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Monthly Archives: March 2019

Need a motor that is clean enough to eat off?

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ABB has announced a series of IEC food-safe motors for food and beverage plants, sealed to IP69 with stainless steel cases built to withstand high pressure cleaning and clean-in-place (CIP) methods. The cases are smooth and self-draining, with no crevices where particles can collect. No motor shrouds are used, which might otherwise harbour food and allow bacteria to breed. Markings are ...

Random Excess Memory

Many many years ago when the chip industry was young, and the leading edge DRAM was 64K, there was the Mother of All Market Crashes. In 1985 you could buy four 64K DRAMs for a dollar. All the US producers, there were over a dozen, pulled out except TI and Micron. The  world was awash with Japanese DRAM and the ...

ON buys Quantenna

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ON Semiconductor is to buy Quantenna Communications  for about $1.07 billion after accounting for Quantenna’s net cash of approximately $136 million. The acquisition enhances ON’s connectivity portfolio with the addition of Quantenna’s industry leading Wi-Fi technology and software capabilities. Following completion, the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to ON’s non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow. ON ...

Hprobe joins with Imec for SOT-MRAM tester development

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Hprobe, the two year-old Grenoble provider of  wafer test equipment for magnetic devices,  has joined with Imec to develop advanced magnetic tester equipment for the next generation of MRAM devices based on the Spin Orbit Torque (SOT) effect. Hprobe has begun to optimize the test flow for SOT-MRAM devices in order to bring the characterization and testing to an industrial level as they ...

Infineon to sell TPM for industrial applications in H2

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In H2, Infineon will have volume availability of a Trusted Platform Module specifically for industrial applications. The OPTIGA TPM SLM 9670 protects the integrity and identity of industrial PCs, servers, industrial controllers or edge gateways. It controls access to sensitive data in key positions in a connected, automated factory as well as at the interface to the cloud. The TPM ...

Tech Beats God In US Survey

Phew! That’s a relief. With all this religiosity around in the USA it comes as a relief to hear that the vast majority of them believe that tech will solve their problems better than prayer. A Pew Research Centre Survey reveals that nine out of ten Americans – some 86% – believe tech is more  beneficial than religion for solving the ...

Fable: The Goldilocks Strategy

A very great man once described how he started a phenomenally successful company:  “We started out with memory as the objective. To look at it more broadly, what we wanted to do was make a complex device.” “ At that time,  in the TTL business, the chips were costing less than the packaging, by a bundle, and it was hard ...

Programmable connectors are environmentally sealed

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Bulgin’s 4000 series of environmentally sealed circular connectors are now available in a ‘smart’ variant from RS Components. They include a programmable memory for data monitoring and IoT applications. Programmability and over the air updates are via an integrated EEPROM. The connector is not designed to read data output from a sensor, only to identify issues such as an incorrect sensor ...

Electric car production hit by China subsidy cut

Nissan Leaf

The electric car production industry will be hit hard by a decision by the China government to cut subsidies to electric car buyers by more than half. As from June the $9,830 subsidy given by central government to the buyer of an electric car will be cut to $4,100. Local government subsidies, which have been up to 50% more than ...