News: Energy
The AutoTram® is as long as a streetcar and as maneuverable as a bus. It doesn’t need rails or overhead lines because it rolls on rubber tires and simply follows white lines...
Products: Energy
austriamicrosystems (Unterpremstaetten, Austria) offers two new battery charger ICs for Li-ion batteries in mobile devices. The AS3610/11 step-down DC-DC chargers offer fast and highly efficient charging of...
News: Electronics & Computers
A development by engineers of Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is inspired by nature. To fill the porous electrodes of lithium-ion batteries more rapidly with liquid...
News: Transportation
The 2011 CAFE Green Flight Challenge has a winner! NASA awarded a $1.35-million first place prize to team Pipistrel-USA of State College, PA. The team's electric Taurus G4 aircraft...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Fraunhofer scientists working on electronic drives have replaced a battery box for lithium-ion batteries with a lightweight component. Not only does the housing save weight and sustain no...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Scanning and Defocusing Properties of Microstrip Reflectarray Antennas
A symmetric reflectarray, consisting of variable-size square patch elements with a commonly used mathematical model for the horn in the form of a cosine function, has been designed using the transmit mode technique for different f/D ratios with –10 dB edge taper....
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Cable Tester Box
Cables are very important electrical devices that carry power and signals across multiple instruments. Any fault in a cable can easily result in a catastrophic outcome. Therefore, verifying that all cables are built to spec is a very important part of Electrical Integration Procedures. Currently, there are two methods used in...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Fault-Tolerant, Radiation-Hard DSP
Commercial digital signal processors (DSPs) for use in high-speed satellite computers are challenged by the damaging effects of space radiation, mainly single event upsets (SEUs) and single event functional interrupts (SEFIs). Inno vations have been developed for mitigating the effects of SEUs and SEFIs,...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Sub-Shot Noise Power Source for Microelectronics
Low-current, high-impedance microelectronic devices can be affected by electric current shot noise more than they are affected by Nyquist noise, even at room temperature. An approach to implementing a sub-shot noise current source for powering such devices is based on direct conversion of...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Measuring Input Thresholds on an Existing Board
A critical PECL (positive emitter-coupled logic) interface to Xilinx interface needed to be changed on an existing flight board. The new Xilinx input interface used a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) type of input, and the driver could meet its thresholds typically, but not in...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Programmable Oscillator
A programmable oscillator is a frequency synthesizer with an output phase that tracks an arbitrary function. An offset, phase-locked loop circuit is used in combination with an error control feedback loop to precisely control the output phase of the oscillator.
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Rad-Hard, Miniaturized, Scalable, High-Voltage Switching Module for Power Applications
A paper discusses the successful development of a miniaturized radiation hardened high-voltage switching module operating at 2.5 kV suitable for space application. The high-voltage architecture was designed, fabricated, and tested using a commercial process...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Architecture for a 1-GHz Digital RADAR
An architecture for a Direct RF-digitization Type Digital Mode RADAR was developed at GSFC in 2008. Two variations of a basic architecture were developed for use on RADAR imaging missions using aircraft and spacecraft. Both systems can operate with a pulse repetition rate up to 10 MHz with 8 received RF...
News: Energy
Thermal Energy Harvesting Enables Wireless Sensor Deployment
Marlow Industries (Dallas, TX) has introduced the EverGen series of thermoelectric-based energy harvesting devices, offering a zero-maintenance power solution for wireless sensor applications. EverGen thermal energy harvesters power wireless sensors without a battery, reducing...
INSIDER Product: Electronics & Computers
The N8816A Infiniium PCI Express 3.0 protocol analyzer software from Agilent Technologies (Santa Clara, CA) provides the ability to perform 128/130 bit and 8b/10b based packet decoding via a patented...
INSIDER Product: Electronics & Computers
Emphase (South Burlington, VT) has announced an all-new Slim SATA flash drive. Available in two grades of performance, this lightweight, low-profile storage drive has been engineered to afford flexibility in embedded...
INSIDER Product: Electronics & Computers
AutomationDirect’s (Cumming, GA) 24 VDC powered SOLO process/temperature controllers are powerful process tools offering flexibility and simplicity. Available in four standard DIN sizes, these single-loop...
INSIDER Product: Electronics & Computers
A new series of hardware mounting kits for PC/104 and PC104-Plus Bus Drives that have to be installed in limited space design/installation applications is among the latest developments from Keystone Electronics Corp....
INSIDER Product: Electronics & Computers
Advanced Digital Logic (ADL) (San Diego, CA) has announced the release of its ADLLAN PC/104-Plus Ethernet LAN. This PC/104-Plus expansion board is available with either a single 1GB LAN Port or dual 1GB LAN Port. The...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
MUTE, an electric vehicle from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), is an agile, sporty two-seater for regional road traffic. Its lithium-ion battery is designed to guarantee a range of at least 100...
News: Energy
Batteries could get an upgrade from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory discovery that increases power, energy density, and safety while reducing charge time. The results could also have significance for...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
UAVSAR Active Electronically Scanned Array
The Uninhabited Airborne Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) is a pod-based, L-band (1.26 GHz), repeatpass, interferometric, synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) used for Earth science applications. Repeat-pass interferometric radar measurements from an airborne platform require an antenna that can be...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Current practice is to uniquely key the connectors, which, when mated, could not be verified by ground tests such as those used in explosive or non-explosive initiators...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Radiation-Tolerant Intelligent Memory Stack — RTIMS
This innovation provides reconfigurable circuitry and 2-Gb of error-corrected or 1-Gb of triple-redundant digital memory in a small package. RTIMS uses circuit stacking of heterogeneous components and radiation shielding technologies. A reprogrammable field-programmable gate array (FPGA), six...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Ultra-Low-Dropout Linear Regulator
A radiation-tolerant, ultra-low-dropout linear regulator can operate between –150 and 150 ºC. Prototype components were demonstrated to be performing well after a total ionizing dose of 1 Mrad (Si). Unlike existing components, the linear regulator developed during this activity is unconditionally stable over...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Excitation of a Parallel Plate Waveguide by an Array of Rectangular Waveguides
This work addresses the problem of excitation of a parallel plate waveguide by an array of rectangular waveguides that arises in applications such as the continuous transverse stub (CTS) antenna and dual-polarized parabolic cylindrical reflector antennas excited by a...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
FPGA for Power Control of MSL Avionics
A PLGT FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is included in the LCC (Load Control Card), GID (Guidance Interface & Drivers), TMC (Telemetry Multiplexer Card), and PFC (Pyro Firing Card) boards of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft. (PLGT stands for PFC, LCC, GID, and TMC.) It provides the interface...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Thermoelectric phenomena provide the direct conversion of heat into electricity or electricity into heat. The phenomena are described by three related mechanisms: the Seebeck, Peltier, and Thomson...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) Simulator
The Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) Simulator is a portable training aid, or demonstration tool, designed to physically illustrate real-time critical-safety concepts of electrical lockout/tagout. The objective is to prevent misinterpretations of what is off and what is on during maintenance and repair of complex electrical...
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