The mood was bullish at Electronica for Digi-Key Electronics with the company reporting an almost 15% growth in sales for the UK in the last year.

Read full article: Electronica: Digi-Key boasts post-Brexit success

Melexis, the automobile IC fabless specialist, is developing a LIDAR chip which is integral to the autonomous car project “We can do that because we have a history of building light sensors,” Françoise Chombar, CEO of Melexis (pictured) told me at Electronica. Chombar is not exactly an autonomous car optimist – seeing it as a …

Read full article: Electronica: Melexis edges towards autonomous cars

Digi was showing off its newly released ConnectCore for i.MX6UL module at Electronica. It is designed to support the rapid development of smart and secure connected devices.

Read full article: Electronica: Digi demos its secure ConnectCore for i.MX6UL Starter Kit

Maxim has designed a high-sides switch that can handle back-EMF from any inductance, regardless how much energy it has stored. MAX14913 includes eight of the switches, which can operate loads at up to 24V (36Vmax) and 500mA. “Designers of industrial controllers can safely drive and demagnetise any inductive load for Industry 4.0 applications,” claimed the …

Read full article: Octal high-side switch shrugs-off any inductance

Silicon doping in GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) could reduce complexity and improve blue laser efficiency, claims a team formed between Meijo University Nagoya University. “GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers are expected to be adopted in various applications, such as retinal scanning displays, adaptive headlights, and high-speed visible-light communication systems,” said researcher Tetsuya Takeuchi of Meijo …

Read full article: Silicon doping comes to the rescue of vertical cavity GaN lasers

Fairchild’s first product was made for IBM. “IBM needed a core driver that would tolerate the 85 degree Celsius operating temperature,” recalls Fairchild’s sales boss Tom Bay as recalled in Charlie Sporck’s book SPIN-OFF, “they needed to drive at 150 milliamp, 60 volt capability. We said sure we could do that. I say we, and …

Read full article: Fairchild’s First Product

At Strategies in Light, a session will be devoted to the topic “Non-Visual Effects of Lighting: Status of Knowledge” and features speaker Mariana Figueiro, who provides key points here on health and circadian lighting.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports the next major release of the PostgreSQL open source database, version 9.6.1. New features include parallel query, phrase search, and improvements to performance and usability. With this release, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also supports the bloom and pg_visibility extensions. 

Amazon Kinesis Streams enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. We have added new functionality to the Amazon Kinesis Streams management console and made it easier to use. You can now choose a custom data retention period between 1 to 7 days for your streams, and enable shard level Amazon CloudWatch metrics using the console. The console also now has a simpler user interface. For example, you can create a new stream in just one step and get started with Amazon Kinesis Streams in minutes. For more information, see the Amazon Kinesis Streams developer guide . 

We are excited to announce a new edge location in Tokyo, Japan for Amazon CloudFront. This is the third edge location for Tokyo and fourth in Japan which brings the total number of worldwide edge locations to 64.