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Reader I/O

Circuit Cellar has always invited readers to send in their comments about the magazine, the Web site, current contests, or whatever it is we're doing at the time. Rather than have the Reader I/O page in the print magazine, we've moved that feature to our Web site in order to expedite the posting process. We hope you'll stop by to drop off your comments, see what other readers are saying, or get any updated Editor's Notes that may pertain to articles in past issues.

E-mail us your comments.

April 22 , 2008

Regarding R7/R8 in Robert Lacoste’s April 2008 column, “Low-Power Techniques” (Circuit Cellar 213), note that R7 impact is probably very small as polarized only when the button is pushed. But R8 impact is not minor at all: 2 V/10 kohm = 200 microAmp. So, R8 must be far higher, 1 Mohm or so.

April 1 , 2008

In Tom Cantrell’s April column “More Than A Core” (Issue 213, p. 86), it was stated that the STM32 Primer uses an ARM7 MCU to provide a USB debug interface, but the part used is actually an 8-bit ST72651 MCU.

January 30 , 2008

Please note the following correction to Aubrey Kagan’s article, “Resilience in Embedded Designs (Part 3),” which ran in Issue 208 (November 2007). In Figure 2 on page 59, the decision box in the background routing the test is:

If cOldCheck0=cCheck0

The marked branch should be "Y" and not "N."

November 21 , 2007

In Figure 6 in Robert Lacoste’s issue 209 (December) article, an arrow is missing from "Output frequency" to the "Divide by N" block.

August 16 , 2007

In Robert Lacoste’s "Let's play with EMI" column published in issue 205 (August), he stated on page 67 that an FFT spectrum analyzer based on a 8-bit digitizer could provide a dynamic range of 48 dB. This is true if the signal is a pure sine, as when the signal amplitude will be lower than one LSB, the output of the ADC will be zero. However, as a reader pointed out, this is very pessimistic in real life. If you analyze a very small amplitude signal summed with some white noise, then the FFT calculation can bring signals out of the noise even if their amplitude is far below one LSB. This is due to the fact that the noise is "shared" between all FFT frequency bins, so each time you double the FFT size, the noise floor is lowered by 3 dB. And luckily noise is eveywhere.

January 3, 2007

During the final proofing stage of the editorial process, the editorial staff inadvertently inserted three typos into Tom Cantrell’s January 2007 article, “Hot Chips 18” (Circuit Cellar 198). Please note the following corrections:

Page 78, column 2, paragraph 3: “10 Kbps” should be “10 KBps”

Page 78, column 3, paragraph 1: “12.5 Mbps versus 10 Kbps” should be “12.5 MBps versus 10 KBps”

Editor’s note: According to IBM, the RAMAC transfer rate was “8.8 Kbytes/s” (http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/255/ibmrd2505ZC.pdf).

Page 83, Table 2: "Xilinx Vertex-4" should be "Xilinx Virtex-4.

Our apologies go out to our readers and Tom Cantrell.


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