Microchip has launched a new range of what it describes as low cost, high pin count 32bit PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs). The company says that, by bringing together key features from its PICM32MX1/2 and PIC32MX5 MCU families, it has created a device suited to applications with complex code requirements. The MCUs in the PIC32MX1/2/5 MCU ser...

The UK economy is facing a dire engineering skills gap and needs 87,000 new engineers a year over the next decade, a report by Unite the union has warned.Launched in parliament, the Engineering excellence - a charter for UK engineering report urges the government to do more to support engineering and calls for an 'engineered in Britain, bou...

Pico Technology has released beta drivers for its oscilloscope and data logging devices, which run on both the BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi development boards.The drivers give programmers access to a range of USB oscilloscopes and data loggers, including high speed oscilloscopes with bandwidths up to 500MHz, 12 and 16bit oscilloscopes, and...

Researchers at the University of Southampton have found a way to produce more reliable and robust photonic chips.Until now, testing and characterising optical chips has been difficult as the light travelling in them is confined in the silicon and therefore cannot be seen or measured. The new method developed by the Southampton team ena...

Altera and IBM have developed an FPGA based acceleration platform that connects an FPGA coherently to a POWER8 CPU via IBM's Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI). By sharing virtual memory between the FPGA and processor, the reconfigurable hardware accelerator is said to improve system performance, efficiency and flexibility in high...

In a move which it says will bring better power performance to data centres, Xilinx has launched SDAccel. The package, part of Xilinx' SDx family, combines an architecturally optimising compiler, supporting OpenCL, C and C++, libraries, development boards, and a 'CPU/GPU like' development environment. Giles Peckham, European ma...

Belgian nanoelectronics research centre imec has partnered with US fabless company MegaChips to develop ultra low power (ULP) short radio technology for smart homes and buildings.Specifically, the two organisations are working to create a multi standard, sub GHz radio solution compatible with ZigBee 900MHz and IEEE802.15.4g, built on CMOS techn...

Marvell has launched an SoC featuring eight Cortex-A53 cores. Called the PXA1936 and running at 1.5GHz, the device is targeted at high performance smartphones and tablets and supports TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and GSM communications. "4G LTE is such a critical technology to enable mobile computing, social networking, cloud gami...

Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (NTU) says academics have successfully printed complex electronic circuits using a common t-shirt printer. Amongst the circuits created using the approach are a 4bit D/A converter and RFID tags. Common electronic devices, including resistors, transistors and capacitors, have been created by pri...

In the new Audi TT, instrument, navigation and multimedia information is bundled in the driver's field of vision. The concept, called the 'Virtual Cockpit', has been supplied by Bosch. The 12.3in high contrast TFT display – which has cropped corners – has a resolution of 1440 x 540 pixels and a colour depth of 24bit...