Electronics Weekly articles from April 2008

Electronics Weekly archives from April 2008

News.
April 2, 2008... 02apr07Mips1004K.pdf cut out diag from page 7 of presentation - Steve will come over to show which bit. Continued from page 1 MIPS has released the 1004k, an multi-threading core for multi-processor use. Modelling the...

News.
April 2, 2008... MIPS Technologies has unveiled its first parallel processing core. "The 1004k is our first multi-processor multi-threading core," MIPS' v-p marketing Jack Browne told EW. The processor is similar to the firm's existing 34k mid-range...

News.
April 2, 2008... Staff at contract electronics manufacturer Prism Electronics raised over [pounds sterling]1,500 for children's charities from a day of activities at its factory and offices in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. "The fundraising was a huge success and I...

News.
April 2, 2008... Siliconix is claiming an on-resistance record for its SO-8 packaged Si7192DP. "The n-channel device features maximum on-resistance of 2.25mO at a 4.5V gate drive voltage," said Siliconix. "On-resistance times gate charge, a key figure of...

Features.
April 2, 2008... As CMOS process technology reduces well below 100nm, large numbers of gates can be had at relatively low prices. But the same is not true of mask sets, and the breakeven volume for application specific products - whether standard or custom - is...

Features.
April 2, 2008... Design engineers are used to deciding which peripherals they need when devising the architecture of a microcontroller-based system they are not used to thinking about when they need them. There is a category of applications, however, in which...

Features.
April 2, 2008... High-performance computing has become a critical resource whether an organisation is in the business of processing real-time stock trades, or analysing medical data. With speeds measured in Giga FLOPS (floating point operations per second),...

Features.
April 2, 2008... Although field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are excellent image processing platforms, their widespread use in high-performance applications has been slowed by a lack of software-to-hardware compilers. But a new generation of FPGA...

Products.
April 2, 2008... 26mar08 conec.jpg A further development of the M12x1 connector family aimed at engine systems offers new miniaturisation. Available is the axial type of construction, as well as 360 degree-shielded version, with over-moulded cable with...

Features.
April 2, 2008... April 10: In-vehicle network training at Warwick Control, University of Warwick Science Park. www.warwickcontrol.com April 14-16: ISLI course on Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing for Wireless Communications at the Alba Campus in...

Features.
April 2, 2008... By Gail Purvis editorial@electronicsweekly.com Pragmatic economist Professor John Kay, a member of Scotland's Council of Economic Advisers, is convinced that countries should develop on existing strengths. "They should ask themselves:...

Features.
April 2, 2008... By Richard Wilson richard.wilson@electronicsweekly.com Electronics manufacturers are amongst those firms being urged to help raise the profile of the industry through a new website which is designed to highlight opportunities in the...

Features.
April 2, 2008... Do I really want to work for a Start-up? By Martin Crapper There is a misconception that only certain "types" of individuals get involved in start-ups often categorised as those with minimal ties and responsibilities, risk takers,...

Features.
April 2, 2008... Ian Walsh has been appointed v-p of business development at Toric, the London-based semiconductor IP licensing company. The start-up specialises in jitter suppression and high-speed clock generation technology and Walsh will be responsible...

News.
April 2, 2008... 02apr08LuxeonK2.jpg in aard.... Electronics Weekly had a quick word with Luxeon product manager Sudhir Subramanya about the future of LED packaging at Philips Lumileds, and a little chat about the past. 2. 3. 4. 5. ...

News.
April 2, 2008... Intel says its latest low-voltage 45nm Xeon Quad-core processors for servers and workstations run at 50W, or 12.5W per core. Next quarter, Intel will also ship a dual-core low-voltage processor with a 40W rating and clock speed of 3GHz,...

News.
April 2, 2008... Synopsys signed a definitive agreement before Easter to acquire specialist FPGA design tool firm Synplicity for around $227m. One of the main attractions for Synopsys will be Synplicity's hardware-based prototyping capabilities that will...

News.
April 2, 2008... London-based Toric has turned its anti-jitter technology into a clock distribution block for scaling and controlling multiple clocks on a system-on-chip independently and making software defined radio designs more efficient. Out of the...

News.
April 2, 2008... Wales-based set-top box maker TVonics has selected the XJTAG boundary scan development system to debug and programme its digital TV products. As well as selling devices under its own brand, TVonics makes products for retailers including Tesco,...

News.
April 2, 2008... STMicroelectronics has released a lab-on-chip test for flu. According to ST, it can identify and differentiate human strains of Influenza A and B viruses, including the Avian Flu strain H5N1, in a single test. Called In-Check, it is a...

News.
April 2, 2008... Exception LOGO @ bottom of column Behind the big red curtain The electronics industry is seeing a migration of some of the supply chain from Asia to Eastern Europe. Why is this? Will the trend continue? Will it grow? And what is...

News.
April 2, 2008... By Steve Bush steve.bush@electronicsweekly.com Frontier Silicon has upgraded its Venice DAB receiver module to handle the DAB+ standard, which has the benefit of making more efficient use of radio spectrum. There are no plans to...

News.
April 2, 2008... 02apr08BUZZER.pdf Harvesting energy using a piezoelectric buzzer By Carlos Cossio, Santander, Spain Energy-harvesting, or "scavenging," systems extract energy from the ambient environment. Unfortunately, these power generators...

Features.
April 2, 2008... The battle for the heart of the microcontroller market has been heating up, with new low cost, low power 32-bit offerings emerging, driven by access to key intellectual property blocks and the latest manufacturing process technology. But at the...

News.
April 9, 2008... Mobius Microsystems of California has announced MM8511, a CMOS oscillator chip complete with frequency setting component. "People say CMOS can't generate its own frequencies, but it can be done and we've done it", said Tunc Cenger, director...

News.
April 9, 2008... By David Manners david.manners@electronicsweekly.com Gennum, the Canadian chip developer, is looking to expand its Bishop's Stortford design centre as the company pushes its high definition transmission technology into more...

News.
April 9, 2008... By Steve Bush Intel has revealed that its Centrino Atom chipset includes graphics processors from Hertfordshire-based Imagination Technologies. The cores are PowerVR SGX for graphics and VXD for video processing, which are located in...

News.
April 9, 2008... Oldham-based chip maker Zetex is to be bought by Diodes Inc of Texas for around [pounds sterling]90m. "We have made good progress executing our strategies but more still needs to be done," said Zetex CEO Hans Rohrer. "The combined group...

News.
April 9, 2008... 09apr08ILSI.jpg The Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) celebrated its 10th anniversary last month and Professor Ian Philips of ARM in his keynote speech at the anniversary dinner described engineering as "an exciting education...

Features.
April 9, 2008... The introduction of standardised currency, in the form of coins made from precious metals, immediately brought with it the problem of counterfeiting. Initially, the value of a coin was based on its physical properties, as opposed to its...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Not so long ago, RF & microwave was regarded as a specialist technology for niche markets, such as military, aerospace and communications infrastructure. But the wireless explosion and growth in broadband services over the past decade has...

Features.
April 9, 2008... The level of competition in the microcontroller market has never been higher. Suppliers are relying more than ever on the strength of the distribution channel to secure design wins in this key market sector. "Competition is very strong in...

Features.
April 9, 2008... A partnership between Huntingdon-based Display Solutions and Taiwanese manufacturer Avalue offers an embedded system design and assembly service which will focus on the gaming, kiosk, medical and digital signage markets. The two companies...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Following direct sales to Europe and the US, Edinburgh-based MEMS equipment start-up Memsstar has signed Canon to represent it in Japan. "This is part of our sales roadmap," sales director and company co-founder Tony McKie told EW. "Japan...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Solid State Supplies has added Rabbit Semiconductor, part of the Digi group, to its linecard for Ethernet and wireless comms products. Solid State Supplies will offer a complete embedded design system, including low-cost development kits and...

Features.
April 9, 2008... With design houses and OEMs looking to distributors to help them simplify and speed up development and prototyping, the availability of design tools, technical support and other engineering services is rising in importance. Arrow and other...

Distribution goes system level to support the service sector.(Features)
April 9, 2008... Service businesses are reliant on the expertise of embedded distributors to build embedded systems that address their specific applications, says Nick Donaldson The UK and European service economy is booming, representing more than...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Luminary Micro runs ARm seminars with Avnet Luminary Micro has teamed with distributor Avnet Memec to run a series of ARM Cortex M3 seminars in the UK between April 29 and May 1 targeted at embedded comms and Industrial applications, The...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Munich-based memory supplier Qimonda has started a distribution partnership with EBV Elektronik covering its DRAM modules and standalone memory devices. The deal, struck in January, is part of Qimonda's diversification into non-PC memory...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Atmel's STK600 starter kit supports the company's AVR flash microcontrollers, including the AVR32 32-bit devices, and is stocked by Nu Horizons. Designed to offer a quick route to developing code, the STK600 board connects to a PC running AVR...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Illustrate with 3 homepages: www.digikey.com/ http://uk.farnell.com/ http://uk.rs-online.com/ The web is changing the face of distribution Premier Farnell has joined fellow catalogue distributors RS and Digi-Key in...

Features.
April 9, 2008... Using multiple configurable processors can cut SoC power dissipation, energy consumption, and cost, says Steve Leibson Rising clock rate causes dynamic power dissipation and energy consumption to grow, resulting in unacceptable energy...

News.
April 9, 2008... Intel's business strategy may be under threat from a technological problem which was described as 'perhaps unsolvable' at a technical conference in San Francisco this week. The biggest problem in computing today is programming multi-core...

News.
April 9, 2008... 09apr08MikeLloyd.jpg Mike Lloyd is managing director of Wiltshire-based design services company ML Electronics 1) Describe the role of a design house operating in the UK in 2008? Design is a service not a technology industry. We...

News.
April 9, 2008... 09apr08Babbage.jpg Must carry 'Doron Swade' acknowledgement The London Science Museum's second 8,000 piece Difference Engine No.2 is off to California. The five tonne monster is 3.3m long, 2m high, and can calculate polynomials to 31...

News.
April 9, 2008... Future Electronics has signed a franchise to sell NEC's ranges of semiconductors and LCDs in the UK and a number of other European countries. These include France, Spain, Ireland and Eastern Europe. One of the aims of the distribution deal,...

News.
April 9, 2008... NTT Communications of Japan claims to have the world's first commercial system for automatically synchronising subtitles. The script is pre-loaded before transmission and, using voice recognition, the system puts up the subtitles at the...

News.
April 9, 2008... Oki Electric claims to be the first to demonstrate an optical fibre comms system which will transmit a data stream of 160Gbit/s over long distances. To achieve this Oki has demonstrated regeneration of a 160Gbit/s optical signal using an...

News.
April 9, 2008... US EDA start-up Tela Innovations claimed it can help IC designs at 45nm by adjusting the structure of a design to fit a pre-determined shape. Problems are caused at 45nm by what the industry calls 'corners' - parts of the chip which are...

News.
April 9, 2008... Children from Glyncoed Primary School in Ebbw Vale took part in the electronic workshops at Axiom. Children from five local schools were invited to attend electronic workshops during National Science Week by the south-Wales-based manufacturer.

News.
April 9, 2008... Richard Whitaker of Vision Software in Macclesfield won Electronics Weekly's 0.9V (EW 19/03/08) microcontroller competition. He suggested that, "a hill-top one AA cell temperature, humidity, and wind logger" would be a good use of such a...

News.
April 9, 2008... Australian super-capacitor firm Cap-XX has signed a manufacturing deal with Murata. "Cap-XX and Murata will establish a comprehensive partnership to provide supercapacitors to the mobile hand-set industry and for other applications, " said...

News.
April 9, 2008... Xilinx has launched a fourth FPGA products in the Virtex-5 family fabbed on the 65nm platform. Xilinx calls its different Virtex-5, ranges "domains". The firm realised it was impossible to create a single system family for everyone. As...

News.
April 9, 2008... On-chip interconnections using carbon nanotube technology have been demonstrated at above 1GHz by researchers at California's Stanford University working with chip firms Toshiba and TSMC. "This is the first time anyone has been able to show...

News.
April 9, 2008... A tiny colour display projector suitable for use in a mobile phone has been demonstrated by US firm Microvision at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco. Washington-based Microvision has produced a module, which it calls...

News.
April 9, 2008... By Steve Bush steve.bush@electronicsweekly.com Micro heat pump firm Nextreme has developed what it claimed to be the world's smallest thermoelectric cooler "and the industry's first device to offer a heat pumping density in excess of...

News.
April 23, 2008... 23apr08CPIwilton1.jpg or 23apr08CPInigelPerry.jpg Nigel Perry, CEO of the newly combined CPI and Cenamps. Two of the North East's high tech initiatives, including a printable electronics pilot plant, are to merge. They...

News.
April 23, 2008... A second firm has started up to exploit the 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 processor. Oslo-based Energy Micro follows Texan firm Luminary Micro, with the Norwegian company promising low power designs: planning to introduce its first "ultra...

Products.
April 23, 2008... Bel Stewart Connector has announced that all single-port, multi-port passive and MagJack Modular connectors are available in the new EPP (Environmentally Protected Product) range. The EPP-918A material prevents corrosion from harsh...

News.
April 23, 2008... Researchers at the University of Manchester have used graphene to create what they claim is the world's smallest transistor. Measuring just one atom thick and ten atoms wide, the device matches leading-edge transistor research taking place...

News.
April 23, 2008... A second firm has started up to exploit the 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 processor. Oslo-based Energy Micro follows Texan firm Luminary Micro, with the Norwegian company promising low power designs: planning to introduce its first "ultra...

News.
April 23, 2008... Electronics manufacturers are challenging the common assumption that outsourcing usually means moving production off-shore. Axiom explains how local companies are adapting in order to survive in the changing market. See Feature pages 12/13.

News.
April 23, 2008... By Steve Bush Maxim has introduced an energy-measurement IC for three-phase mains power metering. "The device integrates analogue and signal-processing techniques to provide more advanced metering features than any single product in...

Features.
April 23, 2008... If outsourcing doesn't make your life easier, you've chosen the wrong supplier. I think it is important that we not only deliver on cost-savings and volume management but make the process as smooth and seamless as possible. It's...

Features.
April 23, 2008... Increasing competition and shareholder pressure for greater profitability has led many UK OEMs over recent years to outsource production to places like Eastern Europe or China. This trend towards off-shoring within the electronics...

Features.
April 23, 2008... The fashion for moving high-tech manufacturing offshore to low labour-cost countries quickly created a backlash, as companies learned the true costs of making the strategy work. Some products, we now know, are simply not well suited to offshore...

Features.
April 23, 2008... You might not think that mackintoshes have much in common with fuel cells, but the chief executive of one of the leading fuel cell technology companies in the US, Polyfuel, reckons that one of the leading mackintosh material companies has the...

Features.
April 23, 2008... By Julian Hayes There is a school of thought that consumers have an insatiable demand for digital consumer electronics products that are ever more complex, providing a medley of digital multi-media functions and features, all contained in...

News.
April 23, 2008... 23apr08Q5ur.jpg Joe Matano is managing director of specialist power system distributor UR Group 1) How would you describe UR's business and its plans for 2008? Business continues to be challenging. Sales grew 17 per cent in 2007...

News.
April 23, 2008... UK-based specialist semiconductor distributors may be under pressure, but they are not under threat. Broadline distributors are driving a new bout of consolidation in the market. Avnet's high profile acquisition of Azzurri Technology in...

News.
April 23, 2008... Spiral gateway wins second round of funding Spiral Gateway, the reconfigurable image processing fabless chip company, has got a second funding round of [pounds sterling]730,000. Last month, the company announced it had fully functional and...

News.
April 23, 2008... NXP Semiconductor is holding an internal debate to decide what to do with the $1.5bn it is to get from STMicroelectronics for the wireless assets which NXP put into the ST-NXP joint venture announced last week. "We are now looking to...

News.
April 23, 2008... Edinburgh-based OLED display developer MED has watched its eyescreen micro display being designed into a wearable mobile media headset by Hong Kong-based Estar Displaytech. The manufacturer of virtual displays has taken delivery of 60,000 units...

News.
April 23, 2008... De Montfort University Leicester has a design which will implement software defined radio technology in a commercial satellite navigation device. The design uses SDR to decode the incoming data from the satellite. Traditional satellite...

News.
April 23, 2008... A new type of Bluetooth wireless comms link running on a tenth of the power of existing technology could soon be used for heart rate monitors and other medical body systems. Cambridge-based CSR is aiming its first chipset supporting the...

News.
April 23, 2008... A GPS navigation device which can tune into different satellite networks is being developed by researchers at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) in partnership with a Nottingham company. With sat nav devices traditionally designed on...

News.
April 23, 2008... By Steve Bush Epson and E Ink announced a controller chip for E Ink's electrophorescent e-paper at the Electronic Systems Conference in Silicon Valley last week. "Epson developed the S1D13521 with E Ink to support e-paper applications...

News.
April 23, 2008... Many flash ADCs, such as National Semiconductor's ADC1175, have a recommended operating input-voltage range of 0.6 to 2.6V. However, in some applications, you must convert a symmetrical analogue input signal. The circuit in this design idea...

Products.
April 30, 2008... 30apr08 maxim.pdf Maxim has introduced an energy-measurement IC for three-phase mains power metering. "The device integrates analogue and signal-processing techniques to provide more advanced metering features than any single product...

News.
April 30, 2008... A crackdown on the problem of counterfeit components in the US has seen the publication of a directory of authorised distributors by the Semiconductor Industry Association. The chip industry body is also working with customs authorities to...

News.
April 30, 2008... The Government must take a lead in encouraging engineers to achieve professional registration, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Drawing a direct link between professional registration and competence, IET...

Features.
April 30, 2008... Design engineers often give circuit protection only cursory attention. For example, fuses, diodes, and varistors are so well known that designers select them with little thought as to the nature of the overvoltage/overcurrent threat and the...

Features.
April 30, 2008... By Dan Gilman We engineers are a clever lot. After all, consider what we do. We give shape to the complex products that make consumers' lives happier and more profitable. As we tell ourselves - privately, of course - we are Renaissance...

Features.
April 30, 2008... For high-end IT and telecom applications, the conventional approach to power conversion involves an AC-to-12Vdc silver box followed by 12V-to-1.xV synchronous buck converter. This approach has inherent limitations in terms of system...