Optoelectronics – the partnership of technology and light – is an area of great innovation and exciting development. Helped by the rapid evolution of components and technologies, new applications abound for electronic devices that source, detect and control light.
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Research into solar cells has succeeded in improving the efficiency of the process of converting photons into electrical energy. Laboratory cells have demonstrated efficiencies beyond 20% and scientists are confident they can push this figure much further. However, the efficiency of the cell itself is only part of the story.
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Rapid growth in the intelligence and interconnected nature of embedded devices is accompanied by an increase in security threats. Attacks are perpetrated not only by the usual suspects, but also by a new breed of hackers supported by organised crime, nation states and terrorist organisations.
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Patents – and IP in general – are big business. One way or another, patents make money for their owners; whether that's from the products they enable or from license fees they generate. But there's another value to patents, one of which has been demonstrated recently in no uncertain terms: the right IP is worth an awful lot of money when sold.
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The need to reduce road accidents and the number of people who die as a result of them has been at the forefront of automotive design for many years. But it is only more recently that electronics technology has been applied to the problem, with research teams around the world working on ways to make driving safer through providing driver ...
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Since its introduction into UK law at the beginning of 1996, the EMC Directive has blended into the background of electronic design. While a few companies may ignore its requirements, the vast majority of engineers now adopt designing with emc in mind as best practice.
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Increasing demand for electrical energy has motivated the drive to reduce energy consumption, as suggested by the European Climate Change Programme. Thus, the decision was made to adopt substantial demand side measures.
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To take advantage of performance improvements provided by multicore processors, it is essential to have a good command of concurrency. Yet most developers are accustomed to reasoning about programs from the perspective of a single thread of execution and may use techniques and tools that are themselves fundamentally based on a single threaded ...
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Even if you have nothing to do with the telecoms industry, it is hard not to see just how rapidly and dramatically things are changing. Just a few years ago, only the most farseeing of commentators could have predicted the revolution we are experiencing; not just in how telecoms networks are used, but also in how they are engineered.
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When integrating a radio chip or module into a typical embedded system, designers often face the frustrating task of tracking down and eliminating noise and spurious signals. Potential noise sources include switching power supplies, digital noise from other parts of the system and noise from external sources.
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Many top sportspeople live by the motto 'Be the best you can be'". In today's ultra competitive sporting world, reaching that peak, maintaining it and then pushing further demands much more detailed information than can be gained from intuition and a stopwatch.
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What do ics, lasers, optical fibres, capacitors, displays and headphones have in common? Answer: they are all electronic products that depend on one or more of the rare earth elements. And that list is far from complete.
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When military customers discuss new embedded radar, communications intelligence (comint), signal intelligence (sigint) and situational awareness systems, they are demanding the levels of performance provided by the High Performance Computing (HPC) systems used in demanding commercial applications.
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There is a school of thought that believes hardware/software codesign is tomorrow's technology – and always will be. But is that really the case?
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Until recently, demand for more processor performance has been met by faster clocking, more bit width and ever smaller fabrication nodes. The introduction of multicore x86 devices has also helped to boost performance while keeping power consumption at a reasonable level.
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Cables are, in almost every application, yesterday's technology; if it isn't wireless, it's almost not worth considering. If you've decided that cables should go, what is the best solution for your product? There's a range of options available to design engineers, but one thing is certain: one size doesn't fit all.
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Continuity in the design flow is becoming critical if engineers are to meet tighter budget and time constraints when developing next generation signal processing and communications systems.
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In today's highly competitive semiconductor industry, profitability hinges largely on advantageous design performance, high yield and rapid time to market. As leading edge designs push into smaller process nodes, this is becoming even more evident.
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It is reasonable to assume that anyone reading this article has dealings, in some way, with a data centre. Whether it's through the use of social networking sites, buying goods and services online or accessing 'cloud computing', the data centre is an integral part of our lives.
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Energy storage has been a focus of much research over the years as developers look to pack more power into a given volume. But increasing the energy density is only one avenue of work; researchers are also looking to increase the power density. By combining high energy density (W/m3) with high power density (W/kg), the best of both worlds can be ...
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Direct conversion, or zero IF, receivers are popular in applications where the need to reduce power consumption, reduce costs and extend battery life are behind requests to use 'all the Nyquist bandwidth' from an a/d converter.
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Medical device manufacturers understand the importance of the operating system (OS) and, contrary to common practice for embedded systems design, often select the OS before they choose the board.
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The emergence of smartphones and tablet computers alongside digital cameras, tvs and laptops means most interactions will soon be between devices, rather than between a device and the internet. Looking to enable these links, the Wireless Gigabit standard is being aimed as a broad interface that will support key computing and consumer electronics ...
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Choosing the right timing solution to fit a specific application is a critical part of the design process. Engineers need to determine system requirements, identify the components that meet these requirements, obtain component samples and evaluate and qualify them.
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The need to develop vocational skills has come into sharp focus over the last few years after a long period during which the traditional apprenticeship was seen as 'old fashioned'.
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