Electronics

EE Times has posted a list of the Top Free DIY Tools Every EE Needs. The tools include:

• SmartSim
• CoolSpice
• Electric VLSI Design System
• Qucs (Quite universal circuit simulator)
• Logisim logic simulator
• Cedar Logic Simulator
• Calculatoredge
• Circuit Virtual Laboratory
• TinyCAD
• DesignSpark PCB
• gplEDA
• DraftSight 2D CAD software
• eDrawing
• Mach3
• CustomPartNet

Agilent Technologies now Keysight Technologies hosted a short course covering

• Component modeling and measurement,
• Circuit design and analysis, and
• System modeling

on April 2, 2014. The course was taught by

• Venkatesh Balasubramanian from Maury Microwave Corp
• Roberto Tiniti from Agilent Technologies
• Murthy Upmaka from Agilent Technologies
• Richard Hoft from Agilent Technologies

and covered five topics including

• Pulsed IV/RF Measurements for compact model extraction
• Amplifier Design Flow
• VNA and NVNA Load Pull for Model Validation
• Amplifier Design in ADA
• Innovation in Nonlinear Measurements and Simulation using X-Parameters

This was a great short course. The instructors lead you trough the process of amplifier design with model extraction, test, verification using a PNA, PNA-X, and augmented PNAs for nonlinear model extraction. The introduction to x-parameters was well done and is a powerful extension to s-parameters.

The ICReplacements.com website has a new tool to help find replacement semiconductors for transistors, MOS-FETs, diodes, Zener diodes, and similar devices.

Jon at the codewrite website has posted a neat project: Arduino Uno Capacitance Meter. The project is very simple as it uses one capacitor and about 40 lines of code. The meter function can measure capacitance from 1 pF to 1000 uF with 1 to 5% accuracy from 3.5 pF to 1200 pf. Jon has improved the design with the Capacitance Meter Mk II.

UC Berkeley has posted the Spring 2010 version of the couse EE240: Advanced Analog Integrated Circuits on YouTube. The course is taught by professor Elad Alon. The lecture notes are also available from the course website. The following references are listed for background reading for the course and include:

• Analysis and Design of Integrated Circuits by Paul R. Gray, Paul J. Hurst, Stephen H. Lewis, Robert G. Meyer, 4th Ed., Wiley, 2001.
• Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits by Behzad Razavi, McGraw-Hill, 2000.
• The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits by Thomas H. Lee, 2nd Ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• The Designers Guide to SPICE & SPECTRE by K. S. Kundert, Kluwer Academic Press, 1995.
• Operation and Modeling of the MOS Transistor by Y. Tsividis, McGraw-Hill, 2nd Edition, 1999.
• Analog Integrated Circuit Design by D. Johns and K.Martin, Wiley, 1997.

There are several articles on how to hack an inkjet printer for printing circuit boards. The secret ingredient is silver nanoparticle based inks and conductive tape. The articles include:

• Hack Your Useless Inkjet To Print Electronics Circuits from Fastcolabs
• How to inkjet-print circuits at fraction of time and cost from Kurzwielai News
• Instant inkjet circuits: lab-based inkjet printing to support rapid prototyping of UbiComp devices from the ACM

PyroElectro has posted an Introduction to analog electronics course on their website. The course consists of 10 lessons, does not require texts books, but a parts kit is needed to do the lessons. The kit cost less than $40 and they recommend that you have a DMM but it is not required.

BITalino is small computer platform that contains physiological sensors. These sensors include:

• Electromyography (EMG)
• Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
• Electrocardiography (ECG)
• Accelerometry (ACC)
• Light (LUX)
• Light-Emitting Diode (LED)
• Bluetooth
• Micro-Controller Unit with up to 1000Hz sampling rate, 6 analog inputs (4@10-bit + 2@6-bit), 4 digital inputs, and 4 digital outputs.

There are APIs for Python, Android, LabView, and Java. The board can be purchased in three different kits for €149 to €169.

EETimes has posted the article: What's the Best Robot Base for My Arduino? Several platforms are described including the

• Turtle
• Pirate
• HRC
• Arduino

The Arduino platform

Hack a Day has posted an article on A simple Forth development board. Leon Nathaniel Maurer created the board and a floating point extension to Forth. The board is available for purchase and the components cost under $15. Forth is an interpreted threaded linked list language and really great for debugging hardware as you can build words in real time to test hardware.

The IEEE Communications Society has made 30-40 papers on 100 Gb/s communications available open source. Some of the topics include:

• 100G QPSK
• FEC
• Optical transport
• Coherent signal processing
• Undersea communications
• Low power PHY at 400G

Planet Analog has posted the article SPICE made easy which reviews the book "The LTspice IV Simulator - Manual, Methods and Applications" by Gilles Brocard. LT SPICE is a free SPICE simulator that does not have any limitations on component count or node count. There is a graphical schematic capture tool now too. It is very popular but isn't well documented until now. The book is available from the publisher for €49 plus VAT.

EE TImes has posted a list and description of 10 Single Boards Computers (SBC) under $100. The SBCs inlude:

• Raspberry Pi Model B
• BeagleBone Black
• Parallella
• Odroid-X2
• Hackberry
• UDOO
• APC Rock
• Cubieboard
• Marsboard
• A13-OLinuXino

Parallella

EE Times has enlisted its readers to say which free circuit simulators they use. I saw that a number of people like PSPICE which is not free. LTspice was another favorite. The number one complaint was the lack of device models. PSPICE is a great tool with plenty of models. It would be cool if was open source. It would seem that online circuit simulators like CircuitLab is being used by students at hundreds of universities around the world so programs like PSPICE, LTspices, and Multisim are likely to fad away.

EE392G Terahertz Technologies and Applications lecture notes are available open source. The course covers generation, detection, and applications of THz electronics and was taught in 2008 by Professor Konstantin Vodopyanov at Stanford.

DoCircuits is a web based circuit simulator and acts like a virtual electronics lab. It has freemium model so there is a free plan, pro plan, enterprise plans ranging from $0/month, $4/month, and an unspecified rate for the enterprise plan. The pro plan allows offline usage too. It has many sponsors like the IEEE and Intel. It easy to use, fun, and nicely done.

I predict that cheap parallel processors/clusters will be common in the future and I would be able to build an array of such processors for my home network (Network Attached Cluster perhaps). Adaptava is shipping the Parallella supercomputer platform now (Kickstarter project). It has 16 processor and can do 100 GFLOPs at 2W all for around $100. Future versions are expected to offer 64 to 16k cores and reach 20 TFLOPs. It would be fun to pair such devices with Mathematica. Maybe you could do some real time imagine processing of video from a quadcopter this way to control the copter, for example. It would be neat.

Analog planet has posted a short summary of The REAL Cost for a Custom IC and describes the team typically needed to produce a custom IC. NRE costs can range from $350,000 to $2,000,000 which is a significant investment. Of course you can go the DIY garage approach and design a chip on the cheap for $3000 for a hobby project.

Beaglebone black is the new community-driven development board from Beagleboard.org. It costs $45 and offers the following features:

• AM335x 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8
• 3D graphics accelerator
• NEON floating-point accelerator
• 2x PRU 32-bit microcontrollers
• USB client for power & debug
• USB host
• Ethernet
• HDMI
• 2x 46 pin headers

and supports the following operating systems:

• Ångström Linux
• Android
• Ubuntu
• Cloud9 IDE on Node.js w/ BoneScript library

Philbrick's one page application note is just so elegant.


Source: Philbrick archive