Articles

Demystifying Electro-Photonic Integrated Circuits

Fiber optic interconnects have enjoyed a relatively long history in long haul telecommunications due to their ability to transmit large quantities of data across great distances. As our...

Meeting the Demand for Complex Communications Design

Communications engineers today must design to accommodate changing missions, shorter product lifecycles, and increasing computer power. As a result, they create hybrid systems that include...

Using Aspheres To Increase Optical System Performance

In a perfect imaging system, light exists as a spherical wave that converges to form a point image. However, in practice wavefront aberrations act to perturb the wavefront from its ideal...

Reducing Electromagnetic Interference in Motion Systems

EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) comes in different forms, frequencies, and levels. Electronic equipment has different categories for both emissions and susceptibility. Under normal...

Evolution of the Solid-State Lighting Connector

Keeping pace with emerging solid-state lighting (SSL) applications can be difficult for design engineers, not only from an end-product standpoint, but at the component level as well. Design...

Why All The Talk About High-Power LED Technology?

It is in the headlines worldwide. Cities, states, and countries around the globe are transitioning away from traditional lighting and towards newer technologies such as high-power LEDs for...

Revolution in Fasteners Helps Bridge the Gap 
to Greener Vehicles

With auto sales down as much as 40 percent, it can feel to some like the industry is coming apart. But a "revolution in fasteners" may soon help bridge the gap to greener...

Power Conversion for Reduced Cost, Volume, and Weight - and Increased Efficiency

Industry and consumers are increasingly aware of the benefits of efficacious use of metered power, as costs and cost trends increase. Making the right choices...

Keep Lighting Green from Start to Finish With Proper Packaging and Disposal of Used Fluorescent Lamps

Fluorescent lamps are a popular lighting option for businesses and consumers that are looking for ways to conserve energy and cut down on...

Electric Motor Efficiency Regulations: What Motor Manufacturers, OEMs, and Motor Users Need To Know

Making Sense Out of SOUP (Software of Unknown Pedigree)

Software test tools have been traditionally designed with the expectation that the code has been (or is being) designed and developed following a best practice development process. Legacy...

Multicore Processing: A Technological Dead End?

The computing press is full of discussions about multicore systems, defined here as single-chip computers containing two or more processing cores each connected to a common shared memory (Figure...

Understanding Virtex FPGAs

With each new generation of FPGA devices, Xilinx continues to push the performance envelope to match the ever-increasing requirements of target applications. The recent announcement of the Virtex-6 is no exception....

Advancing Automotive Design With Innovative Collaboration

The automotive industry has faced hardships in recent times, but it can and will survive by renewing itself through innovation. After enduring a $14.6 billion loss in 2008, Ford reported...

Choosing the Right Touchscreen Display Technology for Your Control/Automation Process

From industrial panel PCs, to open-platform graphic operator interface terminals (OITs), to microOITs, to human-machine interfaces (HMIs), there are many...

Light Emitting Diodes — Choosing the Right LED for the Job

Understanding how LEDs work and what materials are used for ideal operation in various spectral ranges will aid in selecting the right color and ideal wavelengths for a variety of...

LED Spectra Pose New Design Challenges and Opportunities

We normally think of ‘white’ light as being comprised of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum, or at least of being comprised of red, green, and blue. However, white LEDs emit...

How to Address the Lighting Challenges of High-Brightness LEDs

Two overriding issues should be considered when driving high-brightness (HB) LEDs. The first is to ensure that a fairly constant current is available with minimal variation, since a...

Using Micro OTDRs to Test Fiber Optic Networks

Uses for traditional optical time domain reflectometers, or “OTDRs” include the certification and troubleshooting of very long-haul fiber optic networks such as campus and metro networks. In...

Reinventing Disease Detection and Diagnosis

As devices for disease detection and diagnosis become more advanced, they also are becoming smaller. Next-generation technologies for faster detection of diseases such as cardiovascular disease,...

Benefits of Magnetostrictive Sensors for Industrial Applications

Modern industrial machines rely on fast, accurate motion control in order to achieve high product quality and productivity, as measurement errors can lead to increased scrap and...

Roller Pinion Technology Allows High Positional Accuracy for Precision Applications

Increasingly competitive markets make efficient and accurate processes more critical than ever before. To meet the demands of manufacturers, machine builders...

All Motors are Stepping Motors

In 1938, General Electric began producing a two-phase synchronous induction motor which, at 60 Hz, ran at 75 RPM. The low speed resulted from using a different number of rotors to stator poles or teeth, which made...

Intelligent Control Increases Motion System ROI

The economic realities of the industrial marketplace are driving machine builders and integrators to get creative and build more intelligence into their machines in order to increase productivity...

Development of a Centrifugal Hydrogen Pipeline Gas Compressor

DOE has prepared a Multi-Year Research, Development, and Demonstration Plan to provide hydrogen as a viable fuel for transportation after 2020, in order to reduce the consumption of...

CAD and Virtual Prototyping Software: Continuous Development in a Challenging Economy

In our annual poll of executives at leading design and virtual prototyping software companies, we found that in difficult economic times, providing customers...

Cooling Embedded Systems What Are The Options?

As the cooling challenges in embedded system applications have multiplied due to increased processing performance, smaller package and system footprints, and the requirement to operate in more...

The Inner Workings of Solid State Flash: SLC versus MLC

Because all solid state flash products are not created equal and flash storage is finding its way into more and more embedded computing applications, system designers should understand the...

VITA 66 & 67 Bringing Fiber Optic and Mixed Signal Capability to VPX

Today’s rugged embedded computing industry demands the best of technology and reliability. Driven by requirements for higher performance solutions, platforms continually...