New Electronics Technology Articles

Breeding success: Embedded World 2012 preview

14/02/2012

This year's embedded world exhibition and conference takes place in Nuremberg from 28 February to 1 March. The tenth running of the event is set to be bigger and more international than ever, according to the organiser. Exhibition manager Alexander Mattausch noted that exhibitor numbers are 23% up on the same time in 2011, with appreciable growth in the number of international companies.

FPGA-PCB codesign; a 21st Century approach to integrating fpgas into the pcb design process

14/02/2012

Integrating advanced fpgas on a pcb is becoming increasingly challenging, with issues including generating optimal fpga pin assignments that do not add layers to a pcb or increase the time required to integrate the fpga with the pcb design. Because of this, fpga designers, schematic engineers and pcb designers struggle to create fpga pin assignments that meet the goals for the entire system.

Maximising range and battery life in cost sensitive wireless networks

14/02/2012

Given the high profile of 2.4GHz wireless standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, many manufacturers assume this is the de facto transceiver frequency. While this is true for some applications, many others have relatively low data rate requirements and operate within a closed wireless network. In these cases, a proprietary protocol can reduce system cost significantly.

Offloading tasks from the microcontroller can improve power efficiency

14/02/2012

The single biggest concern among microcontroller users used to be system cost, but energy consumption has steadily become a bigger issue.

Power management in battery powered medical devices

14/02/2012

A fundamental shift in the nature of healthcare delivery is seeing a host of therapeutic procedures, once found only in hospitals, migrating to the doctor's surgery and the home. The driver is the increased costs of treating a growing population and the need for greater efficiency.

Reference design addresses issue of power consumption in portable products

14/02/2012

Increasingly, electronic products are being designed to consume less power. The reasons include the use of smaller batteries to enable smaller products or to provide longer battery operating life. And there is particular pressure on those developing mobile devices in this respect.

Will haptics transform the way in which we interface with electronic devices?

14/02/2012

We are surrounded by electronic machines, many of which have advanced at an astonishing rate. But, arguably, the way we interact with these machines has lagged far behind. For example, decades after speech recognition was invented, how many people do you hear talking to their pcs? The humble keyboard and mouse remain the dominant interface.

Advanced technology ics cut all current paths to achieve zero power drain in standby

24/01/2012

With standby power consumption representing a significant proportion of electricity consumed around the world, standards for no load performance are tightening. For example, the European Commission's Energy-related Products (ErP) Directive Tier 1, which permitted a no load consumption of 0.5W for products manufactured in 2010, was tightened in 2011 to 300mW for adapters with an output less than 51W.

Company takes the assp route to support 100Gbit Ethernet systems

24/01/2012

Merchant chips that address 100Gbit Ethernet and optical transport are finally coming to market. Cortina Systems claims its CS605x family of transport processors is the first to address the 100Gbit Ethernet and Optical Transport Network (OTN) markets.

E-paper displays find industrial applications

24/01/2012

Electrophoretic displays have been developed by companies such as E Ink to replicate, as closely as possible, the appearance of text on paper. Not surprisingly, these displays have been the enabling technology for e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Kobo's Touch.

Mixed signal asics meet cost and performance targets

24/01/2012

Custom analogue/mixed signal asics are economical at comparatively low volumes, with affordable non recoverable engineering (NRE) costs, meaning a custom chip design can be considered more readily than previously.

The seven stages of start up

24/01/2012

The south of France is a haven for start ups and its success can be measured by a continuous stream of new ventures and the sustained growth of earlier launches.

Connector system removes the need for a midplane in high performance systems

10/01/2012

High performance computing systems by necessity pack as many boards in an enclosure as possible. But the fact they are high performance means they generate a lot of heat. Cooling them becomes an important design issue.

Cubesats and low cost launchers open space to many more users

10/01/2012

Towards the end of 2012, a tiny satellite the shape of a cd rack will be blasted into space on top of a converted intercontinental ballistic missile, then be hurled into orbit by a spring-loaded pod. Although dwarfed by communications and military satellites, the launch of the UK Space Agency's first nanosatellite will mark a milestone: kicking off a satellite industry for the rest of us.

How integrated solutions are simplifying sensor transmitter design in industrial applications

10/01/2012

Sensors transmitters are commonly used in process industries to help control parameters such as temperature, pressure and flow. Temperature transmitters (TT), for example, can be found in food and beverage, pharmaceutical and environmental control processes. In the chemical industry, the TT will be used to ensure the solution in a chemical reactor stays at a constant temperature.

In-target test automation set to boost embedded software quality

10/01/2012

Releasing a product with bugs is potentially very expensive, especially when the cost of field upgrades, recalls and repairs are considered. Less quantifiable – but at least as important – is the damage done to reputation and consequent loss of customer goodwill.

New transistor design tackles threshold voltage variability issues

10/01/2012

As cmos transistors continue to get smaller and smaller, it becomes increasingly difficult to make them behave in a similar fashion. With more and more transistors being packed into smaller areas of silicon, the consequence is that more devices are likely to fail to meet design requirements.

Quartz crystals clocking off?

10/01/2012

The exceptional mechanical and piezoelectric properties of quartz crystal oscillators have, for decades, ensured their success for frequency generation in a range of consumer, computing and communication applications.

Diamond based MEMS devices to solve future communications problems?

13/12/2011

The perceived wisdom is that diamonds are a girl's best friend. But the highly coveted allotrope of carbon is beginning to find friends amongst those developing technologies for the electronics industry.

Gallium nitride based devices set to bring substantial boost to power efficiency

13/12/2011

Gallium nitride has long been known to have useful properties when it comes to electronic components. Even so, its application has largely been confined to more exotic areas of the industry, particularly rf transistors.

Identifying new applications for rfid devices

13/12/2011

The market for rf identification (rfid) devices is exploding. Active and passive tags are appearing in our cars, clothes, food packaging and luxury goods – even on our bodies – as well as being used throughout the manufacturing, processing, transport and logistics sectors.

Silicon photonics the favoured approach to moving vast amounts of data

13/12/2011

The 21st Century is experiencing a data avalanche. Not long ago, a terabyte (10¹²byte) was seen as a vast amount of data. Today, you can have a 1Tbyte hard drive in your desktop pc for less than £50. Soon, much the same will happen at the petabyte (10¹⁵byte) level. And plans are well underway for the exabyte, or 10¹⁸byte generation.

Start up takes power switching technology out of university lab

13/12/2011

There is an amazing amount of fundamental technology research undertaken in UK universities. But getting that work into the hands of entrepreneurs and small companies so it can be exploited has been a struggle. As such, facilitating this kind of technology transfer has been on the industry's 'to do' list for some years, with little sign of progress.

Triteq defines system architectures for clients' designs

13/12/2011

Since product design and development consultancy Triteq was established in 1992, its reputation has grown to the extent that 35% of new business is won through customer referral. But what exactly are its customers' expectations and how are these met?

Better by design: Introducing the Engineering Design Show 2012

22/11/2011

The increasing imperative is for engineers to operate across a variety of technological sectors and to incorporate ever more advanced technology into their designs – and this makes getting to grips with the latest products and techniques crucial.