Taiwan reversing brain drain    R Colin Johnson
Government funded research labs are enticing Taiwan's brightest expats to return in hopes of revitalizing the country as an innovator.
  post comment   11 comments    last comment  resistion
Lucky for them to be able to choose to return to their country of origin.

Time to start work on 400 Gigabit Ethernet    John D'Ambrosia
John shares some thoughts about the rapid growth of the Web and social networking as he gears up for the first working meeting on 400G Ethernet.
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  Neo1
Are they out of really useful work at IEEE? 400G, you bet!

Are you my third cousin twice removed?    Clive Maxfield
Have you ever heard the terms "second cousin" and "third cousin" and wondered what they meant?
  post comment   21 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
Cool Beans -- thanks for sharing

Girish Mhatre reflects on the early days of EE Times    Girish Mhatre
A former EE Times editor-in-chief ('82-'88) and publisher reflects on the days when Gordon Moore keynoted industry conferences and the home PC was a strange notion.
  post comment   3 comments    last comment  Mark.Rackin
I remember those days also, all too well! I was probably one of the earliest subscribers; when did ...

Learning electronics with the Arduino    Clive Maxfield
There's always something unexpected going on here in the Pleasure Dome (my office). Just a few days ago, for example, I received an email from Don Wilcher…
  post comment   4 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
Cool Beans -- thanks for sharing

The "Top 10" worst computers of all time    Clive Maxfield
Have you ever owned a computer that made you want to pull your hair out?
  post comment   26 comments    last comment  ghfarmer
Amen! I learned to program on a Commodore PET so the VIC20 was limited in comparison but I could ...

Your chance to win an Exploration & Discovery experience and go behind the scenes at NASA!    Clive Maxfield
Littelfuse's Speed2Design Exploration & Discovery program brings engineers behind-the-scenes at NASA's Ames Research and Johnson Space Centers.
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  Monkey_noise
I got all excited, filled in the registration form, then saw the rules...US only. :-( I'm UK

April's contest had larger than life competition    Rick Merritt
Eight caption-eers made us laugh, but only one was selected as April's big winner.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  shanes1007
Speaking of contests, I'm loving LPKF's #myPCB contest: http://www.lpkfusa.com/mypcb/

Your March captions raised my spirits    Rick Merritt
Some might think our March winner went over like a lead balloon, but it raised my spirits.
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What do Bob Dylan, Woodstock, and Wavy Gravy have to do with Design West?    Clive Maxfield
Sometimes the way the world works leaves me gasping with astonishment and delight.
  post comment   7 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
You are correct about the Oakland A's -- Stacy also told me how this all came about -- I could have ...

Blast from the past – Practical Wireless mags circa 1972    Clive Maxfield
Ooooh, this takes me back. I just opened the first one from January 1972. There's no way to artificially replicate that 41-year-old magazine smell.
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  Asad.Asif
Agreed! Wish there were digital copies (scanned or otherwise) of old electronics related magazines.

In space no one can hear you scream… or can they?    Clive Maxfield
An experiment that will change the scientific world forever – a plan so audacious that not even NASA has attempted it!
  post comment   8 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
LOL

When is IP theft OK?    Brian Fuller
That the Chinese are hacking North American networks should surprise no one, especially in the electronics industry. We're all doing it.
  post comment   23 comments    last comment  DarkMatter
"Designing around" can sometimes just be a search for loopholes, but sometimes it can result in real ...

Will cuts slam military electronics supply chain?    Brian Fuller
Doomsday scenarios are everywhere with sequestration cuts in the U.S. federal budget set to take effect Friday, March 1.
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  don3605
That and their retirement program, put them on Social Security like the rest of us.

Do people matter anymore?    Brian Fuller
In a recent post in The Atlantic, a capital- and derivatives-markets lawyer concludes that people are becoming less valuable to companies.
  post comment   16 comments    last comment  seaEE
I've never seen a robot take home a paycheck (er, I mean have one autodposited in their bank ...

Industrial robot helps researchers    Elizabeth Montalbano
Rethink Robotics is giving researchers an ability to get up close and personal with its Baxter industrial robot with a new research version they can use to build custom software and applications.
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IP Nightmares    Brian Bailey
While we accept the necessity of IP, everyone seems to have plenty of grips as well. What are your biggest complaints about IP developers or users?
  post comment   6 comments    last comment  M_S
I've been using some IP from Altera for a DDR2 SDRAM memory controller. I have not been able to get ...

What were they thinking: no transparency    Brian Bailey
I am getting on my soapbox today to complain about the way tickets are sold for large concerts. This may not be true where you are but this is the way it is done in Portland…
  post comment   3 comments    last comment  DaStargzer
Brian, Well, if you're ever in the Annapolis, MD area, check out the Rams Head On Stage at the Rams ...

High-tech jobs migrate    Jack Ganssle
A new jobs report shows where high-tech jobs in U.S. are moving.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  Jeroen
Definition of "High-Tech Jobs" is given in the appendix: engineers, scientists, their managers but ...

10 tips for a successful engineering resume    Jacob Beningo
Here are some basic tips for handling resumes and establishing an online presence, after all, resumes are no longer limited to simple paper versions.
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Do you deserve a Christmas bonus?    Sylvie Barak
Did you slave the year away and not get a bonus? Did you expect one?
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  David Ashton
The (very) difficult part is getting your boss to offer them...

Telecom's messiest wiring?    Sylvie Barak
It's hard to make wiring look tidy, but it's also fairly difficult to make it look quite this complicated!
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  WKetel
There was a photo published a few years back that showed a similar mess of wires in a city in India, ...

Engineering horror at Disney    Dave Riness
When roller coasters go wrong...very, very wrong.
  post comment   3 comments    last comment  MVD
Unfortunately, Lucky never lets you pick.

Engineering Horror: Shock of a lifetime    Stephen Taylor
As we approach Halloween, EE Life brings you tales of horror, extreme current and severed body parts, as engineers tell us their real life horror stories.
  post comment   10 comments    last comment  DaStargzer
"Shocking! Positively shocking!" -- James Bond (Goldfinger) I remember as a pre-teen using two ...

Technology Insight Report: Fiber Optic Sensors    Robin Luniya
This report takes a look into the patenting activity around fiber optic sensors uncovering the companies, inventors, intellectual property trends and other key indicators. Fiber optic sensor is a sensor that uses optical fiber either as the sensing element ("intrinsic sensors"), or as a means of relaying signals from a remote sensor to the electronics that process the signals ("extrinsic sensors"). This report graphically analyzes fiber optic sensor markets from many perspectives, categorizes and highlights the key companies involved, defines unique keywords. This report also covers the global fiber optic sensors marketplace. It focuses particularly on the markets and opportunities for fiber optic sensors in defense, oil and gas exploration and drilling, medical, and industrial markets. The study considers future opportunities for new application markets. This report was prepared by mining patent data using Patent iNSIGHT Pro, a comprehensive patent analysis platform that helps one accelerate time-to-decision from patent analysis activities. Read More on http://www.patentinsightpro.com/techreports.html
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  hm
Conceptually, Fibre optic sensors have immense potentail in real world applications. However, they ...

Market Barriers to entry in commodity capacitor market?    David Warwick
I do consulting research for the Global Commercialization Group at the University of Texas, and I have been assigned research on the commodity capacitor market to assess the difficulty of a foreign capacitor entering the US market. They make an iterative improvement on an aluminum polymer capacitor, and I was looking to see if there was anyone that understood the process of getting commodity components to distributors and the best places to network, like trade shows. Any thoughts, advice or referrals is appreciated.
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I only know Assembly Language ... Am I already Extinct??    Norman Washington
Hello All .. I am due to graduate this year from university with a degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering. (British University). One of the first things I noticed is that some of my friends who attended other universities studied either C or Java as the programming language of choice for thier electronics degrees. (which seems to be a resonable thing to do as almost ALL jobs going in the embedded in the industry require C/C++ or Java programming experience). However, our course administrators felt that their students "should be able 'know' the underlying machine and from this be able to 'think at the level of the hardware' which will not only make the very low level aspects of hardware more visible to the student but force them to consider the hardware implications of each program statement written" - in other words, we were taught Assembly Language and no other language throughout the degree course!! Now, I really enjoyed assembly langauge programming .. so much so that my final year project was based on an analogue/digital/embedded control system and the firmware was hand-written assembly code - with high efficiency/optimization as the driving goal..For which I achieved a distinction grade. But now I am about to graduate and I am looking around the various vacancies for electronics engineers and I do not see any requirement for assembly language anywhere!! ... It is almost all C/C++ and even C# (as well as Java). Have I (or rather my lecturers) made a catastrophic mistake ??? Thanks. Bewildered Graduate
  post comment   20 comments    last comment  adipdutt
Well I started with 8085 micro and had to program in hex code in 1983,in 1986 I got my hands on ...