Electro-ramblings

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We are now introducing an eNewsletter dedicated to the Mannerism blog written by our esteemed colleague, David Manners, Senior Components Editor on Electronics Weekly.

Short and sweet, the weekly email will contain his latest posts and a collection of the most read posts from the last seven days.

Under the My Emails heading, tick the box for:
"Semiconductors: Authoritative and frank industry analysis and comment, from the David Manners blog, "Mannerisms" - Weekly"

Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows.

Don't miss out on our new online jobs service for the electronics industry, boasting some of the most advanced technology powering any jobs site in the UK. It has relaunched today, helping you to zero in on the latest vacancies for your sector and area. See: www.electronicsweekly.com/jobs

Essentially, it will deliver a superior online experience for both jobseekers and recruiters in the electronics industry. In particular, as well a more accessible search interface, you can register for jobs by email in order to receive relevant jobs without visiting the site, CVs can be searched by employers, and there's a new "Careers advice" section to help you look for new jobs.

Jobseekers will be able to:

* Search the latest jobs from leading employers easily and quickly

The Electronics Weekly News Roundup Podcast

Have just posted this week's roundup of news stories - The Electronics Weekly news roundup

It's a pick of the main stories crossing the ElectronicsWeekly.com News Index this week, from Infineon's CEO resigning, and ST's Bozotti declaring no interest in Infineon's wireless chip business, to Lumileds reducing colour bins in white LEDs and Renesas plans for a new processor...

But if it's more convenient to listen to the news than to read it, don't miss our new audio bulletin of industry developments - The Electronics Weekly News Roundup Podcast.

The latest Q5 interview is with Hamid Farzaneh, president and CEO of video interconnect technology company DisplayLink, which has an R&D team in Cambridge.

He reveals his thoughts on the cost of designing a new chip from scratch, the most interesting application for PC multiscreens, the future for wireless displays and wireless USB, and what makes Cambridge such a good location for undertaking chip R&D.

The five short sharp questions this week are:

Can you describe your technology in two sentences?

What do you estimate to be the cost of designing a new chip from scratch?

The generators in Freeplay radios have moved on a great deal from the original Trevor Bayliss design, and look quite superb.

I noticed this when squinting through the blue tinted plastic of a Freeplay EyeMax (pictured). [Recently featured in a Gadget Master competition, btw - Ed.]

Bayliss' original leap of imagination was that a modern wind-up radio was possible, and he followed this up by developing one - coming up with a design that stored power in a spring.

The spring unwound through a set of gears that spun a small DC motor operating as a generator.

Effectively a Mark II, the next version was a better shape to grip when winding, and added a rather neat power-saving touch - a transistor shorted out the motor when its reservoir capacitor was full - which almost stopped the motor and effectively froze the spring until power was next needed.

Catch up on all the significant news from the International Electronics Forum 2008, hosted in Dubai this year. According to the organisers, the event brings together more than a hundred decision makers from the world's largest technology companies.

Our man on the spot, filing from the event, is David Manners, Senior Components Editor on Electronics Weekly.

Stories to note include:

* IEF 2008: Semiconductor industry consolidation the way to disintegration?
Financial adviser mocks the moves to consolidation in the chip industry. "The consolidation of two companies is like the collision of two garbage trucks", he said, "you get a lot of stuff on the road, but you don't necessarily get any organised pattern that can take you anywhere.".

* IEF 2008: Flash memory leading process technology
The requirements of flash memory scaling are driving the process technology of the semiconductor industry with the NAND flash industry demanding a doubling of density every year

For circuits and circuit design ideas, don't miss an important resource on the site. The
Design Ideas section aims to help engineers find ideas and inspiration for their circuits.

For example, in the Displays category, a moving-dot LED-display interface to a microcontroller uses only three output pins, in Test & Measurement, a white-noise generator has no flicker-noise component, and, for Microprocessors, a crystal controlled microcontroller generates precise timing ticks... There's many, many more, broken down into relevant subject areas.

The full list of sub-sections is:

He reveals his thoughts on the biggest commercial opportunity for LEDs, manufacturing in the UK and the biggest challenge to the development of a high volume LED market.

The five short sharp questions this week are:

Can you describe your business in two sentences?

What is the biggest commercial opportunity for LEDs?

Liked this cartoon that was sent to me, from Non Sequitur.

Follow the link for the full picture http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2008/05/09/

The value of Wikipedia does divide people, to some extent, but I think most welcome it as "a very good thing", providing easy access to (very largely) reliable material. Maybe you feel you shouldn't rely on it as a single source of authority? In that case, you can always follow the references at the end of the entries.

Speaking of which... I was pleased to see that another Electronics Weekly article is cited as a reference. The latest involves memristor technology (resistors with storage capabilities), and cites our Technology Editor Steve Bush's article "HP nano device implements memristor"

Check out the Wikipedia entry for Memristor

In a break from working out how to stabilise mountain sides, Imperial College London was recently called in to rescue Henry Moore's Arch - a not unpleasant six metre tall stone sculpture that was taken down from a London park in 1996 because it was on the verge of falling down.

Despite its ultra-modern image, Imperial still has wonderful big materials testing machines lurking in its basements, and a startling amount of expertise in things rock.

It found that the sculpture's unusual shape combined with the poor location of the joints between its seven pieces, and the use of travertine which is a brittle stone, conspired to make it unstable.

• Buck-boost converters find use in automotive, consumer-electronics, and other applications.
• Simple buck-boost and Cuk converters invert the input voltage.
• SEPICs (single-ended-primary-inductance converters) and four-switch synchronous H-bridge buck-boost converters do not invert the input voltage.

In this most celebrated play of the 20th century, two tramps patiently wait by a tree for days for someone named Godot to arrive, making excuses for idleness ("nothing to do") while they wait. Not even sure what Godot will do for them when he arrives, they continue to wait, anticipate, reflect, argue, dream, and wait some more. Of course, Godot never arrives.

In our own industries we can find it easy to wait for others instead of taking action to solve problems that are meaningful to us. In the semiconductor IP space, we have waited for many years for the emergence of standards around the development and use of IP.

I travelled on Eurostar from St Pancras Station for the first time, and I am impressed, and also slightly disappointed.

I used to leave from Waterloo, and it was always a bit of an embarrassment when returning from Paris or Brussels as the mighty train dropped from 180mph in continental Europe to about 20mph as it bumped and clattered across Kent and crept into London.

Incidentally, I am told that the power electronics in Eurostar has its roots in the UK's Advanced Passenger Train - That ill-fated train which ultimately failed because the ultra-light drive mechanics that allowed it to run fast on standard rails was a technological step too far for its gearbox oil and drive shafts.

Allegedly, the APT had another successful spin-off - its tilting mechanism may be the one used in the Alstom-built Pendolinos that ply the West Coast mainline.

If anyone can confirm or disprove the above 'facts', I would be interested.