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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Ben Coughlan
PHD SCHOLAR, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Interview with Ben Coughlan, consultant/engineer, working on unmanned aircraft.
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INTERVIEW
Ben Coughlan
How did you originally get into electrical engineering and electronics? My interest in electronics can go back as far as playing with Funway into Electronics kits from Dick Smith. My background since then has been mostly software. I completed my Bachelors degree in Software Engineering at the Australian National University in 2009 while working at Codarra Advanced Systems. After getting a taste for embedded software development on a few projects, I jumped at the chance to return to university to complete a PhD focused on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. So far this has taken me well outside of my software comfort zone involving a lot of electronic and mechanical design. How do you find working in other disciplines given your software background? I touched on a number of other disciplines during my degree including basic electronics and mechanics. The things I find most useful are the abstract concepts required for systems
engineering. These concepts are very familiar after learning about software architecture and design.
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The thing I find the most useful is the abstract concepts required for systems engineering.
My interest in electronics can go back as far as playing with Funway into Electronics kits from Dick Smith.
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INTERVIEW
When I approach a new discipline, its easy to map the required system knowledge. Its then just a matter of learning the specifics of design and implementation for what Im trying to build. What are your favorite hardware tools that you use? The tool I use most often would easily be my callipers. Simple yes, but whenever I need to build a model, which is pretty often, my callipers are invaluable. I should probably also mention my cast-iron frying pan. Its the easiest way for me to reflow a board with surface mount components and it makes pretty great pancakes. What are your favorite software tools that you use? I think my two favorite pieces of software would be Altium Designer and Solid Works. Between these two products I can design and model just about everything I want to build. Being able to create virtual prototypes is invaluable when money for physical prototypes is hard to come by. What is on your bookshelf? There are a lot of textbooks. The two most relevant/recent additions are Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems by Franklin Powell and Probabilistic Robotics by Thrun, Burgard, and Fox. On the fiction side Ive been enjoying the Book of the New Sun series on audio book. At the moment Im listening to Catch-22. Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? Nothing specific. My usual approach always involves doing things the hard way, or from scratch myself. Often I learn why I shouldnt be doing it myself from scratch but it does leave me with a better understanding of how something works. As the quote goes: Aim for the moon; even if you miss youll land among the stars. It always helps to surround yourself with people that know things. Im lucky to have experienced colleagues that can easily answer all my silly questions. Otherwise I can always turn to online forums. Its important to involve yourself and your work with the world. Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? My most noteworthy accomplishment would be an award for innovation my team and I won in 2009 at the Australian National iAwards for a software framework supporting the development of robotic applications on Linux platforms. The Linux Robotics Framework was my final year project for my Bachelors degree. I managed a team of five other students to produce the framework for our sponsor Nias Digital. The framework was intended to provide a collection of software components and accompanying design concepts to simplify the development of robots running Linux. This included a hardware abstraction layer with drivers for a few interface devices like the Pololu TReX motor controllers and serial servo controllers, as well as some higher level functions like steering, throttle, and a controller for a 3 DOF arm. We built a robotic vehicle named Buzz as a demonstration for our project. Starting with a 4WD RC truck, we constructed a chassis to mount the extra hardware we wanted. This included a pan/tilt CMOS camera, a 3DOF arm with a gripper, various controller boards and transceivers for 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and video. The main processor was a 32bit AVR on an Atmtel NGW-100. This was a conveniently sized, low-powered board that our sponsor was using at the time. More recently, the first prototype of Asity, the avionics board Ive developed, came off of the frying pan and actually worked on the first try. It being my first significant electronic design, I was pretty happy with this. What are you currently working on? My PhD is investigating energy usage in unmanned aerial vehicles. The goal is to monitor energy levels and consumption onboard the aircraft in real time and try to develop behaviors that optimize these. Including solar and wind energy, I hope this will lead to extremeendurance aircraft that maintain the capabilities required in the growing UAV industry. Can you tell us more about your UAV research ? My research is investigating the
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energy usage of onboard UAVs. This includes monitoring the total energy stored in the system, including the aircrafts velocity and altitude, in addition to the battery. The goal is to develop flight behaviors that optimize energy usage in reaction to air conditions and energy inputs (e.g., solar). In suitable aircraft or use cases, this will hopefully increase the endurance of the system. Simply put, I would like to show that the most efficient behavior for an aircraft is not necessarily straight and level. This is a highly experimental project so I have had the opportunity to develop many custom hardware components. The main avionics is a custom board Ive named Asity. This is a processor, inertial sensor pack, and radio in a small package to fit in the slim fuselage of the gliders I work with. The main processor is actually an FPGA to allow for high integrity, interrupt-free, and flexible design of the avionics firmware. FPGAs are notoriously power hungry, so I have used the Actel ProAsic3 series of chip. Being flashed based, in contrast to their SRAM based competitors, they have a much lower current draw and dont require any configuration memory. The current Asity prototype has 1M system gates; time will tell if this is sufficient. I am avoiding soft-core processors for as long as I can, and I believe I can build a complete avionics system in HDL. While Im developing an experimentation platform, Ive decided to include capabilities for the Outback Rescue Challenge. I hope to compete in 2012 with my 4 meter glider. What has been your favorite project? My current one, hands down. I was into model aircraft as a kid and now I get to play with them for a living. Given this is a research project, I enjoy a lot of freedom with what I work on. What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years? I still have a few years in the comfort of academia. Between now and then I hope to develop something that can support further research. My main goal is just to keep working on the same or similar projects. What challenges do you foresee in our industry? The biggest challenge in the UAV industry specifically is mostly legislative, although this is driven by quite reasonable, technical short-comings. Aircraft are not currently permitted to fly truly unmanned without constant supervision from someone who can take control. This does limit the range and utility of such aircraft. The challenge for engineers in this field is to develop systems that are safe, reliable, and capable of sensing and reacting to abnormal situations.
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Mike Steinberger
Lead Architect Serial Channel Products
TECHNICAL ARTICLE
to determine confidence limits for time domain simulations in general.
Experimental Approach
The channel simulated was 5 Gb/s data transmitted over 1.5m of PC board trace in a low loss dielectric. There was no equalization at the transmitter and linear equalization at the receiver. The experimental approach taken was to vary the data pattern used in the time domain simulation as well as the length of the time domain simulation. To make sure that the data patterns were independent, they were drawn from different starting positions in the same 263-1 linear feedback shift register (LFSR) pattern. This LFSR pattern has the advantage that it is much longer than any of the time domain simulations in the experiment. If a data pattern were to be repeated over the course of a simulation, then the data patterns would no longer be independent.
Rather than choosing different seeds for the same LFSR pattern, we could have chosen different LFSR patterns. If the different data patterns were long enough to produce a representative sample of the intersymbol interference, that would have been a valid choice. An alternating 1/0 pattern or a 27-1 LFSR would not have provided an adequate sample of the intersymbol interference, however. This approach was applied to simulations of three different lengths: one million bits, ten million bits, and one hundred million bits. These results can be used to estimate how much the confidence limits can be improved by running longer time domain simulations. Statistical analysis was also applied to the same channel. Statistical analysis is entirely different from time domain simulation in that it computes the statistics of the eye diagram directly rather than compiling them from samples of a time domain waveform. This computation has the advantage that it directly accounts for a statistically significant sample of the intersymbol interference, and the disadvantage that it is only rigorously applicable to linear, time invariant channels. Since the channel used in this study was truly linear and time invariant, this statistical analysis can be considered to be an evaluation rather than a computational experiment, and its results are what the average of the time domain simulation results should be. For the purposes of this study, the statistical analysis results are the right answer.
Results
A performance analysis of a high speed serial link produces a lot of results offering many different ways to look at the behavior of the channel. It is not the goal of this article to explore the many ways in which channel performance can be presented. Rather, the goal is to show how the results of time domain simulations vary. We will therefore use three different outputs as examples: 1. Inner eye contours: The shape of the inside of the eye diagram at a particular probability. The probabilities shown are 10-3, 10-6, 10-9, and 10-12. 2. Bathtub curves: Plots of the probability of error as a function of sampling time. These curves are called bathtub curves because they often resemble the cross section of a bathtub. 3. Eye width: The width of the open portion of the eye diagram. This value loosely correlates with timing margin. Figure 1 is an example eye diagram for the channel. All the eye diagrams in this study look very similar to each other. The following figures show the inner eye contours for the three different lengths of time domain simulation. Note that as the length of the time domain simulation progresses from one million bits to one hundred million bits, the 10-12 contour becomes clearly distinct from the 10^-6 contour, and its almost possible to discern the 10^-9 contour. Notice also that the lower probability contours have
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Pattern 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR 2^63-1 LFSR
Seed 8191 8291 8391 8491 8591 8691 8791 8891 8991 8091
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Persistent Eye Diagram
1.5m low loss PCB trace
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considerably more variance than the higher probability contours. The following figures show the bathtub curves for the same sets of simulations, along with the bathtub curve for the statistical analysis (shown in red) and the clock PDFs for the time domain simulations. Note that this way of viewing the data makes it much easier to see the variation due to the different data patterns. Figure 8 is an expanded view of Figure 5, Bathtub curves for one million bit simulations and statistical analysis, on page 5, showing how the bathtub curves diverge for the ten different data patterns. Note that the bathtub curves are nearly the same for the higher error probabilities, but then diverge for the lower probabilities. Finally, Table 2 summarizes the mean and standard deviation of the eye width for the time domain simulations and statistical analysis. Note that as the time domain simulation gets longer, the eye width approaches the statistical analysis result. Note also that increasing
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Figure 4: Inner eye contours for one hundred million bit simulations.
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Probability
Probability
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BLACK: Ten million bit time domain simulations using ten different data parameters
the length of the simulation doesnt reduce the standard deviation very much.
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1E-8 1E-10 1E-12 1E-14 1E-16 1E-18 1E-20 100.0 -50.0 0.0
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Figure 5: Bathtub curves for one million bit simulations and statistical analysis.
BLACK: Ten million bit time domain simulations using ten different data parameters
1E-8 1E-10 1E-12 1E-14 1E-16 1E-18 1E-20 100.0 -50.0 0.0
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Figure 6: Bathtub curves for ten million bit simulations and statistical analysis.
BLACK: One hundred million bit time domain simulations uisng ten different data patterns
1E-8 1E-10 1E-12 1E-14 1E-16 1E-18 1E-20 100.0 -50.0 0.0
Time ( s)
The accumulation of a persistent eye from a time domain simulation is an event counting experiment very much like counting radioactive particles with a Gieger counter. That is, for any particular bin in the eye diagram, the expected number of events is equal to the probability density for that particular bin times the number of bits simulated. Also, as in the Gieger counter experiment, the variance of the even count is equal to the square root of the number of events counted [3]. Therefore, as the number of expected events goes down, the variance of the count becomes a larger percentage of the count. In the limit that only one event is expected (for example, along the inner contour of the eye diagram), the variance is also one, meaning that maybe there will be an event counted and maybe there wont. One simple conclusion from the above reasoning is that the number of bits in a time domain simulation should be greater than the reciprocal of the probability of error. That is, if the target bit error rate is 10-12, the time domain simulations should be at least 10-12 bits long. Thats not an experiment Im anxious to try. The more important conclusion, however, is that there is a statistical variation associated with the results of any time domain simulation of a high speed serial channel. Its important that the user has a reasonable estimate of that variance so that they can use the
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Figure 7: Bathtub curves for one hundred million bit simulations and analysis.
BLACK: One million bit simulations with ten different data patterns
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simulation results to make reliable engineering decisions. This article has demonstrated one approach for obtaining such an estimate.
Eye Width Results
Simulation Duration One million bits Ten million bits One hundred million bits Statistical analysis
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References
[1] Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling and Flannery, Numerical Recipes in C++, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2002. [2] Steinberger, Exploration of Deterministic Jitter Distributions, DesignCon2008. [3] Bevington, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences, McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Table 2: The mean and standard deviation of the eye width for the time domain simulations and statistical analysis.
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Advantages of Packaging a
Proximity Sensor
with an
Tamara Schmitz
of light sources have energy in the infrared wavelengths (think about which light sources also give off heat). To demonstrate this filtering, see the plot in Figure 1. The ISL29028A from Intersil provides the best match of filtering in its ambient light sensor compared to the response of the human eye. A proximity sensor measures an infrared signal. Instead of the signal coming from the surrounding area, the proximity sensor drives an external infrared LED. The signal from this LED is directed out above the proximity sensor. If something enters the path of the infrared emission, some will be reflected back toward the sensor. There is another LED within the proximity sensor ready to pick
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1.2 1.0 IR And Proximity Sensing Human Eye Response Ambient Light Sensing 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
Wavelength (nm)
Figure 1: Human eye response, ambient light sensor spectrum and proximity sensing spectrum of the ISL9028A
The next reason is slightly more subtle: location. Both the proximity sensor and ambient light sensor need access to the outside world for proper function, so their placement within a system is strongly related to their sensitivity and their correct operation. In some cases where an ambient light sensor is packaged alone, it has been placed deeper within a systembehind a speaker screen or further down a printed circuit board from a nearby external access point. This practice has pushed ambient light sensors to be more and more sensitive to this indirect light. Light intensityis measured in lux. While sunlight exceeds 100,000 lux, these ambient light sensors can detect 0.001 lux! Thats a tiny fraction of a candles light. For a practical array of the lux levels of various light sources, see Figure 2. A final and compelling reason to house the proximity sensor and ambient light sensor in the same package is that it enables quick and undisturbed communication between the two. Remember in the beginning during the explanation of the operation of the ambient light sensor that we explained how its sensor must mimic the human eye. The human eye does not see infrared light, so the ambient light sensor is specifically designed to remove as much energy in the
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up this reflected light. This allows a system to react to someone or something coming close. A great example of this is on many cell phones. The user doesnt want their cheek to be pressing buttons or hanging up on a call while they have the phone up to their ear. It would be convenient if the phone could turn off the touch screen whenever the phone is brought up to a users ear. This is exactly what the proximity sensor allows the phone to do. These two separate systems are now being offered in one package. Are semiconductor companies overexcited by their drive to integrate more features and systems, or are there real advantages in copackaging the proximity sensor with the ambient light sensor? While it is true that they are two separate systems, they are both optical systems utilizing a sensing LED. They collect information from the outside world, quantify it, and provide it to the system. Currently,
Normalized Response
the system predominantly uses the information to adjust the backlight of the display. The information could just as easily be used to control more system features in the future. Of course, it is convenient to save space, to share supplies, and to combine power supply bypassing. The size of the solution is a critical parameter in many systems, especially portable ones. The copackaging of the proximity sensor and ambient light sensor is an enabling step in the development of more compact, yet feature enhanced, cell phones.
100,000 to 130,000 Lux 10,000 to 20,000 Lux 1,000 Lux 300-500 Lux 10-15 Lux
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infrared wavelengths as possible. Remember also that the proximity sensor operates precisely within the infrared spectrum. Whenever the proximity sensor is attempting the make a measurement, it is simultaneously sending out infrared light in the hope of bouncing off of a nearby object. This infrared energy could easily swamp the ambient light sensors input and cause false positive measurements, an instance in which the ambient light sensor measures more light energy than is actually in the surrounding area. It is for this reason that it is vital to coordinate the operation of the ambient light sensor with the proximity sensor. While this can be accomplished with a microcontroller, it is easier and a much smaller footprint to have this coordination within a single package. That one package houses
both the ambient light sensor and the proximity sensor. Locating the ambient light sensor and proximity sensor in the same package provides a number of advantages. They both enable power savings through the dimming or shutdown of the backlight and interface with the same system blocks. Co-packaging saves space and reduces complexity. Both sensors need access to the outside of the system and would likely be located in similar places. And since interference from the proximity sensor system can disturb the ambient light sensor, coordination between these two features is paramount. It is for all of these reasons that there is a huge advantage in co-packaging the proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.
About the Author Tamara Schmitz is a Senior Principal Applications Engineer and Global Technical Training Coordinator at Intersil Corporation, where she has been employed since 2007. Tamara holds a BSEE and MSEE in electrical engineering and a PhD in RF CMOS Circuit Design from Stanford University. From 1997 until 2002 she was a lecturer in electrical engineering at Stanford; from 2002 until 2007, she served as assistant professor of electrical engineering at San Jose State University.
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