Viewpoints

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an industry buzzword for years, writes Richard Walsh, head of memory at Samsung Semiconductor Europe, but he considers the technologies now powering developments, such as high-bandwidth memory, smart SSDs and SR-IOV, in-memory computing and parallel processing… It has garnered headlines as a potential force of danger with robots overtaking the world, but most often AI is ...

Dr Esen Bayer, CTO at ETL Systems, shares his vision to tackle the ground segment demands of a new generation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites head-on. He and his team are creating a collaborative platform of completely new smart universal chassis’ designs, where the modules and habitat communicate with one another, interacting intelligently and almost all elements are hot-swappable. This, ...

Nick Hill, CEO at the engineering and design consultancy Plextek, laments the currently disadvantaged position of students affected by the Covid-19 pandemic due to exam cancellations, and shines a light at the end of the tunnel by reintroducing internships. When the history of the UK’s response to coronavirus is written, I’m confident that the cancellation of exams will be seen as ...

In the last decade, an exciting dynamic is propelling manufacturing towards 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), writes Bill Davis of Siemens Digital Industries Software, discussing the digital twin. From a machining perspective, additive manufacturing enables designers to consolidate components, leading to less expensive parts, superior reliability, increased durability, and creative design. Also, from a smart manufacturing perspective, a comprehensive ...

We are surrounded by IoT solutions, from phones to smart meters to smart vehicles that are connected to the internet and constantly share data, writes Zoltan Varnai of Nokia. But while today’s cellular IoT devices are primarily connected via 3G and LTE networks, the development of 5G will broaden the realm of possibilities when it comes to IoT. Take a robotic ...

A collaborative environment helps build vital soft skills such as co-operation and leadership.

Ross Murgatroyd, Senior Global Product Manager at Farnell considers the use of NFC in IoT use-cases where continuous connectivity is either impractical or unnecessary. The technologies behind the internet of things (IoT) is making the world around us more intelligent. In many implementations, the sensor nodes that are installed to relay data constantly to servers in the cloud will provide ...

David Hollander, of the Bluetooth SIG, considers how Bluetooth is becoming the smart building protocol of choice.

Softbank’s sale of a majority stake in Arm Technology to Hou An gives China IP access rights. It has been suggested that Arm will not hand over its IP to Huawei, but this seems problematic. If the boss of Arm’s owner Softbank tells Arm’s CEO to hand over Arm IP to China, what else would happen? There are several reasons ...

We talk to Alex MacDougall, founder and CEO of SamacSys, about EDA tools and component libraries.