Ferrite Out Better Core Materials For Your POL Design

Power architectures with nonisolated voltage regulation continue to evolve, and power inductor designs are fundamental to the success of the new product designs. The trend toward two-stage conversion with nonisolated point-of-load (POL) modules is fueling the demand for low-profile, high-power surface-mount inductors with current ratings...

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FDA Introduces New Technology to Improve Food Security

The Food and Drug Administration today announced further steps to use modern technology to provide new protections for America’s food supply. First, FDA announced that its new electronic registration system for food facilities, foreign and domestic, will be “live” today at 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This registration system, available...

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Cheap, Superefficient Solar

Technologies collectively known as concentrating photovoltaics are starting to enjoy their day in the sun, thanks to advances in solar cells, which absorb light and convert it into electricity, and the mirror- or lens-based concentrator systems that focus light on them. The technology could soon make solar power as cheap as electricity from...

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Cognitive Radio

Growing numbers of people are making a habit of toting their laptops into Starbuck's, ordering half-caf skim lattes, and plunking down in chairs to surf the Web wirelessly. That means more people are also getting used to being kicked off the Net as computers competing for bandwidth interfere with one another. It's a local effect -- within...

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Electricity from Sugar Water

A new way to make hydrogen directly from biomass, such as soy oil, reported in the current issue of Science, could cut the cost of electricity production using various cheap fuels.Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a catalytic method for producing hydrogen from fuels such soy oil and even a mixture of glucose and water....

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Super-vivid, super-efficient displays

Your next MP3 player may sport more-vivid color displays and longer-lasting batteries. That's because a major manufacturing effort by South Korea's Samsung SDI could help bring a display technology called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, into the mainstream. Until now, OLED displays have not been manufactured in high volumes, and...

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LED Driver Supports Multi-Mode Operation

Catalyst Semiconductor’s high-power, 500-mA inductive boost LED driver is designed for Movie/Flash mode applications. The CAT4134 offers a fully integrated Movie/Flash switching function, which allows designers to set the exact Flash and Movie modes required via a single resistor, minimizing the need for external circuitry. Capable of driving...

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Thermal Solutions Provider Licenses Heat Transfer Technologies

Celsia Technologies has entered a multi-year agreement with Taiwan-based Yeh-Chiang Technology (YCTC), a manufacturer of heat pipes. Under the terms of the agreement, YCTC will manufacture Celsia’s thermal management products in China. YCTC will also license Celsia’s patented thermofluidic technology to offer to its key OEM customers.“Celsia’s...

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Rerouting Brain Circuits with Implanted Chips

New, implantable and wireless brain chip can create artificial connections between different parts of the brain, paving the way for devices that could reconnect damaged neural circuits. Scientists say the chip sheds light on the brain's innate ability to rewire itself, and it could help explain our capacity to learn and remember new information....

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TPS40140 Synchronous PWM Controller

Although new technologies based on digital power control promise to be disruptive technologies in the long run, mainstream analog control technology can still have a significant and immediate impact on power system designs. Such can be said for this year's Power Electronics Technology Product of the Year award winner. The TPS40140 synchronous...

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Rectifier IC boosts

Increasing system efficiency by 1% over discrete solutions, the IR1166 SmartRectifier IC simplifies the design of mid-power secondary synchronous rectification (SR) circuits of resonant half-bridge converters and flyback converters designed for 50 to 150-W discontinuous conduction mode, critical conduction mode, and continuous conduction...

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Automotive Applications

Product development services for a range of automotive applications, including mobile satellite communications and automotive cruise control radars. For satellite communications applications, ERA has pioneered the use of unique low cost, very low profile scanning antennas. Designed initially for reception of satellite TV services in Ku-Band,...

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Single-chip receiver for mobiles handles TV and radio

Start-up Mirics Semiconductor describes its new MS1001 RF-tuner IC (Picture) as a "polyband" device for mobile digital-broadcast reception. Although several companies have recently made announcements that focus on the mobile-TV sector, Mirics says that its chip has much wider applicability, covering multiple broadcast standards. The chip...

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SOG LCD modules

Targeting high-resolution portable products such as PDAs and GPS units, a family of 2.7- and 3.5-in. system-on-glass (SOG) LTPS LCD modules delivers a resolution of up to 640 x 480 pixels. Available in both transflective and transmissive configurations, the 70%color gamut switching VGA/QVGA devices include a touch panel and can display up...

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14-Channel Clock ICs Boast Low Phase

The AD9516 series of clock ICs features low-phase-noise clock generation with 14-channel clock distribution at jitter levels below 1 ps. The devices integrate an integer-N synthesizer, two reference inputs, a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), programmable dividers, adjustable delay lines, and 14 clock drivers, including LVPECL, LVDS, and...

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Digital Signal Controllers Expand Options for Power Conversion and Motor Control

Texas Instruments has expanded its TMS320C2000 family of digital signal controllers by adding new options for on-chip memory and more PWM peripherals. The new controllers include the TMS320F2809 and TMS320F2802 flash-based controllers and custom ROM-based TMS320C2801 and TMS320C2802, which are fully hardware- and software- compatible with...

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Nanotube Computing Breakthrough

The use of carbon nanotubes in ultrafast computers and other electronic devices has been stymied because batches of the material contain nanotubes with varying electronic properties. One nanotube is semiconducting, while the next is conducting. Now Northwestern University researchers have developed a reliable and potentially practical way...

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Wireless GroundLink® System (WGL)

Teledyne Controls’ Wireless GroundLink® System (WGL) enables aircraft operators to fully automate the recording and transmission of their flight data, therefore eliminating all risk of data loss involved with traditional manual procedures. Offering unprecedented reliability, the GroundLink solution is a unique patented system that records...

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Instrument Ethernet links get standardized

With local area networks (LANs) becoming an enterprise necessity, virtually every desktop and rack-mounted test instrument has a LAN port for remote connectivity. The trouble is, the way test engineers must use that port varies from instrument to instrument. Now, an industry consortium is on the verge of releasing a new standard for controlling...

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Transmitted-reference methods

TR modulation technique has the advantage of sending the same pulse twice through an unknown channel where both pulses experience the same type of channel distortion and detection becomes easier with a correlation receiver. Therefore, instead of correlating the distorted received pulse with a “clean” template pulse as in PPM, both the data...

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Samsung Electronics Develops Highly-Integrated System-on-Chip for HDTV and Digital Set-Top-Boxes

The S5H2200 is a single-chip solution that incorporates dual HD MPEG-2 decoders, which can simultaneously provide high-quality audio and video for digital broadcasts to the sub-screen as well as to the main screen, an ARM920T-based 330MHz CPU, and the company's proprietary picture improvement function, DNIe (Digital Natural Image Engine)....

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Analog - Low-power data conversion technology enhances portability

Designed to increase the portability of patient and industrial monitors and improve the performance and throughput of automated test equipment (ATE) and data acquisition systems, Analog Devices' AD7980 1-MSPS (mega-sample per second) 16-bit ADC consumes 80 percent less power and board space than the closest competing 16-bit ADC in its class."Power...

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Transparent Intgrated Circuits

"This is a quantum leap in moving transparent electronics from the laboratory toward working commercial applications," said John Wager, a professor of electrical engineering at OSU. "It's proof that transparent transistors can be used to create an integrated circuit, tells us quite a bit about the speeds we may be able to achieve, and shows...

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