Social Networking for the Microelectronics Industry

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Competitiveness: Smart People - Smart Ideas - The right environment

This is an extract from an article that caught my eye in The Irish Times. I noticed the article as the message (along with several other) were uttered by Craig Barrett, the ex chairman of Intel and given my role of industry champion (paraphrased of course) at NMI I wanted to see what else he had to say.

Average just won't do and shoe-horning thousands of undergrads through any sort

… Continue

Added by John Moor on February 9, 2010 at 10:13am — No Comments

An Event Without Power Point

How viable is it to run a technical event without Power Point presentations ? This is my big challenge. Each year I run the UK Embedded Masterclass. It started as a small forum to for the exchange of information regarding new Embedded Systems technologies. Now, in its 10th year, we have over 30 of the leading Embedded Systems vendors involved, 6 1/2 day technical workshops, a schedule of presentations and expect 200-300 embedded engineers to attend.… Continue

Added by Richard Blackburn on February 2, 2010 at 1:00pm — No Comments

2009 Findlay UK Census

Findlay Media & New Electronics have just finished the 2009 UK Universe census. There are now 4646 sites in the UK where electronics design takes place, plus another 2039 peripheral sites where purchasing of electronics components takes place. 51,588 electronics design engineer’s work in the UK as follows: - Electronics OEM - 1886 sites with 12,897 electronics design engineers Intensive End Users - 2744 sites with 16,568 electronics design engineers Non-Manufacturing - 2055 sites with 22,12… Continue

Added by Tricia Bodsworth on January 29, 2010 at 2:33pm — No Comments

iPad: New dawn or hype?

Unless you've been asleep for the past week you may have noticed that Apple have introduced their new iPad to an amusing mix of acclaim and derision. Speaking personally I am excited by the opportunity that the new format iPad provides to developers and consumers a-like. Having acquired both an iPod Touch and an iPhone in Q4 2009 I have to say that I have been impressed with both products and how useful they are. I have been equally impressed that both my wife and son regularly wrestle the iPod… Continue

Added by John Moor on January 29, 2010 at 12:10pm — No Comments

2009 - What a year its been

Its fair to say that 2009 has been an interesting year... it is fair to say its been an interesting year that at the very least! Everybody - and I do mean everybody - had concerns at the start of the year as economies hit uncharted waters and semiconductor markets looked to be plunging into another down cycle. This time, however, the prevailing conditions were not the usual that we had seen throughout our 50 year industry history. For the first time ever (so I am led to believe) average s… Continue

Added by John Moor on December 22, 2009 at 10:26am — No Comments

What were you doing on 1st January 1985?

That was when the mobile phone network in the UK started (with Cellnet and Vodafone). Twenty five years later, Cambridge Wireless are running a “Celluar 25” event. Looks to be a great event and line-up of speakers - more details are linked from http://www.nminet.org/events/cellular-25. I first used a ‘mobile’ phone in 1988 – as a post-finals student earning extra money at a celebrity tennis weekend near Bath (Ilie Năstase was the star attra… Continue

Added by Robin Kennedy on November 30, 2009 at 3:17pm — No Comments

How do we encourage more budding engineers into the industry?

Those of you who attended the NMI Annual General Meeting last week will have heard three inspiring talks from the invited speakers. Indro Mukerjee of CMAC Technology raised the important issue of how we encourage more engineers into the industry and I believe that the NMI are working to raise this issue with government given the declining numbers of undergraduates entering relevant courses in UK Universities. Indro talked about taking the solution back further down the "food chain" into school… Continue

Added by Dr Trevor Gainey on November 13, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments

Challenging the Conventions of DfM

It’s that DfM time of year again. Not that DfM is specific to any time of year, but NMI’s annual event on this topic is coming up this week in Bristol. Entitled “Application Aware – Challenging DfM Conventions”, it promises a focus on the end product, and includes speakers from the Telecommunications Industry. I am pleased to see there is a panel session on “Philosophy of DfM – Significantly More Than Tools”. My personal philosophy of Design for Manufacture, or any element of Design for X (DfX)… Continue

Added by Stephen Meats on November 9, 2009 at 12:00pm — No Comments

Do your semiconductors contain 'conflict minerals' ?

Thanks to Sean Moynagh of Mirics for raising this one. Some large customers are wanting to know whether semiconductor devices contain what are known as 'conflict minerals'. Specifically, these are Gold and the three Ts (Tin, Tantalum and Tungsten) mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For those who don't know, there is a long-running genocide and widespread sexual violence going on there that is financed in large part by the Electronics Industry, (our companies ?), and ultimately by… Continue

Added by Chris Watts on October 21, 2009 at 2:25pm — 3 Comments

The future of Reliability Assurance

I recently attended an excellent Reliability Seminar and Workshop at the University of Greenwich (14-15 September) http://reliability-outreach.gre.ac.uk/. A wide range of topics was covered including Software Assurance, MEMS, and Six Sigma Techniques. For the purpose of this article I will concentrate on the subject matter relating to Reliability Assurance. I have previously emphasised the importance of Design for Reliability,… Continue

Added by Stephen Meats on September 29, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments

ESL in the Future: The Impact of Open Source

This talk was given on 24 September 2009 at the National Microelectronics Institute meeting on Electronic System Level Design in Bristol, UK. Introduction You will notice I am not using any PowerPoint slides. Well I want to tell you a story, and for a story, words are better than pictures. My story is about why SystemC was an important turning point for the EDA industry. Not for its technology, but because of the way that technology was made available. It was the first major st… Continue

Added by Jeremy Bennett on September 24, 2009 at 2:00pm — No Comments

What Is The Outlook For The Cap Ex Market

What Is The Outlook For The Cap Ex Market Fri 31 July 2009 Ans: Q3-09 will be dire ... the current absolute spend rate is circa $800 million per month i.e. at spares and maintenance levels, no expansion at all. The front-end book to bill is still less than 1 so billings will get worse before they get better. As per our earlier comment, TSMCs recently announced cap ex 'binge' barely represents one modest fab module ... too little to make any real difference and with the summer ‘recess’ now in f… Continue

Added by Gemma Fabian on August 6, 2009 at 3:04pm — No Comments

What Is The Significance Of ST’s Deal With Global Foundries

What Is The Significance Of ST’s Deal With Global Foundries Thu 30 July 2009 What is the significance of ST’s deal with Global Foundries? Ans: It is clearly a win-win situation for both, but it also needs to be put into perspective. In ST Global Foundries has landed a top Tier 1 account and for ST, Global Foundries represents a technological strong supplier, on a par with market leader TSMC. But that is as far as it goes. In the grand scheme of things it is not enough for either, the real que… Continue

Added by Gemma Fabian on August 6, 2009 at 3:02pm — No Comments

More than Moore OR More Moore?

I recently saw 2 articles in same EDN newsletter that are curious to me as they present 2 views on the continuing debate over "More Moore" or "More than Moore" (also curiously written by Suzanne Deffree): The first article is with Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP entitled "Moving beyond Moore" (http://www.edn.com/article/CA6670961.html) . In the article Rene notes that scaling down the Moore's Law curve is do-able technically however he questions the economics of it. In the second blog post;… Continue

Added by John Moor on July 31, 2009 at 8:33am — No Comments

Spicing up nanotechnology

The heat is on for a networking site for nanoscientists. The Internet Nanoscience Community, TINC, was created by Hungarian chemistry student Andras Paszternak and now has more than 2000 members. The heat is on for an online social networking community for nanoscientists… Continue

Added by András Paszternák on July 29, 2009 at 8:44pm — No Comments

Major Japanese Buyer visits the UK

PTT Company Limited from Japan is visiting TechnologyWorld09, Ricoh Arena, Coventry on 23rd to 24th November. PTT is interested in meeting UK companies that can supply semiconductor devices and electronic components. Major business domain is consumer electronics for audio visual, home appliance, mobile communication, fixed communication, and industrial electronics for health care, battery, solar cell, green energy. PTT have been introducing superior leading-edge technology and devices from arou… Continue

Added by Steve Williams on July 6, 2009 at 10:08am — No Comments

Free Flight offer to ESC Bangalore & Embedded Systems, Boston

UKTI can help your overseas business strategy take flight thanks to an offer from British Airways. The airline has provided UKTI with international return flights to help UK SMEs expand their business to new markets. Flights have been allocated for ESC Bangalore, 22/24 July and Embedded Systems, Boston - 22/23 Sept http://www.esc-india.com/ http://esc-boston.techinsightsevents.com/ These flights are subject to some restrictions and availability. For More detail and an application form, cont… Continue

Added by Steve Williams on July 6, 2009 at 10:01am — No Comments

When will multicore processing truly be mainstream and is it simply a software issue?

Last week one of my colleagues at NMI ran an event entitled Multi-core/Multi-processor systems - an event I took a personal interest in having cut my teeth on transputer technology way back in the 80's. As a freshly minted engineer I marvelled at how simple it was to create systems with scalable performance simply by designing code that could be partitioned based on good old CSP (communicating sequential processes). The default language was Occam of course - it was all very neat and efficient -… Continue

Added by John Moor on July 1, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Processing Power and 3D Visualisation - small form factor & low power

We had an excellent series of presentations at the NMI Multi-Core/Multi-Processor Event last week including a taste of things to come with realistic 3D graphics in Sat Nav. This will require an order of magnitude increase in processing power provided by (you guessed it) multi-core. While this is an incredible technical achievement, it was brought home to me earlier this week (at 3am to be precise) how much more advanced the animal kingdom is. My eldest had woken up complaining there was a “larg… Continue

Added by Robin Kennedy on July 1, 2009 at 11:27am — No Comments

Pcbtalk.com- Daily Pcb news and information for the printed circuit board industry

PCBTalk.com is the online home of PCB News and the most reliable source of information for the printed circuit board( pcb) industry. We have been keeping professionals in the pcb industry up-to-date since 2008. Pcbtalk is an independent research and publishing team, we employs 5 staffs at its office in Vietnam and US, and we are connecting with some partners, writers in various countries (as Australia, Singapore and UK…) as who track their local market. Pcbtalk provides international customers w… Continue

Added by Duy Ng on June 27, 2009 at 6:14pm — No Comments

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