Banana Pi is a single board computer from China that is mechanically similar to the Raspberry PI educational computer. Computationally, it is far more powerful as it is built around Allwinner’s A20 chip with a 1GHz dual core ARM Cortex-A7 and it has 1Gbyte of DDR3 RAM. Also on the main die is an ARM Mali400MP2 graphics processor. “With removable ...

The University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) has founded the Photonics Institute in Singapore, with Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Three directors will head the Institute: NTU professor Tjin Swee Chuan, NTU professor Nikolay Zheludev, and ORC director Professor Sir David Payne. L-r in the photo are Payne, Chuan and Zheludev. In the Photonics Institute will have a total of ...

People constantly bang on about computers taking over from humans and running the whole show but this was recognised as twaddle 171 years ago.

  Energy efficiency in ubiquitous components will be a major differentiator for manufacturers of electromechanical switches and sensors, writes Leon Mordang Delivering more for less energy is very much the name of the game in our industry as Electronica 2014 rolls around. Emech and sensors are proving to be two of the top technologies in design engineers’ armouries in delivering ...

Safety has always been a critical focus area for automakers, and technology advances have dramatically improved vehicle safety statistics, with fatalities decreasing by more than 50% over the last three decades alone. Safety concerns have now shifted from automobile accidents involving another vehicle to reducing the number of accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are enabling ...

Northrop Grumman is claiming a speed record with “the fastest solid-state amplifier integrated circuit ever measured”. Developed for US military lab DARPA, the ten-stage common-source amplifier showed 10dB gain at 1.0THz and 9dB at 1.03THz. The transistors are 25nm gate length indium phosphide (InP) HEMTs. “Gains of six dB or more start to move this research from the laboratory bench ...

The O-S-D (opto, sensors, discretes) sector will grow 9% this year after 1% growth in 2012 and 2013, reports IC Insights. This year sales should reach a record $68.9 billion.

Samsung suffered a catastrophic collapse in smartphone market share in Q3 from 35% to 25% while four year-old Xiaomi of China bagged up a 6% share to take third place after Apple’s 12%, reports Strategy Analytics .

The French CGT union has weighed into ST management accusing it of using R&D grants to pay dividends and pursuing a break-up strategy rather than a growth strategy.

Arbitrary-beam headlights are another step closer, claims a German consortium.  Cars already exist in which cameras shape the headlight beam around other road users – maximising light on the road while minimising dazzle. These adaptive headlamps are based on forward-facing cameras and shaped mechanical shutters within the headlight. With the advent of LEDs, headlamp developers have been trying to remove ...