It always seemed that working for one of Silicon Valley’s new, global, multi-billion dollar algorithm companies would be good fun – bring your pet to work, free connoisseur meals, lots of sexy chicks, recreational facilities in the office etc. But apparently it’s not quite like that. A sacked Facebook advertising manager called Antonio Garcia Martinez ...
There was once a memory technology which used the floating body effect of SOI as a switch. It was a capacitor-less single transistor technology 2x the density of DRAM and 5x the density of SRAM. It was invented in Switzerland by a former Micron guy and a Russian. A company raised $22 million to develop ...
Fable: The Memory Which Zero-ed
Natalie Price has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £14,000 to bring her device for people with dementia and their carers to market. She was inspired to create a device that would keep people living with dementia safer having watched her own mother care for people with the disease for over 15 years. Price has ...
Young entrepreneur goes crowdfunding for device to aid dementia care
Toshiba has revealed details of an electrostatic discharge protection scheme for 0.13μm analogue power semiconductors. “ESD protection is much more robust, up four times, and the standard deviation is only 1/12 that of the conventional structure,” claimed the firm. 3D simulation revealed that lattice temperature increase due to the current flowing at the highest electric field ...
Input structure boosts analogue ESD protection
Harting has announced a range of current transformers with an eye to wind energy system developments. The window type current transformers can be used to measure the feed from decentralised power generation plants for billing activity with the network operator. The transformers incorporate a transducer that has a rectangular shape with a cut that is ...
Current transformers shape up for wind power systems
Zytronic, the supplier of rugged projected capacitive touch sensors, has added force sensing to its sensor range which will allow systems to differentiate between a soft and hard touch. Force or pressure sensing is becoming available on smartphones and UK-based Zytronic is bringing it to retail and industrial applications. Its approach is based on a ...
Touch sensor will measure force too
NI has introduced a PXIe module source measure unit (SMU) with a measurement sensitivity of 10fA and capable of driving a voltage output up to 200V. The PXIe-4135 SMU has the low-current accuracy and can provide up to 68 channels in a single PXI chassis for wafer-level parametric test, materials research and characterisation of low-current ...
PXIe-based wafer tester has 10fA current sensitivity
Toshiba has announced an opto-isolated IGBT pre-driver IC for automotive inverters within electric and hybrid vehicles. Called TB9150FN, it includes a number of protection functions. with various enhanced protective functions “It integrates a photo-coupler that secures high-level isolation characteristic between control [primary side] and drive [secondary side]. It incorporates a precise IGBT temperature detection function, ...
Opto-isolated IGBT pre-driver for in-vehicle inverters
Forgive me for missing this one at the time, but I just noticed that Toshiba announced its intention to get out of GaN-on-silicon white leds by the end of last year (2015) The company had published some high-efficacy devices, and was working on 200mm wafers, but maybe yields were lower than Toshiba was comfortable with. ...
Toshiba gets out of GaN-on-Si leds
Silicon Labs is sampling multiband Wireless Gecko SoCs which enable developers to use the same multiprotocol device for operation in 2.4 GHz and multiple sub-GHz bands. The devices are designed to support standards-based and proprietary 2.4 GHz protocols for short-range connectivity and proprietary sub-GHz protocols for long-range connectivity. A single hardware design can support multiple ...
Silicon Labs sampling multiband wireless Gecko chips
Mouser has signed a global distribution agreement With Via Technologies. The VIA product line of integrated boards and modules enables the development of embedded system designs based on industry-standard PicoITX and ETX form factors. The VIA EPIA-P910 integrates the performance of a 1.2GHz VIA Eden X4 processor with a media system processor (MSP), two USB ...
Mouser signs up Via Technologies
The Yanks love a good lawsuit and will start one at the drop of a hat on the flimsiest of evidence – but the guy who invented the iPhone 15 years before Steve Jobs, takes the biscuit. The guy didn’t actually get a patent for his design because he didn’t pay all the fees but ...
The Man Who Invented The iPhone
Electronics Weekly is hosting the IoT Design 2016 event in London on 15 September 2016. And note that the deadline for early bird offers expires on 30 June.
Deadline for IoT Design Early-Bird booking approaches
An interview with Wired magazine sees Rasperry Pi co-creater Eben Upton talking about the possibilities of running Android on a Raspberry Pi.
Promising signs for Android on a Raspberry Pi?
Universal Display Corporation has bought the OLED intellectual property assets of BASF, through its wholly-owned subsidiary UDC Ireland for approximately €87m. “Representing 15 years of research and development, the assets include over 500 issued and pending patents around the world, in 86 patent families,” said UDC. “Largely consisting of phosphorescent materials and technologies, the portfolio has ...
OK, so you might have another use for a non-stick surface for polycarbonate and polypropylene, but getting the last of the shower gel out of a bottle is important in my book. Laundry detergent spreads out on a piece of normal polycarbonate (left), but flows rapidly across, and off of, a treated piece. Researchers at ...
Getting the last drop out of bottles
Odd that Vodafone should take Brexit as a trigger for suggesting it may relocate its HQ outside the UK. For years while good Euro-democrats like Neelie Kroes pushed for better deals for mobile network consumers – e.g. for cutting roaming and data charges – Vodafone has been the chief lobbyist behind whichever wretched UK politician ...
Intel has committed to invest $1.5m over the next three years in research in semiconductor materials, devices and photonics technologies at Tyndall National Institute, the Irish ICT research institute. Intel has been investing in research at the Cork-based institute since 2009. Bernie Capraro, Research Manager, Silicon Technology at Intel Ireland, said: “The standard of work from ...
Intel invests $1.5m in IoT chip R&D in Ireland
HD audio is not just nonsense – it can be distinguished from CD audio by ear, according to Queen Mary University of London. The University has just done a meta-study of over 12,000 different trials from 18 studies where participants were asked to discriminate between samples of music in different formats. “Audio purists and industry ...
HD audio is perceptibley better than CDs
Portable medical monitors and terminals will move more healthcare to the patient’s home and this is creating special requirements for designing the power systems which allow safe and reliable operation, writes Tony Armstrong Portable and wireless medical instruments rely on low power operation, however, unlike many other low power applications, these types of medical products ...
Personal healthcare terminals need good power design
Applied Materials has come up with a new etch technology capable of a precision of two atomic layers. The system, called Selectra, is already installed in 10nm process flows at five customers – three of them logic manufacturers and two of them memory manufacturers. It is being used for 3D NAND production. “Selectra has been ...
Applied etches to two atomic layers precision
Aaeon Boxer 6638U is an industrial computer from Review Display Systems based around Intel’s Core i3-5010U. At 197 x 174 x 55mm, it is the smallest member of the Boxer family yet. “This embedded PC is constructed in such a way that access to the devices interior is easy, just by removing screws at the base ...
Core i3 industrial PC fits in 1.9 litres
Imagination and China’s 3Glasses are collaborate to promote ray tracing technology for virtual reality devices. Ray tracing technology enables more immersive games and apps with real-life dynamic lighting models that enable advanced lighting effects, dynamic soft shadows, and life-like reflections and transparencies, previously unachievable in a mobile form factor. Imagination’s PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing ...
Imagination and 3Glasses promoting ray tracing for VR.
Know a really keen Star Trek fan? Well, their Christmas present is sorted for this year! Provided you are happy to pay £119 for a perfect replica of Star Trek communicator.
Beam us up Bluetooth! Star Trek communicator goes on sale
Infineon has begun volume production of its IR1161L and IR11688S secondary synchronous rectification (SSR) family of Controller ICs for SMPS applications. The IR1161L and IR11688S SSR ICs meet the new 2016 standards set by the U.S. Department of Energy and the “European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centre” which demand a 1 ...
Infineon starts volume production of SSR controllers
Applied Micro has announced Mudan – a full Ceph storage reference platform built on 64-bit ARMv8-A technology using Applied Micro’s X-Gene to coincide with the upstream release of Ceph 10.2.1 (Jewel) and runs on RHELSA7.2. Mudan is a fully-featured storage reference platform with a total of 14 storage disks in a 12+2 configuration with a ...
Applied Micro launches Mudan storage platform
Thanks to Time for this one – the top ten tech movies made this millennium. Gravity The Social Network Avatar Her Inception WALL-E Primer Minority Report Skyfall Iron Man
Top Ten Tech Movies Of The 21st Century
LoRa, which is bidding to be an IoT wide-area wireless network technology, is being adopted across Europe, but not yet in the UK. Gothenburg in Sweden is the latest city to see a deployment of LoRa wireless network technology as part of a smart city project. This follows announcements of LoRA deployments in France and ...
Europe goes for IoT network technology without UK
Ed Snowden really is a bit of a boy – after pissing off the US government by revealing the extent of its surveillance he now risks pissing off the Russkies by criticising a new Bill. The Bill, passed by the Duma but not yet signed by Vlad, provides that: Telecoms companies must keep copies of ...
According to the Nikkei, NTT is using reflected laser light for encryption. Random number sequences used in cryptographic systems are usually generated from mathematical formulae but by understanding the algorithms behind the formulae hackers can crack the encryption. Using irregular physical phenomena to generate random numbers can achieve a higher level of unpredictability. NTT has ...
NTT uses reflected lasers for encryption
Another one that has been around for a while, but I missed it – get in touch folks. Gaggione has reversed the shape of its collimator input cone to reduce stray light. It is implemented in its LLC66x7 silicone collimator range – presumably the optics would not come out of the mould if they were ...
Gaggione invents a light input structure
Welcome Project Bloks, from Google. Helping kids to get to grips with technology, via modular building blocks, is a crowded space, but that hasn't stopped Google entering the educational area.
Google Project Bloks for Kids picks Raspberry Pi Zero
Intelligent LED Solutions announce industrial grade flexible LED strips for machine lighting. Branded PowerFlex the range includes constant current drivers, protection diodes and 3M thermal tape. Led-to-led spacings from 7.5 to 25mm are available. Up to 3,500 lm/m and 50,000 hours working life is achievable. “We now have customers using the PowerFlex for machine tool lighting and it is proving ...
Industrial-grade lighting strips
Allegro MicroSystems’ surface-mount magnetic speed sensor contains a compensating circuit that reduces the detrimental effects of magnet and system offsets. “Digital processing of the analogue signal provides zero-speed performance independent of air gap as well as dynamic adaptation of device performance to the typical operating conditions found in automotive applications, including reduced vibration sensitivity,” said the ...
Magnetic speed sensor rejects offsets
For IoT sensor nodes read open-source beacons; to finance a product launch go to a crowd-funding website. Finnish firm Ruuvi Innovations is the latest in a rush of developers to use crowd-finding to get their IoT beacon to market in time for mass take-up. Called, RuuviTag it is a stand-alone Bluetooth 5 ready sensor beacon ...
Bluetooth beacon turns IoT node into a weather station
Hackster.io is running a challenge to add voice control to an internet of things (IoT) project, with support from Raspberry Pi and Amazon Alexa.
A Raspberry Pi voice control challenge
CEVA, has introduced its CDNN2 (CEVA Deep Neural Network), its second generation neural network software framework for machine learning. CDNN2 enables localized, deep learning-based video analytics on camera devices in real time. This significantly reduces data bandwidth and storage compared to running such analytics in the cloud, while lowering latency and increasing privacy. Coupled with ...
Taking a leaf from its neighbour Taiwan’s book, China is to set up a Science Park. Taiwan had a famous success with the Hsinchu Science Park near Taipei then added two more in the middle and south of the island. China will build a park specifically for ICs near Beijing called the Zhongguancun Science Park. ...
China to build $600m IC Science Park
SMIC, has bought a 70% stake in Italy’s small foundry LFoundry for €49 million. LFoundry has total capacity of 40k 8″ wpm. Its 2015 revenue was €215 million. LFoundry mostly makes automotive, security, and industrial ICs including CIS, smart power, touch display driver IC’s and embedded memory. “This allows us to enter the automotive market,” ...
As evidenced by the report of the President’s Commission on National Goals there is urgent need for more basic or pure scientific research in the United States. So, 56 years ago, started the American Letter feature in Electronics Weekly’s edition of December 21st 1960. The article continues: There is every evidence President-elect Kennedy holds this ...
US Should Spend More On Basic Research
We know Raspberry Pi stories for high-end audio often prove popular – see Getting Hi-Fi sound from Raspberry Pi and Hi-Fi add-on board gives Raspberry Pi HD audio – so maybe this one will of interest. Check out the RaspTouch project on KickStarter, from France. It has two main elements: the touchscreen interface and the ...
Raspberry Pi powers RaspTouch open source music player
Microchip has created the lowest power and least costly family of PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs), positioned between the PIC24F XLP and PIC32MX families, and the first PIC32s to have the firm’s ‘core independent’ peripherals. Called PIC32MM, family is aimed at IoT, consumer, industrial and motor control applications. Key figures are: sleep down to 500nA and a 4x4mm package. The ...
Microchip extends PIC32 range downwards
One of the increasing number of things which puzzle me is what IBM is doing in semiconductors. When it sold its semiconductor business to GloFo last year, IBM said that it “expects its unparalleled semiconductor and materials research to continue to advance its capabilities in systems for years to come.” And so it has. A ...
Maybe everyone else has known this for ages, but at last there is enough information on led and collimator data sheets to work out how far one should be form the other to get the specified beam. Gaggione LLC17N This was bought to my attention by optics maker Gaggione – which I had know had ...
Designing led/optic assemblies gets easier
Qualcomm has developed a prototype radio system for 5G mobile communications research and first network trials. Interestingly, this latest 5G prototype system from Qualcomm operates in the sub-6GHz spectrum bands and not in the millimetre-wave (28-65GHz) frequency bands. However, this just confirms the likelihood of a two stage introduction of 5G services over the next ...
Qualcomm offers 6GHz radio chips for early 5G launch
Recent company acquisitions in the component distribution sector may only be the start of things. Since selling over the internet changed the way companies and so-called “maker” designers find and buy new components, the distribution business has been turned on its head. For decades the component distribution business was straight-forward. Supply companies with components for ...
Makers make their mark with distributors
Intel, having failed to sell its VC arm, is now putting McAfee on the block, reports the FT. No one could ever explain why it bought McAfee in 2010 in for $7.7 billion. Especially when the EC then extracted an undertaking that any special protection developed for x86 processors would also be offered to AMD. ...
Intel Said To Be Selling McAfee
When I tell you that I am looking at the Spendwallet, “The thinnest electronic wallet that consolidates all your cards”, you'll not be surprised to know that the first thing I wanted to know about was security.
Spendwallet style takes care of your substance
Take a look at this report from US website Make, describing how to make a wireless drone-disbler using a Raspberry Pi.
DIY Raspberry Pi defence against your neighbour’s drone
After dropping 7% in 2015 to $12.3 billion, power transistor sales are expected to stabilize and begin a modest recovery in 2016, growing by a little over 1% to $12.4 billion, says IC Insights. Power transistors—the $12 billion growth engine in the $21 billion discrete semiconductor market—have faced a choppy uphill climb since surging in ...
Power transistor market growing at 4% CAGR
The Chinese are about to feel the lash of Qualcomm’s fearsome legal department. At the height of Qualcomm’s litigious spree towards the end of the last decade the company was spending $200 million a year on legal fees trying to assert its rights to exploit CDMA technology which it was obliged to license under FRAND ...
China To Feel Qualcomm’s Legal Lash
We are very pleased to announce that IBM will be presenting a paper at the IoT Design 2016 event, organised by Electronics Weekly.
IBM emerging technology specialist to speak at IoT Design 2016
TDK Corporation has added two models to the TDK-Lambda i6A series of step-down, non-isolated DC-DC converters. The i6A4W is capable of supplying currents of up to 20A, and the i6AN allows the creation of negative voltages delivering currents up to 8A. Both can be used in conjunction with the previously announced 14A rated i6A series ...
TDK adds to DC-DC converter series
Microprocessor inventor Dr Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff Jr. was dubbed by The Economist “one of the seven most influential scientists since World War II”. His originality surfaced early earning him a couple of patents before he’d completed his education. Working in college holidays at the General Railway Signal Company he designed a circuit that detected ...
One Of The Seven Most Influential Scientists Since WWII.
Interested in online Android training? Google is inviting people to enroll in a new Android Basics Nanodegree.
Google invites you to enroll in an Android Basics Nanodegree
The EU has reminded member states that they are required to implement EU occupational health & safety directive 2013/35/EU on electromagnetic fields in national law no later than 1 July 2016. Despite the Brexit vote, it is expected that this EU Directive will be implemented in the UK. Directive 2013/35/EU defines minimum regulations for the ...
Brexit: UK reminded to implement EU Directive on EMF
The electronics supply chain is strong enough to get through the period of business uncertainty which will follow the UK decision to leave the EU, says Adam Fletcher, chairman, ECSN. The head of the body which represents UK electronic component distributors and suppliers believes the sector should “keep its heads down” and try to continue ...
Brexit: electronics supply chain can get through this, says ECSN head
The UK people have voted to leave the European Union, but does the decision have any relevance to the specific concerns of those working in the electronics industry. It was clear from a survey by Electronics Weekly before yesterday’s historic vote, that the vote was going to be a personal rather professional decision. The issues ...
Business issues didn’t decide EU referendum
Well, by a small margin, the people of the UK have voted to leave the EU. For weeks before the vote, Electronics Weekly was scouting around for people to go on the record about leaving or remaining. Plenty of people were prepared to talk about the benefits of remaining and, at the last count, nobody ...
Julian David, CEO of techUK, representing the technology and IT sector has said that the UK vote to leave the EU was not the outcome that the majority of techUK members were hoping for. “It opens up many uncertainties about the future. However, the UK tech sector will play its part in helping the UK ...
Brexit: Tech sector must play its part to prepare, says techUK
ARM and Marvell have developed the ARMADA 8040 networking community board, targeting OpenDataPlane (ODP), OpenFastPath (OFP) and ARM network functions virtualization (NFV) ecosystem communities. The board is based on a quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor and includes full CPU and I/O virtualization, an advanced networking packet processor and rich state-of-the-art connectivity. Collaboration with the software ecosystem ...
ARM and Marvell develop ARMADA networking board
Crikey. No one expected that. Cameron’s gamble of offering a Referendum to keep his party together before the 2013 election has come massively unstuck. One suspects that the Cameron/Osborne/Johnson tendency to see politics as a game without consequences, has led England into a potentially dangerous situation. The EU is also to blame. At heart it ...
Despite being seen as a leading semiconductor market driver, the automotive IC market grew only 0.2% last year, says IHS, though the fortunes of the major players were very mixed. The top ten players were: ($bn) NXP 4.2 Infineon 2.9 Renesas 2.7 ST 2.1 TI 1.9 Bosch 1.5 ON 1.1 Micron 0.66 Toshiba 0.65 Osram ...
Volatility Within Flat Auto IC Market
Embedded board design kits for COM Express Type 6 modules based on the 6th generation of Intel Core processors, these are the previously codenamed Skylake U and H processors, have been introduced by Avnet Embedded. The Skylake H CPUs range from Celeron dual-core, Core i3, i5 and i7 all the way up to Xeon quad-core 14nm ...
COM Express gets Intel Xeon quad-core 14nm processor
STMicroelectronics has added low-layer application program interface (LL API) software to its STM32 development tool set. This is for experienced designers and will allow them to work with the ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers (MCUs) down to register-level code, to controlling device peripheral and to optimise performance and run-time efficiency. The LL APIs are integrated into the STM32Cube ...
STM32 developers get access to low-layer APIs
A team of engineers was once assembled to start a chip company. Heading it were a CEO, an exec vp and three vps. Within three years of founding the company, two of the vps, both of equal status, fell out. The crunch came over the data sheet for what was to become the company’s turning-point ...
The latest reinvention of the sticky note is SeeNote, an electronic, wireless device, a little larger at about 3.5-inces square, with a polycarbonate case. It has an ePaper touchscreen and runs on a rechargeable, one-month, li-ion battery.
Gadget Watch: A sticky note for the digital age
“National Women in Engineering Day (#NWED2016) is an international awareness campaign to raise the profile of women in engineering and focus attention on the amazing career opportunities available to girls in this exciting industry.”
UK head of a leading engineering company believes women have the potential to solve some of the world’s biggest engineering problems and address the skills shortage in the sector. On National Women in Engineering Day, the president of Bosch UK believes the internet of things (IoT) could be an opportunity to encourage more woman to ...
Women engineers needed to address skills shortage
u-blox of Switzerland has introduced a GPS receiver that works with inertial sensors to add dead-reckoning navigation when satellites signals are weak or before the receiver has locked-on. It requires an external MEMS inertial sensor and flash memory, and also works with other satellite navigation (GNSS) systems (list below). “EVA-M8E adapts automatically to installations anywhere ...
GPS chip adds inertial dead-reckoning for car tracking
A Danish company has created an internet connected hearing aid. The designer, Oticon says it will allow the hearing aid to communicate directly with connected devices such as door bells, smoke detectors and baby alarms. Called Opn, the hearing aid is compatible with the web-based service IFTTT (If This Then That) for communicating with other ...
Danish firm creates “first” IoT hearing aid
A French firm has designed an open source audio player based on a Raspberry Pi 3 computer module. Called RaspTouch, the audio player is the work of Bordeaux-based Audiophile, which is looking to fund the product introduction on Kickstarter. The firm has created an aluminium chassis for the player which has an ESS Sabre ES9018K2M ...
Raspberry Pi 3 becomes Hi-Fi audio player with Sabre DAC
Researchers from KU Leuven (Belgium), the University of Strasbourg, and CNRS have discovered a new phosphor that could make next-generation fluorescent and LED lighting even cheaper and more efficient. The team used highly luminescent clusters of silver atoms and the porous framework of minerals known as zeolites. Silver clusters consist of just a few silver ...
Zeolites could make LEDs cheaper and more efficient
Ekinops is introducing a flexible rate transponder/muxponder line which allows network operators to quickly and easily double their transport capacity. Using an advanced digital signal processor (DSP) combined with Ekinops’ enhanced T-Chip (Transport-on-a-Chip) technology to support both DP-QPSK and 16QAM modulation formats on a single line card, Ekinops is able to deliver a low-cost, programmable ...
Ekinops transponder/muxponder line doubles network capacity
TT Electronics has launched an SiC power mosfet for high temperature, power efficiency applications with a maximum junction temperature of +225°C. As a result of this operating potential, the package has a higher ambient temperature capability and can therefore be used in applications, including distribution control systems with greater environmental challenges, such as those in close ...
TT Electronics launches SiC power mosfet
Silicon Valley-ites giving to the poor? It’s like a cat swimming. But an organisation called Y Combinator is giving 100 families in Oakland $1000-2000 a month each. Oakland is that place you end up in if you take take the wrong turn off the Embarcadero and end up going over the San Francisco Bay Bridge. ...
A developer in Latvia has come up with a clever but simple control interface for your Linux devices which can be embedded Raspberry Pi designs. Dubbed pyLCI, the software framework runs on the Raspberry Pi as long as it is connected to a suitable display and will control and configure a Linux system in headless ...
Raspberry Pi controls Linux devices without the hassle
With London Technology Week taking place this week, Jim Bowes, CEO and co-founder of digital consultancy Manifesto, suggests ways London can encourage future growth in its internet of things (IoT) technology sector. The capital has been successful at attracting digital technology and software start-ups, but Bowes says more can be done to support research in ...
Call for more support for London’s IoT start-ups
Buzzwords like Industry 4.0, the internet of things (IoT), mobile computing, and cloud computing can currently be found in many headlines in magazines. The common theme throughout is the development of RF communications systems, writes Wolfgang Bartels. Behind all these applications you will find the technologies like LTE, 3GPP, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, RFID, NFC, and ...
Testing the RF circuit for IoT success
Be aware there was (and may still be) a missing sentence in the consolidated version of EU ROHS in the EU website.
As Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One points out there’s no point starting a business where there’s loads of competition. You can’t make money. Taxi-hailing apps are a business which has attracted a large number of competitors, yet Uber has raised $15 billion in backing. Don’t Uber’s backers realise that any cab company can run ...
FTDI Chip has introduced two new board level products and a new IC to support engineers with comprehensive support when implementing USB into their embedded systems. The UMFTPD3A programmer module is designed specifically for use with the company’s development hardware and ICs containing either internal one-time programmable (OTP) memory or eFUSE logic (which are both ...
FTDI Chip adds to support for USB implementation
As purchases are increasingly made via the internet, never before has the packaging of electronic products and components, and their successful delivery through the supply chain, played such an important role in brand loyalty, writes Jean-Louis Evans As the delivery environment can be quite harsh, if a product or its packaging arrives damaged, this can ...
Comment: Risks of buying off the internet
KiloCore is a thousand core processor whose 621 million transistors execute 1.78 trillion instructions per second. Designed with an emphasis on low power operation by engineers at the University of California, the chip was fabricated by IBM on 32nm CMOS, and was revealed at the Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu. “To the best of ...
Enter the 1,000 core processor chip
ADI has announced an optical sensor for gesture recognition, which improves sensing accuracy and reliability by measuring a subject’s position, proximity, and gestures from a single sensor. Solutions requiring multiple sensors are often inaccurate, as the sensors “see” objects differently from varying angles making the signals difficult to combine. The single-point sensing used in the ...
ADI optical sensor for gesture recognition
TI has introduced three retimers which enable an extended signal range over long traces, connectors and cables without degradation of signal integrity. These devices expand TI’s high-performance retimer portfolio, and support flexible, cost-optimized system design, enabling designers to speed their products to market while maintaining optimal performance. The retimers improve signal quality by removing jitter ...
Thanks to IHS for this one – the top ten automotive semiconductor suppliers last year: $bn NXP 4.1 Infineon 2.7 Renesas 2.7 ST 2.0 TI 1.8 Bosch 1.5 ON 1.1 Toshiba 0.7 Micron 0.7 Sanken 0.7
The story begins in 1989 when the glove was launched as a controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System...But it's now been hacked into a motion controller for use with a drone.
US telecoms commission, the FCC will decide next month (14 July) on which frequency bands in the radio spectrum will be used for 5G in the US. After considering spectrum population from low bands below 2.4GHz through mid-range Citizens Broadband Radio service in the 3.5GHz band it seems the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will go ...
US to take global lead on 5G spectrum
Cree is going for horticulture lighting with the XQ-E Photo Red led. “XQ-E Photo Red LED is capable of providing very high levels of growth-promoting light wavelengths from a footprint that is less than one-third the size of its closest competitor with similar output,” claimed Cree. In the same way that lumens indicate not just ...
On June 20th 2016 the Candidate SVHC list increased by 1 to 169.
Problems at fabs making commodity chips have always attracted a question mark. Some years ago Samsung saw its share price go up and the DRAM price rise when it said it had suffered a power outage at a Korean DRAM fab. Later on, Korea’s electricity suppliers said there had been no power outages. So, in ...
Achronix has announced availability of the new PCIe form factor Accelerator-6D accelerator board which is the industry’s highest single-FPGA memory bandwidth, PCIe add-in card for high-speed data center acceleration applications. The board integrates a Speedster 22i HD1000 FPGA with 700,000 look-up-tables that connects to six independent memory controllers allowing for up to 192 GB of ...
Achronix board delivers acceleration for data centres
Qualcomm is supporting the European Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) with its chipsets and Snapdragon mobile processors. Until now Qualcomm’s hardware support for Galileo was in selected chipsets nonly. The Qualcomm IZat location services platform will connect with up to six satellite constellations which means more than 80 different satellites can be used when ...
Qualcomm goes big on sat nav with Galileo support
China is still number 1 in world supercomputing, breaking its own record with an entirely new machine. Built using Chinese designed and built processors with a Chinese archetecture, Sunway TaihuLight achieves 93Pflop/s on the LINPACK benchmark. Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing ...
China leads supercomputing with new machine
The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) is creating a microprocessor benchmark targeting the compute-intensive applications commonly implemented on embedded heterogeneous compute architectures. The benchmark will be applied to parallel applications such as automotive surround view and image recognition and mobile augmented reality (AI). According to the independent processor benchmaking organisation, identifying the potential compute performance ...
AI processors to get performance benchmark
More than a quarter of UK adults polled in the UK Robotics Week survey believe that the biggest benefit of driverless cars will be fewer road accidents. While 20% of adults polled in research believe driverless cars would make road rage less of a problem. The research has been commissioned by the EPSRC UK-RAS Network, ...
UK drivers say robotic cars will be safer
A quarter of people polled in research has been commissioned by the EPSRC UK-RAS Network believe that ball-collecting robots at tennis games will exist within the next 10 years. This one one of the quirky findings in the market research which is being released ahead of UK Robotics Week (25 June – 1 July 2016). ...
Robots will be at Wimbledon in 10 years
An international team has developed a transparent hole conductor. While transparent electron conducting oxides are common, transparent oxides that conduct holes have not been commercialised due to their low conductivity. “Even though conducting holes and transparency were considered mutually exclusive, this new material both efficiently conducts holes and retains most of its transparency to visual ...
Transparent hole conductor for displays, solar cells and LEDs
Bosch Sensortec has launched a 9-axis motion sensor in a 2.5 x 3.0 x 0.95 mm3 package, claiming it to be the world’s smallest. BMX160 includes accelerometer, gyroscope and geomagnetic sensors, and typically consumes 1.6mA. “It is ideally suited for applications such as smartphones, smart watches, fitness trackers, smart glasses, smart jewelry – rings and ...
Bosch claims smallest 9-axis motion sensor
Imec has developed a highly efficient bifacial n-PERT (BiPERT) solar cell featuring a bifaciality value close to 100%. With a rear cell efficiency close to the efficiency measured from the front of the cell, imec’s new achievement underscores the ability to strongly enhance the energy yield of photovoltaic (PV) modules made with this type of ...
Imec develops highly efficient bifacial n-PERT solar cell
TI has introduced a 60-V N-channel power FemtoFET power transistor in a 1.53-mm-by-0.77-mm silicon-based package with a typical on-resistance (Rdson) of 54-m designed to replace standard small-signal MOSFETs in space-constrained industrial load-switch applications. The CSD18541F5 expands TI’s NexFET technology portfolio of FemtoFET MOSFETs to include higher voltages and manufacturing-friendly footprints. CSD18541F5 key features and benefits ...
TI adds to NexFET FemtoFET MOSfets
Intersil is selling a 12-cell Li-ion battery pack monitor which provides cell balancing and voltage and temperature monitoring to safeguard Li-ion battery packs in hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles. System designers can use the ISL78610 as a standalone battery-pack monitor or as a redundant back-up device when combined with the ...
Intersil shipping 12-cell Li-ion monitor for electric cars
This is the season of Goodwill towards all men (and women!). But a suspicion of bitterness has crept in. Colour television has been banned for at least three years whilst the Pilkington Committee deliberates on it and on other broadcasting matters. So, 55 years ago, started the leader column in Electronics weekly’s edition of December ...
The Season Of Goodwill – But Not For TV Industry
IDT and Cavium have come up with a reference design for data centres which incorporates IDT’s DDR4 memory interface and Cavium’s ThunderX family of 64-bit ARMv8-based processors. Cavium and its industry partners developed the design to target server solutions for members of the Open Compute Project (OCP) and other data centre customers. “IDT’s DDR4 technology ...
IDT and Cavium match DDR4 with ThunderX
There's just one week to go until the first Electronics Weekly webinar, which involves Test & Measurment - Combining the Power of Functional Test and Embedded System Access
One day to go – Functional Test Webinar
If you work with flat screens or integrate them into the products you manufacture you will have used low-voltage differential signalling (LVDS) cables.
Only Connect: LVDS cables, a simple guide
A lot of people see this as a bit of a facer for the Yanks – China has built the world’s fastest computer using China-designed microprocessors. Its processor is a 260-core chip developed by the Jiangnan Computing Lab called the ShenWei SW26010 running army 1.45GHz delivering 3 Teraflops. The ShenWei processors were said to have ...
To house small PCBs using USB as the external power and signal interconnect, Hammond Electronics has extended its 1551 miniature enclosure family with three new sizes, all 15.5mm high: 35 x 20mm 50 x 25mm 65 x 30mm “The sizes have been chosen after customer consultation to provide prototype builders and small volume OEMs generous ...
Small enclosures for USB dongles
Insight SIP l, the wireless RF module specialist, has packaged the nRF51822 chip from Nordic Semiconductor (running Bluetooth 4.1), a 32-bit ARM Cortex CPU, 128 kB flash memory, analogue and digital peripherals SPI, I2C and GPIO, a 16 MHz crystal, an RF antenna and matching circuit to form a standalone Bluetooth Low Energy node. Called ...
Insight SIP launches low cost BLE module
The SEMI book-to-bill continues positive with 1.09 for May in line with April’s 1.09 though slightly down from March’s 1.15. May bookings totalled $1.75 – 9.6% higher than April’s $1.60 billion, and is 13.1% higher than the May 2015 order level of $1.55 billion. may billings were $1.60 billion – 9.6 p% higher than April’s ...
SEMI book-to-bill continues positive
Well it’s Referendum Week. The level of debate has been deplorable. Lies, appeals to emotion, patriotic slogans and slander have been the currency of the discussion. Out of all our hundreds of publicly-funded politicians not one has been prepared to give an even-handed account of the pros and cons. All have been partisan and that ...
Many an interesting Bluetooth device for Gadget Master to see at the 'Discover Blue' event in London, which was highlighting some examples of Bluetooth innovation.
Discover Blue showcases latest intelligent Bluetooth devices
The chip industry has been known to get ahead of itself and, back in 2007, a TSMC exec told a forum on 450mm wafer development that “the industry should begin seeing momentum perhaps by the end of this year.” The exec argued that: “When production capacity of the latest wafer size accounts for more than ...
Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter have created a metasurface that strongly absorbs light across the solar spectrum but minimises emission of thermal radiation. It uses uses amorphous carbon as an inter-layer between thin gold films with the upper film patterned with a 2D periodic array using focused ion beam etching. Gold is a first step, ...
Metasurface converts sunlight to heat for electron emission
The industry should machine vision technology more user-friendly because this cutting-edge field has dramatic and positive potential for embedded applications, writes Stephen Turnbull. At its core, machine vision is simply leveraging the information available in an image to make a decision about what to do next with the object in the image. A simple pass/fail ...
GPUs bring scalable processing to machine vision
As well as increasing the range and speed of Bluetooth transmissions, the next version – dubbed simply Bluetooth 5 – will also increase its broadcast messaging capabilities, for beacon operation and location services. The Bluetooth SIG promises Bluetooth 5 will quadruple its range to up to around 400m and will also double its speed. Broadcast ...
Bluetooth 5 standard promises to quadruple range, doubles speed
Rome-based telecoms operator Unidata has adopted the LoRaWAN technology platform to deploy a low power, wide area network (LPWAN) in Italy. This follows news that Orange is deploying LoRa wide area wireless networks for smart cities in France. Unidata will also promote the IoT wireless technology with a demonstration lab in Rome LoRa technology supplied ...
Avnet Memec – Silica has introduced a starter kit for industrial IoT designs with cloud services and applications from the IBM Bluemix. Called MicroZed, the IoT design platform runs Wind River Pulsar Linux operating system on Xilinx Zynq-7000 programmable silicon. The kit integrates the IBM Watson IoT Platform agent on top of a custom-configured, certified ...
IoT design kit offers free IBM Bluemix cloud trial
French microelectronics research organisation Leti is hosting a one-day conference discussing security of IoT devices and applications. Called “System Reliability & Security in a Connected World” the conference will take place in Lyon on June 23. According to Alain Merle, Leti’s strategic marketing manager for security, new technologies are needed to provide privacy and security ...
Intel discusses IoT security at Leti conference
As high-speed electronics replaces micromachines and chemicals, the electronic nose (e-nose) could get cheaper. Aimed at health monitoring through breath analysis, the e-nose has been designed at the University of Texas Dallas and performs ‘rotational spectroscopy’ at over 200GHz using a 65nm CMOS chips. “There have been many efforts to build an electronic nose,” said ...
E-nose sniffs opportunity for health monitoring
The market for PCs and tablets will fall 2% this year following the 8% fall last year, says IC Insights. The markets for PCs and tablets continue to fall as more users delay replacement purchases and increase their reliance on smartphones for mobile-computing applications and access to the Internet. Worldwide shipments of PCs and tablets ...
PC and tablet units to drop 2%
ADI has added ADSP-SC57x and ADSP-2157x processors to its series of single-chip multicore SHARC processors. The devices advance the audio experience by enabling superior sound quality and more cost-effective and reliable audio systems. The new processor platform meets automotive temperature ranges without the need for costly, bulky heat sinks or fans, which saves space in ...
Have you noticed how the semiconductor M&A thing has gone away? Last year there were around $120 billion worth of M&A deals done. This year, apart from a few failed Chinese bids and a NXP shedding a division or two, there hasn’t been much. “It’s not the same gold rush,” says Reinhard Ploss. Why is ...
What’s Happened To All The M&A?
I heard a few bits and pieces about detecting gravitational waves. And the engineering is phenomenal. Gravity waves are measured by movement of suspended test masses, which are 40kg blocks of silica polished to have mirror ends so they can be sensed by laser (I have no idea how laser sensing works when gravity is ...
Thanks to SEPAM for suggesting this Fable. 25 years ago this year, three Japanese companies, inspired by an abandoned attempt by IBM, built a computer based on a technology which had been conceived 24 years before by a Brit who won the Nobel Prize for his idea. After three years, the three companies succeeded in ...
Imagination Technologies has teamed up with Eindhoven chip security firm Intrinsic-ID to add a ‘physically un-cloneable function’ (PUF) to MIPS cores – initially the M5150 CPU – for authentication and anti-cloning. “With growing connectivity across nearly every product category from consumer to automotive to industrial and beyond, security is an ever increasing challenge, and the massive ...
Imagination increases security on MIPS processors
The Big Bang Fair is looking for companies, education institutions and show organisers to play their part in next year’s Fair, taking place at the NEC in Birmingham, 15-18 March 2017. The Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair brings together the STEM community in a collective effort to inspire over 70,000 young people, ...
Big Bang Fair wants firms to get involved in STEM promo
An end-to-end IoT ecosystem designed with re-usable infrastructure and open industry standards has been demonstrated at the recent internet of things (IoT) Thames Valley meetup in the UK. Advantech B+B SmartWorx, Connect2 Systems and DevicePilot were the three companies behind the demonstration of remote monitoring and management of industrial ultra-low power IoT sensor devices. It ...
Meetup demonstrates IoT built on open standards
Businesses looking to recruit specialists with digital skills need to offer competitive relocation packages, new research has found – with 94% of digital candidates willing to relocate for a role if offered good perks. The research, by digital recruitment agency The Candidate, surveyed 500 digital professionals and revealed that 25% have been offered a relocation ...
Relocation, relocation is key for recruiting digital specialists
Cambridge CMOS Sensors (CCMOSS), a specialist in MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) for gas sensing and infrared applications, has been bought by Austrian semiconductor manufacturer ams. The semiconductor company wants to add to its technology for industrial and medical sensors for detecting gases like CO, NOx, and VOCs. The Cambridge firm manufactures its MEMS structures on ...
Cambridge sensor firm bought by ams
Murata is claiming a miniaturisation record with ‘high-frequency’ inductors that have a 0.25 x 0.125mm footprint, and are 0.2mm tall. Officially 008004 size, and called the LQP01HQ series, they apparently have the same Q characteristics as its previous 0.4×0.2mm (01005/0402) LQP02TN range, which have Q=15, but with half the board mounting area. That said, its existing 01005 ...
Murata claims smallest inductors
Xilinx has introduced a stripped-down version of its Zynq FPGAs, reducing the number of 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 cored from four to two in the new ‘CG’ variant. The chips retain both the dual 32bit Cortex-R5 cores of their predecessors, but loses the Mali-400 graphics processor, and there is no H.264/H.265 video codec. “The devices add a ...
Xilinx cuts ARM cores to two in Zynq FPGAs
Imec has developed junction-less gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire (NW) FETs built in lateral and vertical configurations. With their simplified processing, improved reliability, reduced low frequency noise and lower IOFF values, they are an attractive option for advanced logic, low power circuits and analog/RF applications. Moreover, they enable a simpler path for considerable SRAM scaling via the ...
Imec develops junction-less, gate-all-round, nanowire FETs
ASML is to acquire Hermes Microvision (HMI) for $3.1 billion. ASML and HMI are already developing joint approaches that IC manufacturers can use to improve yields. “Our over-arching goal is to serve our customers even better and offer them the tools they need to achieve higher yields at the most advanced nodes,” says ASML CEO ...
ASML buys Hermes Microvision for $3bn
Silego has added to itSGreenPAK (GPAK) product line. Silego’s GPAK family of Configurable Mixed-signal ICs (CMICs) is designed to easily integrate common discrete ICs and passive components into a single device with programmable Non-Volatile Memory. The SLG46108V brings the functionality and versatility of the GPAK family into the ultra-small 1.0 x 1.2 x 0.55 mm, ...
TI has brought out two automotive motor drivers that support high-performance powertrain applications – the DRV8305-Q1, a three-phase brushless DC gate driver, and the UCC27211A-Q1, a high-current half-bridge gate driver. For powertrain applications such as transmission pumps or engine cooling fans, the DRV8305-Q1 features a smart gate-drive architecture with programmable slew-rate control that allows easy ...
TI brings out powertrain motor drivers
Cavium is to buy QLogic for $1.36 billion including QLogic’s $355 million cash. The acquisition delivers ‘significant growth at scale in data centre and storage markets’ says Cavium, ‘the combination enables Cavium to offer a complete end-to-end offering to customers in Enterprise, Cloud, Data Centre, Storage, Telco and Networking markets. QLogic adds an incremental $2+ ...
Soccer violence is nothing new. Edward II banned the game in 1314 because of the off-pitch violence it generated. Why does soccer generate this violence when rugby doesn’t? Rugby fans don’t hate the opposing team’s fans. Quite the reverse. A year or two back while in the South of France during an England v France ...
Vishay has published an app note on charging its 196 HVC Enycap series of hybrid energy storage capacitor-batteries – which combine electrostatic and faradaic energy storage, in its words – as it looks like these components need a little TLC if they are to last. “For applications requiring a constantly high charge state of the Enycap capacitors, such ...
App note covers charging Vishay supercap-battery hybrid
Cree has upped the efficacy of its single-die 3.45 x 3.45mm XLamp XT-E leds. Called XT-E High Efficiency, a 25% increase is claimed over earlier XT-Es providing “a guaranteed minimum efficacy of 164 lm/W at 85°C and 350mA”, according to the firm. At least part of the difference is due to a lower Vfmax than standard ...
Interested in learning more about the IoT? Be sure to make a date in your diary for our IoT Design conference, which is running in London on Thursday 15 September.
Making IoT work for us – IoT Design programme announced
Xilinx has added streamlined dual-core members to the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC family of devices. The new dual-core “CG” family members expand the Zynq MPSoC portfolio scalability, to include dual application and real-time processor combinations. The CG devices will be supported on the Vivado Design Suite, version 2016.3 in Q4 2016. Customers can start designing today ...
CL100 is a mini industrial computer from US-based Logic Supply that can drive a 4k display. Based on Intel’s NUC motherboard size, it has Braswell processor. The all-metal enclosure is around 50mm tall, and is vent-less, keeping dust out of its interior, which increases reliability. “The CL100 is the product of years spent working with embedded ...
TIny fanless industrial PC has 4k video
Net neutrality in the USA got a boost yesterday from a US appeal court ruling that the US FCC can treat Internet service providers as ‘common carriers’ and regulate them accordingly. It stops ISPs throttling some sites and accelerating others which pay them more. AT&T says it will try and take the fight to the ...
Egil, ARM’s next Mali video processor due later in the year, has been designed to optimise performance between the various IP blocks through use of bandwidth saving technologies such as ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC), writes ARM’s Roger Barker. AFBC can be implemented across the entire range of multimedia IP within an SoC and, depending ...
Sam Foster describes the best way to use a power analyser to characterise inrush currents and properly size fuses. In the development of different technologies, many engineers encounter and have to deal with inrush currents to their devices. The reality of inrush current and the meaning of an I2t measurement will be discussed. Also, an ...
NXP has had its sale of its RF Power unit to Jianguang Asset Manangement (JAC Capital) from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The divesture of the RF Power business was a condition for NXP’s merger with Freescale Semiconductor. Earlier this week NXP and JAC Capital announced they had agreed the ...
NXP gets regulatory approval for RF Power sale
Thanks to CapIQ for this one – the ten most profitable (operating margin %) IC companies in 2014: Inotera 53 LTC 46.3 ARM 40.3 TSMC 38.9 Nanya 38.3 Xilinx 32.4 Qualcomm 30.5 ADI 30.1 TI 29.9 Hynix 29.8
Top Ten Semi Companies For Profit
There are only four days remaining to enter your company for an Elektra European Electronics Industry Award. Due to popular demand, the entry deadline for the Elektra Awards 2016 was extended by two weeks, but that finishes Friday 17 June. Entering is simple and free. We hope the deadline extension will allow you to submit the best ...
Elektra Awards 2016: Entry deadline approaching
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), the free programme of study, accessible via mobile, tablet and desktop, is taking off in a big way at the University of Southampton which has just signed up its 200,000th learner. The attraction of MOOCs is that courses can be delivered to large numbers of participants in a way that ...
Mentor Graphics is now supporting the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices with its embedded tools and software portfolio. The embedded software support includes Linux and Android OS, Nucleus real-time operating system (RTOS) and Mentor’s Embedded Hypervisor. Scot Morrison, general manager of the platforms business unit, Mentor Graphics Embedded Systems division, writes: “Dealing with the complexities ...
Xilinx Zynq UltraScale gets embedded software support from Mentor
We like a bit of energy scavenging on Gadget Master and it seems the US Marines are conducting field trials of a device called PowerWalk, that will scavenge energy wasted during route-marches.
US Marines test wearable tech for battery support
