Articles
The LED rundown
March 22, 2013 2:16 pm | by M. Simon, Technical Contributor | CommentsThe life of a light-emitting diode (LED) isn’t as simple as some advertisers may lead you to believe. Manufacturers offer numbers like 100,000 hours as the expected lifetime of high-powered LEDs, but those numbers reflect calculations done using optimum conditions and specification points.
Reader's Response: What energy management technology will generate the most buzz over the next 12 months?
March 22, 2013 12:31 pm | by Kasey Panetta, Associate Editor | CommentsWe wanted the lowdown on Smart Grid and the future of the engineering, so we asked our readers to answer a question: What energy management technology will generate the most buzz over the next 12 months?
Bendable display technology takes the stage
March 22, 2013 12:06 pm | by Kasey Panetta, Managing Editor | Corning, Samsung | CommentsIt happens to everyone who owns a smart phone or tablet. One ill-fated toss into the car or accidental drop on the hardwood and suddenly the screen is too cracked to read. Not only does this render the phone useless until you can get to a store, it can mean spending hundreds of dollars on a new screen or an entirely new phone.
Lockstep microcontrollers advance aerospace electronics safety
March 22, 2013 10:53 am | by Anthony Vaughan, Texas Instruments, www.ti.com | Texas Instruments | CommentsMechanisms like lockstep CPUs, error correction code (ECC) logic for embedded memories and automated built-in self test (BIST) engines integrated into embedded controllers may greatly simplify and reduce the development time needed to design and certify safety critical electronic systems for the aerospace industry.
Counterfeit devices take us all the way to the scene of the crash
March 22, 2013 10:44 am | by George Karalias, Director of Marketing & Communications at Rochester Electronics | Rochester Electronics, Llc | CommentsIn early January 2013, the CBC News concluded its investigation about Canada’s new Hercules C-130J aircraft military transport aircraft containing counterfeit Chinese parts in the cockpit instrumentation. The report confirms what a leading U.S. testing lab has known since 2010 — that the parts are fake and could leave pilots with blank instrument panels in mid-flight.
Five things you really want in a digital oscilloscope (but didn’t know you needed)
March 21, 2013 9:00 am | by Faride Akretch, Tektronix | Tektronix | CommentsFor anyone designing, manufacturing, or repairing electronic equipment, a digital storage oscilloscope is a must-have tool. It lets you see high-speed repetitive or single-shot signals across multiple channels to capture elusive glitches or transient events. An oscilloscope is equally as useful a tool for qualifying elements of a new design....
Design for testability
March 19, 2013 9:41 am | by Holger Goepel, CEO, GOEPEL electronics | Goepel Electronics Llc | CommentsSince the very early days of electronic components, failures have continuously been appearing. In spite of enormous development and production improvements, this situation has not changed. The increasing circuit density and board complexity are critical factors for producing faults.
A fireside chat: Counterfeit components in the military
March 15, 2013 1:16 pm | by Jeff Reinke, Editorial Director | CommentsDriven by financial gain and opportunism, counterfeiting is not new, or uncommon. Recently, counterfeited products have been appearing in the military and aeronautics marketplace as counterfeiters take advantage of profitable components. PD&D caught up with Mark Bollinger, Vice President of Marketing at Smith & Associates, to learn more about this trend....
The philosophy of embedded design
March 12, 2013 12:42 pm | by Carl Cohen, Director, Embedded Marketing Programs, Avnet Electronics Marketing, Americas | CommentsAs technology has become more pervasive in our day-to-day lives, easy adoption is a critical factor in the overall success of a product release. To achieve this, embedded designers must first determine the practical problem the application will solve or the tangible life enhancement it will offer.
FPGA debug using high-bandwidth, mixed-signal oscilloscopes
March 11, 2013 2:35 pm | by Daniel Ruebusch, Agilent Technologies, Inc. | CommentsHow do you test and debug a device with hundreds of thousands of internal logic cells and transceiver speeds up to 28 Gbps? Such is the challenge facing designers of today’s industry leading FPGAs. From the perspective of digital debug, the biggest challenges arise from the inaccessibility of critical logic nodes and a limitation on the number of available physical pins.
Optimizing high-speed, embedded memory interface designs
March 4, 2013 2:00 pm | by Steve Durnal, Micron | Micron | CommentsDesigners of energy-efficient, high-speed memory subsystems for small form factor or power-sensitive embedded and wireless products are often making the shift from traditional DDR2/DDR3 to low power (LP) DDR2/DDR3 memory solutions. This is largely in response to the ever-challenging power reduction requirements....
Maximizing solid-state storage capacity in small form factors
March 4, 2013 10:38 am | by Kent Smith, Senior Director of Marketing, Flash Components Division, LSI | Lsi Corporation | CommentsUsers want ever-smaller and lighter devices but also demand ever-increasing storage capacity to keep more apps and data loaded on their mobile computing platforms. To accommodate these two competing objectives, solid-state storage form factors will need to get smaller, while NAND flash memory geometries will be shrinking and storing more bits per cell.
Balancing reliability and availability
March 1, 2013 9:28 am | by Chris Hobbs, Senior Developer, Safe Systems, QNX Software Systems Limited | CommentsOn 14 September 1993, Lufthansa Flight 2904 overran a runway in Warsaw because the reverse thrust deployment system operated exactly to specification. Unfortunately, the Airbus designers had not anticipated conditions during a cross-wind landing. In an analogous incident, on 11 July 2011, a Victoria underground train in London moved off with the doors open....
Big Brother makes our rational choices less rational
February 28, 2013 3:13 pm | by Chris Warner, Executive Editor | CommentsWhile writing my February 2013 column about EDRs (event data recorders, AKA “black boxes”), I came across an article on the same topic (http://bit.ly/12YX4Fe) by one of my colleagues. She commented on the reservations I share with many others about the use of the data derived from the black boxes.
Migrating legacy M2M systems to the cloud
February 27, 2013 4:51 pm | by Chris Downey, Laird Technologies | CommentsThe rapid pace of technological change means that, even before a system has matured, it often is replaced or enhanced with new technologies. Such is the case with machine-to-machine (M2M) applications and their migration to the cloud, or what sometimes is called the Internet of Things (IoT).
