Why are London busses like eFPGA companies? Because zilch happens for ages, then three come along at the same time. In October I spoke to three CEOs aiming to to license FPGA cores. Although conceding that embedded FPGA is an idea whose time has one, each of them denied that they were influenced by the ...
Read full article: Multiple Vendors Pursue eFPGA
QuickLogic is to license its FPGA technology to SoC designers wanting hardware acceleration or reconfigurability. The FPGA core being licensed is ArcticPro eFPGA,. The initial foundry being used is GloFo, and the initial processes available are 65nm and 40nm with 22nm FD-SOI available next year. More foundries will be added next year. “With nearly three ...
Read full article: QuickLogic to license FPGA cores
Future trends, technologies and engineers were the subjects for the keynote of NIDays 2016, National Instrument’s Graphical System Design Conference in London.
Read full article: NIDays 2016: Future trends, technologies and engineers
Wolfspeed (part of Cree) has introduced a 1,000V silicon carbide mosfet. C3M0065100K is a 65mΩ device in a four-lead TO-247-4 package – it has a second source pin for the driver. “This package provides lower switching losses with minimal gate circuit ringing due to the Kelvin gate connection,” said Richardson RFPD, which is stocking the ...
Read full article: SiC mosfet switches 1kV in TO-247 package
Raytheon UK has developed a positioning and navigation system that adds 3D dead-reckoning to global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs, GPS for example), allowing navigation inside buildings. Called ‘Strider’, it comes in two parts – a ‘boot-mounted unit’ (BMU) and a phone app. Inside the BMU are accelerometers, gyros and a pressure sensor (height). This communicates ...
Read full article: Shoe sensor adds dead-reckoning to GPS
Verbatim used LuxLive in London to launch anti-glare AR111 retrofit LED bulbs and demonstrate a new range of linear LED products. Low glare is the big marketing point. “To avoid the uncomfortable glare, the lamps mimic the lighting effect of a traditional halogen lamp by emitting light indirectly via the reflector,” said the firm, which is ...
Read full article: LuxLive: Vebatim’s AR111 and linear source
Marianne Culver is the new president of RS Components. Culver is best known in the component distribution sector for the 10 years she spent at the RS rival, Premier Farnell, where she was director of supply chain/supplier management. Lindsley Ruth, CEO of Electrocomponents, believes Culver’s experience of global distribution is well suited to her new ...
Read full article: RS gets former Farnell exec as president
Chips used to embed IoT functionality are expected to generate sales of $12.8 billion in 2016, says IC Insights. Between 2015 and 2020, IoT IC sales are projected to rise by a compound annual growth rate ( CAGR of 13.3% compared to 4.3% for the entire IC market, which is projected to reach $354.7 billion ...
Read full article: IoT IC Sales To Outpace Market By 3x
Tomorrow evening is the date for the industry’s largest technology and business awards: the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2016. These are the individual success stories and technical and business achievements which will be recognised and presented to an international audience at the Gala Dinner which takes place this Tursday, on 1 December 2016 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park ...
Read full article: Elektra Awards 2016
National Instruments has outlined plans for supporting time sensitive networking for the deterministic handling of data – such as required for industrial IoT applications – at its NIDays Graphical System Design Conference. It is the attempt to answer some of the challenges for the transmission of large amounts of data deterministically – so called ‘Hard ...
Read full article: NIDays 2016: Industrial IoT routes itself into Time Sensitive Networking
Molex can print silver flexible circuits on polyester (PET) substrates with tacks as narrow as 0.13mm (0.005in) spaced by as little as 0.13mm. And it has a way to attach fine-pitch ICs. “The process creates a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditional flexible circuits: etched copper traces on polyimide,” said the firm. “Polyimide is more expensive than ...
Read full article: Printing makes tracks down to 0.13mm on flexi PET
Intel has set up a new group called the Automated Driving Group (ADG) led by Doug Davis and Kathy Winter. Today’s announcement comes after CEO Brian Krzanich announced a $250 million investment for autonomous driving. Intel is teaming with Delphi and Mobileye for Self-Driving Cars and cars based on the Intel solution are expected to ...
Read full article: Intel sets up autonomous car operation
X-FAB and efabless corporation have launched an open mixed-signal design challenge. The objective of this challenge is to give designers the opportunity to deliver a completed design IP for an ultra-low power voltage reference. The IP will be developed in X-FAB’s 350nm mixed-signal process with designers being granted access to the required models, design files ...
Read full article: X-Fab launches mixed-signal design contest
Thanks to the IMF for this one – the ten biggest economies: $trn USA 18.5 China 11.4 Japan 4.4 Germany 3.5 UK 2.8 France 2.5 India 2.3 Italy 1.9 Brazil 1.5 Canada 1.5
Read full article: Top Ten Economies
Touch control has now moved into mid-air gesture control with tactile feedback. Bastien Beauvois describes some of the techniques for designing haptic touch interfaces As technology has advanced so has our way of interacting with it. The first mobile phone keypads aimed to replicate the familiar push-button approach of a traditional telephone handset. Twenty or ...
Read full article: In the air gesture control gets haptic feedback
Allegro Microsystems has crammed a awful lot of electronics into a small package for its latest programmable precision linear magnetic sensing IC – which includes both diagnostics and ESD capacitors. Sensible fields range from ±40 to ±1,800G. Called A1342, the monolithic BiCMOS IC has includes: a Hall sensing element, Hall temperature-compensating circuitry (both sensitivity and ...
Read full article: Precision magnetic field sensor hides many secrets
Three year-old French reverse-engineering and IC security analysis company Texplained of Sophia Antipolis, near Nice, has opened a new laboratory. The lab offers analyses of microchip security and helps companies protect ICs against counterfeiting and piracy. “Microchips are extremely vulnerable to security threats,” says Texplained CEO Olivier Thomas, “we approach, assess and solve microchip security ...
Read full article: Texplained opens Nice lab for IC analysis
TSMC is going to introduce a half-node process at 12nm, reports Digitimes. The 12nm process will have better leakage and be lower cost than 16nm. It is being reported that the half-node process is a competitive response to the 14nm processes of Samsung and GloFo. However GloFo announced. 12nm FD-SOI last month. “In a world ...
Read full article: TSMC introduces 12nm half-node
One of the attractive ways in which the world is trending is that many people can work from anywhere. A number of organisations have sprung up to provide working sites in exotic locations. Hubud provides an environment in Bali with desks and fast Internet and help with accommodation and transport and local requirements. Or there’s ...
Read full article: Working In Shangri-La
The successful launching of an ionosphere probing satellite gives the United States a four-success, three-failure score for scientific satellites in 1960. So, 56 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of November 16th 1960. The story continues: Experimental meteorological and communication satellites and a deep space probe were the other triumphs registered last ...
Read full article: Probing The Ionosphere
The big day is almost upon us, for the industry’s largest technology and business awards: the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2016.
Read full article: Countdown to the Elektra Awards 2016
French research labs Leti and Inac have demonstrated a quantum-dot-based spin qubit using a CMOS process on a 300mm FDSoI wafer. The device, developed with the University of Grenoble Alpes, consists of a two-gate, p-type transistor with an un-doped channel. See University of Sussex quantum gate “Our one-qubit demonstrator brings CMOS technology closer to the emerging ...
Read full article: Leti demonstrates qubit on CMOS wafer
Could Samsung be the first big defection from ARM since the SoftBank takeover? It was always thought that, when ARM relinquished its independence, its customers would look around for other alternatives. The nice thing about RISC-V is that it’s independent, open source and royalty-free. And RISC-V is what Samsung is reported to be using for ...
Read full article: Samsung Defection From ARM to RISC-V.
The winners of the first "Make with Ada" embedded programming competition are announced. For projects implemented on ARM Cortex M or R processors, it's showcasing Ada, the secure language named after Ada Lovelace.
Read full article: Make with Ada competition showcases its winners
The University of Sussex has proposed a route to a practical quantum computer, and has just demonstrated the core ingredient – a two-qubit quantum gate. ‘Practical’ is an important word here, according to Sussex professor of quantum technologies Winfried Hensinger, as while other quantum computer designs might in theory be scalable, they could require billions ...
Read full article: More on: Sussex quantum computer
Rohm Semiconductor has developed an evaluation kit for motor driver devices which is designed as a ‘shield’ to plug directly into the Arduino open source board. There different versions of the kit for the supplier’s various stepper motor driver ICs– from standard, micro step, low voltage to high voltage. It covers supply voltages from 8V to 42V, enables up to 2.5A ...
Read full article: Rohm plugs stepper motor drive design into Arduino
Steve Rawlins, CEO, Anglia Components tells Electronics Weekly that the market remains buoyant and firms are taking a sensible and responsible approach to uncertainties about Brexit 1. Are you concerned the Brexit vote is having negative effect on the UK manufacturing sector? Steve Rawlins: No not at all. UK manufacturing has been up for the last ...
Read full article: Brexit effect is not really hurting us, says distributor
Researchers at Cambridge University and China’s Jiangnan University have found a way to deposit graphene-based inks onto cotton to produce electrically conductive textile. The researchers created inks of chemically modified graphene flakes that are more adhesive to cotton fibres than unmodified graphene. Heat treatment after depositing the ink on the fabric improves the conductivity of ...
Read full article: Cambridge and Jiangnan researchers use graphene for conductive textiles.
In Q3, 91% of the worldwide profit from smartphone sales was made by Apple, reports Strategy Analytics. Total smartphone operating profit in Q3 was $9.4 billion. Apple had $8.6 billion of that with the second, third and fourth most profitable companies, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo each making a profit of $200 million representing 2% of ...
Read full article: Apple bags up 91% of Q3 smartphone profits
Today I resolved to get to grips with the government funding of science and asked my Permanent Secretary to fix up a meeting with the top boffins. “Which boffins, Secretary of State?” asks the PS. “The ones who run R&D.” I reply. “Well, there’s the EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, BBSRC, STFC, AHRC and MRC, Secretary of ...
Read full article: Ed Pisses Off The Boffins
Organiser 2 was launched in April 1986 and drove Psion’s growth through the second half of the Eighties from a £5 million company to a £30 million company. It was still in production – for industrial use – in 2000. In 1988, Japan struck back. Sharp and Casio of Japan copied the concept, even using ...
Read full article: The Genesis Of The Psion 3
Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Organisation for this one, highlighting the use of a Pi to help with automated weaving...
Read full article: Raspberry Pi powers automated weaving
Design firm Plextek says it has completed a proof of concept project with the UK government’s Centre of Defence Enterprise (CDE) to create an immersive skills training system for trainee tank drivers and pilots using the virtual reality headset the Oculus Rift. Using a commercially-available laptop and the Oculus Rift headset, the VR system will be used to ...
Read full article: Plextek develops low cost VR for military training
JTAG Technologies and Altium have combined to offer the circuit board designer the capability to assess the JTAG/boundary-scan testing resources on their design before committing to layout. Called JTAG Maps it is available as a free extension for the Altium Designer tool. Boundary-scan device models (BSDLs) are used for JTAG/boundary-scan testing as they indicate which ...
Read full article: JTAG Tech and Altium map boundary scan devices
Here are the top ten most popular articles on ElectronicsWeekly.com in the last week, with graphene, Arduino, Foxconn and Hi-Fi audio all figuring prominently...
Read full article: Top 10 most popular articles on ElectronicsWeekly.com
42 Technology has won an Innovate UK grant towards commercial development of a remote monitoring system for the UK’s network of electricity sub-stations, of which there are 400,000 according to 42. The phase one grant will see 42 Technology working with the UK’s Power Networks Demonstration Centre (PNDC) in Glasgow (pictured) to develop the business ...
Read full article: Novel sub-station power monitor gets Innovate UK grant
Infineon has got into the Lidar business by acquiring the Dutch company Innoluce. Infineon’s aim is to reduce the cost of Lidar so far that it can be widely deployed. “We have further strengthened our leading position in automated driving by entering the Lidar market through the acquisition of Innoluce, a fabless semiconductor company headquartered ...
Read full article: Infineon acquisition aims at mass deployment of Lidar
Scientists at the University of Sussex found a way to hold ion-based qubits without lasers. “Quantum computing on a small scale using trapped ions is carried out by aligning individual laser beams onto individual ions with each ion,” said the University. “However, a large-scale quantum computer would need billions of quantum bits, therefore billions ...
Read full article: Quantum computing without millions of lasers
Having spent the past couple of days in Rome, closeted with Continentals for the European Nanoelectronics Forum, I realise something is missing – it’s the How part. How are they going to achieve all these good intentions? The intentions are splendid. Gunther Oettinger, European Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, told the Forum: “Digital ...
Read full article: EU Tech Road Paved With Good Intentions
With more and more IoT devices being connected to the internet, and smart city data projects starting to be implemented, there is an urgent need to develop search solutions which will allow information from IoT sources to be found and extracted. So says the University of Surrey and Wright State University. “Search engines have come ...
Read full article: IoT needs a search engine
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has come up with a way to build durable gold wires onto flexible, thin plastic film. “The finding might overcome a basic issue confronting medical engineers: how to create electronics that are flexible enough to be worn comfortably on or even inside the human body without ...
Read full article: Pores stop gold wires cracking in membrane for medical wearables
There was once a CEO of an ambitious semiconductor start-up company targeted on making microprocessors, DRAM, SRAM and E2PROM. The CEO was of the opinion that it was a particularly good time to start a chip company because the technology had finally stopped zig-zagging all over the place and it was now absolutely clear that ...
Read full article: Fable: The CEO Who Thought NMOS Was here To Stay
The Imagine Blue Awards aim to highlight "the work and imaginations of creators, developers, designers, and students using Bluetooth technology"
Read full article: Final call for the Imagine Blue Awards
Thermal PCB company Cambridge Nanotherm has introduced a Six Sigma PCB fabrication route with Elvia PCB Group. “Aimed at the most demanding and heavily regulated industries such as aerospace and automotive, applying the six sigma process ensures 99.99966% of all steps to produce a part are statistically free of defects. In other words, only 3.4 ...
Read full article: Nanotherm PCBs available for automotive and avionics
Vishay’s VCNL4100 is an infra-red proximity sensor that works up to 1m, and includes an ambient light sensor. Inside, it combines an IR (940nm)emitter, photo detectors for proximity and ambient light, a signal-processing IC, and an 8bit/16bit ADC. For ambient light sensing, sensitivity 16bit and up to 0.011375 lux/step, allowing sensing though low-transmittance (dark) lenses as well ...
Read full article: IR proximity detector works up to 1m
Plessey has added to its Stellar family of beam forming modules with +/-7.5° and +/-25° (15° and 50° FWHM) options. They deliver over 3000 lm from a unit 5.6mm thick and 82mm in diameter – including optics, but excluding heatsinking. Key to including optics and LEDs in under 6mm of height is to use small ...
Read full article: LuxLive: Wider and narrower beams from Plessey
In a guest post for Gadget Master, the Design Spark blogger Redstone gets smart with Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy (BLE) - AKA Bluetooth Smart - an increasingly attractive choice for designers.
Read full article: Getting hands-on with Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy
The EU R&D project CONNECT will develop carbon nanotube and metal-CNT composites for IC interconnect, the European Nanoelectronics Forum 2016 in Rome was told today. Novel CNT interconnect architectures for the exploration of circuit- and architecture-level performance and energy efficiency will be developed. CMOS compatibility as well as the challenges of transferring new processes into ...
Read full article: NANO16: EU project for CNT interconnect
Europe has the brains and the know-how to be the world leader in digital healthcare, Professor Shahid Ali of Salford University told this week’s European Nanoelectronics Forum 2016 in Rome. Giving patients the ability to monitor their own health and set their own health targets not only resulted in better health outcomes for patients, but ...
Read full article: NANO16: Europe can be world leader in digital healthcare
The European Nanoelectronics Forum 2016 in Rome today raised an issue which applies to the entire workings of the EU government – how do we explain to the general public the usefulness of what we do? “There is concern about what policy makers do without involving the general public,” said Ben Ruck, Chair of ECSEL, ...
Read full article: NANO16: EU Angst At Communicating Achievements
That awful sight of the SUV swaying as it careers towards you with the driver chatting on the phone, or of cars weaving across lanes as the drivers compose text messages could be a thing of the past as US regulators start to get involved. If they do, laws may follow and, if laws follow ...
Read full article: Stopping The Motorist Texters And Chatterers
Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond outlined in the Autumn Statement the creation of an National Productivity Investment Fund to invest in the nationals digital infrastructure. But it will also see £100m invested in the development of infrastructure for autonomous vehicles, the much talked about ‘driverless cars’. The Chancellor ear-marked £390m for transport technology, including £80m for charging infrastructure for electric ...
Read full article: Autumn Statement: Chancellor bets on driverless car tech
Government plans for new investment in infrastructure and R&D in the Autumn Statement, will be good for the engineering and technology sectors, says the Royal Academy of Engineering. This follows the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s commitment of £2bn per year by 2020 for research and development funding and £1bn for digital infrastructure. Professor Dame Ann Dowling, President of the Royal Academy ...
Read full article: Autumn Statement: Match tech investment with skills, says RAE
Highlighting the brightest, most talented young electronic engineers in the UK
Read full article: The EW BrightSparks search begins
BBC TV programmes can be downloaded and viewed offline on your Raspberry Pi as high definition .MP4 files. For some time now there has been an open source utility program called get_iplayer which is a set of scripts that allow you to download BBC iPlayer content for offline viewing. Alex Eames from the RasPi.TV blog ...
Read full article: Raspberry Pi downloads BBC TV iPlayer content
Messe München, the trade show company that organises the event, reports healthy figures for Electronica 2016.
Read full article: Electronica boasts strong attendance figures, for visitors and exhibitors
Fifteen months into its course, the WAYTOGO FAST EU R&D project for promoting FD-SOI has achieved some significant targets the European Nanoelectronics Forum in Rome today was told. . Boosters for 14 and 28 FD-SOI have been investigated and developed . SOl wafers: +20% nFET loff/leff tradeoff . STRASS technique: +1.6GPa demonstrated (stress level > ...
Read full article: NANO16: FD-SOI moves towards 22nm
Brussels officialdom seems to wish us nothing but ill, but there is good stuff coming out of the EU. At the European Nanoelectronics Forum 2016 in Rome today, the NexGen project showed how it aims to develop technologies and components for future personal health care systems. NexGen aims at developing interconnected body monitoring systems linking ...
Read full article: Euro Nano Forum Looks To Personal Health Monitoring
Check out a couple of new whitepapers on the site relating to IoT and networking. They’re from Intel and cover extending a Retail Sensor Platform with Beacons and a virtual probe function to deliver end-to-end network visibility. Extending the Intel Retail Sensor Platform with Beacons This Intel report covers how adding a retail beacon solution can extend ...
Read full article: IoT: Case study on Bluetooth Beacons and the Intel Retail Sensor Platform
Researchers at Manchester and Nottingham universities have come up with a better new material than graphene for electronics applications – Indium Selenide. InSe crystals can be made only a few atoms thick and are a better semiconductor than graphene. “Ultra-thin InSe seems to offer the golden middle between silicon and graphene,” says Nobel Laureate Sir ...
Read full article: Manchester and Nottingham universities find graphene-beater.
The SEMI book-to-bill went negative in October after 11 months in positive territory. The October b-to-b was 0.91. October bookings were $1.49 billion – 5.1% lower than September’s $1.57 billion, and 12.2% higher than the October 2015 bookings figure of $1.33 billion. October billings were $1.63 billion – 9% higher than September’s $1.49 billion, and ...
Read full article: SEMI book-to-bill goes negative
Codasip, the RISC-V processor IP provider, and UltraSoC, the provider of semiconductor IP for on-chip analytics, are to integrate the Codix-Bk series of RISC-V cores with the UltraSoC environment. As RISC-V based SoCs enter the mainstream, the need for commercial support with production-quality debug, analysis and bring-up tools become critical. This collaboration provides the RISC-V ...
Read full article: Codasip and UltraSoc combine on RISC-V
Thanks to Rootmetrics for this – the 16 best cities for mobile coverage: Liverpool Belfast Edinburgh Manchester Sheffield Coventry Leicester Birmingham Nottingham London Bristol Leeds & Bradford Newcastle Glasgow Cardiff Hull
Read full article: Top 10 (+6) Best Cities For Mobile Coverage
Graphene could improve loudspeakers, both in audio systems and phones, claims Canadian start-up Ora. To do this, the firm is replacing the cone and dome diaphragms of loudspeakers with a composite consisting of 95% graphene, 5% binder and possibly other materials. The result has been dubbed a ‘nanocomposite’ and branded ‘Grapheneq’. The composite is both ...
Read full article: Graphene: the ultimate loudspeaker cone material?
Hail QuadBot, which has just launched on KickStarter. The aim is for the robot to engage makers and teach robotics. With an Arduino-compatible "brain", the designs features 3D printed mechanics.
Read full article: Crowdfunding Watch: QuadBot, making robotics fun
More still sneers to be done to encourage “a love” of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) amongst school students, according to industry research by software tools firm MathWorks. The view of those working in the tech sector is that students need to be encouraged towards these sectors much younger and at primary school. Almost a fifth of those ...
Read full article: Children can be encouraged to “love” science and tech, says MathWorks
Students should be encouraged to pursue a STEM career while they are of primary school age, according to 50% of STEM professionals responding to a survey by MathWorks, which was intended to reveal reasons behind the UK skill shortage. When asked to consider their own experiences; 40% said they were inspired to love the subjects by ...
Read full article: Parents must encourage primary school kids to love science and maths
There used to be lots of chip companies like Linear Technology which believed that innovation was the route to success and where the founding team stuck around to keep the invention culture bubbling. Now there are few such companies and, with the acquisition of LTC by ADI for $14.8 billion, the best of that ilk ...
Read full article: The LTC Way
The Shieldbuddy is an Arduino-style embedded board with a multi-core Infineon Aurix TC275 processor. This is certainly a high performance Arduino board with the processor running at 200MHz and with 4Mbyte of flash, 128kbit of data flash and 500k of RAM. As a demonstration of the processor’s performance, it was recently used to break the world record for a ...
Read full article: ‘Arduino’ board gets record-breaking multicore processor
The open-source community behind the MIPS processor is working with the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the area of software controlled radio technology for IoT. Eric Schultz, community manager with the prpl Foundation will advise on how proposed FCC regulations may affect the open source community and the growth of the internet of ...
Read full article: Open source community seeks “balance” in IoT radio regulations
UK scientists have grown high-quality mono-crystals of organic semiconductors, which are large enough to construct FETs on. Such FETs show good clean characteristic curves, although have comparatively low mobility. A common way to create organic semiconductor crystals is to dissolve the material in a solvent, then deposit the solution onto a surface. Subsequent evaporation of ...
Read full article: Spray-on process yields quality organic semiconductors
Leti has launched an Horizon 2020 project to enable mass commercialization of Si-photonics-based transceivers For data centres and super computing systems. The Leti-coordinated COSMICC project will combine CMOS electronics and Si-photonics with high-throughput, fiber-attachment techniques. These scalable solutions will provide performance improvement an order of magnitude better than current VCSELs transceivers, and the COSMICC-developed technology ...
Read full article: Southampton and St Andrews Universities join Leti Si photonics project
Quite unlike the position in the United States, the European scene in transistors and diodes is at present dominated by the demand of the domestic side of the industry, notably for transistorised portable radio receivers. So, 55 years ago, started an article in Electronics Weekly’s edition of February 1st 1961 written by Dennis P Riley, ...
Read full article: US Semiconductor Manufacturers Denied 60% Of The Market
MACOM has bought AppliedMicro for $770 million – representing a 15% premium to its prior-acquisition market cap – but says it will dispose of AppliedMicro’s computer business within 100 days of the deal closing. MACOM thinks that Applied Micro’s connectivity business comprising OTN framers, MACsec Ethernet networking components and PAM4 platform is complementary. MACOM thinks ...
Read full article: MACOM buys AppliedMicro
The company behind the thermal simulation tool 6SigmaET has published a report,Heat is On, looking at some of the priorities of current electronics design.
Read full article: Survey: Electronics design engineers not feeling the heat
With a software programming industry saturated with men it is believed that software companies could be losing out on gifted women coders. Inspiring women from a young age to enter the technology industry could see software development companies receiving a greater number of female applicants. However, according to data released by Coupfy, more than half (56%) of women in ...
Read full article: Software firm aims to empower women in technology
Is Intel getting out of wearables? Well that is the conclusion being drawn as reports come in of lay-offs in the company’s New Devices Group (NDG) Two years Intel bought a company called Basis Science which made fitness bands called Basis Peak but these turned out to burn people and, earlier this year, Intel shut ...
Read full article: Intel lay-offs put question mark over wearables.
LED streetlight firm Schréder has signed an agreement with Panasonic, to co-develop products and infrastructure for smart cities. Schréder is a multi-national, with a Brussels HQ and a design centre in the UK. According to a company spokesman, the UK design centre was responsible for Shuffle (pictured), an interactive street column, launched in 2015, that ...
Read full article: Panasonic ties with UK streetlamp designers for smart cities
The problem with connecting billions of IoT devices to the internet is that currently this relies on 25-year-old digital radio technology. If driverless cars that are connected to the internet are to work reliably they will need radios that are dramatically more spectrum efficient; they will need to change frequency, bandwidth or radio standard in ...
Read full article: Is software-defined radio the Holy Grail for 5G and IoT?
For many design engineers and purchasers, the area of US mains power cables can be a minefield as, unlike in the UK, the American standards are rather complicated.
Read full article: Only Connect: On US mains power cable specifications
Fujitsu Semiconductor and Panasonic have developed 4 Mbit ReRAM, claimed to be the densest ReRAM. The MB85AS4MT is an SPI-interface ReRAM product that operates with a wide range of power supply voltage, from 1.65V to 3.6V. Its average current in read operations is 0.2mA at a maximum operating frequency of 5MHz. It is targeted at ...
Read full article: Fujitsu’s 4Mbit ReRAM
GMB, the union for professional drivers, is calling for HMRC to exercise legal responsibility for enforcement of the minimum wage laws and collection of taxes at Uber. An Employment Tribunal ruled that Uber’s drivers are employees so HMRC has legal responsibility to enforce minimum wage laws and collect national insurance contributions and PAYE taxes from ...
Read full article: Noose tightens round Uber
French chap came in today wanting to know what terms we’d be offering if he set up his factory in the UK. Of course, post Brexit, we can offer any terms we like. He wants a five year tax holiday followed by 10% in perpetuity, freedom from labour protection legislation, access to our universities for ...
Read full article: Ed Meets A Kindred Spirit
7 in 10 firms plan to maintain or increase spending on innovation says a CBI survey. As the UK develops its economic role in the world outside of the EU, the survey of over 800 businesses – supported by Deloitte and Hays – shows that 70% of respondents plan to increase or maintain their innovation ...
Read full article: 70% of companies maintaining or increasing post-Brexit innovation investment, says CBI.
Would you believe it, I am writing this away from Electronics Weekly Towers via a remote connection and using a Raspberry Pi 3, kindly donated to Electronics Weekly by Element 14 (RS Components has been just as generous to EW with Raspberry Pis in the past. The computer is quick and responsive – at least ...
Read full article: Writing this on a Raspberry Pi 3
One of the most controversial trade deals ever done was the 1986 semiconductor trade deal between the USA and Japan which mandated a 15% Japan market share for US chip manufacturers. The following year Shintaro Ishihara, a member of Japan’s Diet, visited Washington. ‘I was at a reception where members of Congress and lobbyists for ...
Read full article: When The USA Cosied Up To Russia
Cree has created a 3,000K version of its IG Series of luminaires for vehicle parking, and has added 0-10V dimming as a standard feature. The light use waveguides to spread where it is wanted, which Cree brands WaveMax. for low glare, little light is emitted outside +/-50 downwards – see the data sheet. “Parking structure ...
Read full article: Warmer white for parking cars
At the NMI’s 20th anniversary Awards last night, Renishaw was celebrated as Company of the Year. The Gloucestershire-based company was hailed as a world leader in the development of precision-measurement systems for areas as diverse as jet engine manufacturing and brain surgery.
Read full article: Renishaw scoops company of the year at NMI 20th anniversary Awards
So what are the four pains of migration from an 8-bit MCU and how can a programmable device approach help to limit the pain, writes Raul Hernandez Arthur Few 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) users actively want to go through the experience of migrating a design to a 32-bit processing platform. The drawbacks of migration are, by ...
Read full article: How to take pain out of 8-bit MCU upgrading
Shining 670nm red light on bees could ameliorate damage caused by neonicotinoid insecticides, according City, University of London and University College London. “The researchers found that when shining a specific wavelength of red light (670nm) it significantly reduced bee death rates and improved cell energy levels, mobility and visual function in animals exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides ...
Read full article: 670nm light helps to un-poison bees
Building the mobile network for 5G will be completely different from what has gone before says the UK government. The Department of Culture, Media & Sport has commissioned Ordnance Survey (OS) to develop a new mapping tool to plan the national rollout of 5G wireless networks. The 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey and the Met Office will ...
Read full article: UK to trial 5G network planning tool in Bournemouth
New research by scientists from the University of Bristol has revealed that domestic LED lights are much less attractive to nuisance insects such as biting midges than traditional filament lamps. The study, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and UK lighting manufacturer Integral LED, used customised illuminated insect traps at 18 field test sites ...
Read full article: LED lights attract fewer insects
Socionext, the Matsushita-Fujitsu SoC jv, has teamed up with PCoIP specialist Teradici to make ICs for PCoIP endpoints for the cloud. Teradici’s PCoIP technology delivers secure virtual desktops, workstations, workspaces, and applications, according to Socionext’s Koichi Yamashita. The first goal of the partnership will be an expansion of Teradici’s PCoIP Zero Client family of ultra-secure ...
Read full article: Socionext and Teradici seek workplace security
According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Apple has asked Foxconn and Pegatron to look at ways to assemble iPhones in the USA. Apparently Pegatron declined to get involved citing cost issues, but Foxconn, although expressing concern about costs, said it would produce a study. This has happened before. Flextronics built a Mac Pro production line ...
Read full article: Foxconn Studying How To Assemble iPhones In USA
The smartphone market is always in flux. Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Apple and Samsung have led it at different times but now it’s changing again. According to Gartner, the Apple-Samsung duopoly is failing fast. Together they now account for under a third of sales when they used to account for half. Samsung is now down to ...
Read full article: Smartphone Duopoly Falters
Companies are still not that good at identifying the technologies that will have the largest impact on their business. According to business analyst KPMG, fewer than one-third of senior executives in technology companies believe they are “very prepared” to address disruptive technologies like IoT and robotics. Many technology company executives fear growing competition from outside ...
Read full article: Tech CEOs live in fear of new ‘non-tech’ competitors
If you have designed a product, and need a prototype, or a batch of them made and tested, Nexus Intelligent Engineering of Ely is only a phone call away. And it will be of particular interested if the design has mechanical or electro-mechanical content, but this is not a requirement – Nexus builds wiring looms, ...
Read full article: Profile: Nexus Intelligent Engineering
Jean-Louis Evans explains the importance of Tempest testing to protect military equipment from emitting unintentional electromagnetic signals which can be used by the enemy Today’s military forces increasingly find themselves fighting on two battlefields – the more traditional force-on-force, alongside the growing threat of cyber and electronic warfare. Unintentional signals emanating from equipment on military ...
Read full article: Tempest thwarts enemy eavesdroppers
Analog Devices has acquired ‘liquid crystal waveguide’ solid-state laser steering technology from Vescent Photonics. “Vescent’s innovative non-mechanical beam steering technology enables more robust integrated lidar systems that overcome many of the major drawbacks associated with today’s mechanical offerings,” said ADI, which intends to apply scanning lidar to self-driving cars. While ADI is not yet saying ...
Read full article: ADI buys solid-state laser steering technology
There was once a Brit whose name became a by-word for destructive pre-announcements. He wrote a dozen books and founded a publishing company before launching himself on the computer market. In 1982 he was selling 10,000 computers a month, had sales of $82 million and employed over 1,000 people. The following year he talked publicly ...
Read full article: Fable: The Guy Who Should Have Kept His Trap Shut
It was Kryptowire of Virginia that discovered that some Android phones included stealth software that secretly sent personal information back to servers every three days, or sometimes daily. Amazon was amongst the companies selling he phones, although there is no suggestion it knew about the spying. “These devices actively transmitted user and device information including the full-body ...
Read full article: Pre-installed bugging phone app cannot be deleted by owners
Electronics Weekly is running a competition and you could be one the lucky winners. We have over £1,000s worth of gadgets to give away for those of you who subscribe to receive your FREE subscription of Electronics Weekly. Click here to complete the subscription form and one of these prizes could be yours… Apple Watch ...
Read full article: Electronics Weekly’s Great Gadget Giveaway…
Maxim has introduced an ARM Coterx-M4F microcontroller with hardware security to protect IP, algorithms, and user data in wearables. Active power consumption is 127µW/MHz, or 32µW/MHz DMA and 3.5µW in sleep – claimed to be industry’s lowest. Called MAX32631, security is embodied in a ‘trust protection unit’ which includes hardware encryption and authentication with and AES ...
Read full article: Maxim ARM MCU adds security to wearables
It's not electronics but room has to be found on Gadget Mater for this one - the EcoHelmet. It's a cool design, and we have quite a few cyclists among our readership, I know.
Read full article: Cycling EcoHelmet wins international James Dyson Award
Microlease, the UK-based test equipment rental and selling business, is the target of an agreed takeover by US firm Electro Rent. This represents a major shift in Europe’s equipment rental sector and creates a global player in Electro Rent, which itself was acquired by Platinum Equity in August. Microlease became one of Europe’s largest rental firms when ...
Read full article: Microlease-Electro Rent merger creates global rental firm
Linear Technology has brought out a 30A step-down µModule (power module) regulator. The LTM4647 includes the inductor, MOSFET, DC/DC controller and supporting components in a 9mm x 15mm x 5.01mm BGA package. The device’s conversion efficiency from 12VIN to 1VOUT at 30A is 87%, when delivering a full 30A continuously without a heat sink or ...
Read full article: LTC launches highly integrated 30A stepdown µModule
Microchip is in volume production of its first automotive-grade 32-bit PIC32MZ EF microcontroller (MCU) family and a higher-speed variant operating over the industrial temperature range. The PIC32MZ EF family features core performance up to 250MHz; an integrated Floating-Point Unit (FPU); a wide selection of peripherals and excellent connectivity options including Controller Area Network (CAN). The ...
Read full article: Micochip p’s first auto-grade 32-bit of PIC.
Nvidia won the crown of fastest grower in the 2016 semiconductor stakes. GPUs and Tegras boosted it 35%, says IC Insights. Not that far behind, riding the explosive growth of China’s handset market, is MediaTek which grew 29%. Poor old ST slumped to No13 in the rankings – a humiliation for a former No.3. Qualcomm ...
Read full article: Winners and Losers in 2016
There’s nothing quite as enthusiastic as Intel getting into a new technological area, or as hang-dog when it surreptitiously exits the field having screwed up. It’s like a puppy jumping up in expectation of a pat and slinking away bewildered when it gets a slap. “I am excited to announce that Intel Capital is targeting ...
Read full article: Intel Diversifies Into Autonomous Driving
We have over £1,000s worth of gadgets to give away for those of you who subscribe to receive your FREE subscription of Electronics Weekly.
Read full article: Great Gadget Giveaway…
Delta Microelectronics, the Denmark-based Asic services firm, is now partnering with Solution in Silicon in the UK. With an interest in medical, communications and security markets the partnership will expand Delta’s supply chain services including wafer procurement and probing, packaging, component testing, storage and IC distribution in the UK. Gert Jørgensen, Delta’s vice-president of sales and marketing, says the firm is ...
Read full article: Danish Asic firm expands in “important” UK market
The top 20 semiconductor companies are expected to grow 3% this year, says IC Insights, with double digit growth at Nvidia, MediaTek, Apple, Toshiba and TSMC and double digit declines at Hynix, Micron, NXP and GloFo. The fastest growing top-20 company this year is forecast to be Nvidia, which is expected to grow 35%. Nvidia ...
Read full article: Top 20 IC vendors expected to grow 3%
Two year-old Tokyo software cyber-security start-up Trillium will have its SecureCAR software incorporated on NXP’s S32k MCUs. Follow-up efforts will expand the scope to include NXP’s Smart Secure Transceivers, and implement the complete solution in a production vehicle with a major Japanese OEM. “This is an important step forward in a critical mission for the ...
Read full article: Trillium, NXP team up on car security
IBM CEO Ginny Rometty has written to Donald Trump and this is a copy of the letter: International Business Machines Corporation Office of the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer One New Orchard Road Armonk, New York 10504-1783 November 14, 2016 Mr. Donald J. Trump Office of the Presidential Transition 1800 G Street, NW Washington, ...
Read full article: IBM CEO writes to Trump
In a special interview to coincide with the Electronica 2016 exhibition Benoit Neel, European general manager at Keysight Technologies tells Electronics Weekly about the test firm’s new business strategy and how its semiconductor technologies will lead to 1.5THz frequency analysis. How would you say Keysight Technologies has changed in business model and approach to ...
Read full article: Interview: Keysight’s new approach to market and technology
IoT security is an increasingly urgent issue, and companies will have to look at the “cost-to-care” ratio which could dictate their response to this issue, writes Andrew Hogan. The internet of things (IoT) has been a discussion point for years, but only recently has the security aspect become anything more than a concept. However, with ...
Read full article: Why IoT security is going to cost you more
Thanks to US News and World Report for this one – the world’s ten best universities for engineering in 2016: Tsinghua MIT Univ of California at Berkeley Zhejiang Nanyang Technological Univ National Univ of Singapore Harbin Institute Stanford Georgia Tech City Univ of Hong Kong
Read full article: Ten Best Universities For Engineering
Ever fancied taking a gamble and investing in a tech start-up? Well, no you can. Indiegogo, the well-known crowd-funding website, is offering an equity service which allows anyone to invest in start-ups and even established companies. Apparently, this is all possible because of new equity crowdfunding regulations that took effect in May this year. These ...
Read full article: Indiegogo says anyone can invest in a tech start-up
The iFixit team have turned their attention to Google Home, the new voice-activated speaker from Google, running Google Assistant services.
Read full article: Tearing down the Google Home assistant
San Diego researchers have created transistor-less chips based on metamaterials. Their device uses low-power laser optical control. Conductivity is increased by more than 1,000%, says UC Diego. Transistors and ICs are limited in their performance by the limitations of the materials from which they are made. . A semiconductor’s band gap determines the energy that ...
Read full article: Transistor-less Chips
LiFi is a disruptive technology that is poised to impact a large number of industries, believes Harald Haas is Professor of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh
Read full article: Comment: How LiFi could transform the way we communicate
Congatec has introduced industrial Mini and Pico-ITX motherboards based around Intel’s Apollo Lake processors. Conga-PA5 is Pico-ITX and Conga-IA5 is Thin Mini-ITX, and both of them are long-term available, said Congatec, and come with a choice of Atom, Celeron or Pentium processors (see table below). “System engineers can immediately deploy them to upgrade existing Pico-ITX ...
Read full article: Industrial Mini and Pico-ITX motherboards get Apollo Lake
Cray has announced a deep learning toolkit for its supercomputers at the Supercomputing Conference in Utah, the day after IBM and Nvidia announced their deep learning toolkit. “The convergence of supercomputing and big data analytics is happening now, and the rise of deep learning algorithms is evidence of how customers are increasingly using high performance ...
Read full article: Cray announces deep learning toolkit
It's a bit of a sad day but hardly unexpected. Google is officially ending support for Eclipse Android Developer Tools.
Read full article: Android Studio eclipses alternative IDE
This month's patent features the challenge of transaction checking and countering 'man-in-the-middle' and 'man-in-the-browser' attacks
Read full article: Electronics patent of the month: Transaction checking
Weebit Nano, the ReRAM start-up, has transferred its SiOx ReRAM from Rice University’s facilities in Houston, Texas, to Leti’s pre-industrialisation facility in Grenoble, France. Weebit Nano was founded in 2014 to develop a memory technology invented by Professor James Tour of Rice University with the potential to be 1000 times faster, more reliable, more energy-efficient ...
Read full article: Weebit ReRAM technology transferred to Leti
Linear Tech has brought out a synchronous current mode monolithic buck-boost converter that delivers up to 5A of continuous output current in buck mode from a wide variety of input sources, including single- or multiple-cell batteries, unregulated wall adapters as well as solar panels and supercapacitors. The LTC 3119 has a 2.5V to 18V input ...
Read full article: LTC buck-boost converter delivers 5A of continuous current.
NXP claims to have the world’s smallest leadless logic package for 8 lead logic functions, measuring 0.8mm x 1.35m x 0.35 mm in height. The 8-pin GX 8 (SOT1233) package succeeds the earlier 5- and 6-pin functions in the GX package, making AXP, AUP and LVC functions are now available in a GX package. Functions ...
Read full article: NXP puts 8 lead logic functions in GX package
The world’s largest moving coil meter – about 17 feet square – will overlook the Tenth Electrical Engineers Exhibition to be held from March 21 to 25 at Earls Court. So, 55 years ago, opened a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of January 25th 1961 The meter scale will be more than 20 feet long ...
Read full article: 17ft Square Coil Meter For Earls Court
As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons “they learned nothing and forgot nothing” so it is with our Euro-elite. Jean-Claude Juncker’s insolent public reaction to the US election shows that he thinks the world is wrong, not him. “We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works,” said Junker, “two years ...
Read full article: A La Guillotine
Zach Shelby, CEO of the micro:bit Foundation has replied on the issue of over-heating chips (and proposed mechanism here) on the BBC’s tiny computer – he says there will be changes in the next revision. As with any other electronic PCB used outside a lab, micro:bits are susceptible to damage, including ESD. If a ...
Read full article: Over-hot micro:bits – Foundation CEO replies
Tesla has agreed to acquire Grohmann Engineering, a German company developing technologies for automated manufacturing. This represents the California-based electric car maker’s biggest expansion into Europe The company wants to develop its own automated manufacturing systems for its car-making factories. “Combined with our California and Michigan engineering facilities, as well as other locations to follow, we believe ...
Read full article: Tesla buys German firm in major European move
Socionext, the Matsushita-Fujitsu SoC jv, has introduced a server processor with 24 ARM Cortex-A53 cores. For maximizing the hardware efficiency of data centre server systems, a scalable, distributed computing server system with power-efficient processors and optimised memory architecture is helps achieve the power/performance balance. The small core solution implemented in the SC2A11A does not require ...
Read full article: Socionext makes 24-core ARM server processor
IBM and Nvidia have collaborated on a deep learning tool to “help train computers to think and learn in more human-like ways at a faster pace”, said IBM. In this case, ‘deep learning’ is being used to mean crunching through vast tracts of data to detect and rank its most important aspects. IBM sees it ...
Read full article: IBM and Nvidia teach computers to learn
Samsung Electronics has agreed to acquire US connected car technology firm Harman International Industries for around $8bn. Samsung said that connected vehicle technology was “a strategic priority” for the company and is expected to grow to more than $100bn by 2025. Harman claims to have more than 30 million vehicles equipped with its connected car and audio systems, including embedded infotainment, telematics, ...
Read full article: Samsung pays $8bn for connected car tech firm
Discover NI’s tips and tricks for your instrument and measurement hardware
Read full article: Instrument Fundamentals White Paper Series
Xilinx is selling an FPGA acceleration stack including libraries, framework integrations, developer boards, and OpenStack support. Xilinx claims it provides the fastest path to realize 40x better compute efficiency with Xilinx FPGAs compared to x86 server CPUs and up to six times the compute efficiency over competitive FPGAs. Using dynamic reconfiguration, Xilinx enables silicon optimization ...
Read full article: Xilinx offers FPGA acceleration stack
Siemens could be announcing a decision to buy Mentor Graphics later today. It is reported that Siemens will pay between $4.5 billion and $4.6 billion in cash. Mentor, headed up by Wally Rhines (pictured), has been up against activist investor Elliott Management which has taken an 8% stake in the company and is pushing for ...
Read full article: Siemens in the frame to buy Mentor
Smartphone shipments are forecast to grow by 4% in 2016 to 1,490 million units after jumping by 13% to 1,430 million in 2015, says IC Insights, and to grow by 5% in 2017, reaching 1,565 million units. Overall, smartphone unit shipments are now forecast to grow at single-digit annual rates through 2020. Smartphones accounted for ...
Read full article: Smartphones growing but total cellphone falling, says IC Insights
Imec and it’s subsidiary Holst Centre have developed a health patch which tracks physical and cardiac activity while monitoring bioelectrical impedance. The technology is available for licensing. “Since our entry in this space, we’ve advanced far beyond proof-of-concept to a patch that has attained a high level of technical maturity,” says Imec’s Ruben de Francisco, ...
Read full article: Multi-functional health patch from Imec
The PM’s really fired up by Trump’s victory, Ed confides to his diary, is the vicar’s daughter titillated by the thought of cosying up to a rough-hewn Yankee builder? I don’t know, but in Cabinet she seems to go a shade pinker when he’s mentioned. Anyway, we’ve all been told to come up with ways ...
Read full article: Ed Joins The Trump Love-Fest
Digi was showing off its newly released ConnectCore for i.MX6UL module at Electronica. It is designed to support the rapid development of smart and secure connected devices.
Read full article: Electronica: Digi demos its secure ConnectCore for i.MX6UL Starter Kit
Maxim has designed a high-sides switch that can handle back-EMF from any inductance, regardless how much energy it has stored. MAX14913 includes eight of the switches, which can operate loads at up to 24V (36Vmax) and 500mA. “Designers of industrial controllers can safely drive and demagnetise any inductive load for Industry 4.0 applications,” claimed the ...
Read full article: Octal high-side switch shrugs-off any inductance
Fairchild’s first product was made for IBM. “IBM needed a core driver that would tolerate the 85 degree Celsius operating temperature,” recalls Fairchild’s sales boss Tom Bay as recalled in Charlie Sporck’s book SPIN-OFF, “they needed to drive at 150 milliamp, 60 volt capability. We said sure we could do that. I say we, and ...
Read full article: Fairchild’s First Product
Silicon doping in GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) could reduce complexity and improve blue laser efficiency, claims a team formed between Meijo University Nagoya University. “GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers are expected to be adopted in various applications, such as retinal scanning displays, adaptive headlights, and high-speed visible-light communication systems,” said researcher Tetsuya Takeuchi of Meijo ...
Read full article: Silicon doping comes to the rescue of vertical cavity GaN lasers
I remember watching remote control aircraft flying near where I grew up. People (men) had made them from scratch, parts or kits, and then learned to fly them – a highly skilled operation. Then self-flying electric copter-style drones appeared, with gyros and intelligence, which essentially fly themselves and only need to be shown where you ...
Read full article: Updated: Remote control aircraft – where did the skill go?
The mood was bullish at Electronica for Digi-Key with the company reporting an almost 15% growth in sales in the UK for last year.
Read full article: Electronica: Digi-Key boasts post-Brexit success
Europe ended Q3 with a slight decline in semiconductor sales, but it was only a “technicality”, according to supply chain market watcher, DMASS. The quarter ended with sales of €1.81bn which was a decline of 0.9%, mainly due to different quarter-end reporting by some members. The worrying news for the UK market, where the effect of the Brexit ...
Read full article: Electronica: Europe strong in chips, but UK wobbles
