Electronics Weekly articles from June 2009

Electronics Weekly archives from June 2009

News.
June 17, 2009... Atmel has expanded its royalty-free touch switch library to cover more of its microcontrollers. "This extension of the QTouch Library allows Atmel to offer our tinyAVR, megaAVR, XMega or AVR32 UC3A devices," said AVR product marketing...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09nanotubeMemory Link to video at http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/06/03/billion-year-ultra-dense-memory-chip/ Vast amounts of data could be stored for a billion years in carbon nanotubes, claim California...

News.
June 17, 2009... Embargoed until Tuesday June 16th at 1:30pm UK time. Inter-operability is the key to the rapid growth of the femtocell business into a mass volume market, according to femto chip-maker picoChip of Bath, which has taken the initiative in...

News.
June 17, 2009... Government stimulus packages for the car industry in Germany and France are mitigating the downturn in those nations, according to iSuppli Corp. European Q1 car sales fell 16.3% in Q109 and, for the full year of 2009, are expected to fall...

News.
June 17, 2009... The silicon foundry industry was the first segment of the semiconductor industry to call an upturn. First TSMC, then UMC, Chartered and SMIC announced that Q209 revenues would show big gains on Q1. That came after three quarters of...

News.
June 17, 2009... The Irish high-tech start-up scene is having a buoyant 2009, in contrast to the investment environment elsewhere. In Q109, 32 technology companies raised [euro]54m, according to the Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA). This is up 24%...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09oled EU scientists have demonstrated a mini-projector based on OLEDs. Developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany with partners in the EU HYPOLED project, the prototype is 25mm long and 18mm in diameter. "The key...

Products.
June 17, 2009... Small footprint BGA packaging for automotive applications Lattice Semiconductor is offering automotive temperature qualified (AEC-Q100) chip scale 132 BGA (ball grid array) packaging for its non-volatile LatticeXP2 FPGA family. The...

News.
June 17, 2009... The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has followed the worldwide silicon foundry industry in calling an upturn to the semiconductor market with a rebound in sales next year. 'The semiconductor showed early signs of recovery in...

News.
June 17, 2009... Despite all the interest in smart metering, especially since President Obama included it in his $787bn stimulus package, the market for smart meters is sinking across the world, according to IMS Research. In the first quarter of 2009, IMS...

News.
June 17, 2009... Suggested headline: Delaware Judge Scuppers Samsung-Spansion Deal A deal by which Spansion was to drop all patent lawsuits against Samsung and give the Korean company rights to all its existing and future patents, has been scuppered by...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09Agni - taken from http://blog.ttxgp.com/ The TTXGP electric motorbike race takes place on the Isle of Man on Friday. In practice Agni team, from the Indian company that makes the motors used in most of the bikes, is ahead with...

News.
June 17, 2009... STMicroelectronics has introduced a 0.75mm high three-axis digital MEMS accelerometer which it reckons is the thinnest of its type in the world. It measures 3mm Xx5mm. Applications for ST's LIS302DLH digital three-axis accelerometer...

News.
June 17, 2009... UK academics are developing a radar-based gun and knife detector for the police, which could be available to police forces within two years. "We are trialling it, it is well advanced, and it is working well," project head Professor Nick...

News.
June 17, 2009... The most positive forecast for the 2009 semiconductor market from a major forecasting house, is the minus 13% forecast from VLSI Research. "Bright spots are beginning to emerge, prompting VLSI Research to raise its 2009 IC sales forecast to...

News.
June 17, 2009... How would you characterise the market for ruggedised embedded systems in the current climate? The market for ruggedised systems has grown steadily from the traditional military requirement to areas of industry which require products that...

News.
June 17, 2009... TSMC, the semiconductor industry's biggest foundry and bellwether, has called the upturn. It plans to hire 30% more process development engineers and 15% more design technology engineers. "The upturn is going to come," Maria Marced,...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09design2.pdf Convert negative inputs to positive outputs A simple way to create a 3.3V source from a -5V supply is described by Shane Chang and Budge Ing You can obtain a precise, positive-output voltage from a...

News.
June 17, 2009... You may sometimes need to turn on a secondary device, such as a lamp or an alarm, when a device that is normally on loses power. You can build a simple circuit using just a transformer and a relay for this purpose. In the circuit, a primary...

Features.
June 17, 2009... The recession is here and we are all affected to a greater or lesser extent. At a recent meeting of the European Manufacturing Services Association (EMSA) it was tabled that the UK electronic manufacturing services sector is down about 15% from...

Features.
June 17, 2009... The original attraction of outsourcing was that it allowed OEMs to concentrate on core competencies and develop new products, while their chosen contract electronics manufacturer (CEM) could take over aspects of the manufacturing on their...

Features.
June 17, 2009... The case for outsourcing has never been stronger. During tough economic cycles there is even greater pressure on product owners to improve their cost competitiveness and to speed product time to market. The business logic is irrefutable -...

Features.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09trident.jpg by Martyn Kaye The traditional distribution customer of ten years ago has been joined by a new class of customer looking to engage with distributors in a true supplier partnership. This new class of customer does not...

Features.
June 17, 2009... Self-service terminals and interactive signage, built using touchscreens, have enabled organisations to reduce their operating costs while enhancing customer satisfaction. This, in turn, has fuelled more widespread deployment, including...

Features.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09anders.jpg Identifying the Importance of the End User Perspective: by Margaret Kato Like many other pieces of optoelectronics technology, TFT displays have become increasingly thought of simply as a commodity. However,...

Features.
June 17, 2009... E Ink, the US-based display maker behind Amazon's Kindle e-book, has agreed to be bought by Taiwanese electronic paper display firm Prime View International (PVI) in a deal worth $215m. The deal reflects the growing interest in the e-book...

News.
June 17, 2009... Is the worst of the recession over for the manufacturing sector? The gloom has certainly lifted a little due largely to encouraging output figures in April. Manufacturing output in the last business quarter was 13.2% lower than the...

News.
June 17, 2009... Infineon Technologies has combined two LDMOS power amplifiers in a single package for Doherty-based amplifier designs used in wireless basestations. Two of the devices operate in the 1800-2200MHz frequency range for WCDMA, LTE and TD-SCDMA...

News.
June 17, 2009... UK academics are developing a radar-based gun and knife detector for the police, which could be available to police forces within two years. No one is revealing much about how it works or what the finished object will look like. It is known...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09nanotubeMemory Steve Bush Vast amounts of data could be stored for a billion years in carbon nanotubes, claim California researchers. "We've developed a mechanism for digital memory storage that consists of a crystalline...

News.
June 17, 2009... 17jun09GitGraphene Raghunath Murali (left) and graduate student Kevin Brenner are shown with a test station used to study the properties of graphene Graphene could out-perform copper as on-chip interconnects, claims the Georgia...

News.
June 17, 2009... Cree is claiming a record efficiency for a 2GHz microwave amplifier, writes Steve Bush. "We have a 50% efficient 480W peak power Doherty amplifier having greater than 80W average power under a W-CDMA [6.5dBpeak/average] corrected to better...

News.
June 17, 2009... Texas Instruments has been quick to follow up its acquisition of ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller firm Luminary Micro with the launch of four development kits supporting the fourth generation of the Cortex-M3-based Stellaris MCUs. The...

News.
June 17, 2009... The University of Durham has produced an all-organic memory-transistor. "It is an evolution of silicon flash memory," Professor Mike Petty told EW. "Our step has been making both the semiconductor and the insulator organic." In the...