Articles – Page 243

February 8, 2012

Free and open technologies are certainly charming. They help alleviate the burden of development and allow you and your colleagues to focus on that important phrase, the “value add”: that part of your product that’s truly original.

Linux is the poster child for open software. It’s developed by the community and freely licensed to pretty much anyone who wants it. It’s a great field-leveler, allowing even small companies to develop big products without the big-OS headaches. Well, sort of.

Android is a nifty spinoff of Linux, with … Read More → "Open vs. Closed: A Design Dilemma"

New Cree LED Platform Transforms What’s Possible with LED Performance and Pricing

by Bryon Moyer

February 8, 2012

DURHAM, N.C.–Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE) today announced a breakthrough in LED technology that completely redefines the lighting industry and erases old assumptions about up-front LED cost and performance. The Cree XLamp® XT-E White LED delivers twice the lumens-per-dollar of other LEDs and features the highest performance and efficacy in the industry. Based on a new silicon carbide technology platform, the XT-E LED and the recently released XB-D LED represent a dramatic transformation in LED … Read More → "New Cree LED Platform Transforms What’s Possible with LED Performance and Pricing"

The Perils of Performance

Mentor HyperLynx Helps Handle the Hot Spots

by Kevin Morris

February 7, 2012

Is it just me, or is digital design getting a lot trickier? We were all going along just fine, flipping our little zeroes and ones happily back and forth, and then somebody comes up with the brilliant idea to replace our nice, simple parallel busses with serial IO. OK, so maybe those parallel busses were not quite so simple by that time; it was starting to be nearly impossible to do the board layout so that all those signals arrived at somewhat the same time. To make matters worse, we kept raising the clock frequencies until & … Read More → "The Perils of Performance"

New SoC Enables Measurement and Diagnostics for High-Power Monitoring in Industrial Applications and Data Centers

by Bryon Moyer

February 7, 2012

Sunnyvale, CA—February 6, 2012—Maxim Integrated Products (NASDAQ: MXIM) introduces the 78M6631, a Teridian 3-phase power measurement system-on-chip (SoC) that embeds power monitoring into high-load applications. This fully self-contained and customizable energy measurement system offers a full range of measurement and diagnostics, and results in ease of design and reduced costs. The 78M6631 is suited for a wide variety of applications requiring 3-phase power and quality measurements, including industrial panels and motors, solar panel inverters, storage power supplies, and data centers.

Jumpstart development for renewable energy applications with TI’s new C2000™ MCU solar kits

by Bryon Moyer

February 7, 2012

Houston, TX (February 6, 2012) – Helping make the world greener, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) announces two new solar kits based on its C2000™ 32-bit Piccolo™ and Concerto™ microcontrollers (MCUs). These new solar kits bring advanced peripherals, application-targeted development hardware, schematics, comprehensive software libraries of algorithms and an industry-leading development environment to the renewable energy market, allowing designers to easily create solar inverter designs while evaluating various solar algorithms and topologies.

C2000 high-voltage Solar Developer’s Kit features and benefits

Read More → "Jumpstart development for renewable energy applications with TI’s new C2000™ MCU solar kits"

A New Crop of Wafer Inspection Tools

KLA-Tencor Announces Upgrades All Around

by Bryon Moyer

February 6, 2012

Nothing can ruin a die like a hunk of debris landing someplace inopportune.

Of course, it all depends on what constitutes “debris.” Not from a material standpoint – a chunk of anything that you didn’t put there on purpose is likely to be a problem – but rather from the point of view of size. Looked at in a Zen way, if a mote lands someplace in the middle of something bigger than itself without disturbing anything, does a production manager make any noise?

So yes, there is the occasional get-out-of-jail-free … Read More → "A New Crop of Wafer Inspection Tools"

Does the World Need a New Microcontroller Family?

by Dick Selwood

February 1, 2012

Everywhere you look there are microcontrollers. 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit; high speed or low power; single or multi-core; and an enormous range of peripherals and I/O. So does the world need another family? Infineon certainly thinks so.

Their reasoning runs like this. Over the last few years the company has been restructured to concentrate on three key areas, which it calls Energy Efficiency, Mobility and Security. In these areas it addresses specific markets, where it is either the largest player, or number two, with microcontrollers, power components and sensors.

The current microcontroller line-up … Read More → "Does the World Need a New Microcontroller Family?"

The Importance of Being Modular

Xilinx Rolls a Huge Wave of Kits

by Kevin Morris

January 31, 2012

In the good old days, there were FPGA kits galore. There was almost a carnival atmosphere. Every vendor with anything novel to sell would design their own FPGA board to go with it. Folks would stroll down the boardwalk, picking up all manner strange kits from street vendors. This one was in between the snake oil and liniment. That one was between two wind-up monkey toys. There were as many varieties of FPGA boards as there were Silicon Valley electronics sharks, and most of them were about as reliable.

OK, maybe … Read More → "The Importance of Being Modular"

A Passive Magic Wand

The EPIC Sensor Hits the Market

by Bryon Moyer

January 30, 2012

It’s the stuff of kids’ play and science fiction. A stick that has magic properties. Some such sticks execute actions at a distance – perhaps when accompanied by a cryptic incantation – while others may passively detect from a distance. It’s the latter we’re interested in today.

We are surrounded by information encoded into the electromagnetic ether through which we pass. Some of it is natural; some of it we have created ourselves. But here’s the thing that may be surprising: when we measure things electromagnetic, we’ … Read More → "A Passive Magic Wand"

New COM-Express Mini Module Targets Handheld/Portable Applications

by Bryon Moyer

January 26, 2012

January 25, 2011, Irvine, California – Advantech, the leading embedded platform and integration services provider, announces the arrival of SOM-7565—a COM-Express Mini module which provides a highly anticipated solution for handheld/portable applications. Powered by the Intel^® Atom™ processor N2600, the new SOM-7565& … Read More → "New COM-Express Mini Module Targets Handheld/Portable Applications"