Have you ever come across a situation where you prototyped a project on a solderless breadboard and liked it so much that you want it on a PCB? Well, read on! So far we have been writing software programs, building binaries out of them and executing them on micro-controllers. It’s time to get physical now! This post, and a couple of upcoming posts will deal with this very thing – how to realize your project in hardware. We’ll deal with PCBs, and also learn how to design and fabricate them. PCB of NI myRIO (Source: National Instruments) Introduction to PCB Design If you are an electronics hobbyist you might have probably designed many electronic circuits and even prototyped them on a breadboard. Now it’s time to step up to the next level. Let’s design the same on a PCB. This article and a couple more of them will be addressing the topic of PCB designing. There are many types of circuits that you can design on a PCB – like analog, digital, RF – and...
Looking back at the continuously evolving smartphone market, it is amazing to note the role that the ARM Cortex-A7 core has played. Previously the processor which initiated the uptake of multicore processing in mobile, the ARM Cortex-A7 is now an increasingly popular choice in energy-efficient mobile computing, enabling devices to achieve high-end functionality alongside all-day battery life and a very competitive price point. Devices based on the mature Cortex-A7 can now be typically found for well under $200, and this is driving widespread uptake in emerging markets such as Brazil and India. (Figure 1: ARM Cortex-A7 processor design) On top of its extreme energy efficiency, the Cortex-A7 incorporates many features of the high-performance Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A17 processors, including virtualization support in hardware, Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE), NEON®, and 128-bit AMBA® 4 AXI bus interface. It provides up to 20% more single thread performance ...