C&K has introduced a three position push-button with a footprint of only 3.0 x 3.7mm (4.4 x 3.1mm including G-type terminations). Called KXT2, it is rated for 100,000 cycles. The manufacturer describes it as ‘double-action’ (see diagram): With no force, two of its four pins are shorted. Once 100g of force has been applied, three of its pins are shorted, and by ...

I can add a new name to my list of heroines: Which now reads: Beryl Burton (cycling), Florence Nightingale (statistics), Dr James Barry (medicine) and Sarah Guppy (engineering). It transpires Sarah Guppy was an engineer in the early 1800s, having made contributions to bridge foundations that were used by Thomas Telford, amongst other stuff. From here, I bow to Wikipedia. And ...

Maxim has introduced battery energy measuring (‘gas gauging’) chips with SHA-256 anti-cloning authentication. The firm has developed its own gauging algorithm that does needs no host interaction. “ModelGauge m5 fuel gauges include an algorithm that converts raw measurements such as battery voltage, current, and temperature into accurate state-of-charge, absolute capacity in mAhr, time-to-empty, and time-to-full while charging,” said the firm, ...

I was asked to have a look at a problem in a camper van this weekend. The van has a sink, and the tap on the sink combines a water valve plus a switch that turns on a remote electric pump to raise water up to the tap. The tap is made by Whale – and I should have taken ...

Today, the Euros 62 million European research project SemI40 (“Power Semiconductor and Electronics Manufacturing 4.0”) – in which 37 partners from five countries will carry out research into developing autonomous factories – was launched. SemI40 will focus on “smart production” and “cyber-physical production systems” in the next three years with secure data traffic playing a key role within and outside ...

The Aerospace & Defence Forum 2016 hosted by National Instruments takes place on Tuesday 14th June at the Royal Berkshire Conference Centre, Madejski Stadium, Reading, UK. It is a free-to-attend conference presenting trends and technologies for aerospace, defence, security and space systems. The programme includes: Morning keynote address from Dr. Marco Lisi, manager and scientist, International Space Organisation Industry Outlooks ...

It’s going to be a bit of fun seeing if this one flies. A driverless car start-up in California called Zoox wants to raise a quarter of a billion dollars. Are there enough mugs around to stump up? After hollow punts like Theranos you’d think no way Jose, but you never know in California. Zoox says it will have driverless ...

The BBC micro:bit educational controller module is to be commercially available in the UK for £12.99. Distributor element14 has a 15 month contract to manufacture and distribute micro:bit in the UK. It also has plans to sell the product overseas at some stage. Element14 is announcing pre-order facilities for consumers and will be the exclusive distributor for resellers and organisations ...

ARM has brought out Cortex and Mali processors to address upcoming smartphone features like augmented and virtual reality on 10nm processes. They will be in SoCs this year and in handsets in 2017. The Cortex processor – A73 – is the smallest 64-bit v8 core ARM has done – at under 0.65mm2 per core on a 10nm finfet process. The ...

GloFo is to equip a 300mm fab in Chongqing, China as a jv with the local government. “China is the fastest growing semiconductor market, with more than half of the world’s semiconductor consumption and a growing ecosystem of fabless companies competing on a global scale,” said GloFo’s CEO Sanjay Jha, “we are pleased to partner with the Chongqing leadership to ...