The Electronic Components Supply Network (ECSN) has reported what it calls 'a welcome improvement' in total monthly billings in March 2015. Consolidated figures reported by the association's authorised distributor (AFDEC) membership show that billings increased by 10% compared to February and by 2% over March 2014.ECSN chairman Adam...

One thing Gordon Moore wasn't thinking about when he contributed an article to the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine was creating a law of any kind.But his prediction – because that's what it was – has indeed turned into a law and a law which has driven the semiconductor industry to its current levels of excelle...

A research team, headed by James Hone from the University of Columbia in the US, has shown that the performance of molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), a two-dimensional material, can be improved by encapsulating it in boron nitride.In 2013, Hone's team demonstrated it could improve the performance of graphene by encapsulating it in boron nitride,...

Launched at the beginning of the year, the European OptIntegral project uses a manufacturing process based on in-mould hybrid integration of thin, organic and large area electronics and photonics components.This enables manufacturing of LED displays at lower cost and higher display resolution than is currently possible. The optics are moulded d...

Terahertz waves are beginning to be used in everyday applications within the security sector, for security screening, and the medical field to replace the more harmful X-ray.Now, chemists at Caltech have created a frequency comb that precisely generates and detects terahertz waves. The device uses ultrafast pulsed lasers, or oscillators, to pro...

Freescale, soon to be part of NXP as a consequence of the deal announced in March 2015, continues its slow recovery from its previously troubled financial position.In its latest statement, the company says it grew Q1 sales to $1.17billion, a 6% increase over the same quarter in 2014."First quarter results marked another quarter of soli...

While silicon based transistors have been the foundation of modern electronics, carbon nanotube wires show promise in replacing silicon because the technology can operate ten times as fast and is more flexible. However, the approach has some problems caused by gaps at the junctions between the nanotubes. Now researchers at the University of Illinoi...

Researchers from MIT have designed a reconfigurable chip that is said to defend cloud based applications against memory access attacks. The concept is that, whenever a chip needs to fetch data from a particular memory address, it should also query a number of other addresses so an observer can't determine which one is of interest. Rese...

Intel has launched the Compute Stick, a palm sized computer featuring a quad core Atom processor. The device is available now to support Windows 8.1, while a version which supports Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is expected shortly.The Windows version includes 2Gbyte of memory, 32Gbyte of on board storage and McAfee Antivirus Plus. The Ubuntu version will ha...

Looking to meet the growing need for processing data acquired by sensors, Cadence has launched the Tensilica Fusion digital signal processor (DSP). Based on the Xtensa Customizable Processor, the scalable DSP core is said to be suited to applications requiring DSP computation, ultra low energy consumption and a small footprint.Gerard Andrews, s...