It’s simply getting from here to there. How hard can that be?
In fact, if it’s indoors, then things aren’t that far away, so that should be even easier, right?
Wrong. Indoor navigation is a bugaboo that’s got all kinds of folks scrambling to figure out how to get you to where you need to be.
As we’ve seen before, navigation outside uses a mix of technologies, but satellite systems figure prominently in the solution. … Read More → "Navigating Indoors"
Back when I was a little kid in elementary school, one of the youngsters in my class was a pathological liar. He’d tell the tallest tales about the famous people he’d just met, the exotic countries he’d jetted to over the weekend, and, in one case, about his lock-picking exploits and subsequent run-in with the law. It was all very exciting, and, gullible youngsters that we were, we believed all of it. One of our more mature classmates, however, saw through all the smoke. She’d frown and say, “Consider the source,” whenever we asked about … Read More → "Consider the Source"
OK, FPGA designers, are you sitting down? We need to visualize. Relax. Close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out, go to your calm and happy place. Everything is going to be OK. You are floating on a warm pond. Your FPGA design is working on the dev board. You feel the sun on your face. You are strong and confident…
Now, we will begin. You are going to design the power supply for your high-end FPGA. It is going to go smooooooothly. There will be no mess of passive components interacting in weird … Read More → "Finding Your Power Animal"
Electronics power density is approaching that of a nuclear reactor core. But don’t worry – it’s still an order of magnitude less than that of a rocket nozzle.
This was the eye-opening “got your attention?” snippet in a presentation launching Mentor’s new FloTHERM XT tool.
The idea of this particular tool is to make life easier for PCB and system designers as they manage heat by bringing together EDA and MDA (Mechanical Design Automation) data early in the conceptual stage of a design to allow earlier, faster thermal simulation.
The status … Read More → "Will Electrical and Mechanical Domains Merge?"
What two components does every embedded system need? Processors and memory, I reckon. And now Spansion has both.
Most of us know Spansion – if we know the company at all – as a maker of flash memory. Old-timers will remember Spansion as the spinoff of AMD’s flash memory business, but that was a long time ago. Since then, Spansion has become one of the larger flash memory companies, focusing mainly on NOR flash (as opposed to NAND flash).
That’s all fine and dandy, but, as we know, memory is a commodity business. You compete … Read More → "Spansion Buys Fujitsu’s MCU Business"
The command line interface is where real work gets done. If he touches the mouse too many times during the day, he starts to feel like a sellout. GUIs are for wussies. He’s used vi exclusively for editing since 1980, and he thinks the whole concept of WSIWYG is a sham. Social Media? What’s that!? He is – The Techurmudgeon.
They say that most people listen to new music only until they reach age 21. After that, they keep listening to the same music they loved during the 16-21 years – over and over again … Read More → "TECHURMUDGEON"
Batteries and capacitors have existed – and co-existed – for a long time. Your typical basic electronics course will probably teach them in different chapters or on different pages because they’re so different: batteries are used to power a circuit; capacitors handle all manner of jobs from establishing timing in RC circuits to helping figure out where the poles and zeros go in an analog circuit to stabilizing the power rail.
That last one has been a standard PCB design feature for many years. It used to be simple: two caps of two different constructions and values to … Read More → "Bringing Batteries and Capacitors Together"
It’s not every day you get to impress the jaded technology nerds in downtown San Jose (“the Capital of Silicon Valley”). It’s doubly hard when ESC – oops, the DesignWest conference – is in town and 90% of the populace is showing off their latest seamless multicore hybrid open-source whatever. And it’s rarer still to be blowing them all away on public roads.
Say hello to my little friend, eRex.
For those of you poor, sad readers who haven’t seen it, eRex is an electric racecar built by Nuvation, a Canadian/American design firm … Read More → "Electric Shock!"
Nice job folks! Over the past few decades, we electronic engineers have created social change so dramatic that previous discontinuities like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and two world wars pale in comparison. Nothing in human history can rival the technological progress that has been achieved in electronics and the impact of that progress on civilized life.
We go to work each day, month, and year – and our baseline assumption is exponential improvement. Think about that a minute. We’ve all taken math (lots of it, in this profession). Exponentials in the real … Read More → "Mobile Drives Everything"
When I go to the SPIE Litho conference, I normally expect to hear the latest on the technologies that are next in line for getting us past the current lithography hurdles. At this point, that might be EUV (or will it?).
But it can be even more fun to keep track of those outrageous ideas that haven’t quite managed to get a “Yes, this can work” check mark next to their names; people are still pushing and pulling to figure out if they … Read More → "Aggressive Hard Drives"
