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Monthly Archives: August 2013

Proved: Why LED efficiency drops at high current

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Researchers at the US Rensselaer Polytechnic have proven a link between LED efficiency drop at high current and carrier mobility. Better lighting LEDs could result. “Efficiency droop, first reported in 1999, has been a key obstacle in the development of LED lighting for situations, like household lighting, that call for economical sources of versatile and bright light,” said the university. ...

What caught your eye this week (30/08)?

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The Electronics Weekly team share their picks of the week, in terms of announcements, developments, product releases, quotes or anything else in the wider world that caught their eye in the last seven days… What caught my eye this week was… Richard Wilson, editor SMART, the space rover setting co-ordinates for West Wittering beach, and field trials conducted by experts ...

Only Two Transistor Inventors

Although it is often said that William Shockley muscled in on John Bardeen’s and Walter Brattain’s invention of the transistor, a letter to the editor of Newsweek suggests he never claimed to have been part of the invention.

Listen out for Pressy, the multifunction Android controller

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How neat is this? We’re talking Pressy, the multifunction Android button controller. It’s very neat if you consider how rapidly the project has achieved its funding target on Kickstarter (400%, in one day). A lot of people obviously like the idea of adding a customisable button onto their Android device. But where would the ‘button’ sit on a variety of ...

Delusions

One of the oddest things about Steve Ballmer’s resignation was that he kept banging on about Microsoft becoming a ‘devices and services’ company.

Gel-based speaker also promises noise-cancellation

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A gel-based speaker is using ions in place of electronics to produce sound. The technology is highlighted by New Scientist and they say it could be used to build noise-cancelling windows as well as the likes of music-making smartphone screens. Sandrine Ceurstemont writes: An almost-invisible film of jelly can now be hooked up to a laptop to blast out your ...

Picture of the Day: Ultrathin mouse with no buttons

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This one has to be worth featuring in our Pic of the Day series – a three button mouse that has no buttons, and is ultrathin and wireless to boot. It comes from Logitech – it’s the Ultrathin Touch Mouse T630, to be precise – and the Bluetooth support means it’s also capable of working with multiple devices (you would toggle ...

Broadcom uses Wi-Fi Direct to link wearable electronics to the cloud

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Broadcom says companies developing wearable electronic systems will find it easier to link to the cloud via smart mobile devices with the integration of a device-to-device Wi-Fi interface into its WICED embedded wireless platform. The company has integrated the Wi-Fi Direct point-to-point interface into its WICED platform. This allows a consumer to directly connect two Wi-Fi devices together without the need for an ...

Windows Embedded for low cost i.MX6 processor design

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Direct Insight has announced a Windows Embedded Compact 7 Board Support Package (BSP) for its TRITON-TXEK low-cost evaluation board for Freescale’s i.MX6 processor. The TRITON-TXEK evaluation kit, which includes an i.MX6Q quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with 1024MB DDR3 64-bit RAM, is intended as a low-cost entry-point for evaluation of the i.MX6 quad-core processor. The 68 x 31mm module carries the processor, memory ...

Server CPU from Imagination next year

Imagination intends to bring out a CPU for servers next year. The chip will be based on the MIPS architecture and will be aimed at low power hyperscale servers which are increasingly being required by big server farm operators like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.