I heard a few bits and pieces about detecting gravitational waves. And the engineering is phenomenal. Gravity waves are measured by movement of suspended test masses, which are 40kg blocks of sapphire polished (to 250pm (=0.25nm)) to have mirror ends so they can be sensed by laser (I have no idea how laser sensing works when …
LoRaWAN brings IoT to Rome
Rome-based telecoms operator Unidata has adopted the LoRaWAN technology platform to deploy a low power, wide area network (LPWAN) in Italy. This follows news that Orange is deploying LoRa wide area wireless networks for smart cities in France. Unidata will also promote the IoT wireless technology with a demonstration lab in Rome LoRa technology supplied …
IoT design kit offers free IBM Bluemix cloud trial
Avnet Memec – Silica has introduced a starter kit for industrial IoT designs with cloud services and applications from the IBM Bluemix. Called MicroZed, the IoT design platform runs Wind River Pulsar Linux operating system on Xilinx Zynq-7000 programmable silicon. The kit integrates the IBM Watson IoT Platform agent on top of a custom-configured, certified …
Intel discusses IoT security at Leti conference
French microelectronics research organisation Leti is hosting a one-day conference discussing security of IoT devices and applications. Called “System Reliability & Security in a Connected World” the conference will take place in Lyon on June 23. According to Alain Merle, Leti’s strategic marketing manager for security, new technologies are needed to provide privacy and security …
E-nose sniffs opportunity for health monitoring
As high-speed electronics replaces micromachines and chemicals, the electronic nose (e-nose) could get cheaper. Aimed at health monitoring through breath analysis, the e-nose has been designed at the University of Texas Dallas and performs ‘rotational spectroscopy’ at over 200GHz using a 65nm CMOS chips. “There have been many efforts to build an electronic nose,” said …
PC and tablet units to drop 2%
The market for PCs and tablets will fall 2% this year following the 8% fall last year, says IC Insights. The markets for PCs and tablets continue to fall as more users delay replacement purchases and increase their reliance on smartphones for mobile-computing applications and access to the Internet. Worldwide shipments of PCs and tablets …
ADI adds processors to SHARC
ADI has added ADSP-SC57x and ADSP-2157x processors to its series of single-chip multicore SHARC processors. The devices advance the audio experience by enabling superior sound quality and more cost-effective and reliable audio systems. The new processor platform meets automotive temperature ranges without the need for costly, bulky heat sinks or fans, which saves space in …
The Mirage
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 …