Electronics Weekly articles from January 2009

Electronics Weekly archives from January 2009

Products.
January 14, 2009... Mosfets help meet Energy Star Silver specification Fairchild has introduced synchronous rectification mosfets aimed at meeting the Energy Star 80 Plus Silver specification - the FDP025N06, FDB024N06, FDP032N08, FDB031N08, FDP047N10, and...

News.
January 14, 2009... What is the role of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the UK's electronics and high-tech industries? One core model that we are pursuing at the Institute is the creation of disruptive technology. The Institute is providing a unique...

News.
January 14, 2009... Sensors automate most processes in industry. Most sensors, such as those for ammonia gas, temperature, are resistive devices in which electrical resistance changes - most nonlinearly - as the surrounding conditions change. The sensors'...

News.
January 14, 2009... Linear Technology has reconfigured its free SPICE circuit simulation software to run on multicore processors. "Parallel processing has been a long-standing challenge for SPICE simulators," said the firm. "LTspice IV implements proprietary...

News.
January 14, 2009... Short-range radio module firm LPRS is behind communications with Cycler, a robot intended to bring the reduce, reuse and recycle message to schools around the UK. A handler sends commands using a concealed radio transmitter over a link...

Features.
January 14, 2009... 14jan09MosheGavrielov The FPGA programmable imperative Now is the time to seize design opportunities in tough economic times, writes Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO, Xilinx The worldwide economic recession kicked off by the...

Features.
January 14, 2009... Microchip has broadened its processor portfolio to span from 8- to 32-bit processors, including microcontrollers and digital-signal controllers. What is Microchip's strategy for supporting this range of architectures? Our strategy is to...

Features.
January 14, 2009... Instead of narrowing the market applicability of its products by focusing on specific customer needs, the programmable logic industry would do better to address its fundamental problems: FPGAs use too much power and are too expensive. The...

Features.
January 14, 2009... A"soft" microcontroller is a processor, memory and peripheral platform which has been implemented in an FPGA's programmable fabric. Historically, off-the-shelf microcontrollers/processors have been significantly less expensive than their...

Features.
January 14, 2009... With roadmaps for processor/DSP technology offering increasing performance you might wonder how FPGAs could be the next stage in the evolution of motor control. Certainly the cost of microprocessors and DSPs is steadily decreasing and motion...

Features.
January 14, 2009... Nearly two and a half years after the introduction of the RoHS Directive, how did we all do? If the UK experience is typical across Europe, then probably not very well. In an attempt to resolve uncertainties and to increase market...

Products.
January 14, 2009... PC-based oscilloscope gets memory increase The PicoScope 4000 Series with deep memory is a major new addition to Pico Technology's latest range of oscilloscopes. The scopes are available with either two or four channels and offer 12-bit...

News.
January 14, 2009... Like dogs, every now and again the DRAM industry has its day. It has always been like this. The memory chip manufacturers make massive losses for years, the market remains over-supplied, prices slump below production cost and then, like...

Features.
January 14, 2009... National Advanced Modern Apprenticeship scheme Harwin is in the sixth year of its apprentice scheme which it says ensures that it will always have a versatile team with the necessary skills. According to the connector manufacturer,...

News.
January 14, 2009... Space science researchers in the US have used a cluster of 16 PlayStation 3s to save money on black hole research. "If we had rented computing time from a supercomputer centre it would have cost us about $5,000 to run our simulation one...

News.
January 14, 2009... Surrey fabless chip firm 3D-Labs has released a multimedia processor, and changed the company name. The device, dubbed ZMS-05, is based around the firm's multi-processor architecture and "can decode H.264 Main Profile video at up to 720p,...

News.
January 14, 2009... TDK-Lambda has opened a skills centre at its European Headquarters in Ilfracombe, Devon. The [pounds sterling]25k facility will be used to train recruits and up-skill existing employees to further their career development. ...

News.
January 14, 2009... Belgian research organisation IMEC has revealed an 11Mpixel micromirror device. Speaking at the IEEE International Electron Devices meeting, which took place in San Francisco in December, IMEC said, "The 10cm2 array has a pixel density...

News.
January 14, 2009... Imagination Technologies Apple bought a 3.6% shareholding stake and licensed the UK-based chip developer's PowerVR 3D graphics accelerator just before Christmas. Interestingly, another of Imagination's high-profile licensees is Intel. ...

News.
January 14, 2009... Warren East CEO, ARM Because ARM ventures out of its comfort zone this year and Intel might be trying to get into it. ARM-based chipsets from Qualcomm and Freescale are going for the netbook market. If they succeed in a market...

News.
January 14, 2009... Picocells Picocells are the mini indoor basestations which will be used to extend mobile phone coverage indoors and in this respect they are analogous to WiFi hubs. Although picocells typically have longer range and higher capacity than...

News.
January 14, 2009... Reach In Reach, the communication downstream of SVHC information and supporting safe use data will be a massive issue, especially when suppliers outside the EU are not obligated to provide the information. Customers/users may not wait as...

News.
January 14, 2009... The University of Surrey is to develop carbon nanotube-doped organic solar cells in a three-year programme. Professor Ravi Silva, director of the Advanced Technology Institute at Surrey, says, "The best organic solar cells are currently...

News.
January 14, 2009... I f all the light bulbs in the world were replaced with energy-efficient LEDs for a period of 10 years, researchers at the US Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute claim oil consumption would be cut by 962 million barrels, removing the need for 280...

Products.
January 21, 2009... Audio amplifier reduces board area and cuts cost by 20% Texas Instruments has introduced a 15mW audio codec with stereo headphone amplifier and mono Class-D speaker driver. The TLV320AIC3107 amplifier substantially reduces board area and...

Products.
January 21, 2009... Circular connectors for 7/8in applications Circular connectors have been added to the Harting range of 7/8in devices. This is a configuration that is used in fieldbus applications. The products include five-pin connectors in straight or...

News.
January 21, 2009... What value-added does boundary-scan (aka JTAG testing) bring to the manufacturing process? Boundary-scan represents a low-cost, if not lowest-cost, means of verifying the soundness of the interconnects between [predominantly digital]...

News.
January 21, 2009... Many modern power mosfets reach low values of on-resistance, even when the gate-to-source voltage is 5V. For heavy-duty power mosfets and, especially, IGBTs (insulated-gate bipolar transistors), however, engineers prefer gate-to-source...

Features.
January 21, 2009... No matter how bleak the current market conditions seem, there will continue to be a semiconductor market, and it will grow in the future. This concept needs to be the guiding principle for companies to manage their business during these...

Features.
January 21, 2009... Cyan has teamed up with RF chip maker Micrel to develop system-level products targeted at metering, public lighting and industrial Ethernet markets. Cambridge-based Cyan's eCOG1X and eCOG16E01 microcontrollers will be combined with the...

Features.
January 21, 2009... Many traditional lighting manufacturers are looking to new and emerging "lighting class" LEDs to help them develop next-generation products for domestic, commercial and industrial environments, as well as applications ranging from automotive to...

News.
January 21, 2009... Parallel processing is not only useful in improving the power efficiency of processors, parallel thought can sometimes help when working out what is going on in the electronics industry. For example, take Qualcomm's recent demonstration of...

News.
January 21, 2009... RS Components has said that more than half its UK distribution business is now done over the internet. The catalogue and online distributor's December figures showed 50.2% online orders across all divisions. The company had set a target...

News.
January 21, 2009... Wet chemistry has added two new tools to the box for researchers trying to develop carbon nanotube-based electronic devices. Cornell University has extracted valuable semiconducting carbon nanotubes (bottom left) from unwanted metallic...

News.
January 21, 2009... The University of York is to develop EMC software for aircraft as part of a [euro]28m European project. "There are 44 parties altogether. The idea is to tie together lots of pieces of software into a single integrated tool. It is partly an...

News.
January 21, 2009... OKI (UK) is to buy renewable energy from Scottish Power for routine power consumption."We plan to reduce CO2 emissions from all activities by 6% by 2012, compared with the corresponding figure achieved in 2007," said OKI (UK) CEO Harushige...

News.
January 21, 2009... Astrium has completed its acquisition of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), the University of Surrey spin-out company. The move reflects growing confidence in the UK space technology industry, which is expected to be resilient to...

News.
January 21, 2009... Design starts in the mobile market are holding up despite concerns about falling confidence in the consumer market, according to the head of Irish chip start-up Movidia. In a week when Motorola announced big job cuts and Nortel went into...

News.
January 21, 2009... Analog Devices has come up with a new low-power design for a three-axis accelerometer with in-built memory and decision-making. Memory and decision-making has been added to cut system power consumption. "I think the FIFO memory is of...

Products.
January 28, 2009... 28jan09allegro.jpg The A4403 from Allegro MicroSystems is a 3A buck regulator IC which uses a valley current-mode control scheme to offer low switch-on times, making it suitable for applications that require high switching frequencies...

News.
January 28, 2009... Wireless power companies have an international technology standard which it is hoped will drive the fledging market for cableless phone and camera chargers. The Wireless Power Consortium, a newly-formed industry grouping of chip suppliers...

Products.
January 28, 2009... Potentiometer designs for guitarists' kit down to 9mm TT electronics BI Technologies will produce custom potentiometer designs for pro audio such as foot pedal, guitar, amplifier and pre-amplifier applications. The panel potentiometers...

News.
January 28, 2009... 28jan09DesignFuse.pdf Circuit indicates ac-mains-fuse failure Use this circuit to alert you when a fuse fails, writes Vladimir Oleynik Fuses are essential parts of power-distribution systems because they prevent fire or damage to...

News.
January 28, 2009... A power LED that retains efficiency even at high currents has been designed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. According to the US researchers, the device achieves a reduction in efficiency droop - a well-known phenomenon that provokes...

Features.
January 28, 2009... Manufacturing services firms are responding to the current market situation with supply schemes intended to help UK-based companies. PCB supplier ALR Services (stand A42) is looking to help its customers stay competitive in the current...

Features.
January 28, 2009... TDK-Lambda (stand C37) will present details of its EFE series of embedded front-end power supplies which incorporate an 8-bit microcontroller to provide digital control of the output and to handle housekeeping routines. ...

Features.
January 28, 2009... With the recession biting hard on all areas of the global economy it seems the offshore manufacturing bandwagon has ground to a halt. The weakened pound against the dollar and euro has, almost overnight, significantly increased the cost of...

Features.
January 28, 2009... Relatively inexpensive, high-density flash memories are good news for product developers under pressure to implement more and better functions in next-generation designs. Reprogramming in situ not only streamlines design and prototyping, but...

Products.
January 28, 2009... RGB emitter driven up to 350mA for illumination Designed for channel letter illumination and sign backlighting the PA3314-LGXRGB from Plus Opto comprises of a single high power integrated RGB emitter mounted on metal core PCB. ...

News.
January 28, 2009... Can the credit crunch determine the success or failure of a wireless communications technology? In the case of ultra wideband (UWB), the very high speed version of Bluetooth, this may yet happen. Cash-strapped chip suppliers seem to be...

News.
January 28, 2009... 28jan08SotonMarineSensor (Use 3 Pictures) The National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, has tested the first of its miniature deep marine chemical sensors - 1600m down off the Canary Islands. "These sensors were dropped into the...

News.
January 28, 2009... Qualcomm has gained handheld graphics and multimedia intellectual property with the acquisition of AMD's handheld products business. The deal is worth $65m. The teams involved develop technologies for mobile devices in areas including 2D and 3D...

News.
January 28, 2009... Freescale Semiconductor has come up with a plan to drive use of 32-bit microcontrollers in the embedded market by offering ColdFire users a free real-time operating system (RTOS). The added complexity and cost of designing in a 32-bit MCU,...

News.
January 28, 2009... 28jan09Nanotech.jpg by Steve Bush Bristol-based fabless chip firm Nanotech Semiconductor is to produce low-power receivers and transmitters for 10Gbit/s Ethernet-over-plastic-fibre. "We are now engaged with rates up to and...

News.
January 28, 2009... Sandia mulls multi-core processor stagnation problem by Steve Bush Sandia Labs in the US has been reviewing the multi-core processor stagnation problem - simulating key algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets. The...

News.
January 28, 2009... by Steve Bush Companies are being warned about the risks of using counterfeit components. The Component Obsolescence Group (COG) has published best-practice guidance to help companies up and down the supply chain avoid counterfeit...

News.
January 28, 2009... Touchscreen technology may be selling like hot-cakes in the iPhone and other consumer devices, but technology firms are looking at ways to improve it. They want to put a 'click' back in to touch control. The way this is done is a technique...

News.
January 28, 2009... Which technologies are expected to provide the biggest opportunities in the consumer market in 2009? Home theatre will continue to be a key category for our industry. Given the tough economy, consumers are looking for inexpensive means of...