EEWeb Pulse - Volume 96

Steve Sanghi President and CEO

of Microchip

EEweb.comElectrical Engineering Community

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EEWeb PULSE TABLE OF CONTENTS

3Visit www.eeweb.com

Steve Sanghi PRESIDENT & CEO OF MICROCHIP

RTZ—Return to Zero Comic

Featured Products

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12

16

20

BodyCom Technology by Microchip

28

Making the Motherboard Connection

24The Raspeberry Pi—Part 3BY KYLE OLIVE WITH EEWEB

BY ROB RIEMEN WITH EEWEB

A conversation about the ways in which Microchip’s President saved the company from financial ruin.

Microchip’s passive keyless entry system (PKE) capacitively couples with the human body, using it as a wire for communication.

How to pick a motherboard based on a pre-determined processor and what electrical components make the difference in this selection.

This third installment goes through the process of setting up a bare-bones Arch Linux ARM operating system on the Raspberry Pi.

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EEWeb PULSE INTERVIEW

EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community

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Could you give us some background about yourself, your career and role at Microchip?I graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1978 with a Master’s Degree. I did my B.S. in India in 1975, and then after graduating in 1978, I joined Intel in Santa Clara, California as a design engineer.

Fast-forwarding 8 years to 1986 and I was the general manager of the division that I had started out as a design engineer in 8 years before. That was the initial part of a pretty fast rise at Intel. From design engineer-ing I went into product engineering, and became the product engineering manager, and then became the manu-facturing manager. I moved the divi-sion from Santa Clara to Folsom, Cali-fornia when Intel decided to expand in 1984. We were the first division that went there. Through growth, and because my bosses would quit, move, or get promoted, I ended up taking their jobs and in 1986, I became the manager of a 200 million dollar busi-ness at Intel, which I then grew to 300 million dollars by 1988.

In 1988 I left Intel to seek my fortunes in the startup world. The first company I joined was Wafer-Scale Integration in Freemont California in 1988. I left

them in 1990 -- the company didn’t do as well as I hoped, and didn’t deliver on some of the promises it had initially had. Through Wafer-Scale Integration, I came to learn about Microchip. In 1989 there was a proposal to possibly merge Wafer-Scale with Microchip Technology. I led the team from Wa-fer-Scale to come and conduct due-diligence with Microchip. The deal was not completed—we couldn’t sell it to board members on both sides. The deal broke, but about a year after that, in 1990, I left Wafer-Scale and was going to start a new company in the Flash technology area.

I saw a number of venture-capitalists to raise money for my Flash com-pany, and somehow got hooked into coming to Microchip and pursuing my dream here. I joined Microchip exactly 23 years ago at the end of February of 1990.

What was the state of the company when you joined?

When I came to Microchip, the com-pany had deteriorated significantly from the company I had seen just a year before. What had happened at Microchip was that it separated from General Instruments in April of 1989. Prior to that, it was the semiconductor division of General Instruments. I had seen the company from Wafer-Scale

in the July 1989 time-frame, soon after they separated from General Instru-ments. By the time I joined them, they had lost a fair amount of cash, and the company was really hurting. I would say that the VCs didn’t really admit to what the company was when I joined it. When I joined the company it was hemorrhaging money—it was losing 10 million dollars a year.

I joined as the Senior Vice President of Operations, and the Board let the President go soon after, within two or three months of me joining. They were searching for a new president, looking at internal as well as external candidates, and about three or four months later they promoted me to be the president.

What did you bring to the table to help turn the company around?

I picked up the pieces in a company that was losing money and essen-tially running out of cash. The initial experience was really restructuring the company, turning it around, rais-ing new money, and instituting some better morale and better processes in the manufacturing area, new product area, quality area, and the marketing and sales areas. It was essentially a complete retooling of the company from what it was.

Around 90% of Microchip’s revenue was in memory, which is always very competitive with very low gross mar-gins. Microcontrollers were a very small business, an emerging busi-ness, and we were only doing about 4 million dollars in microcontrollers a year.

From there, we decided to essen-tially re-target on the microcontroller market, and put a substantial focus on growing our share by adding pro-grammability to our products, new development tools, and new cost-

“Our stock is up about 6,400 percent from our initial public offering, and including all the dividends granted, the return to the investors is about 8,100 percent.”


EEWeb PULSE INTERVIEW reduction efforts. The microcontroller market really took off for us. We pro-vided some unmatchable offers to customers in the marketplace, which the prevailing industry did not have. That is the platform on which we went public in March of 1993. In fact, this past March 19th was the 20th anni-versary of the IPO. It has been the best-performing IPO in semiconduc-tors of any company that went public in a similar time frame. Our stock is up about 6400 percent from that time, and including all the dividends granted, the return to the investors is about 8100 percent. I think that 1,200 invested in 1993 in the IPO would have become a million dollars today.

We went public in 1993, following a phase of very substantial, very strong growth year after year. We ended the fiscal year 1993 with 89 million dollars in revenue. I believe the following year it was 139 million dollars. A year after that it was over 200 million dol-lars. So you’re talking just runaway growth in a few years.

As we hired lots of new employees we built a second factory. We just had one fab factory, and we bought a second one in 1994, which helped us to grow significantly over the next several years. We also added a fac-tory in Thailand, and had substantial growth in employment and multiple divisions. The business went from 89 million dollars in 1993 to almost half a billion dollars just a few years later. It was quite exciting managing through the exceptional growth of this company.

Have there been many acquisitions during this process of growing the company?

Microchip didn’t really start doing acquisitions until much later. There were really no acquisitions from 1990 to 1998. In 1998 our revenue was about half a billion dollars, and

we had done no acquisitions -- it was all internal growth.

The first major revenue acquisition that we did was in 2001. We acquired Telcom Semiconductor, which had about 40 million dollars in revenue. By 2001, Microchip was a company of about 700 million dollars, and we acquired a company of about 40 mil-lion dollars. However, we didn’t really start doing acquisitions until about 4 or 5 years ago. In the last 4 years we have bought about 10 different companies.

What is your strategy when it comes to acquisitions?

We have some strong internal filters regarding the acquisitions we go through. For example, one is the price we’re willing to pay versus existing revenues that we want to pay from an ROI on earnings standpoint. A large portion of the acquisitions we do are accretive to our earnings, and we have targets on gross margins and operating earnings.

We also buy some very small compa-nies that are technology acquisitions. For example, last year we bought a company in Germany, outside of Munich, which does Air Gesturing. Just like on an iPhone when you touch things to make something happen; in this one, you don’t even have to touch it, you could be 8-10 inches away. With air gesturing you flick your hand and you could go to the next page, things like that. Those products are being introduced almost as we speak this quarter. I have a demo where I don’t have to touch my screen or my key-board. I can just move my hand over the keyboard, and it will go to the next slide in a PowerPoint presentation.

That technology has many different applications. It did not have any revenue; it was not accretive when we added it because there was no

revenue and we only had expenses, but we saw significant potential and that technology has won a number of awards already in the first year. We look at both, but there is a pretty strong discipline in what we look for and what we buy.

Could you tell us about your non-commissioned sales force?

We are the only non-commissioned sales force in the industry, and we went to that structure in 1996. I am an engineer by training, and in the mid-1990s time frame the industry was going through a significant transition where lots of U.S. companies, large U.S. multinationals, were closing their factories in the U.S. and were going to Singapore and Taiwan.

This book chronicles how Microchip’s management bypassed advice from consultants to develop their own unique model for reform to help turn it from a failing company to a market leader. This solution, called the “Aggregate System,” is a big-picture approach that creates a welcoming business culture and management model that improves all aspects of business.

Driving Excellence by Michael J. Jones and Steve Sanghi

8



With that, the sales process started to become more complex. A sales rep selling in Boston or New York or Chicago—how does he get paid? If the customers don’t want to buy any-thing in San Jose, and the buying was happening in Singapore and Hong Kong and now China, it was difficult for a sales rep to show what designs they were creating, how much busi-ness they were creating, and how they would get paid. The structure in the sales force for years has been a commissioned sales force, where half or less of the pay sometimes comes from the salary, but then they have to really sell, and make revenue, to make commissions. The sales force started to spend a lot of their time cre-ating tracking mechanisms, and a lot of time arguing with the management regarding how much they should get paid and what business they created.

There used to be so much effort going into budgeting and setting the budgets for sales guys. Our fiscal year usually begins on April 1, and in April we usually have a worldwide sales meeting to train them on new products and to set the budgets. When they would leave they had the budgets for the year and what their commissions would be. What I found was that leading up to that sales

meeting, my backlog would dry up. I wouldn’t be getting many orders in January, February, or March, because everyone would be trying to negotiate for a much lower budget, and then they would go back home, and all the backlog would show up. During that time the factory was inefficient, couldn’t build the product, and it was just game-playing. Everyone in the company confirmed that there was game-playing going on every day.

I sat together with some distributors whose people told me that they spent up 40% to 50% of their time working on tracking so that they could get paid, because basically when the sales guy created a design in San Jose and then the design disappeared and got parts somewhere over in China, that guy wouldn’t get paid unless he put a lot of energy into showing what he had done. What would happen was that a sales guy would work on a smaller design for a customer that would buy in San Jose, but not work on a larger design that would get bought in China, to the detriment of our com-pany.

Did this lead to competition within the company?

Absolutely. We would see that a design was done in Boston, and the

purchasing was going on in, let’s say, China, and the purchasing managers would try to get a lower price. They would get a quotation from the guy in San Jose, of $2.00, and they would get the quotation of the Chinese sales guy of Microchip of $1.80. When the guy in San Jose would hear about it, he would be angry and say “I was the one who did the design originally,” and then quote $1.60. Then the China guy would go down, and finally the order would be booked at $1.10. They would be competing within Microchip because they would both be trying to get commission.

As I analyzed all this behavior and all the time wasted on trying to get paid, to the detriment of Microchip, I real-ized that these commissions are just no good. In fact, I analyzed the total commissions people made. Every salesperson on the average made about 104% commission. Anybody who had a bad year got a very low budget the following year and beat his budget the next year. Then, anybody who got a very high-attainment one year, would get a very large budget, and then miss and get paid less. It really wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Eventually in 1996, we designed a system to get rid of all the commis-sions. We raised everyone’s salary to pay a portion of the commission to them in a flat salary, and the bal-ance we converted to a management incentive compensation plan, which had exactly the same metrics as the compensation of all the management staff. That has to do with total world-wide sales growth, total worldwide gross margins, total profits, total earn-ings per share, things about which investors care, which managers care about, which the board cares about. Everyone now could be one team, a joint team to really promote those things. Now when the guy quotes a lower price to book the business in

“We trained our sales team on how a global sales force working together can have more profitability. We built that into our Aggregate System, and the results have been outstanding.”


EEWeb PULSE INTERVIEW China, he personally does not ben-efit, and in fact gets hurt, because the company would get a lower profit. Slowly that behavior started to change, and now when the guy has to quote a price in China, he first calls the guy in Boston and says, “What did you quote,” and then gives exactly the same price, or slightly higher.

Was your sales team met with resistance?

We did this in 1996. It’s been 17 years and veteran sales guys told us it would never work, that all the best sales guys would quit, sales guys need a reason to get up in Chicago and go to work, and find territories where management isn’t watching, but it was all bogus. We didn’t do that in a vacuum. We applied oversight, we trained them, and we made sure that we didn’t take the commissions away without giving something else instead. We did give something in-stead, which was this management compensation program. We trained them on how a global sales force working together can get better and have more profitability. We built that into our Aggregate System, and the results have been outstanding. Today we’re still the only sales force in the industry that is non-commissioned.

Does this help you prepare for economic downturns?

Yes. Another thing that people do is, the moment a recession comes, sales become slower. Every CEO in any industry just jumps immediately to layoffs. They lay off their factory people, their engineers, their design people, and cut down development, sales people; basically layoffs are just rampant.

I analyzed that behavior over many years, and found that our industry is very cyclical. Everybody lays off people, and maybe a year and a

half later, maybe faster, the business comes roaring back, and when the business comes back you hire people again in droves. Many times this in-volves paying for relocation, train-ing new people, and hiring people in the factory who make mistakes, create problems, and create longer lead time to your customers to supply the product. There was just a huge amount of lost productivity in mess-ing people up, creating bad morale, paying the severance charges to lay off the people, and then—6 or 9 months or a year later, rehiring the people, signing bonuses, and paying relocation costs— all when the busi-ness was strong. All that just did not make sense.

When the global financial crisis came at the end of 2008, when the semicon-ductor industry from peak to bottom was down about 40%, and business was just falling off a cliff, everyone one of our competitors across the industry laid off people. We got together and we said, “well, we could obviously do the same, but let’s try something different.”

In the entire 2008-2009 bust and the subsequent growth in 2010, Micro-chip was the only company that did not lay off a single person. Not a single person. We had two types of people working. One type consisted

of the people working in the factories; the other type was the people work-ing in the offices. These two types are different because the workload went down in the factories. When the work slows down in the factories you have to do something; you can’t just keep building the product. We took the people in the factory, and on any given day, we said 1/3 of the people will be off, furloughed without pay. The following week a different 1/3 would go away, and then the third week, a different 1/3 would go away. Everybody worked 2 out of 3 weeks.

We brought the production capacity down by 1/3, but everybody had a job—everybody worked 2 weeks out of 3, everybody got their healthcare paid. Anytime we implemented a new product or a new technology or a new improvement, everybody got trained on how to make those things work. But the hardship was that, rather than having a few people getting no money and getting completely laid off, 1/3 third of the people were off without pay. There was obviously unemployment insurance available that, for many production operators, covered a significant portion of their pay, and for others covered less than that.

Then we created a Microchip charity that we called AZFirst. In that charity,

“In the entire 2008-2009 bust and the subsequent growth

in 2010, Microchip was the only company that did

not lay off a single person.Not a single person.”

10



all the employees of Microchip world-wide donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the charity, from which we would distribute charitable dollars to the lowest-paid people, in terms of Wal-Mart coupons, so they could buy food, medicine, diapers, clothes, or supplies for whatever their needs were.

As the business started to come back, we went from every third week off to every fourth week off, and then every sixth week off, and then every eighth week off, to working full time and then working overtime. It worked so beautifully, and when the business came back, every one of our com-petitors had a long lead time that they couldn’t support. Microchip was able to expand flawlessly because we had the same people fully-trained, and they just had more hours to work.

The second group of people is made up of those who work in the offices, design engineers, market-ing engineers, product engineers, test engineers -- the non-production people. Now, their work does not really depend on how much product you are selling. If they are working on a new product, their work doesn’t change depending on how much the old product is selling because of the recession. If you lay off 10-15% of the people, then you have to do 10-15% less work, and then you have to kill some new products, not make some improvements, or visit fewer custom-ers. Each sales guy might get a larger area and more customers, so he’s not going to be able to do as good a job. We said, “Well, that’s what everybody else is doing, let’s do something dif-ferent.”

Were there any pay cuts to your workforce?

We asked all of our employees world-wide—around 3,000 employees—to take a 10% pay cut. Now, in the U.S., the laws are such that you can actually implement the pay cut -- people could quit, but they don’t have a choice -- it’s a non-union environment. But in all the foreign countries, the government laws don’t allow you to do that. In Germany, France, the U.K., India, and China you cannot cut somebody’s pay unless they agree to do so. It has to be voluntary. Out of 3,000 employees worldwide, everybody voluntarily signed up for the 10% pay cut, except for two people in France. Those were special cases -- but the rest of the 3,000 employees world-wide signed up for the 10% pay cut. The other 10% —the average bonus in the company is 10%—we said that bonuses would be 0% until we were through this major crisis. We got 10% savings from there, so we had 20. We saved another 4% from discretionary spending—travel, supplies, not up-grading computers, whatever. Our government seems to not be able to save 85 billion dollars out of 2. 8 tril-lion, but for most companies it’s not that difficult to squeeze 4% by doing nothing. We saved 24% in operating expenses without firing a single shot and laying off anybody. It was the best operating expense savings of any of our competitors. When they laid off people, they saved 10, or 12, or 15 percent; without laying off anybody we saved 24%.

Everybody kept working so we didn’t have to delay visiting customers, stop solving problems, or doing whatev-

er our jobs were. When the busi-ness came back, we were so much better positioned than everybody ekse—with a new product pipeline, with new technologies, and new enhancements, and customer good will because we had kept supporting customers in the same way, while everyone else had withdrawn some of their support.

When the business came back the following year, we grew 58%. We grew so much, and it was so profitable, and we gave 250% bonuses to our em-ployees who had made this sacrifice (which was in many cases a voluntary sacrifice) for this outstanding perfor-mance. We paid everything people sacrificed back and even more.

What can you tell us about the vision and future of Microchip as you continue to grow?

It’s largely about growth. We want to be a growth machine. We did over a billion dollars in 2010, and we put a plan together to be at 2 bil-lion dollars in 5 to 7 years, and now it seems that we’re going to reach that goal significantly faster than what we had envisioned, some with help from acquisitions, and because our internal business has done quite as well. That’s a target we’re focused on now over the next very few years - to get to a 2 billion dollar milestone. At the same time we’re developing the next strategic plan, and where to go from there. ■



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FEATURED PRODUCTS

Optocouplers are the only isolation devices that meet or exceed the IEC 60747-5-5 International Safety Standard for insulation and isolation. Stringent evaluation tests show Avago’s optocouplers deliver outstanding performance on essential safety and deliver exceptional High Voltage protection for your equipment. Alternative isolation technologies such as ADI’s magnetic or TI’s capacitive isolators do not deliver anywhere near the high voltage insulation protection or noise isolation capabilities that optocouplers deliver.

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EEWeb PULSE INTERVIEW FEATURED PRODUCTSHigh Performance eMPUsMouser Electronics, Inc. announced the immediate availability of the new SAMA5D3 series of embedded microprocessor units from Atmel. These high-performance eMPUs are based on the ARM® Cortex™-A5 processor and feature market-leading low power consumption. SAMA5D3 eMPUs operate at up to 536MHz (850DMIPS) at under 200mW, making them ideal for cost-sensitive industrial and consumer applications. These Atmel devices include state-of-the-art security features and provide a comprehensive peripheral set for connectivity and user interface applications. For more information, please click here.

Human Body as Low-Power Comm. ChannelMicrochip Technology Inc., announced from the Embedded World conference in Germany its BodyCom™ technology, which provides designers with the world’s first framework for using the human body as a secure communication channel. Compared to existing wireless methods, BodyCom technology provides lower energy consumption, while further increasing security via bidirectional authentication. Because no RF antennas are required, BodyCom technology allows for simpler circuit-level designs and a lower bill of materials (BOM). For more information, please click here.

Low Jitter MEMS OscillatorIntegrated Device Technology, Inc. announced the industry’s first differential MEMS oscillators with 100 femtosecond typical phase jitter performance and integrated frequency margining capability. The extremely low phase jitter and adaptable output frequency of IDT’s high-performance oscillators significantly reduce bit error rate in 10 gigabit Ethernet switches, routers, and other related networking equipment. The 4H MEMS oscillators leverage IDT’s patented piezoelectric MEMS resonator technology to provide a high-frequency source of unparalleled performance and reliability. For more information, please click here.

Dual PWM/Linear Controller Single-Chip SolutionIntersil introduced a new dual PWM + linear controller that delivers the industry’s most flexible, efficient power solution for a broad variety of broadband and networking applications. The ISL6446A integrates complete control, monitoring and protection functions for two synchronous buck PWM controllers and one linear controller. It allows designers to easily convert 4.5V to 24V DC into as many as three output voltages, with extensive protection. Each output can be controlled independently with adjustable soft-start control. For more information, please click here.

Optocouplers are the only isolation devices that meet or exceed the IEC 60747-5-5 International Safety Standard for insulation and isolation. Stringent evaluation tests show Avago’s optocouplers deliver outstanding performance on essential safety and deliver exceptional High Voltage protection for your equipment. Alternative isolation technologies such as ADI’s magnetic or TI’s capacitive isolators do not deliver anywhere near the high voltage insulation protection or noise isolation capabilities that optocouplers deliver.

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Quad HDMI 1.4a Receiver InterfaceThe TDA19978A is a four input HDMI 1.4a compliant receiver with embedded EDID memory. The built in auto-adaptive equalizer improves signal quality and allows the use of cable lengths up to 25 m (laboratory tested with a 0.5 mm (24 AWG) cable at 2.05 gigasamples per second). For more information, please click here.

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FEATURED PRODUCTSOptical Gesture & Proximity Sensing ICsMelexis releases a product family designed for easy implementation of robust optical proximity and gesture detection systems into automotive environments. Automotive Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) need to be intuitive and safe to use, On the other hand, new car buyers expect functions and features like smartphone and media integration. Optical proximity and gesture detection enable a more intuitive HMI experience. Typical challenges for such systems are cost, sunlight robustness, electro-magnetic interference and mechanical integration constraints, while supporting multiple OEM configurations. For more information, click here.

Ultra-Low-Power Small Package 16bit FRAMFujitsu Semiconductor Europe announced the addition of a new small package to the MB85RC16, the 16kbit ultra low-power Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) device with an I2C interface. Fujitsu has been supplying MB85RC16 with standard package SOP-8. The new SON-8 plastic LCC (Leadless Chip Carrier) package with a dimension of 3×2 mm reduces the mounting space by 80 per cent in comparison to the SOP-8 package. For more information, please click here.

Frequency Synthesizer with VCOThe LMX2581 is an ultra low noise wideband frequency synthesizer which integrates a delta-sigma fractional N PLL, a VCO with fully integrated tank circuit, and an optional frequency divider. The LMX2581 integrates several low-noise, high precision LDOs to provide superior supply noise immunity and more consistent performance. When combined with a high quality reference oscillator, the LMX2581 generates a very stable, ultra low noise signal. For more information, please click here.

Low-Power Stereo Audio CodecThe MAX98090 is a fully integrated audio codec whose high-performance, ultra-low power consumption and small footprint make it ideal for portable applications. The device features a highly flexible input scheme with six input pins that can be configured as analog or digital microphone inputs, differential or single-ended line inputs, or as full-scale direct differential inputs. For more information, please click here.

Portable High Efficiency Solar ChargerIXYS Corporation announced the release of The Solar Pad – a high-efficiency Li-Polymer solar charger ideal for charging smart phones, tablets, and multi-media players via standard USB connection. Measuring 120mm in length, 76mm in width, and 18mm in height and weighing 300g, the IXYS solar charger is highly portable – it is about the size of a smart phone. For more information, please click here.

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EEWeb PULSE INTERVIEW FEATURED PRODUCTS

Power Factor Correction ControllersISL6730A, ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730DThe ISL6730A, ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730D are active power factor correction (PFC) controller ICs that use a boost topology. (ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730D are Coming Soon.) The controllers are suitable for AC/DC power systems, up to 2kW and over the universal line input.

The ISL6730A, ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730D are operated in continuous current mode. Accurate input current shaping is achieved with a current error amplifier. A patent pending breakthrough negative capacitance technology minimizes zero crossing distortion and reduces the magnetic components size. The small external components result in a low cost design without sacrificing performance.

The internally clamped 12.5V gate driver delivers 1.5A peak current to the external power MOSFET. The ISL6730A, ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730D provide a highly reliable system that is fully protected. Protection features include cycle-by-cycle overcurrent, over power limit, over-temperature, input brownout, output overvoltage and undervoltage protection.

The ISL6730A, ISL6730B provide excellent power efficiency and transitions into a power saving skip mode during light load conditions, thus improving efficiency automatically. The ISL6730A, ISL6730B, ISL6730C, ISL6730D can be shut down by pulling the FB pin below 0.5V or grounding the BO pin. The ISL6730C, ISL6730D have no skip mode.

Two switching frequency options are provided. The ISL6730B, ISL6730D switch at 62kHz, and the ISL6730A, ISL6730C switch at 124kHz.

Features• Reduce component size requirements

- Enables smaller, thinner AC/DC adapters- Choke and cap size can be reduced by 66%- Lower cost of materials

• Excellent power factor over line and load regulation- Internal current compensation- CCM Mode with Patent pending IP for smaller EMI filter

• Better light load efficiency- Automatic pulse skipping- Programmable or automatic shutdown

• High reliable design- Cycle-by-cycle current limit- Input average power limit- OVP and OTP protection- Input brownout protection

• Small 10 Ld MSOP package

Applications• Desktop computer AC/DC adaptor

• Laptop computer AC/DC adaptor

• TV AC/DC power supply

• AC/DC brick converters

FIGURE 1. TYPICAL APPLICATION FIGURE 2. PFC EFFICIENCY

+

ISL6730

VCCISEN

ICOMP

VIN

GATEGND

FB

BO VREG

COMP

VLINE VOUT

VI

OUTPUT POWER (W)

EFFI

CIE

NC

Y (%

)

ISL6730C

ISL6730A, SKIP

100

95

60

65

70

90

85

80

75

0 20 40 60 80 100

TABLE 1. KEY DIFFERENCES IN FAMILY OF ISL6730

VERSION ISL6730A ISL6730B ISL6730C ISL6730D

Switching Frequency 124kHz 62kHz 124kHz 62kHz

Skip Mode Yes-Fixed Yes-Fixed No No

February 26, 2013FN8258.0

Intersil (and design) is a registered trademark of Intersil Americas Inc. Copyright Intersil Americas Inc. 2013All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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EEWeb PULSE SPECIAL FEATURE

16 EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community

Passive keyless entry (PKE) systems and “smart keys” have been on the market for years,

but until now, there has not been a system quite like BodyCom™ Technology from Microchip.

Where traditional PKE systems are usually used to open vehicles through RF or inductive-field

transmissions from key fob to vehicle, BodyCom is the first system to capacitively couple with

the human body, very much in the way of how you would use the body capacitance to operate a

touchscreen, and then use the body as a wire for communication. However, capacitively coupling

with the body is merely the first of many unique features of the BodyCom system. To find out

more, we spoke with Edward Dias, the Business Development Manager at Microchip, about the

inner-workings of the system as well as the seemingly endless amount of applications—from home

security systems to medical clean rooms.

BodyCom MicrochipReplacing Wires with the Human Body

Technology by



Passive keyless entry (PKE) systems and “smart keys” have been on the market for years,

but until now, there has not been a system quite like BodyCom™ Technology from Microchip.

Where traditional PKE systems are usually used to open vehicles through RF or inductive-field

transmissions from key fob to vehicle, BodyCom is the first system to capacitively couple with

the human body, very much in the way of how you would use the body capacitance to operate a

touchscreen, and then use the body as a wire for communication. However, capacitively coupling

with the body is merely the first of many unique features of the BodyCom system. To find out

more, we spoke with Edward Dias, the Business Development Manager at Microchip, about the

inner-workings of the system as well as the seemingly endless amount of applications—from home

security systems to medical clean rooms.

BodyCom MicrochipReplacing Wires with the Human Body

Technology by



BodyCom OverviewAt its core, the BodyCom is a short-range, low data rate solution that can be used in a variety of secure wireless applications. “The application we set our development kit to sort of mimic is for a traditional automotive PKE system,” Dias told us. “Think of having a key fob in your pocket, walking up to your car door, and touching the handle, which allows you access to the vehicle.” Although this is the most traditional application for this type of technology, typical PKE systems use an inductive field that’s present around the vehicle and constantly pumps out signals to connect with the key fob. As the fob comes within 1 meter of the vehicle, the base unit in the vehicle recognizes the fob and is activated. BodyCom accomplishes the same thing with no RF transmissions, and instead uses the human body to communicate between the vehicle and the key fob, which allows for a simpler circuit-level design. Compared to other PKE systems out there today, BodyCom boasts lower energy consumption because the touch-sensing technology used to activate it consumes far less energy than the RF and inductive-field systems currently available. “We also use some of our lowest-power microcontrollers that we have in our portfolio,” Dias states, “They are part of our XLP (extreme low power) technology for low active and standby usage.”

Applications“BodyCom could replace a lot of keyless passive entry devices out there that drain your battery power,” Dias said. “You could even apply this in your home door lock.” With this model, all you would need to do is put the key fob in your pocket, walk up to a door handle where the base unit is, grab the door handle and use the immediate authentication and walk right in the door. This kind of authentication for door locks can be implemented in hotel doors and other industrial door locks, where the serialized key fob acts as a “virtual key” to allow user entry where corresponding base units are deployed. “We’ve even had requests for medical applications,” Dias said, “where you would put a base unit coupling pad on a mat on the floor in an operating room environment.” In this application, the doctors or surgeons would put the key fob in their pockets and would be made authorized users for this particular mat. These authorized users would do nothing more than walk across the doormat and it would do the authentication and would open the door for them, through capacitive proximity detection, which is essentially the same technology as capacitive touch sensing without the need for a physical touch. “The key here,” Dias explained, “is that these doctors wouldn’t have to touch anything so their hands can remain sterile,



which is essential in medical environments.” The fact that there are no RF transmissions with the BodyCom system is another added benefit to this application because this would not interfere with any medical equipment.

The other potential application for this device comes in the area of safety. Take power tools, for example: a manufacturer can design BodyCom into a battery-powered saw or drill. This means that after the user is done with the tool and puts it down, then the device is disabled because the user is no longer paired to that device because the human body acts as the wire. “It’s essentially a safety feature that authenticates itself based on the user,” Dias clarifies. “Now my 10 year old can’t come over and pick up the saw and just turn it on and use it.” This authentication feature could be implemented in a number of devices—from drills to guns—to prevent from unwanted usage or theft. The fact the key fob is calibrated to the corresponding touch pad creates a secure bi-directional authentication so that only the user with the key fob can use the device. If the device is stolen, but the thief doesn’t steal the key, then it is useless.

The typical arrangement of a BodyCom network is one base unit with 1 to 20 corresponding mobile units. Each mobile unit has its own serial number, so in theory you can have all different types of combinations of mobile units to work with one base unit. This can serve as the model for a home security system where each family member has a mobile unit that connects with the front door lock and alarm system upon entry.

Dev Kit & SpecsIn almost everything Microchip does, the company tries to give its customers hardware to work with as a demonstration unit, but also to do a little development

work. With the BodyCom development kit, the customer receives a base unit and two mobile units, each of which contains a PIC® microcontroller, an analog front-end, and a capacitive coupling pad. In the example of the passive keyless entry system in a vehicle, the BodyCom base unit would be inside the vehicle, specially mounted in a door handle. The mobile unit side would be in a typical key fob that you would carry around in your pocket or bag. The components on both sides are rather simple. On the base unit, there is a PIC microcontroller and an analog front-end that acts as a signal demodulator, both of which have been in Microchip’s portfolio for some time now. (You can implement the BodyCom framework in just about any PIC microcontroller in Microchip’s portfolio of more than 1,000 8, 16 and 32-bit MCUs). Because BodyCom is triggered by either capacitive touch sensing or capacitive proximity detection, on both ends there is a capacitive coupling pad.

The size of these units can vary depending on the application. The typical mobile unit is around the size of a key fob that you can hang on a key ring. The coupling pads can range from a quarter-sized button up to a 10 x 10 inch touchpad. The base units are typically hard powered on an automobile or door handle, but can also be powered by a standard coin cell battery, which is more typical on the fob side.

In terms of passive keyless entry systems, the BodyCom seems to be geared towards offering the most comprehensive, energy-efficient, and multi-purpose device on the market. Microchip simplified the system into a device with an overall lower bill of materials and eliminated the RF and inductive-field signals so that the device isn’t as power-hungry as the typical system. By using the human body as a wire to conduct communication, the user will hardly notice that there are devices in play.

“When I’m traveling and talking to customers,” Dias told us, “you could just see the wheels spinning in their heads in how they can implement BodyCom in their applications. The variety of these customers ranges from industrial access control to medical companies.” In hearing about the variety of customers, it seems as though BodyCom’s relatively simple circuitry can have nearly endless applications. ■

EEWeb PULSE TECH ARTICLE


Rob RiemenComputer Engineering Student at the University of Cincinnati

In continuing with my computer

hardware theme, I have chosen to discuss

how to pick out a motherboard based on

a pre-determined processor and what

electrical components make the difference

in this selection. Now that you picked your

processor based on operating frequency,

number of cores, and cache size; we will be

able to determine the right motherboard to

choose to optimize performance.



Rob RiemenComputer Engineering Student at the University of Cincinnati

In continuing with my computer

hardware theme, I have chosen to discuss

how to pick out a motherboard based on

a pre-determined processor and what

electrical components make the difference

in this selection. Now that you picked your

processor based on operating frequency,

number of cores, and cache size; we will be

able to determine the right motherboard to

choose to optimize performance.



Motherboards are designed to link together all of your important components for functionality. Certain aspects of this design make more difference to the user than others. Specifically, the data transfer bus makeup and the northbridge and southbridge composition make the most difference when selecting a motherboard. But, to begin, it is necessary to find a motherboard based on the physical socket construction.

Find your packaging for your processor, or a specifications list; and find the CPU-Socket Type. After the processor has been fabricated and the pins have been aligned, motherboard manufactures create motherboards based on the alignment of the processor’s pins. The processor will be able to make an electrical connection through it’s pins into this socket. Although there are some socket-types that are cross compatible with other architectures, it is necessary to find the motherboard that fits your processor. This makes buying the right motherboard crucial, as even in its basic physical shape, a processor won’t fit across all socket types. Switching back to the electrical side, the CPU series and speed are only compatible with motherboards with the correct socket. After you find a set of motherboards that fit your CPU, understanding the electrical design of a motherboard will help in finalizing your choice.

Data BussesA motherboard is home for the computer. Every chip, every card, and every peripheral connects electrically through the motherboard. These electrical links are called data busses. These busses send groups of electrical pulses from one section of the motherboard to another. The components connected to the motherboard read these groups of pulses as a series 1’s and 0’s. A 1 is for voltage high, where there is a voltage gain for that link. A 0 is for the case when no voltage is supplied to that link. When these are grouped in certain formations, the computer can understand it as data in binary. Then the computer can use that information efficiently. The links in the busses are designed to ease data flow. Major chip manufactures research and design patented busses to make the most use out of the components they are designing for. For example, Intel has implemented a bus called Direct Media Interface (DMI). The DMI represents the connection between the northbridge and the southbridge of the motherboard. This data bus transfers data between components like the CPU and PCI slots. It is very important that the CPU gets the information it needs as quickly as possible and busses help complete that challenge.

When selecting a motherboard, make sure to check out how your chipset is designed. The data busses can play a huge rule in the transfer of data. A chipset may be optimized to house the northbridge in the CPU rather than creating a separate hub. Then, the processor can talk to the other components connected to the northbridge much more efficiently. The CPU might need to talk with the hard drives at a fast rate in order to improve performance of certain programs. The functionality of the data busses makes a huge difference in the performance of applications.

Relating to my previous example, DMI 2.0, Intel’s flagship chipset link produces a data transfer rate of 20 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) with a x4 link. These electrical busses carry 20 Gbit/s between the northbridge and southbridge, increasing system performance. AMD, on the other hand, uses a different tactic to connect the hub’s designed on the motherboard. They used what is named the A-Link Express III platform. AMD believes that PCI express 2.0 provides an efficient and solid connection between the northbridge/southbridge hubs as well as across peripherals. Each of AMD’s busses are derived from the PCI express 2.0 platform. These busses run at x4 and are able to push data comparable, but not equivalent, to Intel’s DMI 2.0 standard.

Depending on the type of work you are looking to accomplish, the chipset design and speed make a

Bus interacting with components



difference in your selection. Finding the chipset that will squeeze the most out of your processor is key. The busses have a patented design that is easily distinguishable through manufacture specifications. Take a look at the main busses’ design when selecting and how they transfer data between the northbridge and the southbridge. During the analysis of the bus design, it is important to note the structure of the northbridge and southbridge.

Northbridge/SouthBridgeThe northbridge and the southbridge make up the core logic chipset of the motherboard. The terms come from Intel’s original development of the concept. But, all processor and chipsets function in a similar fashion. The northbridge handles the connection between the Random Access Memory (RAM), the CPU and the Graphics card; the most important components of the computer. The southbridge handles the I/O connections, such as USB connections, Ethernet connections, and PCI connections. I/O is inherently slow compared to the components of the northbridge. As you can see from the image below,

the types of speeds across the busses in the northbridge range from 8 Giga Bytes per second (GB/s) to 16 GB/s. Meanwhile, the southbridge can only pump 6GB/s max through it’s busses.

Each chipset manufacture develops a chipset with the northbridge/southbridge theory in mind. But, there are some designs that put the CPU in a memory controller position, reducing the latency between these two, therefore increasing performance. There are other designs that combine all functionality of the northbridge into the CPU. By reducing information busses, the computer can communicate with the appropriate hardware with reduced lag time.

ConclusionWhen selecting a motherboard, it is important to research and note which setup the specific manufacture has decided to implement in terms of the northbridge and the southbridge. The busses that connect these bridges are just as important in the selection process. By bringing both of these concepts together, someone looking for a motherboard will be able to find the right motherboard to squeeze out the most performance from their processor. ■

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Intel Based DMI Northbridge, Southbridge

http://www.eeweb.com/blog/rob_riemen/making-the-motherboard-connection



Kyle OliveComputer Engineering Student &

IEEE Student Branch ChairRaspberryInstalling ArchLinux ARM

PART 3:

The

Pi®



Kyle OliveComputer Engineering Student &

IEEE Student Branch ChairRaspberryInstalling ArchLinux ARM

PART 3:

The

Pi Assuming you’ve checked out the first two installments of this series, you may have already gotten a Raspberry Pi

and have it running on Rhaspbian Wheezy. Hopefully, you’ve even started tinkering with the platform and have created some projects of your own.

While Rhaspbian is an excellent choice for an operating system, with extensive support and numerous packages, you may want to use a system that is a bit more customized. Using Rhaspbian, or some other similar operating system, means that there will probably be resources on your Raspberry Pi that won’t be utilized. For example, Rhaspbian comes with software, packages, and environments that are unnecessary for specialized applications, and only result in wasted memory and CPU usage. You don’t need a graphical desktop environment when you’re only setting up a web-server, after all.

There are many alternative operating systems to the Raspberry Pi. Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses. While some operating systems are developed with a specialized use case in mind (for example, XBian is a Raspberry Pi flavoured version of XBMC, an operating system that turns your Raspberry Pi into a media-center), others are more general and allow you to decide what you want to do with them. In this article, we will go through the processes of setting up a bare-bones Arch Linux ARM on your Raspberry Pi, a lightweight and flexible operating system which is inspired by the Arch Linux operating system for x86 architectures.



Setting Up Your SD Card ImageInstalling Arch Linux ARM starts off the same way as installing Rhaspbian. We must begin by downloading and preparing the Arch Image, which you can grab here.

Just to recap the instructions from Part 2, we’ll quickly go over how to prepare your SD Card.

First, mount the SD Card on your computer, if you’re using Windows, you merely have to plug it in, if you’re using Linux, you’ll have to get the right drive names using “df -h”. Once you’ve done that, write the Arch Linux ARM image to your SD Card using the Win32 Disk Imager Tool on windows or the “dd” command on Linux, as described in the previous article.

Remember, be careful with these commands and make sure you select the correct drives, making a mistake could cause you to lose data that you want to keep! Writing these images erases whatever is written on the SD Cards.

When the write is complete, eject your card, load it up on your Raspberry Pi, and start it up.

Setting Up Arch Linux ARMInsert the formatted SD Card into your Raspberry Pi and turn it on. You should now see the system boot up and, provided nothing went wrong, prompt for login to the device, which by default is named ‘alarmpi.’

The default login information is:

Username: root

Password: root

At this point you should have a bash shell prompt waiting and be logged in as root. If you’re connected to a network, you can test your connectivity by using the ping command (e.g., ping google.com). If you don’t get any response you should check your network connectivity and fix any problems down the line.

The Is -R / command will recursively list the files on your hard-drive. It’s a good way to generate entropy.

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/download.php?file=/images/archlinuxarm/archlinux-hf-2013-02-11/archlinux-hf-2013-02-11.zip



Assuming you’ve gotten this far, you now should perform first-time setup of the device. This includes changing the root password, device name, setting the appropriate region and timezone, and installing basic software.

You can (and should) change the root password of your device from the default ‘root’ to something else. Don’t forget this password or else you’ll have trouble setting up fur-ther software on the device. Enter “passwd” into the terminal and it should prompt you to enter the new root password.

Unlike Rhaspbian, which has a graphical tool used to perform first time configuration, on Arch Linux ARM configuration settings are done using a text editor or command line tools. Vi is installed by default and can be used to edit files.

To set your timezone use the com-mand: “_timedatectl set-timezone <Region>/<SubRegion>” where _<Region> and <SubRegion> should be replaced with the appro-

priate region and subregion strings. If you’re not sure what these strings are, enter the “timedatectl list-timezones” command to get a list. You can use the arrow keys to browse the list or enter a string preceded by “/” to search and highlight results.

Change your hostname (the name that identifies your Raspberry Pi on the network) by editing the file /etc/hostname using vi. If you don’t know how to use vi, I would recommend you perform a quick google search and get familiar with the text editor.

A restart of your Pi should reflect these changes.

Finally, you will want to initialize your package manager, pacman, and update the system. First, you have to gen-erate a keyring for pacman. In order to ensure a secure key, you must also generate entropy on the system by running commands in a second window. Start a second terminal by hitting ALT + F2 (you can hit ALT + F1 to switch back to the first window, and ALT + F2 to switch to the second).

In one terminal, run the command: “pacman-key —init”. Switch to the other window and generate entropy by en-tering random commands such as “ ls -R / ”. Generating a key can take a long time if you don’t actively generate entropy. By running commands in a separate terminal it can take much less time.

Once pacman-key —init has completed, you can run “pacman -Syu” to perform a system update. This com-mand will update the software repositories for pacman, and attempt to update any out-of-date software that is already installed. This can take some time.

When the system update is completed, your Arch Linux install is ready to be customized for your specific use case. Whether you want to install a web server stack, a graphical desktop interface, or lightweight application, you simply need to install and setup the required software components for your needs. The beauty of Arch Linux is its minimalist simplicity – it will have only what you need and want, and none of the extra stuff that can get in the way.

To get started, you may want to look into setting up sec-ondary users and common software packages such as:

sudo

XFCE / LXDE ,

Vim,

GCC

The software packages you decide to install is up to you, and you should do the relevant research to figure out what you need, and how to configure it. In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at how to set up your newly configured Raspberry Pi running Arch Linux ARM as an internal server, including serving web pages and as a file server. ■

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Arch Linux ARM is a lightweight and flexible operating system

which is inspired by the Arch Linux operating system

for x86 architectures.

http://www.eeweb.com/blog/kyle_olive/raspberry-pi-part-ii-raspbian-wheezy-with-setup-guide-arch-linux-arm

Secret Information - Part 6

Happy Edison Day

Embarrassing Personal Email

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EEWeb Pulse - Volume 96

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