Leland Teschler, Executive Editor Here’s the latest IoT security nightmare: All of the wireless routers through which most IoT traffic passes are probably vulnerable to botnets and other kinds of security breaches. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Fraunhofer FKIE in Germany who analyzed 127 different routers sold by seven vendors. The routers they examined […]
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Spread Spectrum Clocks
Digital clocks are everywhere. In fact there are too many clocks around. If you do a quick sweep with a spectrum analyzer, then as well as the frequencies you might expect to see – local TV and radio stations, cellphones and WiFi signals – you will find all sorts of other spurious signals from the […]
Comparison of the Cypress PSoC 1, 3, 4 and 5LP
By Chris Francis The first generation Cypress PSoC “Programmable System-on-Chip” – PSoC 1 – was the first programmable analog system that was general purpose, flexible and with usable performance in my opinion. Various other companies attempts at programmable analog prior to that were either too restricted, slow or relied solely on switched capacitor analog blocks. […]
Microchip PIC Microcontroller Configurable Logic Cells (CLC)
By Chris Francis Some of the newer Microchip PIC microcontrollers feature “configurable logic cells” or CLC. What are they and how useful are they? They appear in a small selection of the PIC devices and are a programmable combination of gates and latches that can be combined to produce an output. Rather than being a […]
Clock Startup in Low Power Microcontroller Design
Using a low power microcontroller and making it “sleep” as much as possible is a common power reduction technique as they can be woken by either an internal or external clock, or by an internal or external event. Taking the PIC 8 bit XLP devices as an example (the so called nanoWatt devices), they have […]
