Friday 21
Thursday 20
Wednesday 19
Tuesday 18
Monday 17
 In this final installment of an All about IC's
trilogy that appeared in Radio-Electronics magazine in 1969, author Bob Hibberd
discusses how
passive components are fabricated in silicon as part of an integrated circuit. MOS
and junction capacitors and diffusion resistors were cutting edge technology in the day.
Although not discussed here, small value inductors could be made with printed metal on
the die. The relatively low frequencies of IC's (a few MHz at best) meant that most inductive
components had to be realized in the form of a gyrator because there was not enough area
available to print a useful wire inductor. Hibberd also describes the dicing process,
aka singulation, for breaking individual IC's off the composite wafer. Processes have
changed fairly significantly, but the fundamentals are still the same ...
 Arun Mulpur has an article on the
Microwaves & RF website titled "5G Hype vs. Reality: Overcome These Challenges to Achieve 'Real' 5G
Deployment" that discusses some of the major technology hurdles that need to be
overcome to truly achieve the 5G paradigm. Few people even really know what criteria
need to be met in order to qualify as having transitioned into the 5G era. Says Arun:
"Many questions surround 5G communications. Here are answers to 5G 'FAQs' that can
shed some light on the matter. Several telecommunications carriers, wireless
equipment manufacturers, and smartphone makers have burst out of the gates this year
with plans to accelerate 5G deployment and adoption. Greater emphasis at major trade
shows like the Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress have further
fueled the 5G hype machine ..."
 European Microwave Week 2018 is a six day event
running from Sunday, September 23 through Friday the 28th. The venue is Madrid, Spain.
It includes three cutting edge conferences and a trade and technology exhibition featuring
leading players from across the globe. "EuMW 2018 provides access to the very latest
products, research and initiatives in the microwave sector. It also offers you the opportunity
for face-to-face interaction with those driving the future of microwave technology. 3
major conferences, associated workshops, tailored courses and seminars for industrialists,
academics and researchers." Exhibitor workshops and seminars will also be provided by
several top organizations with superior expertise in microwave, RF, wireless and radar ...
 As with a lot of things, when you have been around
test equipment for a long time and new equipment with new features evolve over time,
you might forget how things used to be as you come to take the modern stuff for granted.
Displaying more than one channel's trace at a time is a good example. When Tektronix
introduced the "Automated
Display Switching" feature on their model 547 oscilloscope with the 1A1 time base
plug-in, its ability to show two sweeps simultaneously was ground-breaking. Prior to
that, the user needed to manually switch between input time base units to get the waveform
displayed. Monitoring two waveforms at a time required separate oscilloscopes, which,
given the massive size of their vacuum tube-based electronics, meant occupying a lot
of lab space ...
 everything RF is now offering
website development services! Get a new website or upgrade your existing
website - All for only $99/month (can go up to $299/month based on the number
of products). There is no design or development charge, nor is there a lock-in or contract.
There is a simple monthly cost which includes everything - design, development, hosting,
backups, data porting and anything else. You do not need to hire an agency and spend
thousands of dollars to create a website ...
 "The recycling process developed by the DOE turns
discarded
hard disk drive magnets into new magnet material in just a few steps.
We generally imagine the world's landfills to be piled up with food, paper, and plastic
waste. But the reality is that 'e-waste,' or electronic devices and components at the
end of their useful lives, is also becoming a problem. Discarded computers and their
hard drives, portable devices, and other electronics often contain valuable materials
like rare earth minerals, but in such minute quantities that the costs to retrieve and
recycle them often exceed their value. Better solutions are required to recover materials
from e-scrap in a more cost-effective way to help advance the cause of closed loop manufacturing ..."
Sunday 16
 This video of a Weather Channel (TWC) reporter
in Wilmington, NC, has gone mega viral. The fool is apparently fighting to keep from
getting blown away by
Hurricane Florence's winds. Then, a couple guys casually stroll by
in the background. TWC spinmeisters say their reporter had a hard time due to standing
on wet grass while the other guys were on pavement (wet). However, a moment later in
the video the other two guys end up walking on the grass, too, unaffected by the winds.
Busted! ...
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 National Instruments' Ashish Chaudhari and
David Squires collaborated with DARPA's Paul Tilghman to give an update on the
government's
Colosseum program, billed as the "world's most powerful emulator
of radio-signal traffic." It is on the Microwave Journal website. "Over the
last four decades, the use of wireless technology has become so pervasive, both
militarily and commercially, that we have come to rely upon its never-ending, and
seemingly unbounded, ability to carry more and more information. Despite our
ever-increasing appetite, the fundamental principles for managing access to the
spectrum, established over a century ago, by and large still hold. Today, the
wireless spectrum is still divvied up through a manual and time-intensive process of
assignment and licensing ..."
 Skyworks Solutions,
Inc. (NASDAQ: SWKS), an innovator of high performance analog semiconductors connecting
people, is pleased to introduce our newest family of compact, high performance
RF front-end
solutions specifically designed for LPWAN and high-power Industrial, Scientific, Medical
(ISM) applications including the connected home, M2M, tracking and other emerging IoT
platforms. These highly integrated modules support LoRa®, SigFox and other unlicensed
band technologies, occupy minimal board space and are power efficient, making them
ideal for sensors, beacons, smart watches, thermostats, wireless cameras, medical
pendants and smoke and CO detectors ...
 France's A-1 (aka "Astérix")
satellite launch in November of 1965 made it the sixth country to place a satellite
in orbit - behind Russia, USA, the UK, Canada, and Italy, respectively. Astérix's
primary mission was to test the booster rocket, and verify the ground tracking
networks. Onboard were a radar transponder, a tracking beacon, and a telemetry
transmitter. Due to a presumed damaged antenna, received signals from the beacon were
very weak and only lasted for two days. Although initially France relied on U.S.
contractors for much of its hardware (mechanical and electronic), it endeavored to
develop and produce the majority of the required technology in-country ...
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 "The European
Parliament passed sweeping copyright legislation Wednesday that, much like its privacy
regulations, could have impact far beyond Europe. Critics argue that the most
controversial part of the proposal will effectively force all but the smallest
website operators to adopt 'upload filters' similar to those used by YouTube, and
apply them to all types of content, to stop users from uploading copyrighted works.
That could pose problems, given how expensive such filters could be to develop, and
the high likelihood of false positives. The legislation will also require site owners
to pay for displaying snippets of content. Critics have called this a 'link tax,'
though links and search engine ..."
 "UL, a leading global safety science company, has
announced that UL Verification Services, Inc. is the first
Bluetooth Qualification Test Facility (BQTF) in the world to be recognized
by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) under the new qualification process. UL
helps manufacturers improve user experiences and minimize their return rates by testing
the market readiness of their Bluetooth products. Bluetooth is a global wireless standard
for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Nearly 4 billion Bluetooth devices are expected
to ship in 2018 across consumer, commercial, and industrial markets. From pairing a mobile
phone to a car's infotainment system to connecting headphones to a smart television,
consumers want ..."
 "Three U.S. technology companies are helping U.S.
Air Force researchers develop new enabling technologies for next-generation electro-optical
(EO) and
radio-frequency (RF) sensors, communications, information processing,
imaging, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) applications. Officials of the Air Force Research
Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, are working with Defense Engineering
Corp. in Beavercreek, Ohio; optX Imaging Systems LLC in Lorton, Va.; and Lockheed Martin
Space Systems in Louisville, Colo. on the Research and Development of Electro-Optical
and Radio Frequency Sensors (RADERS) project. Defense Engineering won a $3.9 million
RADERS contract ..."
 "Cubic Mission Solutions (CMS), the business division
of Cubic Corp., has received orders worth more than $55 million to deliver
its
inflatable satellite communication and networking systems to the U.S.
Army. These orders will satisfy the Army's upcoming fielding need for 1.2- and 2.4-meter
GATR systems, associated spares as well as training and sustainment support. Cubic's
GATR satellite communication and networking systems offer the transportability, high-bandwidth
capabilities and the ease of setup necessary for Army units to execute their mission.
The solution provides robust high-speed links that enable secure network communications,
sustainment support and mission command across the full spectrum ..."
 "HP has unveiled the world's most advanced metals
3D printing platform. New 'Metal Jet' will make 3D printing of final parts cheaper and
faster. HP has launched a new commercial 3D printing platform called
'Metal Jet.' The platform was launched on September 10 at the 2018
International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS). HP envisage their technology to be
used by commercial manufacturers to produce final parts. Metal Jet is already being deployed
by manufacturing leaders GKN Powder Metallurgy and Parmatech for the factory production
of final parts. Volkswagen, Wilo, Primo Medical Group and OKAY Industries are among GKN
clients ..."
 "The IC industry is counting on
integrated
silicon photonics as early as 2021 to enable performance gains in networking and
high-performance computing (HPC) devices, but integrated photonics design today remains
a costly and time-consuming manual endeavor, requiring expertise in photonics and electronics.
Mentor - along with customer Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) - is hoping to change that
with the introduction of the LightSuite Photonic Compiler, billed as the industry's first
integrated electrical / photonic layout automation tool, promising to help engineers
do in a matter of minutes what otherwise could take weeks when performed manually ..."
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