Features
Solar-powered everything!
March 25, 2013 3:14 pm | by Chris Rendall, Mechanical Engineer, PCDworks | Blogs | CommentsI’ve heard for years that “soon we’ll have solar panels on everything.” To be honest, I’ve never paid much attention to the hype because these magical solar panels that can fit on and inside everything never seemed to materialize commercially, or if they did they were always way too expensive for the everyday consumer, or maybe just for me.
Nuclear power: The future of human civilization
March 25, 2013 10:23 am | by Tom Ligon, Technical Contributor | Blogs | CommentsThis is not an article about the environment. This is not an article about oil. This is an article about the long-term future of human civilization. Are you with me so far? Are you in favor of human civilization having a future, not just for another hundred years, but for thousands ... tens of thousands?
The best way to improve distributors, according to engineers
March 22, 2013 4:43 pm | by Kasey Panetta, Associate Editor | Blogs | CommentsHow do you deal with distributors? Distribution is a key aspect of the engineering process, and it's important to choose the right distributor. You need dependibility, reliability and transperency to make the relationship between distributor and manufacturer work.
Smart grid technology of the future
March 22, 2013 2:53 pm | Articles | CommentsWe asked our industry experts to weigh in on our Smart Grid question: What home energy technology do you expect to see as a breakthrough in the next 12 months?
What home energy technology will break through in the next 12 months?
March 22, 2013 2:41 pm | Articles | CommentsOur energy and Smart technology experts weigh in to answer our smart grid question for this month: What home energy technology do you expect to see as a breakthrough in the next 12 months?
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 | Articles | 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?
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 | Articles | 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 | Articles | 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.
Obama wants research to wean vehicles off oil
March 15, 2013 1:21 pm | by Matthew Daly and Nedra Pickler, Associated Press | News | CommentsPresident Barack Obama is pushing the U.S. Congress to authorize $2 billion over 10 years for federally funded research into clean energy technologies that can wean automobiles off oil. Obama proposed the idea of an energy security trust last month in his State of the Union address....
Green energy pirates
March 15, 2013 9:26 am | by M. Simon, Technical Contributor | Blogs | CommentsI got an e-mail from a friend recently railing against what he called (loosely translated by me) "Green Energy Pirates". Let me quote one sentence from his e-mail. "There is a whole slew of companies that move from subsidy to subsidy globally and then abandon 'green projects' when the subsidies dry up."
Engineering Update #6: Spidey's new suit, robotic cheetahs and stretchable power supplies
March 14, 2013 10:03 am | Videos | CommentsECN's Engineering Update, brought to you by Mouser Electronics, takes a look at: a Spidey Sense suit. Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago have found a way to replicate Spider-Man's superhuman powers of perception with a Spider Sense suit. Modeled after the Marvel comic book hero...
Practicalities of owning and driving an electric vehicle
March 14, 2013 9:12 am | Videos | CommentsThe IET interviews Andrew Bissell an owner and driver of a Tesla, filmed at the University of Newcastle, UK, 3 May, 2012. This interview covers range anxiety, charging the car, why people should buy an electric vehicle and an owner's perspective on the drivers needed for mass adoption.
The philosophy of embedded design
March 12, 2013 12:42 pm | by Carl Cohen, Director, Embedded Marketing Programs, Avnet Electronics Marketing, Americas | Articles | 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.
On-site electric current measurement to improve Smart Grid design
March 12, 2013 9:26 am | by EurekAlert! | News | CommentsNew and improved technology for measuring power quality in smart grids could save 839k tonnes of carbon and bring £250 million annual GVA in economic benefit. The technology has been developed by scientists at the Centre for Carbon Measurement, part of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK's National Measurement Institute.
FPGA debug using high-bandwidth, mixed-signal oscilloscopes
March 11, 2013 2:35 pm | by Daniel Ruebusch, Agilent Technologies, Inc. | Articles | 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.
Solving the counterfeit crisis, engineers weigh in
March 11, 2013 9:57 am | by Kasey Panetta, Associate Editor | Blogs | CommentsHow would you stop counterfeiting? One of the hottest topics in electronic components--and basically every other industry-- is how to deal with the issue of counterfeiting. So we put it to the readers to come up with the best solutions for the counterfeiting crisis.
Nuclear plant inspections need to improve: report
March 11, 2013 9:23 am | News | CommentsMore than one-third of U.S. nuclear power plants suffered safety-related incidents over the past three years, and nuclear regulators and plant operators need to improve inspections to prevent such events, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said in a report on Thursday.
Focus on climate change in the Arctic could yield environmental and financial dividends, panel concludes
March 6, 2013 9:36 am | News | CommentsClimate change in the far north is occurring far more rapidly than elsewhere around the planet, but common-sense efforts to mitigate key emissions and protect the fragile Arctic environment could slow this trend and benefit communities, the environment, and companies.
Optimizing high-speed, embedded memory interface designs
March 4, 2013 2:00 pm | by Steve Durnal, Micron | Micron | Articles | 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 | Articles | 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.
Agita over 3D printed guns is absurd
March 1, 2013 4:26 pm | by Jason Lomberg, Technical Editor | Articles | CommentsHobbyists, tinkers, and DIYers are the unsung heroes of our industry — "hackers" in the original sense of the word. But conflating "hobbyists" with "guns" causes fits of hysteria. And it’s entirely unwarranted. The handwringing over the imagined capability to print 3D guns and the associated moral implications is absolutely absurd and betrays a basic misunderstanding of firearms and physics.
Mayer’s memo ending telecommuting puts Yahoo in good company
March 1, 2013 12:27 pm | by Chris Warner, Executive Editor | Blogs | CommentsMarissa Mayer created quite a hornet’s nest when she issued a memo effectively ending the work-at-home option for Yahoo employees. In the memo, obtained by AllThingsD, Mayer writes, “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side."
Why 3D-printable guns are a terrible idea
March 1, 2013 9:45 am | by Kasey Panetta, Associate Editor | Blogs | CommentsMention the words "3D printed guns" and you’ve got an instant, increasingly heated debate on your hands. When you consider there were 16 mass shootings—defined as a shooting with multiple, random victims—in 2012 with at least 88 people dead including children, it’s definitely a topic worth discussing. My take? No one needs a 3D printed gun or the ability to create one.
Balancing reliability and availability
March 1, 2013 9:28 am | by Chris Hobbs, Senior Developer, Safe Systems, QNX Software Systems Limited | Articles | 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 | Articles | 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.
