In our Deep Green Editor’s Choice section, we look at technology helping design green into today’s new products.
The quest for smaller and smaller smartphones and other mobile devices is pushing technology that doesn’t normally like to be small, low power, and cost effective. Consider it a challenge for creative embedded minds – here’s three samples of new technology aimed at several difficult problems in the areas of cameras, RF, and serial flash memory.
Solidly in focus, 10 cm to infinity
Powering the LVAF solution is the SMB274 driver from Summit Microelectronics (see Figure 2). While the driver uses an on-chip charge pump, integrated feedback signal processing optimizes performance and minimizes external components. An I2C/SMBus serial interface and nonvolatile configuration options provide simple host control and flexibility to address various applications.
LensVector
www.lensvector.com
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Summit Microelectronics
www.summitmicro.com
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Multiband power front end
Mobile devices are now faced with operating seamlessly on multiple bands of 3G and 4G wireless networks. Dealing with this requirement can easily eat all of the power savings achieved with other design steps if designers aren’t careful. RF Micro Devices has introduced a line of PowerSmart platforms (Figure 3) to provide a multiband front end for mobile devices.
The PowerSmart platforms provide a wide range of mode coverage (GSM/GPRS, EDGE, EDGE Evolution, CDMA, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA/HSPA+, and LTE/4G) and industry-leading band coverage (bands 1-6 and 8-10). The device uses a standardized digital interface to connect to most transceivers, and is designed to extend battery life and lower thermal dissipation, helping smartphones be greener.
RF Micro Devices
www.rfmd.com
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Expanded possibilities for serial flash
Serial flash memory isn’t new, but a new Numonyx device makes the technology much more usable and saves size and power. With features designed to enable eXecute In Place (XIP) and replace DRAM in many applications, the Forte N25Q device has what Numonyx says is the industry’s first nonvolatile configuration register, which optimizes the device configuration by allowing multiple parameter options to be maintained after a power on and off cycle.
The N25Q serial flash memory supports multiple I/O SPI protocols (single, dual, and quad) on the same device and significantly improved read and write speeds over the entire supply voltage range, improving clock speeds up to four times, or 432 MHz, in the quad I/O mode. The device is available with 128 Mb density in both 3 V and 1.8 V versions.
Numonyx
www.numonyx.com
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