Hmmm. I don't know quite what to make of this - a Digital Saxophone, from Yamaha. The YDS-150, to be precise.

STMicroelectronics has a 650V GaN transistor half bridge sharing a package with drivers and control logic – describing it as “the world-first platform embedding a half-bridge driver based on silicon technology along with a pair of  gallium-nitride (GaN) transistors”. ST has named it MasterGaN1, and is aiming it at consumer chargers and power adaptors, and industrial applications up to 400W. GaN ...

The universe is made up of ~6% matter, ~25% dark matter and ~69% dark energy, according to University of California Riverside. If you want to know where the normal energy is, it is part of the 31% that isn’t dark energy – so that 31% represents all of the energy and matter. “To put that amount of matter in context, if ...

The de-coupling of the mobile industry will proceed apace if Huawei’s plan to license its proprietary mobile OS Harmony comes to fruition. Zhang Ping’an, president of Huawei’s consumer cloud services, said last week that the company is in talks with other smart device vendors to get them to use the Harmony OS instead of iOS and Android. “We are even more ...

UK-based IC test company Smiths Interconnect has extended its DaVinci Test Socket Series to 67GHz. 67GHz is for analogue signals though the 0.8mm pitch connectors, digital can go up to 56Gbit/s NRZ. The part has spring probes in a patented insulated housing, resulting in a coaxial structure. The whole signal path is shielded and 3A can be carried through a ...

Reliability is critical for defence and aerospace applications, but the level of reliability must be managed across different systems, explains Roger Tall. To minimise the time and cost of development, more aerospace companies are using components which have a lower reliability grade than the version which will be used for final development. Many engineers will use a COTS, industrial or automotive-grade ...

Engineers from around the world, now working at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) and at PragmatIC, share their career experiences and reflect on the importance of role models. A female academic at Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico, was a memorable role model for professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon. Now president and CEO at NMITE (New Model Institute for ...

A customised communications protocol can be a boon in today’s embedded design work, but there will be analysis and debug issues that need to be addressed, warns Boris Adlung. Embedded design, and especially design work using low speed serial signalling, is one of the fastest growing areas of digital electronics design. The need to communicate between modules, FPGAs and processors ...

Diodes Incorporated has introduced a pair of low-power analogue multiplexers that can operate from 10V to 36V or ±5V to ±18V. Supply current for either device is typically 135μA. PS508 is a bi-directional single-pole eight way switch PS509 is a bi-directional dual-pole four-way switch – suitable for 4:1 switching of differential signals Both work across -40°C to +125°C. “The analogue multiplexers that ...

Picocom, the 5G Open RAN baseband chip provider, will use Moortec’s  in-chip sensing fabric to improve power consumption, performance and reliability for its SoC for 5G small cell infrastructure. Picocom’s distributed unit (DU) baseband offload SoC is designed to be deployed in cityscapes and buildings to increase 5G coverage and reduce the processing load on 5G macro cells under the Open ...