Electro-ramblings

With less than two weeks to go until the world's biggest electronics trade show, now might be a good time to pay a visit to the Electronica pages on Electronics Weekly.

We've posted some early releases from companies exhibiting at the show, along with useful information such as a floor plan of the halls.

During the week of the show, from November 14 to 17, we'll have reporters trawling the halls for the best stories and news items, which we'll post live to the website.

Also worth a visit is the official website of Electronica, where you can find out lots more useful info about the show, including an exhibitor database.

This week there's a long article on Electronics Weekly offering help and advice on improving staff performance, and hence productivity in business.

Written by Helen Cracknell from Business Link, Improving staff performance looks at the review process, training, motivation, leadership and personal development plans.

The article is the latest in a series from Business Link. Also on the site are Small business: Planning for growth, Using a business plan to grow your company, and Starting a business? Get yourself educated.

On the recruiting side of things we've got Business Advice: Getting new workers started and Recruiting 101: How to hire new staff.

It's becoming a really useful series of articles for anyone running a smaller firm, or anyone wanting to start their own firm.

More information can be found at Business Link.

RoHS - the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive - has had a profound impact on the whole electronics industry through 2006, and next year is likely to prove just as traumatic.

Why's that? Because China is about to enact its own version of the lead-free rules. My colleague Suzanne Deffree at Electronic News in the US has written this excellent article, Supply chain braces for China RoHS in 2007, which we have reproduced on Electronics Weekly.

While the six banned substances (lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, polybrominated biphenyl and polybrominated diphenyl) remain the same, it looks like China RoHS is being implemented in a completely different way to the EU legislation.

“China is taking a radically different approach than did the EU. The EU had a date and time and said all products are covered by this except the ones that are out of the scope, like military. In China, they will publish a catalogue that will say what will be covered the first year. Right now, you don’t know if you are going to be covered yet,” said Steve Schultz, director of strategic planning and communications for Avnet Logistics.

The warning is: just becuase you comply with EU RoHS, don't assume compliance with China RoHS. March 1 should be very exciting!

I thought I would look through our site analysis package Webtrends and list the top ten articles from 2006 on ElectronicsWeekly.com.

The result is mostly a mixture of legislation and IT stories:

Dr RoHS answers your questions

Clearspeed plans AMD co-processor linkup

Intel rebrands business systems as VPro

European Commission to plug RoHS loophole

WEEE RoHS Directives doomed to fail, says consultant

Rambus pushes complete memory patent packages

RoHS Directive turmoil as loophole stays open

Electronics Weekly start-up map 2006

Qualcomm makes consumer bid with iPod style chip technology

RoHS Distance selling loophole explained

The roll-out of Internet Explorer 7 continues apace, with the stats for Electronics Weekly's website showing that for January, IE7 has overtaken Firefox.

Up until the launch of IE 7, various flavours of version six of Microsoft's browser brought around 75 per cent of the traffic to EW.com, with Firefox making up the bulk of the remainder with around 20 per cent.

Firefox obviously hasn't changed much, but the shift from IE 6.x to 7 is fairly clear.

Hi everyone. It's unlikely I'll post anything for a few days as I'm on a mountain leader training course in North Wales. Just in time for the sub-zero blast of weather that's heading towards the UK. Nice.

This blog showcases what's happening on the Electronics Weekly website. It gives a great chance to highlight new features on the site and throw the spotlight on existing content that may not otherwise be getting its full share of attention. In the coming months there will also be plenty of new points to highlight!

Getting to grips with the stats for ElectronicsWeekly, one thing is clear - on Fridays, people have careers changes on their mind. More than any other day, people make their way to the Jobs section of the site...

The Dilbert fans among you will have noticed that all was not well in cubicle land, but there's good news to be told...

Dilbert must be cursed. After recently trumpeting his return, with the delivery of fresh daily content, the gremlins have well and truly struck...

The newsletter to accompany the Made By Monkeys blog has made its debut, pleasingly pushing traffic to the site. Good to see, too, the number of comments on posts increasing.

Yes, Dilbert has shrugged off his illness and returns to his rightful position on the site.

Sudoku is back, too! Just check out the Circuit Break section.

AW

"The rising popularity of open source Linux for desktop and server computing is well documented, but in the electronics space the mobile implementation of Linux is gaining increasing attention..."

So begins the Electronics Weekly guide to Mobile Linux, which has now been made live.

When it comes to processor news, it's all gone quad-core...

AMD has finally released its long-awaited native quad-core "Barcelona" (check out the news article) with the 2.0 GHz, 55- and 75-watt, Quad-Core AMD Opteron server chips.

Talking of microprocessors, as I was yesterday, x86 is not the full picture of course. Other companies than Intel, AMD or VIA dominate outside mainstream computing fields.

ARM dominates in wireless telecom applications, for example, MIPS in wired telecom apps and Texas Instruments' DSPs in digital signal processing...

We round up this week's Top Ten most read sories from the Electronics Weekly News Index, starting from the top with the diffulty of finding suitably qualified engineering staff...

Have you signed up to receive the new Circuits and Made by Monkeys newsletters yet? Go to MyAccount to make sure you keep receiving them.

During their launch period, ElectronicsWeekly.com has been offering Circuits and Made by Monkeys to all our readers, but this is coming to a close. So if you wish to keep receiving the newsletters you will need to register!

Samsung Electronics has a "Sashimi Theory" of Success for dealing with the ultra-competitive consumer electronics market.

CEO Yun Jong Yong believes that getting hot products to market before they become "dried fish" lets Samsung fetch high prices and better maintain its margins. Credit to BusinessWeek for the quote.

Transformers are very versatile for electronics applications and can be used in many ways. So believes Robin Evans, the Senior Design and Development Engineer at Wound Magnetics. He provides the introduction to the latest addition to our Trends & Technologies section: an Electronics Weekly guide to transformers.

Here are the top ten most popular articles on EW.com in the last week, with Qualcomm and graphics technology still leading the way (it helps when AMD itself links to the article!).

1. Qualcomm to put Xbox 360 graphics in mobiles - News

Here are the top ten most popular articles on EW.com in the last week, with Qualcomm figuring strongly once again, courtesy of Google and its proposed Android platform - operating system, middleware, user interface and applications software - for mobile phones based on Linux.

1. Google joins Qualcomm and Motorola to put Linux in mobiles - News

One for SOC designers. Check out a new in-depth feature that has just been posted on Electronics Weekly.com - Traffic management: A growing nightmare for SOC designers

Here are the top ten most popular articles on EW.com in the last week, with Qualcomm graphics for mobiles leading the way (once more)...

1. Qualcomm to put Xbox 360 graphics in mobiles - News

Have just loaded two features onto the site - Why design engineers need to know about lithography, part 1 and
part 2. Check out this tracing of the topography of lithography, as it were.

Part one considers how semiconductor manufacturers have moved to lasers with ever smaller wavelengths (from 436 nm in 1980, to 365 nm in 1988, to 350 nm in 1994, to 248 nm in 1998 and finally to 193 nm in 2001) up to the 248-nm generation of lithography tools, when people began patterning below the wavelength of the light source.

Have you signed up to receive the Circuits and Made by Monkeys newsletters yet? Or the Weekly editorial email? Go to MyAccount to make sure you receive them.

During their launch period, ElectronicsWeekly.com was offering Circuits and Made by Monkeys to all our readers, but this has come to a close. So if you wish to keep receiving the newsletters you will need to register!

Gary Nevison - our resident blogger on environmental legislation and government directives - has reached 50. Fifty blog posts, that is - read the 50th post

From Arsenic and batteries to WEEE and the Xbox, Gary covers the ground. These topics are taken from the blog's tag-cloud, by the way, where RoHS and the EU also stand prominently.

One for your diary. In fact, dozens for your diary. We have updated our online courses directory, populating it with lots of fresh content for throughout 2008 - there's lots of details for each month already, all the way to next December.

Here are the top ten most popular articles on EW.com in the last week.

No prizes for guessing what is still hanging on to the top-spot. It's kinda like Wet Wet Wet and "Love Is All Around Me" all over again... It just shows what happens when the (US) homepage of AMD features your story.

1. Qualcomm to put Xbox 360 graphics in mobiles - News

The Electronics Weekly Christmas Quiz, which was first featured in last week's magazine, now only has a couple of days left for entries (December 12 is the deadline).

With 16 multiple choice questions about recent news items, the prize is a Christmas Hamper. The picture above is taken from Q15, about research at a particular institute that is developing thermo-chemical nanolithography...

'Twas my old school motto, and very applicable for Electronics Weekly, too, this last week. Hot on the heels of the pics and video from the Electra Awards, we bring you more multimedia with the site's second podcast, courtesy of Gadget Freak.

Rob Kotevski writes in his blog, by way of introduction:

Just a gentle reminder that the second instalment of Warren Savage's monthly column on Semiconductor IP is already live on the site.

He begins:

What's the difference between a hot product and dud? Let me tell you: it's the degree to which a product completely solves a problem. Hot products do something, and they do it well and most importantly they do it completely.

Let me give two examples of complete products. First, the ubiquitous Starbucks. High quality coffee, available everywhere, in almost every variant you'd want, and delivered to people completely consistently no matter where you are. I get the same café latte in Cambridge as I do in Paris, New York, and San Francisco. You can count on it. That's a complete product.

I love Dilbert, and today's strip is a classic. Check it out - Dilbert on ElectronicsWeekly.com - but be quick because the strip is updated daily.

Here are the top ten most popular articles on ElectronicsWeekly.com in the last week, with Intel and wireless technology leading the way.

1. Intel points the way toward wireless HD standard - News

Don't forget to check out the Events section of ElectornicsWeekly.com. The Elektra 2007 awards may be over, but Nepcon 2008 is now on the horizon...

I've just updated the site with a piece about the annual showcase for electronics production - Nepcon UK invites exhibitors to step on board Technology Highway

The show runs 29 April - 1 May and the organisers have announced a new feature - a "Technology Highway" that puts the spotlight on AOI & X-Ray inspection, giving an opportunity to view a whole range of equipment used across the production line.

Warren Savage On: Collaboration Needed for Success

In his latest column on semiconductor IP, Warren Savage considers the factors behind products that only get the chip designer to about 80% of where they want to go. Following on from his last column - Warren Savage On: Swiss Cheese Solutions - he believes these systems hold back the entire semiconductor industry from running at maximum efficiency.

He also considers some good examples from Intel, leading the PCI Special Interest Group and USB Implementers Forum, and Freescale Semiconductor, driving next generation automotive networking through its contributions to the FlexRay Consortium.

Check out the latest Valley View: Do IPO numbers hint at recession?

The monthly Valley View column is now hosted online within the UK Tech Startup blog and the latest thoughts of Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners, concerns IPOs and their indication of economic health.

Specifically, Silicon Valley chip investors are asking whether this is the beginning of a downturn or not...

Check out the updated Electronics Weekly focus on MEMS, micro-electromechanical systems - MEMS mix up the silicon - there's a new added (RSS) ingredient to ensure freshness of content!

As well as an introduction and overview of the topic, a listing of important news stories involving MEMS, and an index of other MEMS-related online resources, we have added a dynamic news feed.