This is why the DSP market is likewise rapidly growing in the automotive segment. Vasudev: With CAN and MOST standards, microcontrollers and DSPs are now necessary for data manipulation and control operations in automotives. CAN standard CAN is a standard that allows various devices and microcontrollers within an automobile to interact and communicate with one another without the need for a host. As the name suggests, it is mainly used for communicating only control information, which requires little bandwidth. CAN cannot support the bandwidth requirements of audio, video and other car infotainment features. The CAN bus is deployed in automobiles to connect the engine control unit and transmission or, on a different sub-system, to connect door locks, climate control and seat control. It incorporates a data CRC check, message error tracking and fault node confinement as means to improve network reliability to the level required for control applications. The message-oriented protocol used does not have an address field with transmitter and receiver address, but uses an identifier that can clearly identify the address. continued on page Use comparators for mixed-signal apps By Keith Curtis Principal Applications Engineer Security, Microcontroller and Technology Development Division Microchip Technology, Inc. Inside Trends 3 Data plane processing challenges DSP Voltage comparators began appearing in single-chip microcontrollers in the late 1990s. At the time, the change was viewed as a simple cost reduction. Comparators required less silicon, while still allowing the microcontroller to compare two analogue voltages. This “single-bit ADC” view of the voltage comparator persisted for much of the latter half of the decade, and well into the early years of the 21st century. Fortunately, as 8-bit microcontrollers began moving into an ever-expanding number of mixedsignal applications, more and more designers with analogue backgrounds began working with microcontrollers. The resulting new breed of mixed-signal micro- controller designers was familiar with both the flexibility and power of the voltage comparators, and began to exploit its capabilities. Applications including sensorto-digital conversion, logic gates, amplifiers, and even power conversion began to appear, using on-chip voltage comparators. Unfortunately, the number of mixed-signal microcontroller designers has yet to achieve the critical mass required to effectively “spread the word” about the voltage comparator. With a broad sampling of the possible uses of voltage comparators, this article continued on page In Focus 6 Design, debug with DSPs Events 9 TES 2008, NCMIPMV ‘08, ICACT ‘08, VLSI Conference 2009, ICETiC 2009 Sponsors 2 National Semiconductor www.eetindia.com http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/%22controller area network%22.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/"media oriented systems transport".HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/"media oriented systems transport".HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.embeddeddesignindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/infotainment.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/power train.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/power train.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.embeddeddesignindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/microcontroller.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.embeddeddesignindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/microcontroller.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.com/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_081216_GS01.htm http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/mixed~@~signal.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.co.in/SEARCH/SUMMARY/technical-articles/mixed~@~signal.HTM?ClickFromNewsletter_081216 http://www.eetindia.com/STATIC/REDIRECT/Newsletter_081216_EETI02.htm

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The File - Dec 16, 2008

EETimes India - December 16, 2008
Contents
National Semiconductor
Data Plane Processing Challenges DSP
Design, Debug with DSPs
TES 2008, NCMIPMV '08, ICACT '08, VLSI Conferene 2009, ICETiC 2009

The File - Dec 16, 2008