June Circuit Cellar: Sneak Preview

Here’s a sneak preview of June 2018 Circuit Cellar:

PCB DESIGN AND POWER: MAKING SMART CHOICES

PCB Design and Verification
PCB design tools and methods continue to evolve as they race to keep pace with faster, highly integrated electronics. Automated, rules-based chip placement is getting more sophisticated and leveraging AI in interesting ways. And supply chains are linking tighter with PCB design processes. Circuit Cellar Chief Editor Jeff Child looks at the latest PCB design and verification tools and technologies.

PCB Ground Planes
Tricky design decisions crop up when you’re faced with crafting a printed circuit board (PCB) for any complex system—and many of them involve the ground plane. There is dealing with noisy components and deciding between a common ground plane or separate ones—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Robert Lacoste shares his insights on the topic, examining the physics, simulation tools and design examples of ground plane implementations.

Product Focus: AC-DC Converters
To their peril, embedded system developers often treat their choice of power supply as an afterthought. But choosing the right AC-DC converter is critical to the ensuring your system delivers power efficiently to all parts of your system. This Product Focus section updates readers on these trends and provides a product album of representative AC-DC converter products.

SENSORS TAKE MANY FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

Sensors and Measurement
While sensors have always played a key role in embedded systems, the exploding Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon has pushed sensor technology to the forefront. Any IoT implementation depends on an array of sensors that relay input back to the cloud. Circuit Cellar Chief Editor Jeff Child dives into the latest technology trends and product developments in sensors and measurement.

Passive Infrared Sensors
One way to make sure that lights get turned off when you leave a room is to use Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors. Jeff Bachiochi examines the science and technology behind PIR sensors. He then details how to craft effective program code and control electronics to use PIR sensors is a useful way.

Gesture-Recognition in Boxing Glove
Learn how two Boston University graduate students built a gesture-detection wearable that acts as a building block for a larger fitness telemetry system. Using a Linux-based Gumstix Verdex, the wearable couples an inertial measurement unit with a pressure sensor embedded in a boxing glove to recognize the user’s hits and classify them according to predefined, user-recorded gestures.

SECURITY, RELIABILITY AND MORE

Internet of Things Security (Part 3)
In this next part of his article series on IoT security, Bob Japenga looks at the security features of a specific series of microprocessors: Microchip’s SAMA5D2. He examines these security features and discusses what protection they provide.

Aeronautical Communication Protocols
Unlike ground networks, where data throughout is the priority, avionics networks are all about reliability. As a result, the communications protocols used in for aircraft networking seem pretty obscure to the average engineer. In this article, George Novacek reviews some of the most common aircraft comms protocols including ARINC 429, ARINC 629 and MIL-STD-1553B

DEEP DIVES ON PROCESSOR DESIGN AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

Murphy’s Laws in the DSP World (Part 1)
A Pandora’s box of unexpected issues gets opened the moment you move from the real world of analog signals and enter the world of digital signal processing (DSP). In Part 1 of this new article series, Mike Smith defines six “Murphy’s Laws of DSP” and provides you with methods and techniques to navigate around them.

Processor Design Techniques and Optimizations
As electronics get smaller and more complex day by day, knowing the basic building blocks of processors is more important than ever. In this article, Nishant Mittal explores processor design from various perspectives—including architecture types, pipelining and ALU varieties.