Ethernet networking could be coming into the living room, bedroom and kitchen as networking system suppliers identify Ethernet local area networking in the home as an emerging market for their hardware and the silicon which drives it. The US standards body, the IEEE, has created a group to come up with a specification for what it calls Residential Ethernet. The ...

Cooling specialist Professor Issam Mudawar of Purdue University has been investigating evaporative cooling, used in domestic refrigerators, to take the heat out of chips. He added a chip-size copper plate with micro-channels to a fridge-like heat exchanger. “We are not trying to reinvent the wheel with respect to the refrigeration cycle,” Mudawar said. “We want to use existing technical know-how ...

Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, is steering biopsy needles by computer. “It is a bit complicated for the human hand,” Professor Moshe Shoham told Electronics Weekly. Biopsies sometimes have to be done on tissue behind obstructions such as blood vessels. “You can’t go straight [in] as there might be some obstacle,” said Shoham. “You an move the base of the ...

Nothing is for free, as they say, so free IDEs (integrated development environments) are usually basic entry-level tools to get your microcontroller design moving, but which probably will not offer the more sophisticated development functions your design will eventually need. Free IDEs generally include basic tools for: project management, code creation, linking, code assembly, and debugging. While some vendors will ...

Electrical safety testing specialist Clare Instruments is offering a range of dedicated test and measurement training courses covering practical electrical safety testing. The one day ‘Safety in the Testing Environment’ looks at the requirements of EN50191 and is intended for all organisations that use voltages over 50Vac in manufacturing, service or test development facilities. The course considers the different test ...

The pressures of testing and approval times for new products mean management is critical, says Andy Brown from RFI Global Now, more than ever before, managing testing and approvals activities can determine whether products get to market on time or not. The pressures faced by manufacturers to bring products to market as fast as possible make basic preparation and understanding ...

Where are you? My guess is that you probably know and you have little need for a technology to answer that question. So what is going to drive the take up of location-based services (LBS)? “Consumers can know nothing about technology but they are the most savvy users of technology. It [location-based services] is not a leisure market and I ...

Looking to tap into what it sees as a resurgence in the telecommunications market, Texas Instruments is introducing a new DSP for that space that it says offers a huge improvement in performance over what customers are using today. The C6455 DSP provides up to 12 times the performance over current products, according to Thomas Brooks, senior DSP marketing manager ...

Fuel cells could be made more efficient using carbon nanotubes to store hydrogen, according to models developed by physicists from the US and Turkey. Using theories of quantum physics, the scientists showed that single-walled nanotubes “decorated” with titanium and other transition metals could hold eight per cent hydrogen by weight. Car makers and the US Department of Energy had set ...

A white paper from IDT clarifies high-speed interconnect technologies for communications applications To obtain higher bandwidths, designers of communications and networking equipment, servers and storage systems are rapidly converting from parallel bus architectures to serial types. Self-clocking serial bus structures eliminate skew between data and clock lines, allowing faster data rates and more bandwidth per pin, while also enabling highly ...