16/06/2017
For more than 50 years, test engineers have been taking a PC-based approach to automating stand-alone instrumentation. With so much investment tied up in capital assets for test equipment, engineers are looking for reassurance that they can satisfy current and future testing needs. While capital expenditure on hardware is often the easiest cost to associate with test, the importance of a good software investment is commonly overlooked. Instrumentation will continue to evolve, but one thing remains consistent over time – software. Software is at the heart of every instrument control system, and it can help you future proof your application.
|
|
|
13/06/2017
A revolution is unfolding amongst manufacturing companies, with an increasing number investing in smart factory technology – intelligent machines, devices and measurement and testing equipment – to monitor every critical parameter of the manufacturing process.
|
|
|
13/06/2017
It’s probably fair to say that an electronic engineer’s ‘go to’ instrument is an oscilloscope. Recognising that, test and measurement product developers have regularly updated their portfolios; not only adding more features, but also providing devices which meet a much broader range of user needs.
|
|
|
24/05/2017
Defective products or work represent the largest cause of liability loss for businesses, accounting for 43% of the value of all claims in the UK. The average value of such claims is in excess of £312,000, with the cost of product recalls a major factor.
|
|
|
24/05/2017
When Freescale introduced the i.MX processor line in 2001, it’s probably fair to say traditional embedded systems developers didn’t rush to embrace them.
|
|
|
23/05/2017
Although it’s 15 years since LED lighting made its debut, take-up is accelerating across all areas of lighting, helped by its lower power consumption, longer lifespan, increased robustness and faster switching capabilities.
|
|
|
23/05/2017
The pressure on those developing new battery chemistries is increasing as consumers demand the ability to use their electronic devices for longer between charges. And it seems that researchers are responding with a range of potential solutions, not only based on lithium, but also exploring other elements. Beyond that, solid state electrolytes are beginning to show promise.
|
|
|
12/05/2017
Faster, quieter and more reliable, with better performance. Flash memory based solid state storage devices (SSD) are pushing hard disk drives out of the market and could, one day soon, replace them all together, according to Robert Fan, president of NAND controller developer Silicon Motion.
|
|
|
26/04/2017
The risks and pitfalls of bringing a product to market on time and within budget are legion yet, as the IoT helps to lower the barriers associated with the deployment of new technology, a growing number of start-ups are looking to take their ideas to market.
|
|
|
25/04/2017
For Professor Veljko Milutinovic of the University of Belgrade, computing stands on the edge of major change and it is one that was predicted by physicist Richard Feynman because of the way computing uses energy. In his lecture notes on computation written in the early 1980s – but not published until eight years after his death in 1988 – Feynman argued that computing itself at its limit could incur practically no energy and that all the power would instead go into computation.
|
|
|
12/04/2017
Up to 80% of a company’s document information can be contained in different or separate formats – such as Word, Excel, pdf and AutoCAD – according to Jurate Venskeviciute-Buciene, chief marketing officer at DocLogix, a specialist in document and process management.
|
|
|
07/04/2017
Imagine today’s typical test manager, awash in an alphabet soup of wireless protocols and sensors upon sensors. Thanks to the proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s a circumstance not unlike a star-filled sky, teeming with a dizzying mix of possibility and disorientation that is surely keeping organisational leaders up at night as they wonder what to do next.
|
|
|
29/03/2017
The automotive industry is going through some significant changes at the minute, with electric and connected vehicles already on the road. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicles are being tested across the globe and will, potentially, enter the mainstream in just a few years.
|
|
|
29/03/2017
Just less than a month ago, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, used his budget speech to make a case for 5G, the next-generation mobile technology, and promised to invest £16million in a series of trials and to support research into the development of technology to underpin its deployment.
|
|
|
28/03/2017
?The automotive segment is often considered to be associated solely with cars and related applications. It is, however, much bigger than that; encompassing a broad range of applications such as buses, trucks, industrial vehicles, mobile machinery, forklifts, automated cleaning machines and emergency vehicles.
|
|
|
28/03/2017
Model-based approaches to electrical and electronic system design – usually based on UML derived languages such as SysML – are frequently not suited to agile, iterative architecture optimisation. But there is another approach; one that uses standardised, hierarchical function models combined on a single abstraction level to describe the technical content of system architecture.
|
|
|
14/03/2017
Although predictive maintenance (PdM) is an established technique, it is quickly becoming recognised as a more viable way of preventing equipment failure than preventive maintenance (PM).
|
|
|
14/03/2017
Connecting a probe to a device under test can prove to be a time consuming activity, especially in the case of the increasingly complex devices that are now entering the market. While the ideal probe should offer ease of connection, convenience, absolute signal fidelity, zero signal source loading and complete noise immunity, there is currently no ideal probe size or configuration.
|
|
|
14/03/2017
The networking world has largely been defined by the development of fixed function chips. While these devices have been one of the means by which data rates have increased, this has been achieved at the expense of configurability.
|
|
|
13/03/2017
PXI has long been established as the de facto standard for building automated test systems, but its uses stretch beyond solely manufacturing or production test. With the PXI platform’s capability for running real-time operating systems or deploying code to FPGAs, it is also well suited to use earlier in the development process, particularly for complex devices like electronic control units (ECUs) and full authority digital electronics control (FADEC) systems.
|
|
|
28/02/2017
The compliance process in electronics product development can appear intricate and precarious; especially so if mandatory rules or regulations are misinterpreted. Now, developers and OEMs have the European Union’s new Radio Equipment Directive 2014/53/EU (RED) to grapple with.
|
|
|
28/02/2017
It may seem something of an understatement, but Phil Mayo, director of sales for Altium UK, believes: “The PCB is important.” And perhaps that’s one reason why the workshop and conference sessions addressing PCB design at last year’s Electronics Design Show (EDS) attracted record numbers of engineers.
|
|
|
28/02/2017
In an ideal world, when the hardware and software for a new product are mated and the power applied for the first time, everything works just as specified. But we don’t live in that ideal world; we live in a ‘buggy’ world where not everything goes as planned.
|
|
|
15/02/2017
While silicon currently remains the material of choice of power devices, there is little headroom available to improve figures of merit such as on resistance and gate charge. However, there appears to be more room for manoeuvre with alternative materials and two such materials which are focusing the attention of device developers are silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN).
|
|
|
31/01/2017
Recently a member of TDK-Lambda’s technical marketing team experienced first-hand just how much influence small diameter electrolytic capacitors can have on long-term power supply reliability. Unfortunately he picked February to have his central heating system upgraded and Britain’s unpredictable weather system delivered snow. The seven year old boiler system in the loft had been turned off for two days while the radiators were replaced. When the installation was complete, the boiler was switched on, but failed to start
|