Viewpoints

How quantum technologies can be tested and evaluated for commercialisation is explained by Dr Rhys Lewis, Head of NPL’s Quantum Metrology Institute. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the UK’s National Metrology Institute and home to the Quantum Metrology Institute (QMI). The QMI brings together all of NPL’s cutting-edge quantum science and metrology research and provides the expertise and facilities ...

With unprecedented demands on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Richard Walsh of Samsung Semiconductor Europe considers what the industry needs to do for the next generation of memory technology. The wonder that is HBM has been on a steady journey over the past few years. Performance, power efficiency and speed have all improved incrementally over time. Until recently, this progress has been ...

Andy Conway, sales manager at military embedded system specialist Recab UK, looks at the critical technologies at the edge of the battlefield and beyond, such as the Ethernet-based HSR, PRP and TSN protocols. Technology becomes more important to military and defence operations with each passing year. We need only look to the UK Government’s recent Defence Command paper and budget ...

Geoff Schulteis, an antenna applications specialist with Antenova, considers the challenges of antenna placement for new wireless designs with 5G. 5G offers the advantage of greater data throughput and lower latency, and will enable a host of new mobile applications, for example in broadcast, robotics, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS), vehicle telematics, remote surgery and Cloud computing. There ...

Martin Woolley, Senior Developer Relations Manager, EMEA, at Bluetooth SIG, considers how Bluetooth technology operates to mitigate interference and increase reliability, with adaptive frequency hopping (AFH). Wireless communication systems usually employ radio as the underlying, physical basis for getting data from one device to another. Bluetooth itself is a radio communications technology. But there’s a problem. Radio is undeniably, unambiguously, ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an industry buzzword for years, writes Richard Walsh, head of memory at Samsung Semiconductor Europe, but he considers the technologies now powering developments, such as high-bandwidth memory, smart SSDs and SR-IOV, in-memory computing and parallel processing… It has garnered headlines as a potential force of danger with robots overtaking the world, but most often AI is ...

Dr Esen Bayer, CTO at ETL Systems, shares his vision to tackle the ground segment demands of a new generation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites head-on. He and his team are creating a collaborative platform of completely new smart universal chassis’ designs, where the modules and habitat communicate with one another, interacting intelligently and almost all elements are hot-swappable. This, ...

Nick Hill, CEO at the engineering and design consultancy Plextek, laments the currently disadvantaged position of students affected by the Covid-19 pandemic due to exam cancellations, and shines a light at the end of the tunnel by reintroducing internships. When the history of the UK’s response to coronavirus is written, I’m confident that the cancellation of exams will be seen as ...

In the last decade, an exciting dynamic is propelling manufacturing towards 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), writes Bill Davis of Siemens Digital Industries Software, discussing the digital twin. From a machining perspective, additive manufacturing enables designers to consolidate components, leading to less expensive parts, superior reliability, increased durability, and creative design. Also, from a smart manufacturing perspective, a comprehensive ...

We are surrounded by IoT solutions, from phones to smart meters to smart vehicles that are connected to the internet and constantly share data, writes Zoltan Varnai of Nokia. But while today’s cellular IoT devices are primarily connected via 3G and LTE networks, the development of 5G will broaden the realm of possibilities when it comes to IoT. Take a robotic ...