MCUs igniting creative explosion    Richard Quinnell
Lowered costs and simplified development are democratizing MCU design, resulting in a burst of creativity.
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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!

DAC in Austin: success or failure?    Brian Bailey
The numbers are in for the 50th anniversary DAC in Austin. How did this year fare compared to previous years…
  post comment   5 comments    last comment  garydpdx
Austin was a matter of quality over quantity. At Space Codesign, we gave many more demos on the ...

London Calling: How will TSMC cope after Chang?    Peter Clarke
TSMC could be set to annouce Morris Chang's successor as CEO sometime toward the end of 2013. But whoever gets the job will be trying to fill the largest pair of shoes working in semiconductors.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  HS_SemiPro
Mr. Chang's shoes will not be easy to fill, it happens to every company, after the original ...

Tariff vaults Japan near the top in solar energy    Junko Yoshida
While the United States appears suffering from solar phobia, Japan is said to be in the process of unleashing its solar potential. Here’s why.
  post comment   16 comments    last comment  DMcCunney
"you don't actually need to be in a volcanic area to get useful heat from the ground." No, you ...

May’s caption winner gave the cable guy a poke    Rick Merritt
A wry and Web-savvy caption won one lucky engineer recognition and admission into our honored EE wit-of-the-month club.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  Paul Glaubitz
"Maybe a battery shirt to go with those glasses", yea that would probably work better than battery ...

Get some fresh air with the June caption contest    Rick Merritt
Hey, it's nearly summer--get out of your cube, get some fresh air and go think up a funny caption for the June EE Life contest.
  post comment   67 comments    last comment  Don Swaab
I wonder how he earned a second-story corner office with wood paneling and a view?

Romanian teenager snags Intel science award    Dylan McGrath
Ionut Budisteanu took home $75,000 for using artificial intelligence to create a model for a low-cost, self-driving car.
  post comment   8 comments    last comment  JackGrat2
"developed a tiny device that fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within ...

What were they thinking: Slithering a snake    Brian Bailey
How many of you have a pet snake and want to take it for slither? Well, you just may need this invention...
  post comment   4 comments    last comment  Battar
The text of the abstract and claim shows up the apparent inability of patent attorneys to construct ...

What were they thinking: Overly complex design    Brian Bailey
I think Wile E. Coyote was the kind of person who created many of the patents I find to write about in my “what were they thinking” series. You know what I mean – those absurdly complicated gadgets...
  post comment   10 comments    last comment  krwada
To tell you the truth ... I would have used a pressurized canister of ethyl ether as the 'blower'. ...

Blending furiously    Clive Maxfield
I've been playing with the Image Blender app on my iPad, and I have to say that it is a LOT of fun.
  post comment   10 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
Hi Carolyn -- I will do so -- thanks for the suggestion -- Max

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 ...

Piezoelectric straw-covered skyscraper harvests energy    Elizabeth Montalbano
Strawscraper, the invention of Swedish architecture firm Belatchew Arkitekter, aims to extend a building in Stockholm with an energy-producing outer shell made of piezoelectric straws that can recover wind energy.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  Cookie Jar
A lightning strike might have some interesting consequences.

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 ...

Startup lessons for interesting times    Simon Barker
Simon Barker, who was EE Times' Student Entrepreneur, is back. He is now two years into his engineering career with thoughts on what it takes to drive a startup company and warnings of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  Frank Eory
Glad to hear things are going well Simon and I look forward to your future blogs.

I want to work in the Consumer Reports test lab    Kristin Lewotsky
Take a look at some of the clever systems for staff has developed to evaluate everything from elliptical trainers to kitchen drawers.
  post comment   3 comments    last comment  Cookie Jar
These are mechanical test analogous to testing electronics through the temperature and humidity ...

The ripple effect: Semiconductor employment across America    brian toohey
Along with many other benefits, the semiconductor industry is a huge job creator for the U.S.
  post comment   7 comments    last comment  DFc300
From the Silicon Valley (SV), the cuts in employment in the 2008-2009 period were never recovered. ...

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   4 comments    last comment  DenFletcher
Unfortunately, they severely underestimated the manpower needed…. $300,000 worth of computer and ...

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 ...