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Author Archives: aroggio

An All CMOS Frequency Source

Sunday, October 24, 2010

IDT has released an inexpensive monolithic CMOS oscillator aimed at replacing crystal-based oscillators without any mechanical frequency source or PLL. Even the most discriminating EE or electronics industry watcher can occasionally gloss over or even ignore the announcement of some new frequency source. After all, as important as oscillators are in all sorts of devices, [...]

Filed in ICs & Discrete Semis | | Comments (1)

Freescale Adds to Tower System

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Last week, Freescale Semiconductor added six more modules to the Tower System, its growing modular and reconfigurable development platform. I have been really impressed with the Tower System concept. With the aim of rapid prototype development, the system modularizes peripheral sub-systems like Wi-Fi connectivity, memory, LCDs, sensors, and microcontrollers. These 8-, 16-, and 32-bit hardware [...]

Filed in Boards & Peripherals, Product News, Software/Development Tools | | Comments (0)

The Pace of Semiconductor Innovation

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Moore’s Law is a surprisingly accurate prediction about the pace of semiconductor—and therefore technological—innovation, which has defined our industry for some 45 years. While researching for an article that would appear in Electronics Magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, forecast that “the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.” To [...]

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Server Memory and the Problem of Data Center Heat

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Yahoo! recently announced that it had opened a new, energy-saving data center in Lockport, N.Y. which might slash power consumption by some 40 percent compared to conventionally designed data centers of a similar size. This new data center uses long hallways that are angled to receive the area’s prevailing winds. This natural air flow along [...]

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Design Demonstrations for TI’s Stellaris MCU

Saturday, September 25, 2010

This past week, Texas Instruments announced the winners of its DesignStellaris 2010 engineering competition that featured innovative electronics applications running the company’s Stellaris ARM Cortex M3-based microcontrollers (MCU). TI awarded the top entrants $10,000 in prizes and is promoting the top designs with contributed articles and press coverage in several publications and on several websites. [...]

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Silicon Photonics and Quantum Computing

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Scientists and researchers from several universities have developed a silicon-based chip capable of producing a two photon quantum walk. Similar to a so-called random walk experiment, a quantum walk produces a probability distribution of many positions or solutions. Scientists have previously demonstrated single photon quantum walks in the past, but this dual photon chip will [...]

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Does Strong Demand for 3DTV Favor FPGAs or ASICs?

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Demand for 3DTV sets is outpacing expectations according to published reports from analysts and an interview with Panasonic executive Laurent Abadie. Abadie, who is Panasonics’ Director of Corporate Management for Europe, told Reuters last week that the demand for 3DTV sets like those made by Panasonic and chief competitors Samsung, LG, and Sony was three [...]

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