Electronics Weekly articles from September 2008

Electronics Weekly archives from September 2008

Products.
September 17, 2008... 17sep08glassman.jpg The FL series from Glassman Europe produces up to 1.5kW of continuous output power from a 1U rack mountable chassis, with 'fully floating' outputs of up to 1500Vdc. The FL series is unusual in that while most other...

Features.
September 17, 2008... 17sep08shrinkingfig1.pdf 17sep08shrinkingfig2.jpg 17sep08shrinkingfig3.jpg Shrinking standards squeeze embedded designs As new embedded designs combine highly integrated silicon, portable platforms, and soaring data rates, the...

Features.
September 17, 2008... How to move from legacy to Linux Bill Weinberg and Jim Ready discuss the challenges and risks involved in converting existing applications to run on embedded Linux Embedded Linux is rapidly encroaching upon application spaces once...

Features.
September 17, 2008... T he Embedded Systems Show 2008, which takes place at the NEC, Birmingham on 1-2 October, will feature live teardowns of the Estes Micro-Tiger RC Helicopter and the X-Box Steering Wheel. This year, the ESS conference features a Build Your...

News.
September 17, 2008... Time was when an FPGA was simply a field programmable gate array. It was used to prototype circuit designs and not much else. But the FPGA rode the wave of system-on-chip design and its use has expanded significantly. What started as the IC...

News.
September 17, 2008... Cambridge's Plastic Logic has demonstrated a large thin e-reader for business users. Revealed at the DEMOfall show in San Diego, the reader is 20x28cm, "yet it's thinner than a pad of paper, lighter than many business periodicals", claimed...

News.
September 17, 2008... Freescale Semiconductor has entered the LED market with the first LED backlight product in its power management IC portfolio. The 10-channel MC34844 white LED driver IC is targeted at LED backlights in notebook computers, as well as in...

News.
September 17, 2008... LeCroy has entered the mid-range sub-300MHz oscilloscope market with a range of scopes which are the lowest cost instruments it has yet offered. The launch of the WaveAce family of oscilloscopes, which range in price from [pounds...

News.
September 17, 2008... Silicon Labs has announced an all-CMOS oscillator to compete directly with crystals. Dubbed Si500, "it generates any frequency from 900kHz to 200MHz and phase jitter is 2ps(RMS) maximum, 1.5ps typical", said the firm. Period jitter at...

News.
September 17, 2008... Californian start-up Achronix has revealed details of its 1.5GHz asynchronous FPGA, which includes 10.3Gbit/s serialiser/deserialisers (serdes). "We get our speed from the underlying silicon technology," said founder and CEO John Holt. "It...

News.
September 17, 2008... Sharp believes the declining cost ratio of dollar per lumen and rising power efficiency ratio of lumen per Watt is propelling LEDs into the general lighting market. "Cost is going down and efficiency is going up," said Sharp's Uwe Hock,...

News.
September 17, 2008... It is almost a year since the Free Software Foundation released the third version of its General Public License. Prior to the release there was a great deal of public consultation where several contentious issues were hammered out. The greatest...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... Printed light guides will open markets for high-brightness LEDs By Iain Kyle Rapid improvements in High-Brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs) are greatly increasing opportunities for Human-Centred Engineering (HCE) to improve environments for...

Products.
September 24, 2008... Avnet Memec is stocking the MAX4983E/MAX4984E double-pole/double-throw (DPDT) analogue switch range from Maxim Integrated Products. To enable the use of a single connector in high-performance switching applications, these switches feature...

Products.
September 24, 2008... Lead Prod 24sep08Austria5304pic.JPG Austriamicrosystems (AMS) has introduced two linear magnetic incremental encoder ICs for motion control applications "The measurement performance and reliability of motion control systems...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08suppZetex1,2.jpg Captions for figures: Figure 1: Example circuit driving 3 LEDs in series from 12Vac using no large capacitors Figure 2: Bridge voltage and LED current waveforms Designing LED lights for existing...

News.
September 24, 2008... Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the current state of the European components market? I am quite positive. There is growth in some parts of Europe, such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and Spain, and particularly in eastern...

News.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08designfig1.pdf 24sep08designfig2.pdf Current source makes novel Class A buffer A pair of classic current sources in totem-pole configuration enables a novel Class A buffer, writes Horst Koelzow The basis for this Design...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08suppFuture1.jpg Fig. 1: relationship between variables affecting LED operation 24sep08suppFuture2a,b.jpg Fig. 2a & 2b: QLED Thermal Simulation demonstration Design tools for optimising the performance of solid-state...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08ledsuppnatsemi.jpg Figure. Simplified LED driving topologies LED Power Converters for Automotive Headlamp Applications by Michele Sclocchi In many different products LEDs are replacing incandescent light sources and,...

Features.
September 24, 2008... Benchmark data and implementation conditions matter when choosing a high-performance microprocessor core but true comparisons are often difficult to achieve. Consumers want higher quality music, video and gaming in multimedia products. And...

Features.
September 24, 2008... The closure of a high tech company can sometimes play havoc with the confidence of engineers in the area. But the recent closure of the TTPCom R&D site in Cambridge, acquired by Motorola in 2006, has had almost the opposite effect, stimulating...

Features.
September 24, 2008... The closure of a high-tech company can play havoc with the confidence of engineers in the area. But the recent closure of the TTPCom R&D site in Cambridge, acquired by Motorola in 2006, has had the opposite effect, stimulating more start-ups...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... By Paul Decloedt and Tim Kaske The market for high brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs) is continuing to grow and diversify at a rapid rate. In the last two years HB-LED technology and construction has evolved such that both the brightness and energy...

News.
September 24, 2008... The trusty AVO model 8 multimeter has finally reached retirement after 57 years on workbenches around the world. Demand for the multimeter has continued since its 1951 debut, despite rises in its production cost. The decision to discontinue...

News.
September 24, 2008... Apackaging technology has attracted $23m of venture capital to go into mass production in a Korean factory. The technology allows chips to be embedded in the substrate material of a PCB. "You can put the I/O pads anywhere on the...

News.
September 24, 2008... Linear Technology is targeting the growing electric and hybrid vehicle market with a multicell battery monitor. The company hopes it will open up the use of high voltage lithium-ion battery stacks. There is great interest in expanding the...

News.
September 24, 2008... Programmable hardware system design is the focus of a two-day seminar on 8-9 October, held at Savoy Place in London by the IET in partnership with Electronics Weekly. Specialists from Microsoft, Texas Instruments, NXP, Xilinx, Altera and...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08suppilluminex.jpg LED technology aids compliance to legislation, reduces costs and is green By Stuart Davies Introduced in 2006, BS 5266-1:2005, places a responsibility on the owner or occupier of public buildings and...

News.
September 24, 2008... The microphone in most mobile phones or recording machines use an electret condenser microphone (ECM). Based on permanently charged materials and using a diaphragm, the basic design has not changed for 40 years. But now there could be a...

News.
September 24, 2008... The madness of the memory business is endemic, expected and enduring. The value of the DRAM industry has lurched from $40bn to $11bn inside a 12-month period before now, even while shipments in terms of units have always gone up. So...

News.
September 24, 2008... Altera's vision is to be the leader in the custom logic segment, which includes Asic as well as programmable logic devices. "At 90nm the cost of Asic development is $30m," says John Daane, Altera's CEO. "Assuming R&D cost at 20% of the...

Supplements.
September 24, 2008... 24sep08supparrow1.jpg LEDs played a key role in the recent Beijing Olympics where approximately 496,000 Cree XLamp LEDs in red, green and blue were used to illuminate the exterior of the Water Cube (if used please credit AP Photo/Natalie...