On my way to this year’s Hackaday SuperConference I saw an article on EE Times about someone taking the $22 Lattice iCEstick and turning it into a logic analyzer complete with a Python app to display the waveforms. This jumped out as pretty cool to me given that there really isn’t a ton of RAM on the stick, basically none that isn’t contained in the FPGA itself.
[Jenny List] has also written about the this application as created by [Kevin Hubbard] of Black Mesa Labs and [Al Williams] has a great set of posts about using this same $22 evaluation board doing ground up Verilog design using open source tools. Even if you don’t end up using the stick as a logic analyzer over the long haul, it’ll be very easy to find many other projects where you can recompile to invent a new purpose for it.
Back in the mid 1980’s I worked at a company called Commodore Business Machines, a company that made home computers where our annual Superbowl was the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the first week in January.
Some time in November a Datsun Z would get parked in the front lot and then not move until whatever snow mounds that got plowed over it melted sometime in early spring. Ultimately I would have it towed leaving behind a sad little pile of rust and nuts and bolts. With a bonus check in hand for finishing the newest computer on time I would go buy another used Z and repeat the cycle.
Climate Change and Rust
These days the old Datsun Z’s; 240Z, 260Z, 280Z, 280ZX, are somewhat rare, probably because they were real rust buckets even when new. After having sacrificed a few myself in search of the next home computer I set out to rescue one for old times’ sake. I really did love the car so I made it my project to restore one. Now I have a total of three Z carcasses, an engine, and a transmission all sitting out back and an almost finished Z in the garage.
Since I had torn the engine down to its bare components I took the opportunity to make some changes: increased the size of the turbocharger, increased bore and stroke of the cylinder/piston, improved the fuel distribution, and improved the flow of air with things like porting the heads and an inter-cooler.
In part one, I compared the different Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) and the roles and properties of Delta Sigma ADC’s. I covered a lot of the theory behind these devices, so in this installment, I set out to find a design or two that would help me demonstrate the important points like oversampling, noise shaping and the relationship between the signal-to-noise ratio and resolution.
Modulator Implementation
Check out part one to see the block diagrams of what what got us to here. The schematics shown below are of a couple of implementations that I played with depicting a single-order and a dual-order Delta Sigma modulators.
Basically I used a clock enabled, high speed comparator, with two polarities in case I got it the logic backwards in my current state of burn out to grey matter ratio. The video includes the actual schematic used.
Since I wasn’t designing for production I accepted the need for three voltages since my bench supply was capable of providing them and this widget is destined for the drawer with the other widgets made for just a few minutes of video time anyway. Continue reading “Tearing Into Delta Sigma ADCs Part 2”→
It’s not surprising that Analog to Digital Converters (ADC’s) now employ several techniques to accomplish higher speeds and resolutions than their simpler counterparts. Enter the Delta-Sigma (Δ∑) ADC which combines a couple of techniques including oversampling, noise shaping and digital filtering. That’s not to say that you need several chips to accomplish this, these days single chip Delta-Sigma ADCs and very small and available for a few dollars. Sometimes they are called Sigma-Delta (∑Δ) just to confuse things, a measure I applaud as there aren’t enough sources of confusion in the engineering world already.
I’m making this a two-parter. I will be talking about some theory and show the builds that demonstrate Delta-Sigma properties and when you might want to use them.
Back in the day where the microprocessor was our standard building block, we tended to concentrate on computation and processing of data and not so much on I/O. Simply put there were a lot of things we had to get working just so we could then read the state of an I/O port or a counter.
Nowadays the microcontroller has taken care of most of the system level needs with the luxury of built in RAM memory and the ability to upload our code. That leaves us able to concentrate on the major role of a microcontroller: to interpret something about the environment, make decisions, and often output the result to energize a motor, LED, or some other twiddly bits.
Often the usefulness of a small microcontroller project depends on being able to interpret external signals in the form of voltage or less often, current. For example the output of a photocell, or a temperature sensor may use an analog voltage to indicate brightness or the temperature. Enter the Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) with the ability to convert an external signal to a processor readable value.
We have talked about a whole slew of logic and interconnect technologies including TTL, CMOS and assorted low voltage versions. All of these technologies have in common the fact that they are single-ended, i.e. the signal is measured as a “high” or “low” level above ground.
This is great for simple uses. But when you start talking about speed, distance, or both, the single ended solutions don’t look so good. To step in and carry the torch we have Differential Signalling. This is the “DS” in LVDS, just one of the common standards throughout industry. Let’s take a look at how differential signaling is different from single ended, and what that means for engineers and for users.
Single Ended
Single Ended: TTL, CMOS, LVTTL, Etc.
Single Ended and Sources of Noise
Collectively, standards like TTL, CMOS, and LVTTL are known as Single Ended technologies and they have in common some undesirable attributes, namely that ground noise directly affects the noise margin (the budget for how much noise is tolerable) as well as any induced noise measured to ground directly adds to the overall noise as well.
By making the voltage swing to greater voltages we can make the noise look smaller in proportion but at the expense of speed as it takes more time to make larger voltage swings, especially with the kind of capacitance and inductance we sometimes see.
Differential
Enter Differential Signaling where we use two conductor instead of one. A differential transmitter produces an inverted version of the signal and a non-inverted version and we measure the desired signal strictly between the two instead of to ground. Now ground noise doesn’t count (mostly) and noise induced onto both signal lines gets canceled as we only amplify the difference between the two, we do not amplify anything that is in common such as the noise.
If you read my first post about a simple CPLD do-it-yourself project you may remember that I seriously wiffed when I made the footprint 1” wide, which was a bit too wide for common solderless breadboards. Since then I started over, having fixed the width problem, and ended up with a module that looks decidedly… cuter.
To back up a little bit, a Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a cool piece of hardware to have in your repertoire and it can be used to learn logic or a high level design language or replace obsolete functions or chips. But a CPLD needs a little bit of support infrastructure to become usable, and that’s what I’ll be walking you through here. So if you’re interested in learning CPLDs, or just designing boards for them, read on!
