The international desalination market has shown a third year of continued growth following a slowdown in the mid-2000s…

French lab Leti has teamed up with imaging firm Pyxalis to commercialise technology that lowers readout noise for image sensors to 0.5 electron noise and improves low-light image sensing capabilities. Dubbed ‘Owly-eyed’, it is based on a patented electrical pixel readout architecture that can be integrated in image sensors, which Pyxalis will offer it in …

Read full article: Leti cuts noise from image sensors

OMC says it can now produce a rainbow of LED backlight colours, including magentas and blue-greens. Previously the only way to achieve non-standard LED colours was to use RGB colour mixing, which involves three times as many chips, complex wiring and requires drive circuitry to control the relative channel levels. OMC’s  Active Reflector Technology uses …

Read full article: LEDs come in rainbow colours

Thermal interface firm Cambridge Nanotherm has expanded manufacturing to meet demand for LED thermal substrates. Its technology is a thin electrically insulating coating with high thermal conductivity for metal cored PCBs (MCPCBs). “Our MCPCBs offer designers a distinct thermal advantage. Demand for our solutions has therefore been strong, and we’re currently engaged with most of …

Read full article: Cambridge Nanotherm expands manufacturing

Renesas Electronics will be demonstrating its latest design kit for a thin film transistor (TFT)-based human-machine interface (HMI) at the Electronica exhibition in Munich later this month. The kit is based on the firm’s 32-bit RX71M range of 240MHz microcontrollers which have up to 4Mbyte on-chip flash memory, 552kbyte on-chip RAM. Intended as a starter guide to create graphical user interfaces, which …

Read full article: Electronica 2016: Kit for fast TFT displays from Renesas

Texas Instruments is aiming at sensing and measurement with two low-power additions to its non-volatile FRAM MSP430 microcontroller family. MSP430FR5994 microcontrollers have 256kbyte of FRAM and DSP capability from the firm’s low energy accelerator (LEA) which computes fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), finite impulse response (FIR) filters, infinite impulse response (IIR) filters and other maths functions. …

Read full article: TI adds FRAM microcontrollers with 2-256kbyte of non-volatile memory

Check out this rather nice idea: its a circuit board tribute to Forrest M. Mims, the American magazine columnist, and author of the popular Getting Started in Electronics and Engineer’s Mini-Notebook series of instructional books.

Read full article: A nice circuit board tribute to Forrest M. Mims

There was once a WWII Spitfire fighter pilot who became the director of Bell Labs’ semiconductor unit. He was told by his boss one day in the autumn of 1969: “If you guys in the semiconductor division can’t come up with something better, then we’re going to have to cut your budget next year and …

Read full article: Fable: Competing Against Bubbles

Lattice has been bought by Canyon Bridge for $1.3 billion, a private equity firm in Palo Alto backed by China money.

Read full article: Lattice sold to China-backed private equity fund

Within 48 hours of Wednesday’s post on automating jobs, a particularly unexpected example of this process has emerged in Switzerland. In June an innovative new coffee shop in Geneva said that customers buying a coffee would get a blow-job chucked in. Yesterday the French newspaper Le Matin proclaimed in a headline: “Geneve: Des Robots Pour …

Read full article: Robots Pour Faire Des Fellations