26/11/2013
No-one's getting any younger and we have a lot more people getting old. By 2060, the number of people in the European Union aged 65 and over will almost double to 29.5% of the population, according to Eurostat. The percentage of people aged 80 and above is expected to triple.
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13/08/2013
When the Pi first appeared, its clear target market was education. It did not take long for companies to realise its potential as a mass produced, low cost off the shelf computer.
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25/06/2013
It's taking time for wearable technology to move from technological curiosity to practical reality. Some of the obstacles are practical; others are more about social acceptability and attitudes. And some of it involves the tendency for effective wearable technologies to become mentally invisible.
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23/04/2013
Not so long ago, getting a business venture off the ground involved one course of action: grovelling to a bank manager in the hopes they would offer a loan or second mortgage.
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12/03/2013
During the past 30 years, open source software has moved from being a fringe activity to a core component of the industry.
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22/01/2013
Computing is now well on its way to becoming invisible, a prospect that the late Mark Weiser, former PARC chief technology officer, saw more than 20 years ago.
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27/11/2012
Short range, low power radio is a hotbed of anarchy amid the highly regulated sections of the radio spectrum, reserved for access by the military, communications companies and TV channels.
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09/10/2012
Viewed from the outside, the world of the printed circuit board (PCB) seems to move very slowly. The core technologies used in PCB fabrication have not changed radically in decades; boards remain based on glass fibre and vias are still the result of holes being drilled and plated. But PCB tools have evolved as more subtle changes in packaging and fabrication technology have taken place.
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14/08/2012
Large scale digital logic began not with the vacuum tube but the electromechanical relay. Although vacuum tubes were available at the time – and were used on competing machines – Konrad Zuse chose to build the first operational programmable computer in Berlin using electromagnetic relays, rather than tubes, because he considered them to be more reliable when used in bulk.
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26/06/2012
The logic analyser had a difficult birth. It only came about as a result of the struggle by Hewlett Packard to keep pace with Tektronix oscilloscopes during the early 1970s. And so dominant was the oscilloscope in design it took the logic analyser some time to be recognised as a category of instrumentation in its own right.
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24/04/2012
Visibility is everything in debug, but it is hard to achieve in the world of embedded systems. Compared to desktop work, where a software monitor can easily show the internal state of a system, debugging an embedded target can seem more like keyhole surgery.
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13/03/2012
The term 'embedded system' dates back to a time when most things had code buried deep inside. The user interface might be nothing more than a segmented led and nobody expected the code inside to be updated, short of a complete board replacement. Now, even a cooker might have some form of touch based graphical user interface, even if it is not quite up to the job of running downloadable apps. And, as more systems acquire network connections, customers expect to be able to update the products they use.
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24/01/2012
In a world where everything is connected to everything else by the internet, the need to keep secrets has never been so strong. Traditionally, the need for strong encryption was limited. Governments and military organisations required it to protect secrets from the enemy and so it remained a specialist subject. The rise of virtualisation has changed all that.
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23/11/2011
When you consider how difficult it was to hook up peripherals to a PC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is little wonder that the Universal Serial Bus (USB) should have been such a success. Users had to wrestle with arcane interrupt and address selections to attach more than a couple of serial or parallel peripherals to a computer, often with unpredictable results and rarely entirely successfully.
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23/11/2011
The fuel cell is one of those technologies that never quite makes it to the mainstream. Yet it is almost as old as the battery that many want it to replace.
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10/11/2011
Practically every year, networking experts claim the internet is about to run out of room, but the truth is the internet has been close to running out of room since the mid 1990s.
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10/11/2011
The trend in RF design over the past 20 years has clearly been towards greater levels of digitisation in order to squeeze more capacity out of some of the most congested parts of the radio spectrum. At the same time, operators want to reduce power consumption in their basestations and hubs while users want better battery life out of their handsets. These factors are uniting to force big changes on the analogue front-end.
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25/10/2011
It says something for the status of FR4 as an everyday material that people notice when a printed circuit board (PCB) is not green. Yet both the fibreglass – yet another product of silicon – and the UL94V0-rated flame-retardant resin that binds the fibres together – the source of the FR in FR4 – are colourless.
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25/10/2011
Wherever you go in electronics, you cannot avoid silicon, although its pre-eminent status is coming under threat. Its amorphous oxide is only just beginning to be displaced from leading edge integrated circuits as the gate material of choice. But, in the meantime, its crystalline form is still going strong as the primary timekeeper for electronics.
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11/10/2011
Electronics design may have gone strongly digital, but the world with which most systems deal remains unreservedly analogue. As more signal-processing functions have moved into the digital domain – partly for flexibility and increasingly because the algorithms offer better power-performance than analogue-domain processing in the latest deep submicron processes – the analogue-to-digital (A/D) converter has become more important than ever.
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11/10/2011
C was never meant to take over the world, yet it has done more than any other high-level language to displace assembly language as programmer's tool of choice. The bad news is that C's success arguably owes a lot to machine code in the first place.
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27/09/2011
The light-emitting diode (LED) has revolutionised the look of electronic products, with each new extension in the range of colours on offer providing an opportunity for designers to set new fashions. It's hard to find a consumer product that does not sport a blue LED – thanks to the rise of nitride-based devices in the past ten years – where once red and green prevailed.
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27/09/2011
Earlier this year, the Computer History Museum in California held a 40th birthday party for the SPICE analogue modelling simulator – the most longest lived and most widely used electronic design automation (EDA) tool in the world.
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13/09/2011
Few passive components exist in the sheer variety of forms that the capacitor has taken. Simple in principle, the design of the capacitor involves a number of tradeoffs that make it impossible to satisfy all possible uses with just a few types of product.
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13/09/2011
The question of efficiency is never far away when looking at power supply design, even though it might be trumped by cost when the final choice is made. For years, however, efficiency has been about a single number: the peak efficiency at a favourable load point.
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