Electronics Weekly magazine feature articles are published on this website every week.
After years of wondering when flexible displays would finally emerge, they jumped out at opposite ends of the size spectrum from Samsung and LG within a few months of each other. And they were all on show in Las Vegas earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Connected vehicles – the real world challenges
Technologies already exist for features such as advanced driver assistance (ADAS), vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications, but delivering these alone is not the issue. The challenge is that introducing these new features to road and rail will only become acceptable to Government and the public when the needs for international standards, recognisable data security and clear ownership of liabilities are understood.
Tektronix sees beauty in user interfaces
Tektronix president Amir Aghdaei sees consumer mobile device design starting to have an impact on benchtop test instrument design. “We are expanding our view of the use-model,” Aghdaei told Electronics Weekly. Since the day test firms like Tektronix put a Windows interface in benchtop scopes, it became inevitable that the user interface would become a differentiating element in instrument design.
Mixed-signal asics are good even for smaller volume products
Traditionally, asic developments are thought to be the domain of high volume applications. Whilst these designs grab the headlines there are many designs that are successfully undertaken for smaller volume product markets. An example of this is the mixed signal asic for industrial controllers. These controllers cover many industries and come in many forms. The basic premise, though, is for a system to monitor and react to a defined set of performance parameters.
Broadcom moves from simulation to emulation with Mentor
Chip designs today have more functionality, more black-boxed intellectual property (IP) and shorter tape-out schedules. However, they require even more design verification than in the past, which leaves little time for verification, yet re-spins are more expensive than ever. Traditional waveform-based debugging is slow and laborious, making it almost impossible to fully verify a design within desired time schedules. There is a pressing need to increase debug and verification productivity.
ARM, Beagle Bone and Pi star in 2013
Editors on Electronics Weekly have made a selection of those products which stood out last year for their capabilities and usefulness. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has designed a infrared camera module and RS Components is selling it for £16.80. Dubbed the Pi NoIR, the infrared camera module is a variant of the existing visible light Raspberry Pi camera with the same 5 megapixel image sensor. Texas Instruments took on Raspberry Pi with the $45 BeagleBone Black computer based on a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with more performance than Raspberry Pi’s ARM11 based processor.
Linear Technology CEO Lothar Maier looks ahead to 2014
With 2014 global outlook likely to be another slow growth year similar to 2013, it’s imperative that a company be in the right markets at the right time if it is going to outperform the market, writes Lothar Maier, CEO, Linear Technology. In the analogue semiconductor market, the sands have shifted favouring the automotive and industrial markets and away from the consumer and communications markets.
