Ascenten Newsletter

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Electronic Design
Embedded Software
Product Engineering

May 2012 / Issue #2

“ Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity ”
- Erik Christopher Zeeman

From the CTO's desk

	Greetings to all our readers! I hope you find this edition of the newsletter informative and interesting like always. As a progressive embedded systems design company, Ascenten has been making some rapid advances in tackling the ever demanding
issues of low power and low cost designs. This month ushered in some pleasant surprises as we were successfully able to reduce power consumption in battery operated utility meters down to 95uA through smart programming. This now makes it a reality to achieve a battery life as long as 10 years on these utility meters. If you would like to know more on how we went about this, please write to me at JigarPatel@Ascenten.net. I would be happy to share some insights. Thank you and happy reading!
Cheers! Jigar Patel

Battery Life in Years

Measuring Microamps

Ketan Patel (Embedded Analyst-Ascenten)

With portability and ever shrinking form factors being tremendously sought after by consumers all over the world in electronic products, a major challenge lies ahead for designers in terms of developing ultra-low power designs to aptly complement the market expectations. This makes the battery life of a product an extremely crucial factor in its success and bounteous adoption.

Success Story: Industrial High Speed DSL Modem

Ascenten developed a Long Reach Ethernet (LRE) module with one Ethernet port (on 1 RJ-45 connector) and one VDSL port (on 1 RJ-11 connector). The module is a bridge mode modem accommodating well proven Ethernet and VDSL technologies and it transmits and receives Ethernet packets at 100 Mbps over 1 km of PSTN twisted pair.

Features

1 full-duplex VDSL link via RJ-11 connector
Selectable CO and CPE mode
Selectable fast and interleaved mode
Selectable target data rate
Selectable target SNR margin
Flexible band plan including 998 ISDN, 997 symmetric ISDN
Compliant with ETSI, ITU and ANSI standards

Specifications

Power supply: 10 to 36 V DC
Operation temperature: -40°C to 85°C
Dual USB powered device
Power consumption: 4 Watt maximum
Interface:

RJ-11 female Phone jack
RJ-45 female Ethernet jack

LAN: Full 10/100 Ethernet support with auto MDX
VDSL: Industry standard phone jack with on-board surge protection

News from the Industry

PCB and ESR subtleties in switching regulator and LDO designs

It's what many vendors and mentors don't tell you that can plague your switching regulator and LDO designs.

Kern Wong, Principal Applications Engineer, Texas Instruments -- EDN, April 27, 2012

Traditionally, RF and high-frequency designs were concerned with parasitics. Today, printed circuit boards (PCBs) and component parasitic elements are becoming an integral part of system designs, even for DC/DC regulator circuits.