Electronics Weekly articles from December 2008

Electronics Weekly archives from December 2008

Products.
December 3, 2008... 03dec08st.jpg STMicroelectronics has a microcontroller for secure identity cards supporting the latest cryptography techniques and large memory for biometric data. ST23YR80 includes a cryptographic co-processor which enables enhanced...

Products.
December 3, 2008... 03dec08ADI.jpg Analog Devices has introduced a wideband analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) which it claims does not have the noise-level penalties usually attributed to multi-MHz bandwidth ADCs. The design is based on a traditional...

News.
December 3, 2008... 03dec08efergy.jpg The role of electronics in improving energy efficiency has been placed in the spotlight with Nokia's plans to develop a wireless platform which will be used to control heating and security systems in the home. As...

News.
December 3, 2008... A UK project is attempting to improve fuel efficiency by telling cars about their local geography. "The aim is to demonstrate how affordable systems - in many cases already existing on-board - can be deployed to utilise the electronic...

News.
December 3, 2008... 03dec08rawlins.jpg Steve Rawlins, CEO of semiconductors, passives and e-mech distributor Anglia gives his view of the components market as it faces up to the challenges of an economic slowdown 1. How would you characterise the UK...

News.
December 3, 2008... The rise of interest in renewable energy created by soaring fossil-fuel costs and global-warming fears has created a matching interest in associated support and demonstration instrumentation. This design hops on that bandwagon with the ability...

Features.
December 3, 2008... In the early days of GSM-only handsets, PIN diodes were used to handle switching functions due to their high performance and low cost. But when the industry moved to converge GSM/EDGE and W-CDMA, PIN diodes could not meet the size and...

Features.
December 3, 2008... Manufacturers of powered devices that rely on the IEEE 802.3af PoE (power over Ethernet) standard rather than AC wall power can shrink board space and the bill-of-materials cost. They achieve this reduction by using a power device interface...

Features.
December 3, 2008... Over the past month or so, the discussion around ultra wideband (UWB) has focused on the tribulations of the companies developing the technology. WiQuest, an early leader in the UWB space, announced at the end of October that it was unable...

Features.
December 3, 2008... Designing low-power circuits while extracting acceptable performance is a difficult task. Doing so at RF frequencies increases the challenge. RF signals can take many forms, from a single carrier continuous wave (CW) to that of a...

News.
December 3, 2008... With all this economic gloom inevitably affecting business confidence in the industry, a small device, no bigger that five inches square, lifted my spirits. I might just have seen a dot of light at the end of the tunnel. The device in...

Features.
December 3, 2008... Seminar on Zigbee, boundary scan and power systems Electronics Yorkshire is organising a networking seminar in Hull on Friday 23rd January 2009. The "Insights into Technologies" half-day seminar, which is being staged with the support...

News.
December 3, 2008... Novel design lifts power-efficiency Cambridge spin-out CamSemi has announced its second chip, a novel primary-side regulated AC-DC flyback controller for wall plug power supplies. "The C2140 series offers current and voltage regulation...

News.
December 3, 2008... 03dec08osram by Steve Bush OLEDs are starting to look like serious contenders to incumbent lighting and display technology in a week where German researchers revealed an efficient RGB-based white emitter and Samsung showed a vibrant...

Features.
December 10, 2008... 10dec08distRichardEden.jpg Companies must still plan for the long term By Richard Eden AFDEC's (Association of Franchised Distributors of Electronic Components) recent revision of its 2008 forecast for the UK market from 2% growth...

News.
December 10, 2008... Alistair Morfey Cambridge Consultants Alistair Morfey, technology director at Cambridge Consultants, discusses smart meters and the contribution the electronics industry will make in this sector over the next 10 years What is...

News.
December 10, 2008... A single-coil latching relay uses memory, usually with a magnetic structure, for two stable positions for the armature that holds the movable contacts. A permanent magnet holds the armature in these stable positions. An application of...

News.
December 10, 2008... If you drive a car, there is a good chance that you are driving a vehicle incorporating an application specific integrated circuit (Asic) designed at Bosch, Erich Biermann, head of Asic development at the German automotive technology company,...

Features.
December 10, 2008... 10dec08cyfi.jpg Programmable device gets 2.4GHz wireless access By Robert Cravotta Developers can now use Cypress Semiconductor's PSoC (programmable system-on-chip) devices with the company's 2.4GHz CyFi low-power RF product,...

Features.
December 10, 2008... The global economic crisis has created a world that we would not have imagined a year ago. Who would have believed offshore suppliers would be refusing to ship components to customers in Europe without cash "up front"? The credit squeeze...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Texas Instruments sees the development of femtocells - mini basestations for in-home mobile networks - as the next big wireless opportunity. It already has design wins in early femtocell basestation products with Samsung and Huawei, among...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Future Electronics has taken on Actel's FPGA line in the US and will expand it into Europe on 1 January 2009. Actel's flash-based FPGAs are typically used in medical, automotive and industrial markets as well as the aerospace and military...

Features.
December 10, 2008... TTI has given more details of how it is working with Mouser Electronics, the catalogue distributor it acquired in 2000, to strengthen its position in the wider components market. As a specialist passive component and connector distributor,...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Future Electronics has made a long-term commitment to the European electronics market with plans for a [euro]40m distribution centre in Leipzig, Germany. Robert Miller, founder and president of Future Electronics, made the announcement on...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Nu Horizons may soon be bringing major LED and flat panel display product lines to Europe. In the US, the component distributor has the Osram and Sharp LED lines, but it has yet to bring these to its growing European business. Talking...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Acal sees opportunities for acquisitions to strengthen its distribution and services business across Europe. Last month, Acal moved quickly with a [pounds sterling]1.85m distributor acquisition a day after reporting half-year losses of...

Features.
December 10, 2008... The fallout from the global financial crisis is being felt by distributors in the semiconductor market, with sales falling by 8.2% in the third quarter, according to the Distributors and Manufacturers Association of Semiconductor Specialists...

Features.
December 10, 2008... IT companies are better positioned to weather the current economic storm than in previous tough times, according to Avnet chief executive Roy Vallee. Vallee is hopeful that the worst of the recession should have passed by mid-2009. "I...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Distributors need to make using the best available power supply technology as easy for the design engineer as reusing the supply from the last time. In doing that, they not only address a significant design challenge for customers, but...

Features.
December 10, 2008... The key to growing business in 2009 will be to aim high and diversify into more specialist components and niche markets. While some sectors are already in free-fall, the downturn is far from universal and, in some areas, high-end products are...

Features.
December 10, 2008... 10dec08disthowardvenning.jpg Despite the financial turmoil in global markets, it can be business as usual for specialist distributors with RF and microwave capabilities, writes Howard Venning. Best selling author, Malcolm Gladwell's...

Features.
December 10, 2008... 10dec08distboard.tif Caption: Silica's evaluation board for Spartan-3A FPGAs Distributors face up to the challenges ahead As the market comes to terms with the reality of the economic slowdown what are the strategies distributors...

Features.
December 10, 2008... Multiprocessor systems based on combinations of FPGAs and DSPs can be optimised with a design flow to address the creation, debug, verification and implementation of complex applications running multiprocessor systems. The design flow...

News.
December 10, 2008... The RoHS Directive update has appeared in draft form with more substances, a link to CE Marking, clear documentation requirements, and legal responsibility for much of the supply chain. There are four new substances. Through a technicality,...