Bench Talk

Today’s wireless charging is like commuting to work by bicycle: great in principle but a pain in practice. Cycling promises fitness, no gas bills and freedom from public transport schedules but the reality involves dodging cars, inhaling truck fumes and arriving in the office disheveled. Similarly, wireless charging has the potential (excuse the pun) to free consumers from the tedium of finding the correct charger from the dozens of incompatible units in the kitchen drawer and to cut through the Gordian knot of power cables lurking under the office desk. Yet wireless charging systems remain thin on the ground and compatible mobile devices are rarer still.

The evolution of wireless (that is, cellular) capability has promised more than its predecessor. At a high level, 2G transitioned from analog to digital modulation and added modest data to voice capability, 3G added a faster but still iffy data rates, and 4G (LTE) represented a massive improvement in speed with data rates adequate for streaming video without hiccups.

Last semester I took a machine and motors class. It has got to be one of the more difficult classes I have ever taken. Not only because it dealt with magnetism (the bane of many an Electrical Engineer) but also because it dealt with transformations. You know a subject is challenging when the easiest solution is to transform to a different reference frame, solve the problem in the new reference frame, then transform it back to the original.

The century-old U.S. electricity grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth. But this infrastructure––comprising more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000 gigawatts of generating capacity connected to nearly 300,000 miles (483,000 km) of transmission and distribution lines––is facing the largest disruption in its history as the way power is generated undergoes a revolution.

What does the word "cybersecurity" mean to you? If you only follow the most shallow of news sources and don't wade into technical depth, the word has bound to surfaced more than a few times.

One of the interesting things, at least to me, about the Internet of Things (IoT) is that every ‘thing’ will have its own address. You might be able to communicate with each of these things by just referencing its address. More complicated things might even have their own email address. You could be able to send messages to your coffee pot, your thermostat and your door lock just as you would send an email to a friend or family member.

A long time ago (January 2014) at a Consumer Electronics Show far, far away (unless you live in Las Vegas), Intel unveiled their Edison “computer-on-module” development board aimed at wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A mashup of an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with a dash of WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 4GB of flash memory compressed into a package just a little larger than an SD card, the Edison has proven to be a formidable embedded platform. In the months since the world got their hands on the Edison boards, a lot of amazing projects have emerged. We’ll take a look at four Edison-based creations that have captured our imaginations.

Not sure of where you live, but in Texas, the wind can be a real force of nature. No, I’m not talking about the times when tornadoes spring out of the clouds, or the occasions when hurricanes decide to visit our southern coastline. I’m talking about this persistent, blustery breeze that sweeps in from the open prairies or up from the Texas Hill Country. And if you’re an avid cyclist like myself, you’re often faced with trying to convert a strong, pushy headwind into a much-appreciated tailwind. (These are the times cyclist envision ourselves as Wild Pecos Bill for however long the wind decides to carry us or simply nudge us along.)

The RF and microwave industry faces the same uncertainties and volatility as its more visible counterparts, but when the future has looked uncertain, a new market has serendipitously appeared to save the day. This time, although the industry overall is robust, a huge new market is beginning to emerge in the form of vehicle autonomy that will be much broader in scope than what IoT will bring. Driverless vehicle ubiquity is at least a decade or more away, but in the meantime RF and microwave hardware will be needed in steadily increasing amounts.

Designing power supplies for factory-automation equipment such as programmable logic controllers , transmitters, automation machinery and human machine interfaces can come with a lot of challenges. Even as processing power continues to increase, printed circuit board (PCB) area and overall equipment sizes tend to remain the same. To meet these strict space constraints, power-supply designs should be compact but also operate efficiently and quietly; heat and noise are absolutely not permissible. In addition, there are multiple industrial power-supply requirements, including a wide-input voltage range, a small solution size and the ability to operate at a high temperature range. Power-supply designers must keep component counts and costs down while providing a reliable solution that doesn’t require a lot of debugging. So starting with an integrated and robust device is a high priority.