February 2008 Archive of engeniusBLOG

“Old Stewball was a racehorse, and I wish he were mine
He never drank water, he always drank wine.” - Leadbelly

Every spring in northern New England, crystal clear streams and brooks meander, rush, and madly crash towards the sea when snowmelt occurs. It's one of nature's bounties, and I always look forward to the experience at winter's end.

In Maine, where I live, water is also big business. Nestlé Waters North America taps a lot of groundwater in my state, and sells its bottled water under the name Poland Spring Brand Natural Spring Water. You've probably had some.

Nestlé Waters says its product is "a light blend of minerals," and if you peruse the company's literature you'll read about Polan...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The Navy put on an amazing demonstration of hyper-ballistic marksmanship when one of its SM-3 missiles neatly pierced NROL-21 (also known as USA 193), one of our ailing spy satellites, a day or so before its decaying orbit brought its remains home to Earth. Reminiscent of the hubbub surrounding the last days of Skylab before it made its fiery re-entry in the fall of 1979, the media and the blogosphere have been abuzz with the images and small scraps of information doled out to us by the military. As a veteran of the aerospace community, I found the whole a...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The DSP project I'm working on uses an Analog Devices ADSP-2181 chip, housed in a 128-lead TQFP (thin plastic quad flat pack) surface-mount package. If you need one of these 16-bit devices, chances are you'll have to accept a Pb-free RoHS-compliant (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) metric version, as the earlier leaded-solder-suffix part numbers are now unobtainium, unless you can find some new/old stock languishing on a distributor shelf somewhere.

Thankfully, the RoHS folks in Europe have saved me from poisoning. My ADSP-2181s are now Pb-free, and are essentially certified to be devoid of cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, PBBs (polybrominated biphenyls), PBDE (polybrominated diphenyl ethers), antimony compounds, and bromine flame-retardants, too. Of course, these ICs do have quantities of iron, nickel, silver, gold, magnesium, palladium, and beryllium. Tin is also predominant as a finish plating. Knowing these precious meta...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There have been stories over recent years about Defense Department research into portable power, getting the military to develop their own power through body movement. When you are out on patrol and, maybe, pinned down, that power might just give you the edge to radio for help instead of ending up with a discharged battery.

It would also help with night goggle power, and for the other battery powered toys that the Marine grunts now have to wear, some of which, I am sure, we are unaware of.

Now there is a civilian breakthrough from the Simon Fraser University, on the doorstep of PMC-Sierra in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Remember the flywheel car toys you played with as a kid? Pull them backwards on a level, hard floor and then let them go as they travel a fair distance forward. (They make a great cat tease as well.) This power producing technology is rather akin to tha...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

One of the weird things about being a tech journalist is that your social circle is pretty far flung. Between the many bright and truly delightful people who work within the bowels of the various tech companies I cover and the journalists I’ve worked with over the years, my peer group is spread across the globe like a Gaussian cloud with its central limit dithering between San José, Austin, Bangalore, and Taipei. In this wired age, it’s pretty easy to keep in touch but e-mails and the occasional phone call are no substitute for a good face-to-face conversation. That’s why I always make sure to meet up with some of my buddies for a beer or a plate of something cheap, hot and ethnic when we all descend on the Valley for whatever conference we’re attending that month.

Cheap, hot and ethnic is how I describe the tiny hole-in-the-wall places we love to haunt when we’re not dining on somebody else’s corporate credit card. Thanks to severa...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The first organic LED (OLED) was in Sony’s research laboratory in Japan many years ago, before I transitioned from engineering manager to journalist. I was sworn to secrecy (but not with a NDA) and was told, rather gushingly, that this would be the future of television displays. Considering that what I was looking at was only a few millimeters square, I had to accept the intensity of their belief.

Most of us now have an OLED on their person, in the form of the tiny display on the front window of our cell phones. But it is a huge jump to go from there to a watchable color display. I was fortunate to be shown a non-working prototype at NAB in Las Vegas in 2007 and now, after all these years, the TV has become a reality.

On February 29th Sony will release the XEL-1 OLED television in Canada (it was earlier announced at CES in Las Vegas). The 11-inch screen TV will be priced at an astoun...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

If you’re like most folks, you probably subscribe to an e-mail reflector or two. My subscriptions include engineering digests, but I also receive e-mails about dogs, British cars, toy trains, ecology, hiking, and conservation.

The e-mails in these reflectors sometimes make me wonder whether the senders have computers equipped with spelling and grammar checkers. As a writer, I've come to expect that when ideas are exchanged for public reading, there should be some minimal conformance to the rules of grammar. Stumbling across writing blunders, such as the use of the pronoun "your" instead of the contraction "you're," irks me.

Lately I’m seeing the use of "a couple" instead of "a couple of." Now, the word “couple” is followed by “of” and a plural noun, in which case it's a plural statement. For example, you would say, "There are a couple of cars in the garage." (In informal uses, ac...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Greetings from Santa Clara, the city that’s the home of DesignCon, a favorite annual gathering for electronics engineers who surf the cutting edge, and is only a stone’s throw from San José’s (in)famous Fourth Street Bowl, a favorite late-night hang-out of certain high-tech journalists. As with most recent DesignCons, the program provided a SPICE-y mix of digital and analog topics aimed at pushing electrons around chips, boards, cables and other media at unreasonable speeds, typically in excess of 10 GHz. Given the eclectic mix of topics that appears at these events, it’s often hard to find any single focus, but this was not the case this year as solutions to the predicted Internet bandwidth shortage seemed to dominate so many of the sess...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Do you remember those heady days when you understood the rules in life? In your own home, be it a humble mobile in a park in the deep South or a monstrous mansion in Montecito, you were private with your own life – or that of your family – free to live as you chose. The only intrusion you might feel would be from the nosey person in the market trying to judge you by the contents of your shopping cart.

You also knew that you had nothing to fear from the CIA, because they only spied in other countries. That changed during the Nixon years when he instructed the Agency to threaten the FBI to stop a domestic investigation, on the grounds of national security. That investigation? Why, Watergate!

Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post, reported in his book Click Here to Read More >>

My pal Jared is a darned good BSEE circuit designer. He knows more about electronics than any electrical engineer I've ever met. What's more, he's got the right approach, reducing challenges to fundamentals, and then tackling problems with whatever software and hardware tools he can lay his hands on. His favorite tool, of course, is a pad of graph paper.

Jared has worked at the design bench for more than 25 years now, and along the way he made time to earn an MBA. Notwithstanding that, he shuns the management side of engineering, preferring to bring circuits to life on the bench. As he puts it, "I won't make my briefcase my grief case."

Until recently, Jared's employer was a major aerospace company. But, since a merger downsized that operation, Jared found employment elsewhere. He now works for a company that specializes in high-speed bus products.

Jared says he was hired, in part, because he has lots of experience designing ASICs based on Xil...  -- Click Here to Read More >>