Articles – Page 48

How to Train Your Robot: Rosie the Robot Vacuum Joins Our Family

October 5, 2022

As I write this article, Rosie the robot vacuum cleaner is taking its third try at mapping my home. Rosie is our name for an Ecovacs Deebot N8 Pro+ vacuum. We purchased Rosie from Amazon on the recommendation of Veronica, who lives next door. Rosie was on sale that day for $420, which is $280 off of the list price. The robot’s about the diameter of a large dinner plate and perhaps three inches thick. She has a pair of large and grippy rubber drive wheels in the rear that are part of a dead-reckoning navigation system … Read More → "How to Train Your Robot: Rosie the Robot Vacuum Joins Our Family"

SiLC’s FMCW LiDAR Can Perceive and Identify Objects More Than a Kilometer Away

by Max Maxfield

October 4, 2022

I’ve told this tale before, and I’ll doubtless tell it again because I think it’s worth the retelling. When I was a kid (think Charlie Brown), my mom had a fulltime job (which was unusual for ladies at that time), so I spent the halcyon days of summer when we were out of school up the road at my Auntie Barbara’s house hanging out with my cousin Gillian (think Lucy because she was mean LOL).

As an aside, one day whilst getting into our usual mischief … Read More → "SiLC’s FMCW LiDAR Can Perceive and Identify Objects More Than a Kilometer Away"

Intel Takes Control of Communications Hill with Analog-Enabled FPGA Portfolio

by Steven Leibson

October 3, 2022

If you drive south from downtown San Jose, California on US 101, you’ll soon see a commanding hill rising high above the city’s suburban landscape. A huge monolith commands the crest of this hill. Several large microwave horns once perched upon this tower as if it were a concrete throne. Some remain. The microwave tower was part of the AT&T Long Lines telephone network. The former Xilinx campus, now AMD, is close to this landmark. One of the company’s device families – the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC – has figuratively sat alone upon the concrete … Read More → "Intel Takes Control of Communications Hill with Analog-Enabled FPGA Portfolio"

When Supercomputers Meet Beer Pong

by Max Maxfield

September 29, 2022

My head is currently swirling and whirling with a cacophony of conceptions. This maelstrom of meditations was triggered by NVIDIA’s recent announcement of their Jetson Orin Nano system-on-modules that deliver up to 80x the performance over the prior generation, which is, in their own words, “setting a new standard for entry-level edge AI and robotics.”

One of my contemplations centers on their use of the “entry level” qualifier in this context. When I was coming up, this bodacious beauty would have qualified as the biggest, baddest supercomputer on the … Read More → "When Supercomputers Meet Beer Pong"

Intel Introduces Two Monolithic Agilex FPGA and SoC Families, Part 1

by Steven Leibson

September 27, 2022

This week at the Intel Innovation event held in Silicon Valley, Intel previewed not one but two new families in its Agilex FPGA and SoC product lines: the Intel Agilex D-series FPGAs and SoCs and a to-be-named FPGA and SoC family formerly known as “Sundance Mesa.” High-end Intel Agilex devices have been fairly successful and, as they often do, customers requested additional Agilex FPGA family members with new features and different characteristics to better fit an even wider range of application requirements.

These new capabilities are increasingly important as customers … Read More → "Intel Introduces Two Monolithic Agilex FPGA and SoC Families, Part 1"

O-M-Gosh, I’ve Been Zeked! (Part 2)

by Max Maxfield

September 22, 2022

In my original O-M-Gosh, I’ve Been Zeked! column, I introduced 11-year-old Zeke who is currently engaged in using professional electronic design automation (EDA) tools to design radio frequency (RF) circuits to be used in conjunction with a giant helical antenna he’s building with the goal of communicating with the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). (Phew! I’m afraid that sentence got away from me towards the end.)

‘H’ is for “Horribly Confusing”

by Max Maxfield

September 20, 2022

When it comes to writing, have you ever wondered what the difference is between active voice and passive voice? Have you ever heard someone say you shouldn’t split an infinitive and thought (a) “What does that even mean?” and (b) “I wonder if I would even have the necessary strength to do so?” Did anyone ever tell you that you should never leave a participle dangling resulting in your visualizing a small cartoon-like creature caught … Read More → "‘H’ is for “Horribly Confusing”"

Follow EE Journal’s Coverage of MIPI DevCon 2022

by Larra Morris

September 20, 2022

EE Journal is live tweeting MIPI DevCon 2022! This year’s virtual event is for developers and implementers of MIPI specifications, system architects and engineering managers, including design, test, application, system, hardware, firmware and other engineers. We’ll be covering conference presentations by MIPI experts and working group leaders, featuring use cases, implementation experiences and application examples.

Follow along with our live tweets September 20 and 21:

Tweets by EEJournalTFM

… Read More →

SSDs Have a Heart of Darkness and You’d Better Not Ignore It

by Steven Leibson

September 19, 2022

Many years ago, I ordered my first hard drive for my original IBM PC. It was a 5.25-inch Seagate ST-225 half-high, 20Mbyte hard disk drive (HDD). That’s a capacity of 20 MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes. The ST-225 could barely hold one of today’s shortest compressed video files for YouTube but it represented enormous capacity back then, when IBM PC double-sided floppy disks stored only 720Kbytes. Unfortunately, that Seagate drive failed after just one or two months. Although such an early failure was somewhat unusual back then, reliability was a problem. Hard drives became increasingly reliable over … Read More → "SSDs Have a Heart of Darkness and You’d Better Not Ignore It"

Let’s Read Our Little Cotton Socks Off (Part 3)!

by Max Maxfield

September 15, 2022

I simply don’t know where the time goes. It seems like yonks since I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this soon to be famous (or forgotten) mega-mini-series. Speaking of yonks (which essentially means “a long time” but can also mean “a longer time than expected”) reminds me of the fact that we use three tenses in the English language: past, present, and future. For example: Bob ate my bacon sandwich (past), I am not happy (present), Bob will surely suffer for his transgression (future). … Read More →