Manufacturing

In this current period of economic uncertainty, stoked by international trade deals and the spectre of Brexit, Jurgen Von Hollen has some words of encouragement. He believes that at a time when CEOs cannot forecast 12mths ahead, the only constant is a need for a company to be flexible and creative, and this can be brought about by robots. In ...

To support medical device manufacture, Staffordshire EMS firm AWS has qualified its quality management system to ISO 13485:2016. The recently revised standard places greater emphasis on risk management and risk-based decision making, in addition to changes related to the increased regulatory requirements for organisations in the supply chain, according to the company. “We strive to ensure our accreditations are up ...

Skywater, the foundry based on Cypress’ old Minnesota fab, has announced a Multi Project Wafer (MPW) FastShuttle program offering customers quick and low-cost prototyping and design enablement with access to high performance processes and regularly scheduled launch dates. The programme provides a vehicle to develop new ASIC and custom designs, meeting customers’ evolving requirements to bring products to market quickly. ...

Plessey Semiconductors and Nanoco Technologies are working together to shrink the pixel size of monolithic microLED displays using Nanoco’s cadmium free quantum dot (CFQD quantum dots) semiconductor nanoparticle technology. Using its existing monolithic process, Plessey will integrate the Nanoco CFQD quantum dots into selected regions of blue LED wafers to add red and green light. This shrinks the smallest practical ...

Students in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at University College Dublin can learn production technologies for Industry 4.0, or the smart factory, with hands-on experience via an automated factory demonstration unit, donated by Maxim Integrated Products. The football factory demo was popular at exhibitions around Europe, where it was used to showcase the principles of intelligent, automated production ...

Nottingham Trent University has developed a way to embed miniature solar cells into yarn that it said allows them to be knitted and woven into textiles: “The cells are encapsulated in a resin which allows the textile fabric to be washed and worn like any other form of clothing.” “Clothing would look and behave like any other textile, but within ...

British agri-tech start up Small Robot Company officially unveiled ‘Harry’, its digital planting robot, at Agri-Tech East’s REAP 2018 Conference in Cambridge. Harry is a prototype of what Small Robot claims will be the world’s first digital drilling robot for combinable crops, one of three smart robots called Tom, Dick and Harry robots that are being designed to feed, seed ...

GLOBALFOUNDRIES has added nine new partners to its  RFwave Partner Program, including Akronic, Ask Radio, Catena, University of Waterloo Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS), Giga Solution, Helic, Incize, Mentor Graphics and Xpeedic Technology. They join current RFwave Program members including asicNorth, Cadence, CoreHW, CWS, Keysight Technologies, Spectral Design, and WEASIC. The new partners will provide unique mmWave ...

Hua Hong Semiconductor, the Hong Kong foundry, says its  second-generation 0.18um 5V/40V BCD process platform has  moved  into mass production. Featuring low on-resistance, a full high-voltage range and few photo etching layers, the platform is an ideal process choice for industrial control applications and DC-DC converters, among others. This new platform has a 40V DMOS breakdown voltage of up to 52V, ...

Siltectra of Dresden will begin offering “outsourced wafering” services to customers