Electronics Weekly articles from November 2007

Electronics Weekly archives from November 2007

News.
November 14, 2007... The Government must stop the [pounds sterling]10bn Galileo Satellite Navigation project from going ahead unless its value for money and effectiveness are convincingly demonstrated, MPs told Gordon Brown this week. MPs on the Commons...

News.
November 14, 2007... By Richard Wilson richard.wilson@electronicsweekly.com An open software environment is critical for further development of mobile phones, says a senior executive at Qualcomm. Enrico Salvatori, v-p for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies...

News.
November 14, 2007... Romsey-based engineering firm Roke has donated money for wind turbine kits for Quilley School in Eastleigh. The school will use the equipment in science lessons. 14-year-old Tony House, said that he enjoyed science lessons "because they are fun...

News.
November 14, 2007... Atheros, the WiFi chip company, is pushing 802.11n MIMO WiFi as a technology which will double range and increase actual data throughput by six times, despite questions over the technology's attractions. There are questions over...

News.
November 14, 2007... David Simms, who was for many years the components editor of Electronics Weekly, has died aged 75. Mick Elliott writes, David had worked for both Marconi and Mullard before joining EW. He quickly became the industry press's leading writer...

News.
November 14, 2007... Claimed to be the world's largest casino, the Venetian Macao has installed face recognition to authenticate 12,000 employees during each shift change. At each of 13 turnstiles, a near infrared grid is shone on the users face and the...

News.
November 14, 2007... Switch supplier C&K Components has expanded its sales force in Europe to address what it sees as local design activity particularly in automotive and industrial applications. The company has a major design and manufacturing facility in...

News.
November 14, 2007... Hirose has named Flint Distribution, which is now part of Avnet, as its design-in distributor of the year. Wendy Leigh, business development manager of Hirose presented the award (centre) to Richard Bates, franchise manager of Flint...

News.
November 14, 2007... A fall in sales for Q4 at Keithley Instruments has been attributed partly to a 30 per cent drop in orders from semiconductor customers. The firm's net sales of $36.3m, down 12 per cent form the same period a year ago. "The results of...

News.
November 14, 2007... Open standards are key to the success of femtocells because they provide a better system than proprietary standards can, according to the founder of the Femto Forum, Will Franks. "As in pretty much any area of the telecoms value chain,...

News.
November 14, 2007... The remaining dial-up Internet users are proving to be reluctant to change to a broadband connection, leading to a slow down in new broadband subscribers in the UK, according to analyst firm Point Topic. The firm estimates that UK Internet...

News.
November 14, 2007... by Steve Bush steve.bush@electronicsweekly.com Aston University's photonics department has been shortlisted for this year's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Knowledge Transfer Challenge. "This means we...

News.
November 14, 2007... Qinetiq has teamed up with Ricardo in a two-year project to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries for use in hybrid vehicles. The project will attempt to demonstrate the use of new lithium-ion cell chemistry in a hybrid vehicle battery...

News.
November 14, 2007... Linux operating system support and an improved internal bus architecture are the main elements of the latest FPGA-based embedded processing platform from Xilinx. The FPGA supplier is looking to promote the use of its Spartan and Virtex...

News.
November 14, 2007... Wolfson Microelectronics' shares dropped around 15 per cent to reach 214.5p, its lowest point since October 2005. The fall came after the company reported Q3 sales up 21 per cent to [pounds sterling]34m. The fall has caused some scratching of...

News.
November 14, 2007... Sony has pulled out of 32nm process development work with IBM and Toshiba but is continuing its joint work with IBM and Toshiba on developing design technology for 32nm geometry ICs. The move follows the transfer of Sony's most up-to-date...

News.
November 14, 2007... Torex Semiconductor has extended its distribution partnership with Azzurri Technology to cover the UK and Ireland. "The UK & Ireland are strategic target markets for Torex and I am very confident that we will be able to increase our presence in...

News.
November 14, 2007... The semiconductor market will grow only five to six per cent this year, according to Future Horizons, making 2007 the third successive year of single-digit growth. For next year, Future Horizons is forecasting a 12 per cent growth in...

News.
November 14, 2007... It seems that every month there is more money being thrown at the electronics and technology sectors by Government - promoting it, supporting it, encouraging it. Just last week the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which was established by...

News.
November 14, 2007... Paul Marsh is managing director of GSPK Design Were you affected by the recent management buy-out of GSPK Electronics? There has been a common misconception within the industry that we were affected but I can categorically advise that...

News.
November 14, 2007... Linear Technology Corporation could become a private company in a few years' time if it continues its policy of buying back shares on a massive scale. LTC recently paid $3bn to buy 30 per cent of its outstanding stock. To raise the...

News.
November 14, 2007... Analog Devices is to sell its CPU voltage regulation and PC thermal monitoring product line to ON Semiconductor for $185m. The deal is part of ADI's plan to focus its power management ranges on high end products for industrial, medical and...

News.
November 14, 2007... Growing interest in solid-state lighting is expected to boost sales of LEDs this year, according to market watcher iSuppli. The market research firm predicted that sales of LEDs will grow by about 13.7 per cent in 2007. LED LANDING PAGE

News.
November 14, 2007... Signalling a cooling of Sprint Nextel's enthusiasm for Wimax, the company has ended its agreement to share its $5bn proposed Wimax network with the network being built by Clearwire, the Intel, Motorola, Samsung-backed network operator set up by...

News.
November 14, 2007... Pace Micro Technology has chosen contract manufacturing firm PartnerTech to provide a fast-turnaround new product introduction (NPI) and prototyping service for its digital set-top boxes. PartnerTech will provide a one to five day turnaround...

News.
November 14, 2007... Renesas Technology has moved a step closer to unifying its ranges of 16- and 32-bit complex instruction set computer (Cisc) microcontrollers. The company has completed the design of the unifying architecture, to be called RX. This...

News.
November 14, 2007... CSR is planning to bring Internet radio to the masses with the launch of a UniFi chip-based design, with an electronics' cost of $15 which will enable Internet radio to be added to devices, including portable devices. "People listen to...

News.
November 14, 2007... The University of Surrey is to lead a five year [pounds sterling]5m Government funded study into silicon photonics. "There is renewed interest in silicon photonics because of the microprocessor interconnect bottleneck," programme leader...

News.
November 14, 2007... Hertfordshire-based microfluidics firm the Dolomite Centre is to introduce a micromachined standard product range. "We will have valves, detectors, and mixing chambers in standard geometries as well as a number of different pumps and...

Features.
November 14, 2007... Fabless semiconductor suppliers have become the cornerstone of chip innovation in Europe. Whether it is commercial success for new product introductions or specific product intellectual property (IP) developments the Elektra Awards invited...

Features.
November 14, 2007... When specifying power supplies, today's customers invariably want four things - small size, reliability, ease of control and, of course, value for money. The size Fifteen years ago, a 1kW SCR phase controlled programmable power supply...

Features.
November 14, 2007... Designers of mobile products, such as multimedia mobile handsets, are today faced with demands to provide versatile, high-quality audio functions, including high-output speakerphone modes and simultaneous speakerphone/headphone operation. These...

Features.
November 14, 2007... 14nov07XP1 Typical COTS converter using stacked PCBs to make use of 3D space. 14nov07XP2 A hybrid before sealing, showing large numbers of conductors and wires that need securing. Technology transference between high...

Features.
November 14, 2007... Technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee and Wi-Fi (or 802.11) have gained widespread recognition, but because they are well-known does not mean that they are superior technically. This article demystifies the choice of wireless communication...

News.
November 14, 2007... Price tag and O2 contract keep iphone exclusive The UK mobile phone market seemed to be holding its collective breath last week when Apple's iPhone went on sale. The hope is that the publicity surrounding the iPod inventor's entry into the...

Technology.
November 14, 2007... Braille technology invented by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (EW 07/11/07) turns out to be rather cunning. The aim, said project leader John Roberts, was to knock the cost out of a 3,600 pin electromechanical display...

Technology.
November 14, 2007... Isle of Wight-based DSP specialist RF Engines (RFEL) has developed a low-resource algorithm for fast vector translation. Implemented in a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA, it executes 350Mconversion/s from 2x20bit rectangular to 20bit magnitude, 12bit...

Technology.
November 14, 2007... 14dec07Marvell41.pdf An isolated mains to 16V power supply with under one per cent power factor distortion, all with one chip Santa Clara-based Marvell has introduced a DSP-based power factor correction chip that can produce regulated...

Technology.
November 14, 2007... MegaWave of Massachusetts has applied an absorbing boundary technique to Surrey-based Flomerics' MicroStripes 3D electromagnetic simulator. "The technique significantly reduces the computer memory requirements and cuts simulation times from...

Technology.
November 14, 2007... MontaVista has removed the need for a real-time operating system in network equipment with the introduction of Linux Carrier Grade Edition 5.0. "We have been working very closely with customers such as Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia-Siemens...

Features.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07DISTfig1.jpg Figure 1. High Side Current Sensing Using a Precision Difference Amplifier 21nov07DISTfig2.jpg High side current sense amplifiers simplify a difficult task By Greg Zimmer One of the most common tasks...

Features.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07DISTvicor.jpg Military V.I chips are 32.5x22x6.6mm in size. 21nov07DISTvicor2.jpg The military uses V.I chips in a variety of applications. by Keith Nardone For many years after World War II, the private sector was...

Features.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07DISTpi.jpg By Rich Fassler In 1998 Power Integrations introduced EcoSmart technology which enables a switched-mode power supply design to operate with high efficiency when in standby and no-load conditions. This ability is...

News.
November 21, 2007... The new Innovation, Universities and Skills (IUS) Committee of the House of Commons is set to investigate what the electronics industry is doing to promote innovation and skills in their sector and what they want the government to do. "The...

News.
November 21, 2007... A military waterproof coating for electronic devices has been made available for commercial use. "Electrical items that would normally have moderate levels of water protection can be taken straight from the production line or even high...

News.
November 21, 2007... NXP intends to be first to come out with an integrated chip supporting all the near-future cellular standards up to LTE, and all the legacy standards, plus Wimax, in the second half of next year. What makes it cost-effective is 45nm. "In...

News.
November 21, 2007... Near field communication (NFC) semiconductor intellectual property (IP) developed by Innovision Research & Technology is to be made available under an evaluation licensing programme. According to the firm, the availability of the NFC...

News.
November 21, 2007... The introduction of femtocells giving improved in-building coverage could be a means of persuading people to move from 2G to 3G technology by improving 3G battery life, according to industry experts. "Operators want to move voice traffic...

News.
November 21, 2007... Power LED maker Lumileds has moved its thin film flip chip (TFFC) die, introduced originally in its Rebel range, into its K2 products and producing some of the brightest LEDs yet, as a result. "Light output performance from a LUXEON K2 with...

News.
November 21, 2007... A Bluetooth-enabled MP3 player with an electronics material cost of less than $10 has been announced by Cambridge-based CSR, which is aiming the technology at the low end of the MP3 market. "This is a single chip, low power, low cost,...

News.
November 21, 2007... DisplayLink intends to speed up development of its low latency video compression technology following the injection of $24m in its latest venture capital round. US-based DisplayLink develops semiconductor and software systems in Cambridge,...

News.
November 21, 2007... With the financial industry poised to share space on smartcards and SIMcards, opinions differ on what processors to offer it. "Typically multi-application cards will require 32bit processors," Richard York, secure product manager at ARM...

News.
November 21, 2007... Altera is to make its Nios core generally available to Asic developers via Synopsys' EDA tools. Altera says it is making the move because the core has reached critical mass in the industry. "It's the most widely used soft CPU for FPGAs,"...

News.
November 21, 2007... Westminster's financial watchdog has criticised the massive increase in costs for the Diamond Syncroton project since it was relocated from Darebsury in Cheshire to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. The House of Commons...

News.
November 21, 2007... Intel unveiled 15 server processors and one PC processor made on its 45nm hi-k hafnium process in Arizona, with up to 820 million transistors in the quad-core processors. The hi-k dielectric cuts gate leakage, for example improving...

News.
November 21, 2007... Silicon Hive has introduced a video processor for designing into full high definition (1080p) video codecs. Significantly, the device is programmable to achieve different video standards and performance levels. The VSP 2500 device scales...

News.
November 21, 2007... Pure Wafer saw its shares tumble after releasing a profits warning. The shares fell around 33 per cent to 109p when the firm said there was uncertainty surrounding a new product for a customer. Turnover for 2008 will be below current...

News.
November 21, 2007... Dawn Ohlson is director of educational affairs at Thales in the UK You appear to be recruiting an increasing number of graduates in the UK. What disciplines are you looking for? We are looking for a large number of graduates with...

News.
November 21, 2007... The 45nm process node will be a watershed for the semiconductor industry as the last process which is truly multi-sourced. After 45nm, the world's five major process development camps will control the development of, and access to, basic...

News.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07Stratophase A slica-on-slicon optical circuit with a Bragg grating in the middle for use as a biochemical sensor. Light is fed in from a laser through a coventional optical fibre. University of Southampton spin-out Stratophase...

News.
November 21, 2007... East Sussex-based start-up Surrey NanoSystems is building its third carbon nanotube growth tool. "Two aspects of the company's intellectual property are driving market interest: the degree of precision and repeatability built into the...

News.
November 21, 2007... A fund management team, based in Oxford, which targets start-up companies in the science, engineering and technology sectors has been awarded [pounds sterling]20m by the Government under the Enterprise Capital Funds (ECF) scheme. The group must...

News.
November 21, 2007... A further 16 technology commercialisation projects have been given funding under Scottish Enterprise's Proof of Concept scheme. The [pounds sterling]3.3m of funding shared out amongst the projects is for round eight of the scheme and 26...

News.
November 21, 2007... The Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) in Scotland has teamed up with Silicon SouthWest to offer Continual Professional Development (CPD) courses to students in South West England. The first course in the South West is on the subject...

News.
November 21, 2007... Twelve mobile network operators are to run trials of contactless mobile payment services in 11 countries prior to commercial roll-out. The trials, which form part of the GSM Association's Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, will take place in Australia,...

News.
November 21, 2007... Scottish organisation ITI Techmedia is developing a backlight technology using polymer optics for LCD televisions and other displays. "The technology is set to improve viewing quality, reduce weight and improve power efficiency at lower...

News.
November 21, 2007... A proposal to create a European telecoms market authority to oversee telecoms regulation in all EU countries has met with a mixed reaction from the industry. Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, said the proposal was by far the most...

News.
November 21, 2007... Keith Schwab, a physicist at Cornell University, has increased the speed of a scanning tunnelling micro-scope (STM) by 100 to 1,000 times. The adaptation, claimed Cornell, could give STMs significant capabilities including the ability to...

News.
November 21, 2007... RF Engines has released an IP core product that is a sub-set of the coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm used in signal processing for radar systems, electronic warfare systems and for power amplifier designs. RF...

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07Agilent4a (bmp or tif) Screenshot of Agilent N6705A delay setup screen or 21nov07Agilent4b Figure 4 - Screenshot of Agilent N6705A scope view Synchronising multiple power outputs sounds like one of those simple...

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07RnS1 Examples of R&S instruments that have the emulation capabilities built-in: ZVA (network analyser), FSU (spectrum analyser) and SMF (microwave signal generator) 21nov07RnS2 Jamie Lunn The implications on long-life...

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07Xjtag1 Andy Evans, senior product engineer platforms, Systems Design Division ARM using XJTAG Debug and test techniques must advance in parallel with new design approaches being applied at component and board levels. Trends...

News.
November 21, 2007... Farnell has a new peelable technique for packaging ICs for shipping to customers. The biodegradable plastic packaging has been developed for the distributor by Antistat. Over 800 ICs with case sizes between 7x7mm and 10x10mm are being offered...

Features.
November 21, 2007... With the increased time, cost and quality pressures on the development of electronic devices, software developers are faced with the challenge of reducing their dependency on the availability of a physical board. Such dependency often...

Features.
November 21, 2007... Wokingham in Berkshire is the best place to live in the UK says a recent survey by the Halifax, partly down to its communications links. These travel links, including the M4 and Gatwick and Heathrow airports are also great for electronics...

Features.
November 21, 2007... Why the M4 should not be by-passed for career opportunities The M4 corridor running from London to Bristol has long been dubbed the UK's 'Silicon Valley' and is synonymous with high-tech industries such as mobile communications and...

Features.
November 21, 2007... From mobile phone semiconductor development to market leading in-the-home mobile basestation technology, Swindon is building on its roots in the chip industry which date back more than 20 years to Plessey which first build a fab in the town....

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... As embedded electronics becomes ever more pervasive, designers are faced with new challenges to meet the increasing demands for speed, miniaturisation, connectivity, power efficiency and ever lower-cost products. They are continually under...

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07NI PXI Express is scalable for parallel measurements Test system architects have a complicated task. They must interpret evolving technologies, such as multicore processors and high-speed data busses, as they design, develop and...

Technology.
November 21, 2007... Gibson has released a self-tuning guitar based on a system developed by German firm Tronical. The Robot guitar employs a piezoelectric bridge sensor to pick up signals from the strings and feeds these into a DSP. The processor then...

Technology.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07ClarityCap10 ClarityCap made 16 capacitors by varying two manufacturing parameters to test its resonance theory - and found a distinct sweet spot. Devices made knowing this, provisionally dubbed the MR series, will go on sale early...

Supplements.
November 21, 2007... 21nov07Keithley Controlling the cost of test has always been a major consideration in managing any type of semiconductor research, design or production facility. In recent years, managers have become more aware of the effect of...

Technology.
November 28, 2007... University of Sheffield spin-out Magnomatics has converted its magnetic reduction gear box into a high-torque motor. "It's the most torque dense motor ever, and a motor you cannot burn out," MD Chris Kirby told EW. The gearbox operates...

News.
November 28, 2007... The European Parliament is attempting to rescue Europe's delayed Galileo satellite navigation project from a funding shortfall amidst heavy criticism of the way the project has been managed. Last week UK MEP Den Dover expressed his "extreme...