The desire to gather more information about manufacturing equipment embodied in Industry 4.0 is pushing sensor manufacturers to make smaller, but more capable devices which generate less heat.Looking to help them meet these challenges, Maxim Integrated has launched the MAX14827, a dual channel 250mA IO-Link transceiver which is said to integrat...

Building on its expertise in developing RF transceivers for medical applications, Microsemi has unveiled a low power sub GHz transceiver for industrial systems. According to the company, the ZL70550 brings ‘best in class’ low power characteristics, a high level of integration and an extremely small footprint.Francois Pelletier, prod...

A collaboration organised by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and involving Bosch Rexroth, Cisco, Intel, KUKA, National Instruments, Schneider Electric and TTTech is developing the first Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) testbed.“Testbeds are a major focus and activity of the IIC and its members,” said IIC executive director D...

A research group from Cornell University in the US believes its work with quantum dot solids might help to usher in a new era in electronics.The team, led by associate professor Tobias Hanrath, has fused together lead-selenium nanocrystal building blocks to form atomically coherent square superlattices.The difference between these and previou...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional...

A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington claims to have generated Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods. The Passive Wi-Fi system is also said to consume 1000 times less power than existing energy-efficient wireless communication platforms, such as Bluetooth Low E...

Power Integrations and Cypress Semiconductor have announced a joint reference design describing a 20W, USB-PD compliant AC/DC power converter targeted at chargers for smart mobile devices. The design, titled DER-533, pairs the EZ-PD CCG2 USB Type-C port controller from Cypress with Power Integrations’ InnoSwitch-CP off-line CV/CC flyback swit...

A business built on the premise of licensing IP can prove lucrative, as evidenced by ARM’s latest financial report. But when the number of deals signed declines, times can be tough, as Imagination Technologies has found out.ARM says its Q4 2015 revenues grew by 19% to £269.1million. In dollar terms, revenues rose by 14% to $407.9m....

Looking to drive what it says is the ‘next wave of innovation in the embedded, wearables and IoT sectors, ARM has announced the Cortex-A32, the smallest device yet based on its v8 architecture. However, the part has been optimised for 32bit processing.Intended to provide an upgrade path for those using Cortex-A5 and A7 cores, the A32 is s...

Researchers at Aalto University have fabricated an electricity conducting material combination with what they call ‘especially promising properties’ by merging graphene and gallium selenide to create a heterojunction.While many 2D structures that combine with graphene have been fabricated manually, the structure developed by Riikone...