Quartz-like frequency stability from a simple, tiny, silicon chip oscillator? That is the claim of…more »
Cambridge-based power electronics start-up Amantys says the time is right…more »
Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at the commercial opportunities for spinning off…more »
Bristol start-up Blu Wireless Technology is ramping up its 60GHz development for multi gigabit WiFi…more »
Quartz-like frequency stability from a simple, tiny, silicon chip oscillator? That is the claim of fabless start-up eoSemi of Congleton Cheshire: accuracy, small size, low power, low cost, and no micromachining, writes Steve Bush.
Last year it sampled its first product: a 1.5×1.5mm 32kHz timing reference chip for mobile phones.
This year, we will see what the market thinks, and await higher frequency products.
Manufactured using a standard CMOS process, the 32kHz oscillator draws 8µA, delivers accuracy down to ±30ppm, and works from -40 to 85°C – complying with the system design requirements of major 3G handset manufacturers, claimed the firm.
Its IP, ‘accurate timing oscillator circuit’ (Atoc), does not involve physical resonators, micromachined or otherwise, nor squeezing every last error out of the oscillator. It is about error compensation – going so far as to correct for stress in the silicon chip substrate. “We have a technique for tuning oscillators, it could be any oscillator: RC or LC,” said CEO Ian Macbeth. “All the smarts are in the compensation, not the oscillator.”
After manufacture, calibration codes to be applied at power-up are blown into non-volatile memory. Plus there is some continuous re-calibration.
Phone-makers want the product, claims Macbeth, but want to cut the risks associated with small start-ups. Desire was strong enough for phone makers to ask big chip firms to come up with a solution, so eoSemi is having its chips made by a trusted supplier – TSMC, and badged by Tier 1 chip firms.
Previous Startups to follow:
The year-old start-up is investing in its sales operation which will target German, China and Japan, after securing new funding of $8m.
Amantys has designed the Power Drive IGBT module gate driver capable of switching 3.3kV, 1.7kV and 1.2kV.
It has patented technology which will reduce size and power consumption of IGBT-based power switching modules, used in high voltage motor drives and renewable energy systems.
The second generation product, dubbed Power Insight, adds monitoring, diagnostics and an optical communications interface to the power module.
According to Amantys marketing director Richard Ord, this is “a breakthrough in optimising performance and improving maintenance in systems such as wind turbine power converters or traction systems for electrically powered locomotives”.
“What we bring to the market is a driver which supports IGBTs from different suppliers and we very high levels of isolation,” said Ord.
“With the new module we are adding siganlling,” said Ord.
To monitor voltages and gate temperature in the module, it is necessaruy to have a data link. But it has been difficult to achieve the necessary isolation form the high voltage switching in the module.
Amantys’ approach is to use a fibre optic comms link.
This adds to the gate driver circuitry to provide simple monitoring and control signals.
This allows the designer to modify gate resistor settings in system via the fibre optic comms link.
Since the drive and module are already characterised, the manufacturer no longer needs to experiment to determine safe operating areas.
The gate drive integrates additional circuitry to monitor and sense a series of key power transistor and gate drive characteristics. Key parameters tracked include drive temperature cycling and number of switching operations to give a leading indicator of potential system faults or failures.
According to Ord, this is a technology which is in the right place at the right time. “The use of IGBT switching is going up dramatically,” he pointed out.
“Traditional applications have been in high voltage motor drives in transportation and factory automation, But now we also see applications in renewable energy systems and hybrid vehicles,” said Ord.
Now Amantys is expanding its commercial activiteios in the important markets of Germany, China, Korea and Japan.
“Each market requires a different marketing approach”, said Ord.
Future product development will include a high isolation electrical data interface with a proprietary signalling protocol.
“There is the potential to add greater diagnostic functions to the module, with remote monitoring via the internet,” said Ord.
Nicky McCabe, chief operating officer at Moonray Investors said: “We have continued to be really impressed with the success that Amantys has achieved over the last year, bringing new and disruptive products to market.”
ARM is another financial backer of the company and ARM vice president of segment marketing Vincent Korstanje is joining the Board of Amantys to represent ARM’s continued support for its investment in Amantys.
“Amantys’ unique power switching technology delivers significant energy savings in medium and high voltage markets. This year Amantys added the Power Insight product that provides real-time monitoring and control of the power switch in order to further improve energy efficiency and reliability,” said Korstanje.
Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at the commercial opportunities for spinning off a new tilting display technology.
The researchers are taking part in VentureFest in Bristol on November 7th to talk to entrepreneurs and investors about the Tilt Display they have developed. Tilt Display is a display surface about half the size of a standard tablet, such as an iPad, and consists of a collection of individual display components each of which can tilt along one or more axes and move vertically up and down. The researchers, through a mobile 3×3 custom built prototype, examined the design space around Tilt Displays to understand users’ initial impressions and looked at how users may interact with these surfaces. They were also interested in the use of a mobile display, because of the range of opportunities for its use it offers.“The ability to tilt along multiple axes distinguishes our display from previous actuatable displays,” said Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science’s Interaction and Graphics group. “Such screen versatility opens a range of opportunities for providing an additional integrated information channel to the user.“These opportunities include collaboration, terrain modeling, 3D video that is beyond auto-stereoscopic 3D and tangible gaming. We can imagine many scenarios that would benefit from the physicality offered by Tilt Displays. However, we need to establish whether users can relate to the new experiences and advantages of using such a device.”The research found participants were very positive about the Tilt Display concept. Their first impression was to associate Tilt Displays to a new method of presenting and consuming 3D content and they linked the Tilt Display to other forms of 3D displays, such as those used in cinema. A second user study examined two interaction possibilities, one for manipulating the surface of the Tilt Display and the second for conducting everyday interactions. A set of six gestures were employed to control all facets of tilt and actuation. The second set, for the low-level interactions of panning, scaling, rotating and selection, found that users preferred on-screen gestures for planar surfaces, but mid-air versions of the same gestures for non-planar configurations. This demonstrates users’ ability to ‘scale up’ their knowledge of gestures to the domain of Tilt Displays.A video of Tilt Displays is available on YouTube.www.sciencecitybristol.com/pages/2-venturefest Silicon serial entrepreneur Chris Toumazou is seeing success for his latest startup in the somewhat unexpected area of high street cosmetics.
Toumazou’s latest venture, DNA Electronics, has teamed up with a cloud-based software provider called geneOnyx to provide analysis of DNA to map how ingredients in cosmetics will match with an individual’s genetic profile.
Quartz-like frequency stability from a simple, tiny, silicon chip oscillator? That is the claim of…more »
Cambridge-based power electronics start-up Amantys says the time is right…more »
Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at the commercial opportunities for spinning off…more »
Bristol start-up Blu Wireless Technology is ramping up its 60GHz development for multi gigabit WiFi…more »
With the dearth of venture capital for chip startups, Maxim Integrated products has launched its own investment fund.
It’s new Corporate Venture Group is to invest in both startup companies and innovative technologies. Through the fund, Maxim will make strategic investments to seed technologies aligning with the company’s focus areas, products, and initiatives, and make it easier for Maxim’s business units to work with smaller companies.
The fun will focus on automotive, industrial, mobility and communications markets, providing partner companies with financial capital for growth and expansion as well as the opportunity to collaborate with Maxim on mutually beneficial products and technologies. The goal is to help Maxim penetrate these markets further and create a spread between high-growth markets such as mobility and computing and more stable ones such as industrial and communications.
“Investments made through our new Corporate Venture Group effectively augment our successful, home-grown technology solutions and those we incorporate through acquisitions,” said Tunç Doluca, Maxim President and Chief Executive Officer. “These investments will also build upon our current technology strengths, allowing for diversification into emerging markets.”
Maxim’s Corporate Venture Group will be led by Yoon Choi, Venture Investment Lead. Prior to joining Maxim, Yoon was actively involved in the venture capital community. Most recently, she worked at Samsung Ventures, where she was actively involved in business development, sourcing of strategic investment opportunities and the financial and business analysis of venture transactions. Prior to Samsung Ventures, Yoon worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers and startup companies.
Maxim’s Corporate Venture Group is an integral part of the company’s Corporate Business Development Group, which focuses on mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, investments and divestitures.
Quartz-like frequency stability from a simple, tiny, silicon chip oscillator? That is the claim of…more »
Cambridge-based power electronics start-up Amantys says the time is right…more »
Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at the commercial opportunities for spinning off…more »
Bristol start-up Blu Wireless Technology is ramping up its 60GHz development for multi gigabit WiFi…more »
The UK’s most promising technology startups are being offered the chance to win an all expenses paid trip to Israel to meet with potential investors and customers in a new competition.
The first Bizcamp Tel Aviv competition is offering one UK winner the chance to join a delegation of ten entrepreneurs from ten different European countries in Israel in October.
Organised by the city of Tel Aviv, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and The Next Web, Bizcamp’s ten day itinerary (14th-24th October) is formed around a schedule of business meetings and workshops with Israel’s most successful start-ups, entrepreneurs, tech investors and leading multinational tech firms.
Seminar topics covered during Bizcamp include strategy formation, financing models, intellectual property and pitching. Bizcampers will also win exclusive “access all areas” visits to R&D centres in Tel Aviv, such as the Google Incubator, Microsoft Accelerator and the eBay Social Centre, where they will get to see up close what these global firms are developing next.
Flights, accommodation and free entry to the three-day DLD Festival in Tel Aviv are included in the prize.
For a chance to win a place at Bizcamp Tel Aviv, all young UK tech entrepreneurs have to do is fill in the online entry form at www.bizcamptelaviv.com. Entries are open until 22nd August and zcamp’s panel of entrepreneurs, investors, journalists and statesmen will then select five UK finalists to take part in a live Grand Final event on 3rd September in London. Entrants must available to travel between 14th and 24th October 2012.
Quartz-like frequency stability from a simple, tiny, silicon chip oscillator? That is the claim of…more »
Cambridge-based power electronics start-up Amantys says the time is right…more »
Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at the commercial opportunities for spinning off…more »
Bristol start-up Blu Wireless Technology is ramping up its 60GHz development for multi gigabit WiFi…more »
To put it in context, that is delivering data over Wi-Fi ten times faster than the fastest Wi-Fi capability commercially available today, says the company.
The company writes:
The 10Gbps Wi-Fi prototype achieved a record transmission data rate of 10.53Gbps on 5GHz frequency bands. The success of this prototype development, and the ten folds increase in spectrum efficiency that made it possible, paves the way for the validation of technologies needed to support the creation of next generation Wi-Fi. Huawei believes that ultrafast Wi-Fi could become commercially available from 2018 pending the agreement of global standards requirements and sufficient chipset availability.
As the demand for ultra-fast connectivity for smartphone applications continues to drive the need for higher data transmission rates, the next generation of WiFi access will need to deliver a better user experience, especially in densely populated environments requiring high density deployment such as enterprise offices, airports, stadiums, shopping malls and coffee shops.
802.11ax WLAN – with 10Gbps WiFi – is a standard planned for commercial launch in 2018.
See also: SETsquared company wins millions in funding for 801.11ad WiGig
The official ElectronicsWeekly.com website blog, highlighting new features, content, and initiatives on the site.
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd, who has over 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry specialising in interconnection cable assembly.
We have always said that some HDMI cables can be over priced and the latest BBC Watchdog programme has confirmed what we have been saying!
While normally you would expect things like gold plated contacts and more heavy duty cables to produce a better image quality, with HDMI being digital these things make very little difference. Either the cables work or they will not work!
This is why a £5 HDMI Cable will work just as well as a £70 cable. The only real difference is if you are using the cable in harsh environments or you expect to be unplugging the cable many times.
When you are next looking at AV Cables speak to the experts that you can trust to give you fair and honest advice.
You can see the full details of the Watchdog Report »
It is understandable that people want the very best cables for expensive TV’s and DVD players, so we always recommend speaking to the expert cable assembly companies for unbiased honest information.
We have produced a simple guide to HDMI Cables »
I hope you have found this helpful.
Nick Locke, Nicab Ltd
Featuring homemade electronic gadgets, the latest in development boards (Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi, etc), examples of cool design, and the latest and greatest (and most shiny) consumer gadgets.
Aviva Rutkin takes up the story:
Tray bakes will never be the same again. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created flat cut-outs that fold themselves into robot-like shapes when heated up. With this new method they have produced high-tech origami structures including a bunny, an egg, a house and a human figure. The unusual method could one day be part of a bigger system that cooks up robots made to order.
“What we would like is to provide design tools that allow people who are not experts to create their own machines,” says lead researcher Daniela Rus. “My own dream is to make it easy and inexpensive to create robots.”
Each starts out as a flat sheet of plastic sandwiched between layers of either paper or Mylar, a type of plastic film. Creases are either printed or laser-cut into the sheet, based on calculations made by a computer program based on the shape the researchers want to produce.
Then it goes into an oven preheated anywhere from 55 to 120 ºC. The heat causes the middle layer of plastic to contract, forcing the sheet to bend at different angles depending upon the width of the crease. Though producing the sheets takes time, the folding itself is pretty quick. For all four shapes, the final product was ready in a matter of minutes.
The work and its robot-like products will be presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong. The team will also share ways to create self-folding electrical components such as sensors, actuators, and resistors to help bring such machines to life.
Their next step is to figure out how to get these tools inside the robots, says Rus, “to add the brains to the body”.
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Featuring homemade electronic gadgets, the latest in development boards (Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi, etc), examples of cool design, and the latest and greatest (and most shiny) consumer gadgets.
A submarine for Titan’s largest northern sea, Kraken MareA robot submarine for exploring the methane oceans of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan, a greenhouse on Mars and a spacecraft that hitches rides on comets to the outer solar system are just three of the far-out ideas NASA is backing in its latest round of funding for the distant future of space exploration. New Scientist’s Jacob Aron takes up the story…
Each year NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) programme asks researchers to submit ideas for space technology that could prove useful in the next few decades. Last year selections included two-dimensional spacecraft and suspended animation.
This time NIAC has chosen 12 projects, each of which will receive $100,000 for a nine-month study, with the possibility of another $500,000 for further research if the idea checks out.
The scheme lets researchers dream up missions to places we have never been before. “The hydrocarbon lakes on Titan are unique in the solar system,” says Steven Oleson of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, who is leading a proposal for an autonomous submarine to explore their depths.
“Besides Earth, there are really no other exposed liquids.” Some hope that life may have taken root in and around those lakes, though it would be nothing like life on Earth.
In 2011 NASA considered sending a boat called the Titan Mare Explorer to that moon, but the mission was passed over for funding in favour of the upcoming Mars InSight probe. Oleson is hopeful that Titan Mare will one day go ahead, and thinks a submarine would be the next logical step. The two probes could even be sent together in a joint mission, he says. “If you only explored our ocean with a boat, you’d miss out on a heck of a lot of stuff.”
Submarines on Earth have to come to the surface to communicate because radio waves don’t penetrate very far though water, but that may not be an issue on Titan. “The really neat thing is that the hydrocarbons should be transparent to radio waves,” says Oleson, meaning the sub could beam data up to an orbiting relay satellite without a break in exploration.
Oleson team’s plans to use the NIAC money to explore this and other ideas, such as using the liquid hydrocarbons for fuel, for a mission that could take place in the 2040s.
Another funded proposal is a sealed Martian greenhouse designed to test whether or not the Red Planet can support life and be terraformed. One end of the lander bores into the ground, taking a core of Martian soil inside before sealing itself off. The top of the craft, which pokes out of the ground, contains a transparent dome to let sunlight in. Inside, bacteria from Earth that can survive extreme conditions would be released into the soil core and attempt to survive in their new home. The mission aims to determine whether such life can take hold on Mars.
Another proposal takes inspiration from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, which will harpoon a comet later this year and ride it around the sun. The new proposal imagines a spacecraft which grabs a comet and then reels itself out while simultaneously applying regenerative braking, gaining energy in the process. This would let a small spacecraft fly quickly to the far reaches of the solar system without the need for extra fuel.
It is claimed that such a craft could reach Pluto in just five-and-a-half years, compared with the nine-year journey of NASA’s New Horizons mission, which is due to arrive at the dwarf planet next year.
Jacob Aron, New Scientist
Image: NASA - Sending a submarine to Titan’s largest northern sea, Kraken Mare
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Featuring homemade electronic gadgets, the latest in development boards (Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi, etc), examples of cool design, and the latest and greatest (and most shiny) consumer gadgets.
What’s in the June (#24) issue? There’s an article describing how to use the Raspberry Pi as a 10 Msps scope, how to build a spectrophotometer using the Raspberry Pi and Wolfram language, using Python with the module ‘Turtle’ to produce LOGO-style graphics, and a look at C++ and object-object communication
There’s also an interview with Carrie Anne Philbin from the Raspberry Pi foundation on the first Picademy, and much more!
The magazine is edited by Ash Stone, and you can view an electronic page turning version with issuu and also view it in the PDF format.
You can view all the back issues, too »
Featuring homemade electronic gadgets, the latest in development boards (Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi, etc), examples of cool design, and the latest and greatest (and most shiny) consumer gadgets.
Exosuit – robotic driving suitThe world’s most advanced robotic diving suit is getting ready to help search for one of the world’s oldest computers, writes Mark Harris of New Scientist.
Called Exosuit, the suit has a rigid metal humanoid form with Iron Man-like thrusters that enable divers to operate safely down to depths of 300 metres (see photo).
Though designed for diving in the bowels of New York City’s water treatment plants, earlier this month it underwent its first trials in seawater at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. The tests are readying the suit for a daring attempt to excavate an ancient Roman shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in the Aegean Sea. A century ago, divers pulled the world’s oldest computer – the Antikythera mechanism – from the wreck. They are hoping that they will find a second device when they go down in September.
Marine archaeologists normally wear scuba gear to explore underwater sites in person, but the time that divers can spend at depth is limited by the dangers of decompression sickness, or the bends. For deep wrecks, researchers rely on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) carrying cameras and sonar to scan an area, or large and expensive craft like the Alvin submarine that explored the wreck of the Titanic in 1986.
The $1.5 million Exosuit falls somewhere in between. “It’s basically a wearable submarine,” says Phil Short, a diving specialist on the planned mission to Antikythera. “The pressure inside is no different from being in a submarine or in fresh air. We can go straight to the bottom, spend 5 hours there and come straight back to the surface with no decompression.”
The suit is made from an aluminium alloy, with articulated joints that permit divers to move their arms and legs freely. An umbilical cable from a ship supplies it with power for horizontal and vertical thrusters, and a rebreather that scrubs toxic carbon dioxide from exhaled air, giving 50 hours of life support. The cable also carries voice, video and data links. In the event of an emergency, a battery can power everything but the thrusters, including a back-up communication system.
Foot pedals inside the Exosuit control the four thrusters to manoeuvre it through the water. And if a diver is busy with a complex task underwater, an operator topside can monitor the Exosuit’s video feed and fire the thrusters to keep it in position – or even take over completely and bring the suit back to the ship.
The Exosuit is needed both because of the depth of the Antikythera wreck – it reaches 120 metres – and the delicacy of any artefacts that might lie within. When Greek sponge fishermen found the shipwreck in October 1900, the pressure was such that they had only 5 minutes on the seabed before having to ascend. It was risky: several divers were paralysed and one died from decompression sickness.
By the time underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau led an expedition to the ship in 1976, the amount of time that could be spent at the bottom had been extended to just 10 minutes. To maximise their efficiency, Cousteau’s divers used a vacuum system to suck up a small area of the wreck, but this risked damaging or destroying priceless fragile objects.
The new expedition won’t face such time constraints. “With the Exosuit, our bottom time becomes virtually unlimited,” says Brendan Foley, co-director of field operations at WHOI’s Deep Submergence Laboratory. “Now we can have an archaeologist in the suit for hours, and we’ll only have to come up to answer the call of nature.”
Despite the limitations of earlier expeditions, the treasures that were recovered at Antikythera represent some of the finest ancient Greek and Roman artefacts in existence. They tell the story of a Roman ship that foundered on the rocky shores of the island around 60 BC. The ship was laden with luxury goods, including bronze and marble statues, precious jewellery, a hoard of coins, glassware, ceramic jars – and fragments of a peculiar geared device whose importance was at first overlooked. Only in the 1950s did scholars figure out that the rusty metal pieces could be assembled into a sophisticated analogue computer for predicting astronomical events. They called it the Antikythera mechanism.
Ironically, 2000 years spent in corrosive saltwater may have been the best way to preserve these riches. Most precious objects from antiquity have been broken up or melted down over the millennia. The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has only 10 major bronze statues from Ancient Greece – and nine of them came from shipwrecks.
Foley believes that the Antikythera shipwreck still holds many secrets. A preliminary survey last year showed artefacts scattered over an area 50 metres by 10 metres, and even revealed a previously unknown shipwreck alongside the first one.
“We have feet, arms and the crest of a warrior’s helmet from statues recovered in 1900 – maybe we’ll get lucky and find the rest of them,” says Foley. “But for me, the mechanism is what sets this wreck apart. It’s the questions it opens up about the history of science and technology that fire my imagination.”
Mark Harris, New Scientist
Image: Mark Harris
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The display is 4.7in (12cm), with an ambient light sensor, and wireless interfaces include: nine bands of LTE, four bands of GSM, five bands of UMTS, 802.11ac (and Wi-Fi channel bonding), NFC, and Bluetooth. 
Samsung Galaxy Tab S“The tablet is becoming a popular personal viewing device for enjoying content, which makes the quality of the display a critical feature,” said JK Shin, CEO and President of IT & Mobile Division, Samsung Electronics.Accessories include a cover and a Bluetooth keyboard that can hold the device for easier viewing and typing (right).
“With the launch of the Galaxy Tab S, Samsung is setting the industry bar higher for the entire mobile industry. It will provide consumers with a visual and entertainment experience that brings colours to life, beautifully packaged in a sleek and ultra-portable mobile device.”
