Electronics Weekly articles from January 2008

Electronics Weekly archives from January 2008

Features.
January 9, 2008... Clean Design Award Sponsored by Omron Judge's comment "If these entries are representative of the industry as a whole then there are signs that companies are taking sustainable design seriously." Shortlist .

Features.
January 9, 2008... Design & Test Product of the Year Sponsored by RS Components Judge's comment Shortlist Agilent Technologies - E6651A mobile WiMAX test set Goepel Electronic - VarioCore multi-functional JTAG/boundary scan platform ...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Distributor of the Year Sponsored by Intellect Judge's comment "In what has been a challenging year for the industry, a number of distributors demonstrated the importance of investment and a solid business strategy." ...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Manufacturer of the Year Sponsored by Avnet Judge's comment "For the third year in a row European manufacturers shone through in this category." Shortlist Plexus (UK) Powerlase TQ-Systems Powerlase ...

Features.
January 9, 2008... R&D Award Sponsored by XJTAG Judge's comment Shortlist Fractus Fractal antenna-in-package technology

Features.
January 9, 2008... Readers' Choice Product Innovation of the Year Sponsored by International Rectifier A reader's comment "That's my choice and I know how good it is because I use one." For the Readers' Choice award, Electronics Weekly invited...

Features.
January 9, 2008... A record number of entries for this year's Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards, organised by Electronics Weekly, made the task of the judging panel even more difficult. "This was a particularly strong year for entries," said...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Company of the Year Sponsored by Amplicon Judge's comment Shortlist Altera Anglia Components Ericsson Power Modules Fractus Hypertac Maxwell Technologies PicoChip Designs Powerlase ...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Design Application of the Year Sponsored by Sony Judge's comment "This is usually one of the most interesting categories, and this year it certainly lived up to its reputation as a source of innovative ideas." Shortlist ...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Embedded System Product of the Year Sponsored by Gleichmann Sunrise Judge's comment "The range of technologies represented in this category was truly impressive." Shortlist Altera - Nios II C-to-hardware (C2H)...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Fabless Semiconductor Supplier Sponsored by Hamilton Parker Judge's comment "This was a particularly strong category, indicating Europe's strength in chip design." Shortlist PicoChip Designs

Features.
January 9, 2008... Passive & Electromechanical Product of the Year Sponsored by EPN Magazine Judge's comment "The entries on the shortlist all impressed for specific reasons, but there was a clear winner in this category." Shortlist Cap-XXX...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Power Systems Product of the Year Sponsored by Anglia Judge's comment "The growing importance of flexible power technologies was clearly evident from the entries in the power systems category." Shortlist Maxwell...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Semiconductor Product of the Year Sponsored by Azzurri Technology Judge's comment Shortlist Silicon Laboratories - Si53xx any-rate precision clock device Xilinx - 65nm Virtex-5 LX FPGA DisplayLink - DL-120/160 USB 2.0...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Website Innovation Award Sponsored by Display Solutions Judge's comment Shortlist Vicor PowerBench online power supply design tool V

Features.
January 9, 2008... Young Engineer of the Year Sponsored by Rapid Electronics Judge's comment "The winner impressed us all by the level of their achievements in both academic and commercial environments. They have every right to be proud of their...

News.
January 9, 2008... NXP Semiconductor has decided to go with a hardware solution for GPS in cellphones which is the reason why it bought GPS fabless semiconductor specialist GloNav late last month. "Our internal approach to GPS was software-based," Mark...

News.
January 9, 2008... Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) is to pay E140m for Bristol-based Apertio, a company which specialises in subscriber data platforms and applications for mobile and fixed telecoms operators. NSN said the acquisition would "strengthen its...

News.
January 9, 2008... The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne is teaching robots to perform specific tasks in general situations by showing them a few times, which is distinct from a copying technique. Hidden Markov modelling followed by combined Gaussian...

News.
January 9, 2008... In the run-up to CES 2007 in Las Vegas, Intel, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric, NEC, Samsung, Sibeam, Sony and Toshiba have announced the completion of a joint wireless specification for high-definition baseband video transmission. ...

News.
January 9, 2008... Wireless woes hit Freescale and Texas Instruments in 2007, with TI facing a 3.4 per cent decline in revenues, and Freescale said to be facing a 10.7 per cent decline in 2007 chip sales, according to analysts iSuppli. Wireless winners were...

News.
January 9, 2008... Intel has pulled out of the One-Child-Per-Laptop project set up by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte to provide a laptop for a billion of the world's poorest children. Apparently Intel refused to get behind a single design for OLPC, preferring to back...

News.
January 9, 2008... Internet radio dispenses with button controls A WiFi-enabled Internet radio with no buttons (pictured) has been shown by Cambridge Consultants at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week. The Iona 'Cube' can be programmed to four...

News.
January 9, 2008... The US government is making exceptions to the rule that high-tech exports to China have to be licensed. So far five firms have been granted exemption from the requirements. Four of these are semiconductor-related companies: Applied...

News.
January 9, 2008... Four universities have been given grants of [pounds sterling]5,000 by the Electronics Enabled Products Knowledge Transfer Network (EEP KTN) SPARK awards, to work on specific projects identified by businesses. One of the SPARK projects, a...

News.
January 9, 2008... Just before Christmas it was announced that one of the UK's last remaining indigenous semiconductor manufacturers has agreed the sale of its gallium arsenide chip business and wafer fab for [pounds sterling]12.5m. Filtronic is to sell its...

News.
January 9, 2008... Murata Europe has opened a SAW filter and resonator measurement facility in Milan. A team of engineers has been set up to support designs in the 300, 400 and 800MHz ISM bands. It will also create application notes for Murata SAW products,...

News.
January 9, 2008... Queen's University Belfast telecoms chip spin-out Titan IC has won seed corn funding worth [pounds sterling]13,500 in an all-Ireland business competition. Added to undisclosed cash from Queen's funding company QUBIS and Invest Northern...

News.
January 9, 2008... Sir Robin Saxby was recognised for his major contribution to the UK's semiconductor design industry at the 2007 Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards which took place at a gala dinner in London before Christmas. Presenting the...

Features.
January 9, 2008... A rather bleak picture for the future of the UK electronics industry was painted by the story on the front page of EW's last issue (12/12/07), with the probability of 45 per cent fewer electronics graduate engineers in the future. But 2008...

News.
January 9, 2008... Pace Micro Technology is to buy the digital TV set-top box business of Royal Philips Electronics. Pace is paying [pounds sterling]68m for the business which employs around 335 staff mostly based in France. "This deal will create a company with...

Features.
January 9, 2008... Power Integrations has tuned its EcoSmart technology with the intention that a switched-mode power supply design can operate with high efficiency when in standby and no-load conditions. This ability is important for meeting the ever increasing...

News.
January 16, 2008... Sony showed TransferJet, its close proximity wireless transfer technology which is capable of speeds up to 560Mbit/s, at CES last week. The technology works at 4.48GHz and can transfer data in devices placed up to 3cm apart. It is intended...

News.
January 16, 2008... Intel will take the wraps of its four-core Itanium, the first processor to exceed two billion transistors, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), to be held on February 3-7 in San Francisco. It implements...

News.
January 16, 2008... The FPGA industry is about to go through a significant transformation similar to the change which has taken place in the Asic industry over the last decade, says the new CEO of Xilinx. Moshe Gavrielov, who succeeds Wim Roelandts at the FPGA...

News.
January 16, 2008... This voice-changing microphone idea has won the My Big Idea competition for 8-11 year olds. A prize of [pounds sterling]1,000 was presented by Anne Miller of sponsors The Creativity Partnership to St Luke's School in Cambridge where winning...

News.
January 16, 2008... It's going to be a good year for semiconductor demand, according to Renesas, but the prospects for prices remain cloudy. "There are many reasons to be optimistic about unit demand," Matthew Trowbridge, CEO of Renesas Technology Europe, told...

News.
January 16, 2008... The US Government had banned the carrying of loose lithium batteries in checked aircraft baggage. "In the cabin, flight crew can better monitor conditions, and have access to the batteries or device if a fire does occur," said the US...

News.
January 16, 2008... Semiconductor firms are addressing the picture quality issues of the latest high definition TVs. So-called 'high definition' picture quality can sometimes suffer from poor contrast, movie judder, motion blur and other defects, particularly...

News.
January 16, 2008... TT Electronics' shares lost over 20 per cent to reach 95p in a week that saw an overall drop in tech shares. The EW Index fell just over 3 per cent. The firm said in December that "the translation of US dollar profits due to the weakness of the...

News.
January 16, 2008... Sales of semiconductors for WiMAX broadband wireless use will benefit from a drive to embedded WiMAX mobile phones and PCs, according to market watcher In-Stat. In-Stat predicts that dual-mode cellular/WiMAX handsets as well as external...

News.
January 16, 2008... US reverse engineering experts ChipWorks have developed a browser that rebuilds parts of any chip into schematics and VHDL or Verilog from an analysis of the different layers of the device. ChipWorks has been doing this for many years and...

News.
January 16, 2008... Franchised assembler and distributor of multi-pin connectors PEI-Genesis has created a team to handle sales through distribution partners. The firm has a $38m inventory of connector piece-parts which is open to redistribution partners. PEI also...

News.
January 16, 2008... Electronic systems such as in-car entertainment are seen as critical elements of vehicle design by car manufacturers, according to an automotive market specialist at Xilinx.For more than a decade the automotive industry has been steadily...

News.
January 16, 2008... Vancouver-based Angstrom Power claims to have successfully completed a six month trial using a hydrogen-based fuel cell to run a Motorola mobile phone. The fuel cell can be recharged in less than ten minutes and the firm said it had...

News.
January 16, 2008... Hans Peter Kuhnert is v-p of sales for the EMEA region at Tektronix Will your customers see a change in style or approach from Tektronix as a result of its proposed acquisition by Danaher? Tektronix will operate as a stand-alone...

News.
January 16, 2008... GPS navigation has been one of the success stories of recent years with the number of bright screens visible in cars on the road nowadays definitely continuing to increase. With so many out there working already on the US' GPS, then what is the...

News.
January 16, 2008... Avnet's acquisition of Azzurri Technology has re-emphasised the importance of technical support and design-in activities in the European distribution market. Berkshire-based Azzurri has grown in its 10 year history into a significant...

News.
January 16, 2008... Chip makers are looking to add the Chinese digital TV standard AVS in case the Chinese government tries to undercut existing royalty rates, says a leading supplier of video decoding technology. "They could make the royalties much lower than...

News.
January 16, 2008... Market Watch Howard Goff is managing director of Exception's off-shoring division The China Syndrome Probably the single biggest concern facing the worldwide electronics sector at the moment is the apparent overheating of the...

News.
January 16, 2008... A miniature, LED-illuminated projection engine designed to be fitted into almost any mobile electronic device has been developed by 3M. The engine can project VGA resolution images larger than 40in. using an LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon)...

News.
January 16, 2008... Peratech has bought smart fabric developer Eleksen from the administrators Deloittes. Buckinghamshire-based Eleksen went into administration in October. Its textile fabric sensors have been used in the manufacture of smart clothing and...

News.(Awards list)
January 16, 2008... A system to encourage outdoor exercise and a vehicle identification tag were joint winners of the NFC Innovation Awards, a design competition organised by Innovision Research & Technology in association with EW and Glue4. Academic teams...

News.
January 16, 2008... University College London spin-out Senceive is developing number crunching nodes for its wireless sensor networks. "There are applications which need very high performance processing," CEO Matthew Britton told EW. "For example, with...

News.
January 16, 2008... Thales Research and Technology in the UK has been showing its latest technology which includes an ultra wideband system for position location indoors. The firm is offering the technology to emergency services and intends to solve the...

News.
January 16, 2008... A Collision Warning System (CWS) prototype, which has been developed under the EU-funded Reposit project, which uses GPS and the vehicle-to-vehicle ('V2V') car communication protocol, has been demonstrated in the lab. The prototype uses...

Features.
January 16, 2008... The increasing cost of developing system-on-chip (SoC) devices is driving more importance onto the software. More designers are turning to programmable SoCs which can be used across a range of different applications, but that is driving more...

Features.
January 16, 2008... The embedded and data processing worlds have been moving apart for some time, and what is emerging is simply not providing the necessary tools to satisfy either camp. Embedded designers need responsiveness, low-latency and determinism,...

Features.
January 16, 2008... West Glamorgan-based Quantum CAD's support for its employees is paying off as it now has three PCB designers with CID (certified interconnect designer) qualifications. Peter Walsh and Stephen Grant-Davies (pictured left and middle) are now...

Features.
January 16, 2008... Jan 25: DSP Implementation - Oxford www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics Jan 31-Feb1: Fast-track Verilog for VHDL Users - Bournemouth www.doulos.com Jan 31-Feb 1: EMC Testing - Castleford www.yorkemc.co.uk/cpd Feb 4-6:...

Features.
January 16, 2008... A workshop to highlight the practical benefits for the electronics industry of surface and interface analysis is being held by CSMA, the Stoke-on-Trent-based centre for surface and materials analysis. The workshop, to be held at CSMA's labs...

Features.
January 16, 2008... C-based FPGA Programming, The Handel-C Approach will be the first course offered by ISLI this year on 29-30 January. The two-day course, being held in Livingston, aims to explain and illustrate the use of Handel-C for designing efficient...

Features.
January 16, 2008... Melanie Reynolds melanie.reynolds@electronicsweekly.com The key to the engineering skills shortage lies in getting the message across to young people early, making them aware of the possibilities for a career in engineering. Once...

Technology.
January 16, 2008... The University of Manchester has proved graphene is the fastest semiconductor. We knew this material is exceptionally good, but we couldn't put a number on it," Professor Andre Geim, director of the University's Centre for Mesoscience and...

Technology.
January 16, 2008... Windbelt is a wind-powered electrical generator claimed by its US inventor Shawn Frayne (pictured right) to be around 10 to 30 times more efficient than similarly-sized wind turbines. The device in the picture uses a tensioned Mylar-coated...

Technology.
January 16, 2008... VIA Technologies has announced a kit to convert its Pico-ITX motherboard into a 15x11x4cm x86 computer weighing 520g. Called ARTiGO, it requires only a hard drive, RAM and operating system for a complete 1GHz PC drawing around 15W idle...

Technology.
January 16, 2008... De Montfort University is to use fuzzy logic to monitor the elderly in a project with the University of Missouri's Center for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology. "The job is to help with technology by putting sensors into sheltered...

Technology.
January 16, 2008... Researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology have created the world's smallest Bible by putting a full version of the 308,428-word Hebrew Bible on 0.5mm2. The nano-Bible was written on a gold-coated silicon surface using a focused beam...

News.
January 23, 2008... The first major inquiry by the new Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee of the House of the Commons will be into engineering - with a sharp focus on electronics. The investigation, expected to start in the early Spring, will look...

News.
January 23, 2008... Former executives from TTPComm have moved in to the communications intellectual property (IP) licensing business with the creation of a new venture which will bring to market IP being created in universities. The team, which includes former...

News.
January 23, 2008... This is the Eye Catcher videophone from London-based firm GreenEyes. With technology from Dutch firm Ex'ovision, it allows eye-to-eye contact by reflecting the image of the person being called onto a mirror screen, behind which lies the camera...

News.
January 23, 2008... UK-based Gooch & Housego has merged five of its businesses to create a division focused on the market for customised optical components. The five units being brought together under the name Gooch & Housego are Gooch & Housego UK, Cleveland...

News.
January 23, 2008... A marketing consultancy for the semiconductor, electronics and software industry has opened in the UK. The business, called High Tech Marketing, has been set up by Paul Dillien, who has worked in semiconductor marketing for over 30 years....

News.
January 23, 2008... A marketing consultancy for the semiconductor, electronics and software industry has opened in the UK. The business, called High Tech Marketing, has been set up by Paul Dillien, who has worked in semiconductor marketing for over 30 years....

News.
January 23, 2008... CSR saw its shares decline 17 per cent to around 457p, its lowest point since 2005. Nearly all tech shares saw a slump, precipitated by Intel's quarterly results which were below market expectations. Intel's Q1 outlook also disappointed the...

News.(Company overview)
January 23, 2008... Asic supplier eSilicon has acquired the product lines of Sweden-based Ethernet chip design firm SwitchCore. As a result of the asset acquisition, the US company will assume responsibility for manufacturing SwitchCore's existing product...

News.
January 23, 2008... Education is a key opportunity for technology development over the next ten years, according to Gene Frantz, the future trends watcher for Texas Instruments. Frantz visited key UK universities last week for the first time, including...

News.
January 23, 2008... The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a technique and standard to measure the Young's modulus of MEMS and integrated circuits. Young's Modulus is a measure of the mechanical stiffness of solids. ...

News.
January 23, 2008... The University of Reading is to study digital power supplies with Bracknell-based Ridley Engineering, sponsored by a Spark knowledge transfer award. "This will allow Dr Shirsavar to work with Ridley Engineering to formalise design...

News.
January 23, 2008... As we move through 2008, the chip industry hopes for continued consumer demand, since this has become the source of most of its growth prospects. Much of this comes from the US, whose economy now faces a credit crisis, election year uncertainty...

News.
January 23, 2008... Is anyone keeping a watch on the money being spent on setting up technology parks around this country? Last week we read that [pounds sterling]8.2m is being spent on the Thames Innovation Centre in Erith, Kent. Then there was 'Creative...

News.
January 23, 2008... Anne Miller is an engineer, inventor and director of The Creativity Partnership. Her book, The Myth of the Mousetrap, is about how to get your ideas adopted. QWhat is the myth of the mousetrap? AThe myth is that if you invent a better...

News.
January 23, 2008... Apple has continued with its desirable but expensive product strategy with this MacBook Air. It is just 0.16in at its thinnest point and 0.76in at its thickest. It has a 13.3in LED backlit display and a full size and backlit keyboard. Powered...

News.
January 23, 2008... Austriamicrosystems has made a $6m investment in New Scale Technologies, a US-based developer of miniature motors. The aim is to create an integrated motion system on the same scale as the miniature motors, which are currently less than 2x2x6mm...