Viewpoints

AI-enabled software for energy management systems can help the switch to EVs write Diego Black and Andrew Hey of Withers & Rogers. With energy demand set to climb as consumers switch to EVs in the run up to the UK ban on the sale of new ICE vehicles in 2030, software developers are harnessing the power of AI to track ...

Stewart Edmondson, CEO at UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF), shares his experience of supporting more than 750 undergraduates through the UKESF Scholarship Scheme. He considers how employers can de-risk their graduate recruitment process… Ash Madni, in his recent Viewpoint piece in Electronics Weekly (26 April 2023 edition), provided interview tips for graduate engineers. He said, “after three or four years ...

The rapid market expansion for robotics brings risks, writes Alexander Ford of intellectual property firm Withers & Rogers. Over the past decade, the robotics sector has been advancing at pace. Early-stage, experimental research projects have given way to major-scale R&D programmes aimed at finding new applications for robotics technologies in a variety of industry sectors. As it stands, we are ...

Ash Madni takes a personal look at some of the British companies that have shown an impressive ability to survive in tough economic conditions and still carve out a niche in the IC Design market. In the modern world of post British companies such as GEC, Plessey, Ferranti, STL, few can boast a history of Integrated Design activities that goes ...

Ash Madni considers hitting snags in electronics design – or what he calls “problem traps” – and shares some very experienced perspectives on how best to manage… So we’ve just started another exciting job in Analog IC design at a good company. We pat ourselves on the back and feel proud of ourselves until a design problem hits our desk. ...

We are all human beings and every now and again, life throws a curveball, writes Ash Madni. Being an engineer doesn’t absolve us from life’s challenges. Sometimes, we can take these in our stride and in others we are reduced to a sombre mood….silence as if our world is collapsing around us. I didn’t mention the “d” word, but we ...

Ash Madni, WIMMIC’s Technical Director, tells how his lifelong adventure in electronics began with the discovery of the world of Bipolar transistors, namely the BC108… It all started when I was 13 years old at school. A class mate was an Electronics hobbyist and during break, he talked animatedly about what he was going to build over the weekend. My ...

Building intelligent devices that can seamlessly switch between many technologies – each being optimised for specific conditions – is the soundest approach for SatIoT, writes Fabien Jordan, CEO of Astrocast. With the arrival of cost-effective Satellite IoT (SatIoT), Systems Integrators (SIs) are rushing to meet the huge pent-up demand for global solutions that allow asset tracking across the 85% of ...

Ash Madni, WIMMIC’s Technical Director, asks “How do Integrated Circuit designers cope with increasing demands while maintaining a good work-life balance?” If you feel like me in the above picture, don’t worry, we are not alone. In today’s commercial world of tight deadlines, technology nodes shrinking while silicon costs go up and the need to achieve right first time silicon, ...

With global demand for EVs growing at pace, the race is on for battery innovators to avert a supply crisis due to shortages of various elements found in the earth’s crust, such as nickel, cobalt and lithium, writes Ben Palmer, a partner and patent attorney at Withers & Rogers. Diminished availability of these much-needed raw materials, combined with growing concern ...