Electro-ramblings

I just read Howard Johnson's column on the EDN website, where he talks of the difference between those people who are forced to trade their time for money, and those who trade knowledge, experience and their own intellectual property.

Howard, a guru of high speed digital design, argues in Why teach science? that people who make the effort to learn something useful in life (like engineering) have the most valuable commodities to trade:

People lacking useful skills or knowledge are forced to trade their time for money. Time is all they have to offer. An hour of uneducated time pays only about $7 in the United States. Successful people cut a different deal with life. They do not trade their time for money. As Robert Kiyosaki outlines in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, successful people directly create value and then trade that value for money.

But it's not just about that knowledge: The way in which concepts and information are transferred is just as important:

My clients pay me not for the time I spend in the classroom, but for the lifetime of experience I bring with me and for my ability to communicate that experience in a way that improves their technical capabilities and, often, changes their lives. That’s value.

I met Howard a couple of years ago at Oxford University, and he's one of the most charismatic likeable guys I've ever met. Here's a shameless plug for his very successful digital design course which you can find at Oxford's CPD centre. The next week is in June.

An article at New Electronics from Graham Pitcher reminds manufacturers and importers of electronic equipment that registration on a WEEE recycling scheme is mandatory by March 15 - just six weeks away.

Update: Richard Wilson has also written the story as Firms must act to meet WEEE compliance deadline at Electronics Weekly.

Producers have to cough up a registration fee to a compliance scheme and state how much electrical and electronic equipment they placed on the market in 2006, and whether it was for household or business use

According to Liz Parkes of the Environment Agency:

We have now started to approve the compliance schemes that applied to us during January. Producers of EEE in England and Wales have until 15 March 2007 to join an approved scheme.

Graham's story comes on the same day that a firm called WeeeCare said it has received a licence from the Environment Agency to become a recycler.

The firm reckons recycling under WEEE could cost just £6 per tonne.

There's tons (ha ha) of data on the Directive at the Environment Agency website.

Few stories have a ten year lifespan in the electronics industry, and Scotland's flirtation with Alba makes the grade, but alas the dream seems to have died.

The story started late in 1997, as Scottish Enterprise and Cadence announced they would attract nearly 2,000 jobs to Livingston with Chip design centre Alba may put Scotland on top of world.

Shortly afterwards in March of 1998, the plan was extended as a second major chip firm was said to have joined up, taking the proposed number of jobs to between 3,000 and 4,000.

Groundbreaking took place in May 1998 as this imaginatively titled story tells: Alba seeing you and in June of the same year the Scottish inward investment boss moved to Cadence.

The fabled "second firm" never really materialised, but Micro Linear followed Cadence to Scotland with the promise of 50 jobs. Not quite the thousand or so promised.

It was in the summer of 2000 that the problems began, as Cadence said it would scale back its Scottish jobs target, to 1,000 engineers by 2004.

Then a boost: Alba Centre attracts Motorola to Scotland came in September 2000, with 550 jobs by 2005.

At about the same time, Scottish Enterprise announced a £40m expansion at Alba, as it spun the centre out in a sort of public /private partnership.

In 2001 the crash in electronics was obvious, and a Scottish bio-tech firm said it would create 500 design jobs at Alba.

Summer 2002 saw Plexus joining Alba in Scotland and similar little events occurred for a couple of years before the focus shifted more to start-up firms.

By October of last year the emphasis has shifted completely: Scottish technology centre supports start-ups

If you look past the hype of the jobs, the bit of Alba that looked interesting right from the start was the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI). And the ISLI is still proving itself to be a winner.

Greenpeace has given the electronics industry a complete kicking in a report on its environmental impact.

In a report called Cutting Edge Contamination: A study of environmental pollution during the manufacture of electronic products, the pressure group said big name firms are polluting rivers and wells with hazardous chemicals.

Greenpeace sampled water from industrial estates in China, Mexico, the Philippines and Thailand, from factories carrying out PCB manufacture, IC fabbing and component assembly.

Analysts said they found polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants, at the majority of sites, organic compounds such as tetrachloroethene and metals such as nickel, copper and zinc in groundwater or aquifers.

Dr. Kevin Brigden from the Greenpeace Research Laboratories said:

Over recent years we have seen an increasing concern over the use of hazardous chemicals in electronic products but attention has focused on the contamination released during disposal or 'recycling of electronic waste'. Our findings of contamination arising during the manufacturing stage make it clear that only when we factor in the complete life cycle will the full environmental costs of electronic devices begin to emerge.

Firms tested by Greenpeace included IBM, HP, Intel, Sony and Sanyo, On Semi, Kemet, Flextronics, Jabil, Solectron, and Sanmina.

IBM was singled out for attack as Greenpeace claimed it had released specific hazardous compounds such as nonylphenol, said to be a "potent hormone disruptor", into groundwater.

Greenpeace wants more traceability between the manufacturer and the supplier of branded goods:

There is shockingly little information on precisely which major brand companies are supplied by which manufacturing facilities. Responsibility for the contamination lies as much with those brands as with the facilities themselves. There has to be full transparency regarding the supply chain within the electronics industry, so that brand owners are forced to take responsibility for the environmental impacts of producing their goods.

A copy of the report can be found at http://www.greenpeace.org/electronicsproductionreport

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past week, but I've been away in Scotland doing a bit of mountaineering.

February half-term week north of the border is a regular feature of the Wrekin Mountaineering Club, but over the past few years the weather and conditions have become more and more variable.

This year was no exception. For the whole of last week the freezing level didn't go below 800 metres, and what little snow there was disappeared through the week. The picture below shows Liathach from Beinn Eighe, and it should be absolutely plastered with snow.

It didn't rain much, so plenty of good walking was available in the Torridon hills, but precious little ice-climbing was available, and all five ski resorts in Scotland were closed by the end of last week.

So is it the fault of global warming - or just a statistical abberation? All I know is that we saw seriously unusual conditions, and something odd is happening year after year.

PR company Napier has been discussing our blogs on its site. In Electronics Weekly to extend blogs, Mike Maynard makes the point that the blogs provide something quite different than traditional news from journalists:

The blogs provide the opportunity for opinion and comment: something that is rarely provided by journalists in our industry... In electronics, editors perform a different function: firstly they provide an intelligent filter for the information and secondly they aggregate information and opinions about particular topics in a very efficient way.

Mike is pre-empting the launch of a handful of blogs on the site, each covering a different sector of the industry, and each written by an expert in that field. This is a crucial point for us: our blogs aim to give readers analysis and information they couldn't ordinarily get hold of.

Our first guru blogger was Gary Nevison of Farnell, arguably the UK's number one expert on legislation, who is writing Directive Decoder, which looks at issues such as WEEE and RoHS.

We'll soon be launching blogs on parallel processing, test and measurement, mil/aero and high reliability, IP and silicon-on-insulator.

Back at Napier, Mike reckons it would be good to get someone of the calibre of Bob Pease to write a blog:

Perhaps the new blogs on Electronics Weekly will produce a contributor of the calibre of Bob Pease, whose articles for Electronic Design on subjects from Floobydust to PLLs are required reading for almost every engineer at some point in their careers... if EW could find another writer like Bob, I'd read the blog every week!

What - you mean you don't read our blogs everyday Mike?

The free electronic gizmos that are starting to appear more often with products like breakfast cereals are actually quite complex little beasties.

Brian Dipert's blog on EDN has this post - See inside a cereal surprise: Dissecting the Xbox Mini electronic games - which breaks down some free toys from Frosties packets.

Brian goes into exquisite detail in his breakdown of these free toys, with the conclusion that they pack in a lot of engineering ingenuity. He asks:

How do you make an electronic toy inexpensive enough that it can be given away within a box of Froot Loops while still retaining enough compelling features to motivate a cereal purchase?

Read Brian's post and be amazed at how these hand-assembled toys do their stuff.

The patent lawsuit between industry behemoth Apple and plucky little innovation firm Quantum (guess who's side I'm on) is really on a roll.

The story kicked off in January with Apple facing a patent claim over iPod touch sensor technology.

That was good stuff, but it got even better earlier this month as the sensor firm warned Apple over its iPhone design.

Duncan Bryan, licensing director at Quantum Research (QR), told Electronics Weekly:

The description of the iPhone suggests it uses a rear-surface touch screen, and has proximity sensing which can tell if it is held to the ear. That's a QR capability.

It's the charge transfer technology invented by Quantum that is at the heart of the lawsuit.

However, now it seems Quantum is playing down the iPhone issue, and will wait until the iPhone goes on public sale before taking it any further.

"Quantum has no knowledge of any infringement by Apple of Quantum's patents in regard to the iPhone or any other product other than those products alleged to be infringing in our 2005 lawsuit against Apple and Cypress Semiconductor, specifically the Powerbook trackpad, Mighty Mouse, and iPod Nano scroll wheel"