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Intro to reed switches, magnets, magnetic fields

This brief introductory video on the DigiKey site offers tips for engineers designing with reed switches. Dr. Stephen Day, Ph.D. from Coto Technology gives a solid overview on reed switches -- complete with real-world application examples -- and a detailed explanation of how they react to magnetic fields.
View the video.

Bi-color LEDs to light up your designs

Created with engineers and OEMs in mind, SpectraBright Series SMD RGB and Bi-Color LEDs from Visual Communi-cations Company (VCC) deliver efficiency, design flexibility, and control for devices in a range of industries, including mil-aero, automated guided vehicles, EV charging stations, industrial, telecom, IoT/smart home, and medical. These 50,000-hr bi-color and RGB options save money and space on the HMI, communicating two or three operating modes in a single component.
Learn more.

All about slip rings: How they work and their uses

Rotary Systems has put together a really nice basic primer on slip rings -- electrical collectors that carry a current from a stationary wire into a rotating device. Common uses are for power, proximity switches, strain gauges, video, and Ethernet signal transmission. This introduction also covers how to specify, assembly types, and interface requirements. Rotary Systems also manufactures rotary unions for fluid applications.
Read the overview.

Seifert thermoelectric coolers from AutomationDirect

Automation-Direct has added new high-quality and efficient stainless steel Seifert 340 BTU/H thermoelectric coolers with 120-V and 230-V power options. Thermoelectric coolers from Seifert use the Peltier Effect to create a temperature difference between the internal and ambient heat sinks, making internal air cooler while dissipating heat into the external environment. Fans assist the convective heat transfer from the heat sinks, which are optimized for maximum flow.
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EMI shielding honeycomb air vent panel design

Learn from the engineering experts at Parker how honeycomb air vent panels are used to help cool electronics with airflow while maintaining electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding. Topics include: design features, cell size and thickness, platings and coatings, and a stacked design called OMNI CELL construction. These vents can be incorporated into enclosures where EMI radiation and susceptibility is a concern or where heat dissipation is necessary. Lots of good info.
Read the Parker blog.

What is 3D-MID? Molded parts with integrated electronics from HARTING

3D-MID (three-dimensional mechatronic integrated devices) technology combines electronic and mechanical functionalities into a single, 3D component. It replaces the traditional printed circuit board and opens up many new opportunities. It takes injection-molded parts and uses laser-direct structuring to etch areas of conductor structures, which are filled with a copper plating process to create very precise electronic circuits. HARTING, the technology's developer, says it's "Like a PCB, but 3D." Tons of possibilities.
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Loss-free conversion of 3D/CAD data

CT CoreTech-nologie has further developed its state-of-the-art CAD converter 3D_Evolution and is now introducing native interfaces for reading Solidedge and writing Nx and Solidworks files. It supports a wide range of formats such as Catia, Nx, Creo, Solidworks, Solidedge, Inventor, Step, and Jt, facilitating smooth interoperability between different systems and collaboration for engineers and designers in development environments with different CAD systems.
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Top 5 reasons for solder joint failure

Solder joint reliability is often a pain point in the design of an electronic system. According to Tyler Ferris at ANSYS, a wide variety of factors affect joint reliability, and any one of them can drastically reduce joint lifetime. Properly identifying and mitigating potential causes during the design and manufacturing process can prevent costly and difficult-to-solve problems later in a product lifecycle.
Read this informative ANSYS blog.

Advanced overtemp detection for EV battery packs

Littelfuse has introduced TTape, a ground-breaking over-temperature detection platform designed to transform the management of Li-ion battery systems. TTape helps vehicle systems monitor and manage premature cell aging effectively while reducing the risks associated with thermal runaway incidents. This solution is ideally suited for a wide range of applications, including automotive EV/HEVs, commercial vehicles, and energy storage systems.
Learn more.

Benchtop ionizer for hands-free static elimination

EXAIR's Varistat Benchtop Ionizer is the latest solution for neutralizing static on charged surfaces in industrial settings. Using ionizing technology, the Varistat provides a hands-free solution that requires no compressed air. Easily mounted on benchtops or machines, it is manually adjustable and perfect for processes needing comprehensive coverage such as part assembly, web cleaning, printing, and more.
Learn more.

LED light bars from AutomationDirect

Automation-Direct adds CCEA TRACK-ALPHA-PRO series LED light bars to expand their offering of industrial LED fixtures. Their rugged industrial-grade anodized aluminum construction makes TRACKALPHA-PRO ideal for use with medium to large-size industrial machine tools and for use in wet environments. These 120 VAC-rated, high-power LED lights provide intense, uniform lighting, with up to a 4,600-lumen output (100 lumens per watt). They come with a standard bracket mount that allows for angle adjustments. Optional TACLIP mounts (sold separately) provide for extra sturdy, vibration-resistant installations.
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World's first metalens fisheye camera

2Pi Optics has begun commercial-ization of the first fisheye camera based on the company's proprietary metalens technology -- a breakthrough for electronics design engineers and product managers striving to miniaturize the tiny digital cameras used in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), AR/VR, UAVs, robotics, and other industrial applications. This camera can operate at different wavelengths -- from visible, to near IR, to longer IR -- and is claimed to "outperform conventional refractive, wide-FOV optics in all areas: size, weight, performance, and cost."
Learn more.

Orbex offers two fiber optic rotary joint solutions

Orbex Group announces its 700 Series of fiber optic rotary joint (FORJ) assemblies, supporting either single or multi-mode operation ideal for high-speed digital transmission over long distances. Wavelengths available are 1,310 or 1,550 nm. Applications include marine cable reels, wind turbines, robotics, and high-def video transmission. Both options feature an outer diameter of 7 mm for installation in tight spaces. Construction includes a stainless steel housing.
Learn more.

Mini tunnel magneto-resistance effect sensors

Littelfuse has released its highly anticipated 54100 and 54140 mini Tunnel Magneto-Resistance (TMR) effect sensors, offering unmatched sensitivity and power efficiency. The key differentiator is their remarkable sensitivity and 100x improvement in power efficiency compared to Hall Effect sensors. They are well suited for applications in position and limit sensing, RPM measurement, brushless DC motor commutation, and more in various markets including appliances, home and building automation, and the industrial sectors.
Learn more.

Panasonic solar and EV components available from Newark

Newark has added Panasonic Industry's solar inverters and EV charging system components to their power portfolio. These best-in-class products help designers meet the growing global demand for sustainable and renewable energy mobility systems. Offerings include film capacitors, power inductors, anti-surge thick film chip resistors, graphite thermal interface materials, power relays, capacitors, and wireless modules.
Learn more.

IEEE Computer Society predicts the future of tech for 2017 and next 5 years

After grading itself on its 2016 vision (B+), the IEEE Computer Society has plunged into technology predictions for 2017 and for the next five years by 2022. IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Technology trends that will reach adoption in 2017:

• Industrial IoT - With many millions of IoT sensors deployed in dozens of industrial-strength real-world applications, this is one of the largest and most impactful arenas for big data analytics in 2017.
• Self-driving Cars - In Silicon Valley, one can easily see up to three self-driving cars on the same street. While adoption is less likely in general use, the broader adoption will likely occur in constrained environments such as airports and factories.
• Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cognitive Computing - These overlapping areas are a fundamental requirement for big data analytics and for other areas of control and management. Machine learning, and deep learning in particular, are quickly transitioning from research lab to commodity products. On the software side, advanced engines and libraries from industry leaders, such as Facebook and Google, are making it to open source. On the hardware side, we see continually improving performance and scalability from existing technologies (CPUs and GPUs), as well as emerging accelerators. Consequently, writing domain-specific applications that can learn, adapt, and process complex and noisy inputs in near real time is easier than ever, and a wide range of new applications is emerging.
• 5G - While it is unlikely that 5G will have immediate adoption in the next year, its roadmaps and standards are being developed, influencing the applications that will eventually evolve. Also, some early-use cases of deployment are being pursued.
• Accelerators - While looking at the long term, the ending of Moore's law is being addressed by novel technologies such as those covered by rebooting computing (see bullet 1 in "5 Year Trends" below), heterogeneous computing founded on accelerators enables the stretching of performance boundaries in today's technologies.
• Disaggregated Memory/Fabric-attached Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) - While NVM has achieved mixed success in productization in the past year, the number of companies working in this arena, be it on materials, architecture, or software, makes it a certain candidate for imminent adoption. Fast, nonvolatile storage bridges the gap between RAM and SSDs, with a performance-cost ratio lying somewhere in between. This fast, nonvolatile storage will be initially configured either as "a disc," accessed by the OS like any other permanent storage device, or as "RAM" in DIMM slots, accessed by the OS as memory. But once the hardware and OS support is fully figured out, this technology will open the door to new applications that aren't currently available.
• Sensors Everywhere and Edge Compute - From smart transportation and smart homes, to retail innovations, surveillance, sports and entertainment, and industrial IoT, we are starting to see intelligence being aggressively deployed at the edge. With intelligence comes the need to compute at the edge, and a variety of edge compute offerings are opening up new disruptive opportunities.
• Blockchain (beyond Bitcoin) - While known as the technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain has far more disruptive uses, potentially changing the way in which we implement processes like voting, financial transactions, title and ownership, anti-counterfeiting, and digital rights management, securing these processes without the need (and bottleneck) of a central authority.
• Hyper-converged Systems - Also known as "software-defined everything," hyper-converged systems are bundles of hardware and software that contain elements of compute, storage, and networking together with an orchestration system that lets IT administrators manage them using cloud tools and dev/ops practices. While they have been on the roadmap for major IT players for the last three to five years, we see major adoption trends that may cause their growth to explode in 2017.

Technology trends that will reach adoption in 5 years:

• Rebooting Computing (includes quantum computing) - The end of Moore's law has resulted in the end of the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) and its transformation into IRDS (International Roadmap for Devices and Systems), focusing on new technologies, such as quantum computing, neuromorphic, adiabatic, and many others.
• Human Brain Interface - There are many types of interfaces developed, but the one that can be most impactful is human brain interface that can drive and control machines directly. This will be enabled by the rebooting computing technologies above but will also require separate innovation to connect the human brain to hardware.
• Capabilities/Hardware protection - Protecting data at rest and flight requires more sophisticated security technologies based on more robust hardware protection, such as capabilities. Capabilities had been popular in the 1960s but were abandoned in favor of paging which was sufficient when physical memory was small. Rapid advances in memory, interconnects, and processors, as well as requirements of big data applications, open up new opportunities for capabilities.
• The Year of Exascale - The scientific community is starting to converge on 2022 being the year where they can expect the first wave of Exascale systems to be deployed. An Exascale machine would almost double the performance of all of 2016's top 500 supercomputers put together, enabling breakthroughs in scientific fields such as weather, genomics, life sciences, energy, and manufacturing.
• NVM Reaches Maturity - There are indicators that the long-predicted adoption of NVM is coming and by 2022, we'll be at least in the second or third generation of true nonvolatile memory devices that will change the entire memory-storage hierarchy, and associated software stack, across the IT industry.
• Silicon Photonics Becomes a Reality - While bridging technologies (such as VCSEL-based photonics) may be sufficient to address the needs for the next five years, we see 2022 as the pivot point where highly integrated silicon photonics components will be necessary to meet the combined cost, energy, and performance requirements of Exascale systems.
• Smart NICs - Networking equipment, such as the kind seeing explosive growth in data centers, is becoming more commoditized and open. Ever-more-sophisticated chips in network interface cards (NICs) allow more offloading of traditional networking tasks from the CPU to the NIC, including encryption, compression, package management, etc. We've seen this trend before with graphics cards: commodity specialized hardware mated with good library support enabled an explosion of applications and libraries in domains far from graphics, earning the nickname "GPGPU." Similarly, GPNICs may allow newly accelerated software to take advantage of the unique hardware properties of NICs, both within classical network applications, such as key-value stores, and in new domains, such as text processing.
• Power Conservative Multicores - Integrated processor cores on a chip will go over hundreds and thousands for top 500 and green 500 HPC machines. With more processors on a chip, memory architectures and data transfer will become key technologies in hardware. In software, a parallelizing compiler that allows users to employ the many cores efficiently and easily will reduce rapidly increasing software development costs. Automatic power reduction with the collaboration of the architecture and compiler will become crucial to apply clock or power gating or frequency and voltage lowering to idle processor cores.

Contributors to these predictions include: Paolo Faraboschi, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fellow; Eitan Frachtenberg, Data Scientist; Hironori Kasahara, IEEE Computer Society President-Elect; Phil Laplante, Professor, Penn State University; Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Distinguished Technologist, and IEEE Computer Society Past President; and John Walz, IEEE Computer Society Past President.

Source: IEEE Computer Society

Published December 2016

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