The chip industry has been known to get ahead of itself and, back in 2007, a TSMC exec told a forum on 450mm wafer development that “the industry should begin seeing momentum perhaps by the end of this year.” The exec argued that: “When production capacity of the latest wafer size accounts for more than …
Metasurface converts sunlight to heat for electron emission
Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter have created a metasurface that strongly absorbs light across the solar spectrum but minimises emission of thermal radiation. It uses uses amorphous carbon as an inter-layer between thin gold films with the upper film patterned with a 2D periodic array using focused ion beam etching. Gold is a first step, …
GPUs bring scalable processing to machine vision
The industry should machine vision technology more user-friendly because this cutting-edge field has dramatic and positive potential for embedded applications, writes Stephen Turnbull. At its core, machine vision is simply leveraging the information available in an image to make a decision about what to do next with the object in the image. A simple pass/fail …
Bluetooth 5 standard promises to quadruple range, doubles speed
The next version of Bluetooth has been announced. As well as increasing the range and speed of transmissions, the next release – dubbed simply Bluetooth 5 – will also increase its broadcast messaging capabilities, for beacon operation and location services. The Bluetooth SIG promises Bluetooth 5 will quadruple its range to up to around 400m …
Bluetooth 5 standard promises to quadruple range, doubles speed
Amazon CloudWatch Events Available in the South America (São Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions
The Amazon CloudWatch Events service is now available in the South America (São Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.
New Amazon EC2 Spot Console Now Supports Spot Fleet and Spot Blocks
Today, we are introducing a redesigned EC2 Spot Requests console , which now supports Spot fleet and Spot blocks , features which simplify and streamline how you use Amazon EC2 Spot instances. Previously, Spot fleet and blocks were available via the AWS CLI and SDK tools only.
TI brings out powertrain motor drivers
TI has brought out two automotive motor drivers that support high-performance powertrain applications – the DRV8305-Q1, a three-phase brushless DC gate driver, and the UCC27211A-Q1, a high-current half-bridge gate driver. For powertrain applications such as transmission pumps or engine cooling fans, the DRV8305-Q1 features a smart gate-drive architecture with programmable slew-rate control that allows easy …
App note covers charging Vishay supercap-battery hybrid
Vishay has published an app note on charging its 196 HVC Enycap series of hybrid energy storage capacitor-batteries – which combine electrostatic and faradaic energy storage, in its words – as it looks like these components need a little TLC if they are to last. “For applications requiring a constantly high charge state of the Enycap capacitors, such …
Silego adds to Greenpak line
Silego has added to itSGreenPAK (GPAK) product line. Silego’s GPAK family of Configurable Mixed-signal ICs (CMICs) is designed to easily integrate common discrete ICs and passive components into a single device with programmable Non-Volatile Memory. The SLG46108V brings the functionality and versatility of the GPAK family into the ultra-small 1.0 x 1.2 x 0.55 mm, …
Xilinx cuts ARM cores to two in Zynq FPGAs
Xilinx has introduced a stripped-down version of its Zynq FPGAs, reducing the number of 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 cored from four to two in the new ‘CG’ variant. The chips retain both the dual 32bit Cortex-R5 cores of their predecessors, but loses the Mali-400 graphics processor, and there is no H.264/H.265 video codec. “The devices add a …