It is a free, one day conference and exhibition intended to present trends currently influencing automated test, as well as featuring a dedicated track focused on the aerospace and defence industries.

The supplier said that delegates will be able to attend technical training and product demonstrations, in addition to meeting industry experts, product developers and system integrators.

The keynote address will be given by Vulcan to the Sky Trust chief executive, Dr. Robert Pleming, who will tell the story of the successful attempt to return the Vulcan XH558 to flight and the huge engineering challenges they faced in taking on such an audacious project.

At the event the aerospace and defence track will include presentations on designing and testing RADAR and navigation systems, validating embedded software and ensuring maximum reliability and uptime of deployable test systems.

Another presentation is entitled:  ‘Expert’s Guide to Building an Automated Test System’ and other sessions will discuss test software frameworks and RF & Wireless measurements.

The certification track allows delegates who are proficient in LabVIEW to take the Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer exam free of charge.

Registration for the Automated Test Summit is free. Register through our website at uk.ni.com/testsummit, call 01635 572498 or email events.uk@ni.com

Although the device architecture supports magnetic input sensitivity ranges of 1.32 to 2.64mV/G and 2.64 to 5.94mV/G, respectively, the products initially being released to market are factory programmed to specific magnetic input sensitivity levels.

The first device types released are the A1318LLHLX-1-T (1.35mV/G sensitivity), the A1318LLHLX-2-T (2.5 mV/G sensitivity) and the A1319LLHLX-5-T (5.0mV/G sensitivity).

The A1318 and A1319 are ratiometric Hall-effect sensor ICs which provide a voltage output that is proportional to the applied magnetic field. The quiescent voltage output is adjusted around 50% of the supply voltage.

The accuracy of the A1318/19 is enhanced via end-of-line optimisation.

Each device features non-volatile memory to optimise device sensitivity and the quiescent voltage output for a given application or circuit.

The ICs are available in LH (SOT-23W) surface mount packages.

www.allegromicro.com

“Your chemistry teacher probably said to you ‘atomic weights are constants of nature’, but nothing could be further from the truth,” says Tyler Coplen, director of the Reston Stable Isotope laboratory in Virginia. In fact, the atomic weight of some elements varies depending on where you are on Earth.

Most of the mass of an atom resides in its nucleus, composed of protons and neutrons (with the exception of hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of a single proton). The number of protons in the nucleus determines what atom you are dealing with: all carbon atoms have 6 protons, all oxygen atoms have 8, and so on. But the number of neutrons can vary from atom to atom of the same element. Atoms of the same element but with different numbers of neutrons are called isotopes.

Every element has a number of unstable isotopes, which break apart through radioactive decay, but some elements have more than one stable isotope too. This is where chemists run into problems when it comes to defining the atomic weight.

Bromine, for example, has two stable isotopes that are roughly equally abundant on Earth. But the two are not equally dispersed: for instance, the heavier isotope of bromine is marginally more common in seawater and salts than it is in organic substances.

Magnesium behaves in a similar way: there are three stable isotopes of this metal, and they vary slightly in abundance in different environments. This means that the average weight of a bromine or magnesium atom in these different environments varies very slightly too.

This has led the guardians of the periodic table – the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) – to decide that the atomic weights of bromine and magnesium are better accommodated by intervals than by single numbers. Bromine’s atomic weight has now switched from 79.904 to the interval [79.901, 79.907]. Magnesium’s atomic weight, meanwhile, was formerly 24.3050, but is now represented by the interval [24.304, 24.307].

While they were at it, the IUPAC also took the opportunity to tweak the atomic weights of three more elements: germanium, indium and mercury.

This is not the first time that this has happened – and it is unlikely to be the last. Two years ago, the IUPAC replaced the atomic weights of 10 other elements with intervals, including some of the most common elements on Earth, such as hydrogen and carbon.

Coplen, an author on the latest IUPAC report, says this will likely happen for other elements with more than one stable isotope in the future, as measurement devices get more sensitive. “The [IUPAC] commission is going to be meeting again this year in August,” says Coplen. “I expect there’s going to be several more elements that will change.”

Journal reference: Pure and Applied Chemistry, doi.org/mk2

Syndicated content: Adam Becker, New Scientist

Available in a 3x3mm TDFN package, the MAX11156 has an internal reference and reference buffer.

It supports a ±5V input from a single positive 5V input rail, which can eliminate the need for negative power supplies and simplifies designs.

The device has an 18-bit resolution and a 500ksample/s sampling rate.

DC accuracy is 0.5 LSB DNL and 2.5 LSB INL (typ)). AC performance is 94.6dB SNR and -105dB THD (typ)). The device has an SPI-compatible serial interface, which can be used to daisy-chain multiple ADCs in parallel for multichannel applications.

www.maximintegrated.com

The B4420 and B4860 are the first devices in the family to include floating point arithmetic. The target computation-intensive applications include radar, medical and media imaging, video analytics, security and industrial automation.

The B4860 runs at up to 14.4GHz and integrates four e6500 dual-threaded Power Architecture processor cores resulting in 61,000 processor CoreMark.

The chip’s six fixed- and floating-point SC3900FP DSP cores yield 230.4 GMACS of fixed-point performance and 115.2 GFLOPS of floating-point performance.

Combined with the four AltiVec SIMD engines embedded in e6500 cores, a total of 172.8 GFLOPS of IEEE 754 floating-point performance is attained.

The devices retain binary code compatibility with the existing SC3900 core.

Unusually for a heterogeneous multicore architectures, the B4 family provides a full cache-coherent system keeping data consistency of the shared resource stored in local caches.

This is not only between L1 and shared L2 caches within the core clusters but also between the different types of core clusters and external interfaces with no software intervention.

The B4860 SoC incorporates a suite of high-speed standard interfaces including two 10Gbit/s XFI/XAUI Ethernet controllers, four 2.5Gbit/s/1Gbit/s SGMII Ethernet controllers and two Serial RapidIO v2.1 controllers.

It also includes two DDR3/3L controllers, 64/72-bit with ECC at 1.867 GHz, NAND/NOR flash controller, I2C, SPI, SDHC, USB and UART interfaces.

The development ecosystem for the B4860 includes the CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on Eclipse technology.

Available tools include the B4860QDS and B4420QDS development boards, C optimizing compilers for Power Architecture and StarCore cores, source-level multicore debuggers, device and core software simulators, optimised device drivers, a Linux SDK, and software analysis tools for profiling and program/data trace.

www.freescale.com

The reference platform’s hardware supports both 3-phase 4 wire and single-phase operation, and configurable sensor types including current transformer.

The intention is to allow it to operate at nominal 230V 50Hz~60Hz, with full 100mA to 100A measurement range.

Accuracy is equivalent to IEC62053-22 (and ANSI C12.20), to at least 0.5s, and compliant with IEC6205-23, class 2 reactive.

The middleware for power measurement includes a set of metrology libraries, enabling precision measurement of voltage and current on each phase, active and reactive power on each phase, and apparent and harmonic power on each phase.

Power quality measurement functions such as voltage sag are also provided. Other software features include single point calibration for the 24-bit precision A/D converter (ADC) and analogue front-end (AFE), and temperature compensation for the AFE including programmable gain amplifier (PGA) and ADC, voltage reference, and real time clock.

Data exchange can be carried out via the IEC62056-21 (also known as IEC1107) optical port and isolated USB virtual COM port. There is also a multi-function graphical display and an intuitive PC graphical user interface.

Renesas is presenting the RX21A meter reference platform on its stand (A8) at Smart Grids Paris on 4th June.

See Renesas offers free design support for RX MCUs

www.renesas.eu

“I want to double our chip production to around 20% of global production,” says Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the EC, “I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically. It’s a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly.”

 The EC proposes the ‘New European Industrial Strategy for Electronics’ targeted at mobilising €100 billion in new private investments between 2013 and 2020.

“A rapid and strong coordination of public investment at EU, Member State and regional level is needed to ensure that transformation,” says Kroes.

The constituent elements of the programme are: Higher and more coordinated investments in R&D&I – maximising the impact of EU and Member State investments through greater cross-border collaboration (70% of public investment is expected to come from Member States, 30% from EU).

Reinforcing Europe’s world-class electronics clusters at Dresden, Eindhoven, Leuven and  Grenoble (FR) and connecting with other leading edge European clusters such as in Cambridge, Carinthia, Dublin and Milan.

The strategy will focus on three things: 450mm; shrinking; greater on-chip intelligence.

€10 billion of private, regional, national and EU funds will be put into a common set of research and innovation goals, including €5 billion through a joint Public-Private Partnership.

This seven-year partnership is designed to cover the whole value and innovation chain in the electronics sector, including funding large-scale innovation projects, under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme.

After growth averaging 5% per year since 2000, the European electronics industry today delivers 10% of GDP, employs 200,000 people directly and supports one million jobs indirectly.

The 420W UDQ2204/001 is the first in a series of DC-DC converters incorporating a PMBus compatible digital interface. The converter is packaged in the industry standard quarter-brick format incorporating the ABC (Advanced Bus Converter) pinout for PMBus communications to an isolated DC-DC converter.

The UDQ2204/001 is an isolated, fully regulated, 420W-12Vout quarter brick that supports the TNV input voltage range of 36V–75V with a typical efficiency of 95.5%.

The PMBus interface is used to support power management features. By attaching the UDQ to the system’s I2C bus, an engineer can monitor Vin, Iin, Vout, Iout, and operating temperature.

The PMBus can be used to set warning flags for temperature, Vin, Vout, Iout and allows the user to customise parameters such as Vout, Vin turn on/off thresholds, output over voltage protection, output current limit and ramp up characteristics.

www.murata.eu

Richard Wilson samples the range of PXI-based test platform products which will be on view at the PXI Show which takes place on June 5 at Silverstone.

Aeroflex will present for the first time at the PXI Show its PXI Maestro automatic wireless device test system as part of its PXI 3000 GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, LTE FDD and WLAN test platform.

A feature of the system is a capability to test multiple devices in parallel. Up to eight devices can be tested at the same time using a dual channel Multi-UE architecture that provides eight bi-directional RF ports in a single 19in chassis.

The system has a multi-way active RF combiner module that supports connection of up to four devices to each channel.

There is also a multi-threaded intelligent sequencer to exploit the benefits of modern multi-core PCs. This allows different tasks both within a measurement step and across a measurement sequence are overlapped or executed concurrently rather than sequentially as with conventional instrumentation.

Multiple threads manage device control, test equipment setup and measurement processing in a tightly coupled manner. Where multiple different measurement are performed at the same test condition then PXI Maestro saves time and executes them in parallel on the same captured data.

National Instruments will present its PXIe-based RF vector signal transceiver which can have its function completely designed in software by the test engineer using LabView.

“This is the first completely software designed instrument,” said Luke Schreier, senior group manager for automated test at National Instruments.

The PXIe-5644R RF vector signal transceiver combines a vector signal generator and vector signal analyser with a user-programmable FPGA into a single PXI modular instrument.

As a result engineers can use the LabView design system to optimise the FPGA-based test hardware for specific mobile protocols and other wireless applications, such as low energy Bluetooth.

The instrument covers up to 6.0GHz and has an 80MHz instantaneous RF bandwidth. This makes the transceiver suitable for wireless standards such as 802.11ac and LTE.

The test company is making the instrument firmware open source and will encourage the engineering community to create an ecosystem for the instrument.

Goepel electronic will demonstrate at the next month’s show two new JTAG digital I/O modules on the PXI bus.

The PXI5396-DT/x modules support structural JTAG/boundary scan tests as well as dynamic I/O operations up to100 MHz for functional test executions. They feature an impedance controlled VPC interface for direct coupling to signal critical load boards or other verification environments.

This allows test hardware to be used for both laboratory verification and in the production line with fixture based systems.

“It allows the implementation of a deterministic test depth already in prototype verification, completely reproducible later in the production area,” said Stefan Meissner, marketing manager with Goepel electronic.

Two variants are available, which differ in the on-board memory depth of 72Mbyte with the PXI 5396-DT and 144Mbyte with the PXI 5396-DT/XM). Both variants provide 96 single ended channels, configurable as input, output and tri-state.

Pickering Interfaces has expanded its range of 2A BRIC matrices.

The latest switch matrix, which will be seen at the PXI Show, is the 40-568 multi-slot BRIC occupying 2, 4 or 8 slots of a PXI chassis. It provides a range of 1 pole matrix configurations from 75×4 to 600×4.

The electro-mechanical relays have a 2A switch rating and 60W power capability to voltages up to 100Vdc, 70Vac.

Pickering has designed its BRIC structure to allow the creation of large matrices in PXI over multiple slots without the use of expensive external cables. The programming interface represents the matrix as a single entity, to simplify configuration.

User connections are through industry standard 78 way D type connectors that are fully supported by Pickering Interfaces range of interconnection products.

Agilent Technologies will be at the PXI Show at Silverstone demonstrating its fastest vector signal generator in a PXIe form factor. The M9381A is a 1MHz to 3- or 6-GHz generator has a modulation bandwidth up to 160MHz for testing RF devices.

Proprietary baseband-tuning technology means its frequency and amplitude switching speed is 10µs in list mode and 250µs from its programming interface.

List mode allows engineers to change 80 parameters, including frequency, power and modulation in as many as 3,201 list mode points.

It will be used to test wideband power amplifiers, front-end modules, transceivers and more, at standard 40MHz RF bandwidth or options of 100MHz or 160MHz bandwidth with real-time corrections and ±0.1, ±0.2, and ±0.3 dB flatness, respectively.

Peak’s modular PXI test rack is designed to provide 13U of full-depth instrumentation space and a further 6U of depth for rear-mounted instrumentation space.

The test rack includes an integrated VPC (Virginia Panel Corp) mass interface receiver adaptor, which supports a number of different contact types to be connected in a single one operation.

The rack features an internal 19-inch instrument rack with slides, and is height adaptable to accept up to 42U of test instrumentation.

Adlink Technology will show a new PXI Express (PXIe) chassis, the PXES-2780 which is an 18-slot PXIe chassis with 10 hybrid peripheral slots.

It provides a configurable PCIe switch fabric for two-link x8 and four-link x4 deployments, which is designed to allow full utilisation of the PCIe gen2 500Mbyte/s bandwidth.

The 18-slot chassis provides one system slot, one system timing slot, 10 hybrid peripheral slots, and six PXI Express peripheral slots for up to 8Gbyte/s system bandwidth and 4Gbyte/s slot bandwidth for dedicated peripheral slots.

Support for 2-links x8 deployment by a configurable PCIe switch fabric eases higher bandwidth system upgrades.

The 10 hybrid slots preserve backward compatibility to accept PXIe/PXI/cPCIe/cPCI modules.

Geotest-Marvin Test Systems has added two new PXI chassis to its product line – the GX7200, a 21-slot PXI Express chassis and the GX7800, an 8-slot, low cost PXI chassis.

The GX7200 provides 20-slots for supporting PXI-1, PXI-hybrid, and PXIe modules. The backplane architecture supports the use of both x1 or x4 system controllers and the system power supply provides 900 watts of system power.

There is monitoring of slot temperatures and system power supply voltages as well providing the ability to program or map each PXI trigger line from one PCI segment to another

GX7800 is an 8-slot, 3U PXI chassis which can accommodate up to 7 instruments as well as an embedded 3-slot PXI controller or an external bus controller.

VTI Instruments has recently introduced the EMX-4350 4-channel, 24-bit, 625ksample/s PXIe digitiser module.

The EMX-4350 provides granularity in 4 channel increments allowing for scalability and matching with any PXIe or PXI (in hybrid systems) modules in building a modular system to fit any application.

Combining the digitiser with the CMX09, 9 slot PXIe chassis allows for deterministic slot-to-slot communication and control with data bandwidth of up to 8Gbyte/s.

Maximum data rates can be achieved across all channels on fully loaded 9 slot and 18 slot chassis for up to 68 channels acquiring data simultaneously on one PXIe 3U rack mounted chassis.

VTI Instruments products will be seen on the stand of distributor TTid at the show.

LG Electronics has previously used both Cortex processors and Mali GPUs in its system-on-chip (SoC) devices. This new agreement will extend the performance of the SoCs.

Launched in October, the Cortex-A50 family bridges the performance requirements of next-generation 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The next generation of the Mali of graphics cores will extend the performance capabilities beyond that offered by the Mali-T678 GPU.

“The close interaction between the CPU and GPU becomes increasingly important as solutions transition between the 32-bit and 64-bit world,” said Bo-ik Sohn, senior vice president, LG Electronics.

“Being able to implement Full Profile GPU Compute in conjunction with ARM big.LITTLE processing configurations will be a key driver to the overall performance and capabilities of our devices,” said Sohn.

“Licensing the highest-performing IP from ARM for both CPU and GPU enables LG Electronics to expand the possibilities for end devices,” said Pete Hutton, executive vice president & general manager, Media Processing Division, ARM.

www.arm.com