Earlier this year, HP was granted a US patent for its see through screen technology, sparking interest among consumers in the future of transparent displays. To many, the concept seemed futuristic, but in certain applications, it is already a reality. Transparent oleds are arguably still constrained to laboratory prototypes, but according to ...
Read More
|
The winners of the 2012 British Engineering Excellence Awards were announced on 25 October at a gala luncheon at 8 Northumberland Avenue, one of London's most prestigious venues.
Read More
|
Nothingness might not sound very useful. In fact, the opposite is the case because nothingness – in the form of a vacuum – has played a major role in the history of electronics. Until the invention of the transistor, vacuum tubes were the industry's critical component because they made it possible to amplify, switch and modulate electrical signals.
Read More
|
Hospitals have complicated and connected technology ecosystems. Few places have such a diverse array of machines, skills and information, all attempting to coexist in a stressful decision making environment. Each department has an array of devices and a staff with highly specialised skills.
Read More
|
FPGAs have undergone significant architectural changes in the last few years. Beginning with hard blocks such as ram and dsp, fpgas now also include transceivers and hard IP blocks, such as Ethernet and PCIe Express. With these new functional blocks, fpga designers can now create complex designs. However, these designs can sometimes push the cost, ...
Read More
|
It wasn't too long ago that wireless communication was only available using devices designed solely for that purpose; walkie-talkies and the like. But over the last few years, wireless communication has found its way into all manner of products. Today, providing the ability for a product to communicate via Wi-Fi, gsm or other rf technologies is ...
Read More
|
The fpga has been embraced with enthusiasm by embedded systems designers. Through its programmability, the device lends itself to a number of roles. At one end of the scale, it can act as a level translator, providing an interface between otherwise incompatible devices. It can act as a companion chip to a central processor or microcontroller and ...
Read More
|
Back in 1965, Gordon Moore realised the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since 1958. He saw no reason why that shouldn't continue to happen 'for at least 10 years'.
Read More
|
As we approach 2013, the mixed signal and analogue markets will unquestionably play an increasingly important role in the design and operation of electronic systems worldwide. Nowhere is this more evident than in the development of power conversion and power management solutions.
Read More
|
Everyone is familiar with the technologies used for person to person communication, such as mobile phones and PCs, but few are as well acquainted with machine to machine (or M2M) technology, a broad term for the huge range of machines that talk to other machines – servers, controllers, sensors or 'the cloud.'
Read More
|
Global energy consumption is expected to grow by about 70% in the next 25 years – driven by rising standards of living in developing countries. Faced with this growth, consumers and commerce alike are looking to the electronics industry and demanding that technology get smarter in terms of how it can contribute to shifting loads and saving energy.
Read More
|
If there is one design pressure above any other in today's environment, it is that of time to market. But an increasing concern to customers is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a project. While cost is always important, the actual component bill of materials (BOM) is becoming much less of an issue to customers than the costs involved in ...
Read More
|
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is a central enabler for Moore's Law and the incredible electronic innovation that is the driving force in today's global economy. Keeping up with Moore's Law requires continuous innovation from the EDA industry. In fact, if you drop any one of EDA's major innovations of the last 25 years, engineers would not be ...
Read More
|
One of the trends during the 21st Century has been the integration of SoC like components into an FPGA fabric.
Read More
|
The technology landscape in the UK has developed somewhat differently from North America and Asia. Britain has not witnessed the massive growth of firms like Apple or the rise of global internet giants such as Google and Facebook. Neither has it seen the emergence of state backed OEMs like Samsung and Huawei. Nonetheless, the UK has managed to ...
Read More
|
Over the last several decades, the basic model of instrumentation has remained largely unchanged. Engineers and scientists have typically selected fixed function hardware and used software, such as NI LabVIEW, on a PC to control the instrument. The PC and bus that connects them have taken on many guises, ranging from a desktop PC controlling ...
Read More
|
The Technology Strategy Board recently announced that it is investing up to £4million in a competition that will stimulate the development of an open application and services ecosystem for the Internet of Things. Indeed, with Ericsson predicting there will be 50billion connected devices by the end of the decade, M2M communications technology will ...
Read More
|
The desire to be seen to be green is seeing the trend to lower voltages go into sharp reverse. The devices beyond the point of load (PoL) continue to reduce their internal supply voltages to avoid stressing their tiny transistors to the point of failure. But low voltages lead to high currents and high energy losses. To avoid burning huge amounts ...
Read More
|
Designing pcbs was at one time a sequential process. But the growth in popularity of fpgas has seen that process become more of a parallel operation.
Read More
|
We live in an increasingly connected world, a world generating a massive amount of data that is growing at a faster rate than current investments in IT can support. The difference between the available investment and what is required to support current data growth has given rise to what I call the 'data deluge gap'.
Read More
|
Electronica 2012 – the world's largest electronics exhibition – will take place between the 13 and 16 November at the Munich Trade Fair Centre.
Read More
|
The beginning of 2012 marked an important anniversary, not only for the electronics industry, but also for consumers around the world. The celebrations – even if they were muted – recognised the launch of Texas Instruments' first digital signal processor (dsp) as a commercial product.
Read More
|
Electronics manufacturing in the UK is an interesting subject for debate for a range of reasons. At the top of the list is the perception amongst many people that electronics manufacturing just doesn't take place here. But once you put that somewhat blinkered view aside, there are a range of debate points which inform companies about the benefits ...
Read More
|
You might have specified an 18bit SAR a/d converter with a signal to noise ratio (snr) of more than 101dB, but will your design give you the performance you expect? To achieve that dynamic range, you need to make sure your largest signals use the converter's full scale; in other words, you need to exercise all the codes. But how do you do that?
Read More
|
The latest communications processor family from Mindspeed Technologies is designed around the ARM Cortex-A9 core, bringing improved performance over the previous generation.
Read More
|