Portable Design雜誌2006 年「編輯首選產品」獎

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Portable Design 2006 Editor’s Choice Awards
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- F. J! l& b! {# k) DNashua, NH -- Every year Portable Design reviews several hundred products intended to make life easier for designers of portable electronic devices. We report the best of these in our magazine and, following the precedent of the 2005 inaugural awards, we recognize the best of the best with our 2006 Editor's Choice Award.
We believe that these products are indicative of the creativity our readers bring to bear, and they're worthy of the wider recognition that this award will bring.

The 2006 Portable Design Editor's Choice Awards go to:
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Digital video development platform
* K$ J. A9 x1 L' U7 _" X* z4 qTexas Instruments' first products based on its DaVinci technology include a pair of DSP-based SoCs, as well as multimedia codecs, application programming interfaces (APIs), and frameworks and development tools. The company says the integrated hardware and software components create an open platform for the design of digital video systems without requiring extensive digital video expertise. Offering up to 1080i MPEG-2 decode and up to 720p MPEG-4 simple profile encode, the DM644x devices are based on the company's TMS320C64x+ DSP core, an ARM926 processor, video accelerators, networking peripherals, and external memory/storage interfaces, all specifically tuned for video performance.
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Texas Instruments - www.ti.com
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- \  g* Y  r7 Y6 E8 PMultimedia SoC processors
. d" u+ v/ b/ [- b/ j7 GMobilic Technology entered into the mobile technology market with the introduction of its SoC multimedia processor family. The MP830 and MP730 SoC series processors provide feature sets designed for mobile applications including 3G handsets, portable media players, PDAs, digital camcorders, and GPS systems. The processors feature a 200-MHz ARM926 CPU to ensure future functional extensions through software upgrades. The processors also integrate a video codec supporting MPEG4 and H.263 standards, an MP3 decoder, a 2D graphics acceleration engine, and interfaces for high-resolution LCD, TV, Ethernet, and USB. The company's in-house video compression/decompression engine supports I, P, and B frames, as well as most MPEG4-based video formats, including 3GP and MP4.

' J9 i! v5 l9 M# q7 `* cMobilic - www.mobilic.com
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Synthesizable processor cores
$ e9 i) z' g9 W4 J# G4 q& NTensilica's Diamond Standard family of processor cores consists of a set of six "off-the-shelf, synthesizable" devices based on the company's Xtensa processor architecture. The Diamond 108Mini is a cacheless RISC controller featuring 20% lower power consumption than comparable ARM7 devices. The Diamond 212GP is a mid-range RISC controller with instruction/data caches and user-selectable local memory sizes. The Diamond 232L is a mid-range RISC CPU core with full MMU (memory management unit) capability for supporting the Linux OS. The Diamond 570T is a "three-issue static superscalar CPU core" that the company says beats the ARM1136JF-S by more than 2× in EEMBC benchmarks. The Diamond 330HiFi is a low-power, 24-bit audio processor for all popular audio and speech codecs, based on the company's Xtensa HiFi 2 audio engine. The Diamond 545CK features a three-issue VLIW (very long instruction word) processor with an eight-MAC (multiply accumulator), SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) DSP.

Tensilica - www.tensilica.com
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Software-defined radio kit
$ W4 h1 r4 k6 T9 v* J% mXilinx partnered with ISR Technologies to introduce an "off-the-shelf prototyping-to-production" kit designed to accelerate implementation of software-defined radio (SDR) modems for the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program, and similar programs. The JTRS SDR kit consists of reconfigurable hardware and software elements that are compliant with JTRS-mandated specifications, including the Software Communications Architecture (SCA). The companies say the JTRS SDR kit is the first to support partial reconfiguration and SCA-enabled system-on-chip (SoC) capabilities. The kit leverages the DSP features and partial reconfiguration capabilities of Xilinx's Virtex-4 FPGAs to provide a programmable platform that meets JTRS requirements.

+ w1 U* a7 [4 ]; b% qXilinx - www.xilinx.com
. H% a  z  Y. `+ ?1 Q  D# Y0 JISR Technologies - www.isr-t.com
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Multicore processor chip platform
# f, v" `' w: @! M" P' a+ f3 jThe IntellaSys SEAforth-24 wireless platform is the first chip in the company's Scalable Embedded Array (SEA) multicore processor platform, aimed at embedded wireless and portable applications. The SEAforth-24 chip incorporates 24 core processors, each able to operate at one billon instructions per second, with power dissipation of just 150 mW for typical applications. Combining a 6×4 array of 18-bit processors with a "powerful set" of I/O functions, the SEAforth-24 chip features an asynchronous, scalable, dual-stack architecture capable of driving an antenna directly. The chip's 11 serial (SPI) ports can double as I2C, I2S, and USB ports; 32 parallel I/O lines support handshaking capabilities; and scalable connectivity among multiple SEAforth-24 chips occurs via high-speed I/O ports.

7 J! m- m( |- ~7 P# b* O. A' bIntellaSys - www.intellasys.net
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Embedded flash file system
6 Y; V& f7 c- _Denali Software introduced its first embedded software product offering, the Spectra flash file system. Spectra was specifically designed to provide embedded system developers with a fully featured solution for both NAND and NOR memories for a wide variety of applications, ranging from handsets to network routers running multithreaded applications. Spectra supports all commercially available NAND and NOR flash devices, including both single-level and multilevel cell (SLC and MLC) flash. Spectra allows concurrent use of multiple volumes as well as dynamic creation and deletion of files and directories. For more advanced designs, Spectra can process multiple threads between an RTOS/OS and the flash device. The software supports execute-in-place (XIP) operation, enabling programs to run code from the same location in which it is permanently stored. It also supports the full POSIX file system.

& z% B5 q$ I& o+ G( IDenali Software - www.denali.com
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+ O( b' _  x7 W/ KReconfigurable WiMAX transceiver
' k0 |7 T% P- {- |! W& u* H# VAsicAhead's AA1001 is a single-chip programmable radio that can be reconfigured in the field to support multiple frequency bands, as well as all currently specified IEEE 802.16e (WiMAX) bandwidth configurations. Targeting low-power mobile devices, the chip aims to eliminate the need for multiple RFICs made necessary by regional frequency band variations and multiple radio bandwidths. The AA1001 is a CMOS zero-IF transceiver chip that connects directly between the antenna and the digital baseband processor. It consists of a full-duplex receiver and transmitter, two frequency synthesizers, and a control loop for the PA AGC. The chip covers the RF range from 700 MHz to 6 GHz, with a tunable bandwidth of 1.5 to 20 MHz. Its baseband interface includes analog and digital I&Q outputs, an SPI interface, and five timing signals. The zero-IF architecture eliminates the need for expensive surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters and a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO).

/ |) T* U' D" }8 k- O" p+ U: [AsicAhead - www.asicahead.com
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  {8 W+ K6 V8 L& z9 P2 ~8 DPolyband broadcast tuner
# Y: ?' N/ L9 A& V  ]5 GMirics is a fabless startup that is currently sampling its MSI001, "the world's first polyband tuner for mobile digital broadcast reception." The chip has five separately switched front ends that cover all the major terrestrial broadcast bands, including LW/MW/SW (150 KHz to 30 MHz), VHF Band II (76 to 108 MHz), Band III (174 to 240 MHz), Band IV/V (470 to 960 MHz), and L-band (1,450 to 1,675 MHz). After a single-stage conversion, the signals pass through reconfigurable IF/baseband filters and AGC amplifiers to provide I&Q outputs to an off-chip demodulator. With appropriate demodulators, the MSI001 can process all of the major digital broadcast standards, including DVB-H/T, T-DMB, ISDB-T, DAB-IP, MediaFlo, DAB, DRM, and plain old AM/FM.
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' ?* Y% c+ x9 W% G" k( H$ Z# FMirics - www.mirics.com

1 j) v' p* C) ~/ q3 |Real-time spectrum analyzers
8 p* W. {; h6 u5 E; ETektronix introduced its RSA6100A Series of real-time spectrum analyzers, targeting digital RF applications. The 6.2-GHz RSA6106A and 14-GHz RSA6114A provide 110-MHz real-time bandwidth simultaneous with 73-dB spurious-free dynamic range, making them well suited to the needs of a broad range of digital RF applications, from power amplifiers for advanced cellular radios to the latest pulsed radar signals. The RSA6100A provides a unique Frequency Mask Trigger (FMT) that allows the user to trigger a measurement based on the occurrence of a unique pattern of events in the spectrum, including triggering on weak transient signals while ignoring strong known signals.

Tektronix - www.tektronix.com

WiMAX transceivers
7 V8 Y: w4 @1 e$ ?NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductor) introduced the world's first fully integrated, high-performance WiMAX family of transceivers designed specifically for mobile and handheld applications. The 2.3- to 2.4-GHz UXF23480 is designed for use within North America and Australia; the 2.5- to 2.7-GHz UXF23460 is for use throughout Taiwan, Japan, North America, and Europe. Both are both fully 802.16e compliant. NXP says that the UXF23480/60 offers seamless handover capabilities. The transceivers interface to various baseband ICs via a generic analog I/Q interface and coexist with cellular, WLAN, and Bluetooth standards.
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NXP - www.nxp.com
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Small-footprint real-time operating system
% ~. |) f/ I: S1 A* d0 d7 BWindows CE 6.0 is a component-based, small-footprint real-time operating system (RTOS) specifically designed for portable consumer applications such as cell phones, PDAs, portable media players, and digital cameras. Unlike CE 5.0, processes are no longer limited to 32, and each process is no longer limited to 32 Mbytes of virtual memory; the 6.0 kernel now handles more than 32,000 simultaneous processes, each with 2 Gbytes of virtual memory space. The new file system supports larger storage media and file sizes (up to 4 Gbytes), and removable media encryption. CE 6.0 includes greatly increased driver support as well as different operating modes: Drivers can be run in kernel mode for performance or in user mode for robustness.
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) C! q4 {% p- j+ lMicrosoft Corp. - www.microsoft.com
Established in 1995, Portable Design has long been the electronic engineer's resource for portable applications. A leading design magazine, Portable Design delivers news, product reviews and application feature articles focusing on the consumer, wireless, automotive and industrial markets.