Industrial

Accutronics is now offering four new pre-engineered Thin Cell 3V primary (non-rechargeable) batteries to electronic design engineers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the UK, Ireland and Europe. Manufactured by its parent company, Ultralife Corporation, the new slimline batteries measure as thin as 1.1mm to meet the increasing demand for handheld and wearable electronic devices.

Smart factories are rapidly emerging around the world, leveraging advanced automation applications such as augmented reality, autonomous mobile robots, cobots, and industrial sensors. Even beyond the traditional factory floor, automation is accelerating in areas like warehouse automation and logistics by using similar applications.

Semiconductors are critical components in many electronic devices such as smartphones, cameras, televisions, automobiles, LED bulbs and household appliances, as well as many other devices we come into contact with every day. It is no surprise, then, that a shortage of semiconductors is very damaging for a multitude of industries, but what is causing the shortage?

Paul van der Tang, Purchasing Director at Offshore Electronics, has worked closely with customers throughout the last 18 months, a time which has laid bare the shortages currently affecting the global electronics industry. In this article, van der Tang analyses today’s market and offers five key points to manage the effects of what some are calling ‘chipageddon’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial disruptions across the engineering sector over the last 18 months, with businesses facing challenges such as changing market requirements, stock shortages and longer lead times. The electrical connector market was no exception to this. Here Shaun Findley, European Director of Product and Purchasing at electrical connector specialist PEI-Genesis, discusses why, despite the disruption caused by the pande...

‘Modular power supplies’ mean different things depending on the market but in this article, we will be discussing AC/DC converters that typically comprise a chassis ‘front end’ with EMI filtering, surge protection, a power factor correction stage, auxiliary functions and bulk energy storage. Jon Cooper, Technical Manager, UK & Ireland, Avnet Abacus, explains.

Ultrasonic-based Scanning Acoustic Microscopy (SAM) has long been the method of choice for quality testing and failure analysis of silicon ingots, wafers, integrated circuits, and MEMS. Ultrasound can locate voids and disbonds between material layers better than other non-destructive methods because sound waves can look inside the layers to detect the thinnest of air gaps and delaminations down to a hundredth of a micron.

The power supplies chosen for electronics can have an impact on how those devices perform or how swiftly manufacturers can produce them. Here are some of the key things that electronics engineering and design professionals should keep in mind.

Thomas Neu, System Engineer for High-Speed Data Converters, Texas Instruments (TI), discusses the present day issue of elaborate filtering that can be required for industrial data-acquisition on the analogue front end (AFE) in front of the analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs).

After remaining essentially unchanged for more than 25 years, the Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) used to authenticate devices onto cellular networks are undergoing a dramatic transformation, moving from physical hardware to downloadable software – embodied by the concept of eSIMs. Cyril Caillaud, NXP Semiconductors, explains.