UK manufacturer says semi-flexible RF cables can deliver

UK-based RF connector manufacturer Intelliconnect has decided to supply its own brand of semi-flexible RF cables as alternatives to Multiflex, T-Flex and Flexiform cables used in defence, security and test system applications.

Intelliconnect to supply its own brand of semi-flexible RF cables

Intelliconnect to supply its own brand of semi-flexible RF cables

According to the supplier, any small reductions in performance of semi-flexible cables compared with semi-rigid cables “are more than compensated for by competitive pricing and compatibility with standard semi-rigid cable connectors”.

The manufacturer’s Spiral Strip shielded coaxial cables are flexible alternatives to semi-rigid coax, which use of strip/round braid composite shields to lower transfer impedance levels.

The 50 ohm construction exhibits the same attenuation characteristics as M17/130-RG402 and M17/133-RG405 cables, said Intelliconnect.

The supplier’s I402 and I405 cable types have been designed with diameters over the outer braids of 0.141-inch and 0.086-inch and have an operating temperature range of -55 to +200°C

Roy Phillips, managing director of Intelliconnect, writes:

“Having our own brand of semi-flexible cables continues our aim of providing high-quality, competitively priced RF and waterproof connectors, cables and cable assemblies with assured sources of supply.”

Chelmsford-based Intelliconnect also manufactures a range of coaxial adaptors to facilitate inter-series connection and gender change. Typical applications include MIL and aerospace, marine, oil and gas, medical and general microwave markets.

 

Richard Wilson

Spectrum adds pre-amp to digitiser

For applications where low-level electronic signals need to be acquired and analysed, Spectrum has added a range of pre-amplifiers that can be used to boost signal levels. When combined with a Spectrum digitiser these low noise pre-amplifiers can greatly increase the measurement systems overall dynamic range and sensitivity.

The pre-amps are designed to complement the built-in amplifiers of the digitiser, effectively extending the available input ranges, and allowing the detection and measurement of much smaller signals. spectrum

Seven different pre-amplifiers are available making it easy to select a model that can best match the digitizer being used. They offer gain ranges from 20 dB to 60 dB, bandwidths from 10 MHz to 2 GHz as well as 50 Ω and 1 MΩ terminations. Most of the pre-amplifiers also have true DC coupling and an adjustable output offset control to further extend their operational use.

To utilize the resolution and maximize the precision of a digitizer it is important that the signal being measured covers as much of the ADC’s dynamic range as possible. Spectrum digitizers already feature highly configurable input amplifiers that offer a variety of input ranges. However, the new pre-amplifiers extend this even further.

For example, the 16 bit M2i.46xx series digitizers come with 8 programmable input settings offering from 50 mV to 10 V full scale range. Using an SPA.1231 pre-amplifier can provide an additional gain of either 40 dB or 60 dB (x100 or x1000) effectively delivering a Full Scale Range (FSR) that can go as low as 50 μV.

The low FSR together with the 16 bit resolution of the digitizer makes it possible to detect signal variations that are way down into the nano-volt range.

The fastest pre-amplifier SPA.1841 with a bandwidth of 2 GHz perfectly matches the Spectrum M4i.22xx series digitizers that offer up to 5 GS/s sampling rate and a bandwidth up to 1.5 GHz. Using the combination of a M4i.2230-x8 and a SPA.1841 amplifier one can sample signals in the GHz range with a FSR of 2 mV resulting in a resolution of 15 μV per step at the given digitizer resolution of 8 bit.

Such high gain often means high noise, especially when amplifying small signals, so careful design of both the digitizer and pre-amplifier is crucial. All SPA series pre-amplifiers are optimized for minimum input noise with models available that reach values as low as 0.9 nV/√Hz. For applications that need to push the technology even further signal processing functions, such as averaging and filtering, can be used on the digitised data. Such signal processing techniques can help to reduce the effects of random noise and greatly improve the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements being made.

david manners

Plessey bags up £6.7m grant

Plessey has been given £6.7m by the Regional Growth Fund

Plessey has been given £6.7m by the Regional Growth Fund

Plessey has been given £6.7m by the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) towards the expansion of its LED manufacturing facility in Plymouth.

Solid state lighting forms a significant part of global efforts to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

According to a new market research report (1), the solid state lighting market size is projected to reach $22.2bn by 2020, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 7.31% from 2015 to 2020.

The report says that the market will be driven by high brightness LEDs delivering higher energy efficiency in all lighting applications.

According to a new report: ‘Lighting the Clean Revolution: The rise of LED street lighting and what it means for cities’, lighting is responsible for 19% of global electricity use and around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Doubling lighting efficiency globally through LEDs would have a climate impact equivalent to eliminating half the emissions of all electricity and heat production in the EU.

And, like many other energy-efficient technologies, efficient lighting will boost global prosperity. In the UK alone, cutting the energy used by lighting by 40% would save £6.5bn in annual energy costs, and reduce energy demand equivalent to 33 mid-size power stations.

Chris Bailey, Plessey’s finance director, said:

“We are very proud of our local heritage and the RGF funding will contribute to our expansion plans for the Plymouth facility. The expansion will bring additional well paid technical jobs to the site, and strengthen our long term future by providing the base for new lighting technologies and products to be manufactured in the UK. The project also aligns very well with national strategies, such as the Growth Review and it aims to increase and support manufacturing in the UK to make the UK Europe’s leading exporter of high value goods and services.”

Plessey will increase its manufacturing capacity from over 100 million square millimetres of Gallium Nitride material per year to more than 3 billion square millimetres. The facility modifications will take place during 2015, with additional manufacturing tools and supporting equipment coming on stream from 2015 through to 2017.

1) Source: “Solid State Lighting & Fluorescent Lighting Market by Technology – Forecast to 2020″, published by MarketsandMarkets.

david manners

Tool debugs multi-core automotive MCUs a core at a time

STMicroelectronics’ recently introduced SPC58 ramge of multi-core automotive MCUs has a debug tool which can target single cores or the whole device, courtesy of  PLS Programmierbare Logik & Systeme.

Tool debugs multi-core automotive MCUs a core at a time

Tool debugs multi-core automotive MCUs a core at a time

The Universal Debug Engine (UDE) 4.4.6 will implement programming of the MCU’s integrated flash memory as well as the control and management of the CPUs and modules.

As a result main cores can be selected as debug targets, but also the MCUs timer and hardware security module or indeed the whole device.

The SPC58 E-line MCUs integrate three CPU cores based on the Power Architecture with 6320kbyte on-chip flash memory and 768kbyte SRAM.

With up to seven Controller Area Network (CAN) nodes and one Time-Triggered Controller Area Network (TTCAN) node, the MCUs are expected to be used in engine management, transmission control and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Management of the individual active units by the debugger is carried out via a multi-core run control manager, which enables an almost synchronous starting and stopping of the various cores using logic that is integrated on the chip.

Multi-core breakpoints are implemented in the UDE and as a result when running shared code a simultaneously acting breakpoint for all cores can be set. Data breakpoints in turn allow the recognition of read and/or write accesses to a variable.

For configuring the MCU’s several hundred registers of the additional emulation memory, PLS offers the Universal Emulation Configurator (UEC) with block graphics user interface in addition to the UDE 4.4.6.

“The Universal Emulation Configurator (UEC) helps the user to cope as effectively as possible with the limited resources of the on-chip emulation memory. In parallel to this, the implemented Aurora interface offers the possibility to externally record a very large amount of trace data and to carry out a statistical analysis of the program flow such as code coverage and profiling,” said PLS.

PLS’ Universal Access Device 3+ (UAD3+) with Aurora pod serves for recording, while the evaluation itself is carried out by the Universal Debug Engine (UDE).

 

Richard Wilson

Raspberry Pi programming language more popular than French

Raspberry Pi programming language more popular than French

Raspberry Pi programming language more popular than French

The Raspberry Pi programming language, called Python, has overtaken French as the most popular language taught in primary schools, according to a survey of school pupils and parents.

Most significant was the importance even parents of the very young school  children placed on learning programming.

Six out of 10 parents want their primary school age children to learn the coding language over French. While 75% of primary school children said they would rather learn how to program a robot than learn the modern foreign language.

The survey, which sampled 3,000 – ranging from five year-olds to parents – was commissioned by Ocado Technology.

More worrying is that the survey also found that secondary school pupils were less enthusiastic about learning computer programming , and over half saw a computer science GCSE is seen as an ‘easy option’ in their schools.

Paul Clarke, Director of Technology at Ocado, writes:

“Unfortunately this is an example of a wider and more serious problem that we face in terms of computer science in the UK not being treated as the serious engineering discipline that it undoubtedly is. The irony is that this is at a time when we are facing a massive shortfall in the number of software engineers and IT specialists who will be required to help build out the UK’s digital economy.”

Clarke believes the government should make computer science GCSE mandatory like maths and English.

Online shopping firm Ocado has also created Rapid Router, a free coding teaching resource which is being used by over 30,000 schools, pupils and teachers.

It is also releasing a series of videos by Computing specialists where they provide fellow teachers with tips on delivering the Computing curriculum.

The research was based on three online surveys conducted on behalf of Ocado Technology by OnePoll in August 2015:

  •  1,000 5-11 year old primary school pupils from England
  •  1,000 parents of school children from England
  •  1,000 secondary school pupils from England

 

Richard Wilson

Automotive algorithms anticipate our driving quirks

Automotive algorithms anticipate our driving quirks

Automotive algorithms anticipate our driving quirks

At the University of California, Berkeley, engineers are preparing autonomous cars to predict what we impulsive, unreliable humans might do next. A team led by Katherine Driggs-Campbell has developed an algorithm that can guess with up to 92 per cent accuracy whether a human driver will make a lane change.

She is due to present the work next month at the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

Enthusiasts are excited that self-driving vehicles could lead to fewer crashes and less traffic. But people aren’t accustomed to driving alongside machines, says Driggs-Campbell. When we drive, we watch for little signs from other cars to indicate whether they might turn or change lanes or slow down. A robot might not have any of the same tics, and that could throw us off.

“There’s going to be a transition phase,” she says. “How do you ensure the autonomous vehicle is clearly communicating with the humans, and how do you know the human is understanding what they’re doing?”

Past algorithms have tried to predict what a human driver will do next by keeping tabs on body movements. If someone seems to be looking over their shoulder a lot, say, that might be a sign that they’re thinking of moving lane.

Driggs-Campbell and her colleagues wanted to see if they could forecast a driver’s actions by monitoring only outside the car.

To see how human drivers do this, they asked volunteers to drive in a simulator. Each time the driver decided to make a lane change, they pushed a button on the steering wheel before doing so. The researchers could then analyse data from the simulator for patterns at the time of lane changes: Where were all of the cars on the road? How fast was each one going, and had it recently moved or slowed down? Was there sufficient room next to the drivers’ car?

They used some of the data to train the algorithm, then put the computer behind the wheel in re-runs of the simulations. The algorithm could predict accurately when the driver would attempt a lane change.

Such algorithms would help a self-driving car make smarter decisions in the moment. They could also be used to teach the cars to mimic human driving tics, says Driggs-Campbell.

It’s good work, but teaching a car to understand others is only the beginning, says Raúl Rojas at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. “Humans are very creative about breaking the rules,” Rojas says. “Computers are programmed to never break the rules.”

Syndicated content: Aviva Rutkin – New Scientist

 

Alun Williams

Fanless enclosure embeds Intel NUC motherboard

Fanless enclosure embeds Intel NUC motherboard

Fanless enclosure embeds Intel NUC motherboard

Pentair fanless enclosure provides IP30 protection and EMC shielding for 10x10cm NUC (Intel’s Next Unit of Computing) motherboards.

A flexible heat path connects the processor inside with heatsinking integrated with the top cover.

“Pentair has developed thermally-conductive elements in metal to transfer the heat from the processors to the case surface,” said stockist enclosures4U. “These elements are variable in height so that they can stay in constant contact with processors of different heights. Dissipated heat is transferred consistently by conduction to the heat sinks and then passed to the environment by means of convection and radiation.”

Alongside the top, the enclosure consists of a body and front panel, held together with two screws.

According to Pentair-Schroff, this is the first enclosure compliant to the embeddedNUC specification, established to expose interfaces relevant to industrial applications and include fanless cooling to increase reliability. Cooling in this case is rated up for dissipation up to 15W.

As defined by SGeT (Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies), restrictions on EmbeddedNUC enclosures are few. Width and depth of the board inside is fixed at 101.6 x 101.6mm, while the height is unrestricted. Cut out locations on the front and rear of the case are also unrestricted as these depend on the application.

Embedded NUC fixed parameters include:

  • Operating voltage: (18 to 24V ±20%) (connector type is not fixed)
  • Operating temperature: 0 to 60°C, or -40 to 85°C.
  • Type 1 minimum:   1 x LAN, 2 x USB, power connector
  • Type 2 minimum:   2 x LAN, 2 x USB, power connector, 1 x mini PCI express (and/or mSATA expansion for mini PCI, express slot), 2 x UART (or COM port).

Applications are expected in kiosks, point-of-sale, signage, vehicle infotainment, surveillance, home automation and industrial automation.

Enclosures4U is part of Essesx-based Foremost Electronics.

steve bush

Highly integrated power supply from LTC

imageLinear Technology has brought out a high voltage, highly integrated, low noise dual output power supply which takes a single positive input supply (VIN_P) and generates low noise bipolar rails up to ±2•VIN_P without any inductors.

The device, LTC3265, includes a boost doubling charge pump, an inverting charge pump and two low dropout (LDO) regulators. The boost charge pump has a wide 4.5V to 16V input range and powers the positive LDO post regulator from its output, VOUT+.

The inverting charge pump has an even wider input range (4.5V to 32V) which may be connected to either the boost input or output. The negative LDO post regulator is powered from the output of the inverting charge pump, VOUT-.

The Device is suitable for a variety of applications that require low noise bipolar supplies from a high voltage input, such as industrial/instrumentation low noise bias generators, portable medical equipment and automotive infotainment systems.

The positive and negative LDO regulators can source up to 50mA of output current each with 100µVRMS output noise, and their output voltages can be independently adjusted from ±1.2V to ±32V using external resistor dividers to generate symmetric or asymmetric output supply rails.

The internal charge pumps of the LTC3265 function in either low quiescent current Burst Mode operation for highest efficiency, or constant frequency mode for lowest noise. In Burst Mode operation, the LTC3265 draws only 135µA of quiescent current with both LDO regulators on at no load.

In constant frequency mode the part operates at a fixed 500kHz, or at a programmed value between 50kHz and 500kHz using an external resistor. Other IC features include low external parts count, stability with ceramic capacitors, soft-start circuitry to prevent excessive current flow during start-up, plus short-circuit and thermal protection.

The LTC3265 is available in a low profile (0.75mm) 3mm x 5mm 18-lead DFN package and a 20-lead TSSOP package, both with a backside thermal pad. The E- and I-grade operating junction temperature range is -40°C to 125°C regardless of package. The H grade operates from -40°C to 150°C, while the MP grade operates from -55°C to 150°C. Devices are in stock, and pricing starts at $3.80 each for the E grade in each package type.

 

david manners

Melexis introduces elevated current version of its Hall-effect sensors

Melexis introduces elevated current version of its Hall-effect sensors

Melexis introduces elevated current version of its Hall-effect sensors

Melexis has an elevated current version of its MLX91208 series of programmable Hall-effect current sensors.

Optimised for the very high fields of hybrid and electric vehicle (HEV) applications, the MLX91208CAV can cope with up to 1000A of primary current. This device complements the existing MLX91208 products which cover low field and high field functions.

Thanks to the proprietary integrated magnetic concentrator (IMC) technology employed, the sensors in the AEC-Q100-qualified MLX91208 series can accurately measure current without the need for inclusion of the bulky external ferromagnetic cores that are required for conventional Hall-effect current sensors.

The IMC structure concentrates the magnetic flux and thereby enhances sensor performance. Melexis’ IMC-Hall devices thus enable significant savings in board real estate and simplify the assembly process as they are housed in compact surface mount standard SOIC8 packages.

Based on the Hall-effect, the MLX91208CAV provides a contactless current sensing mechanism that meets required performance benchmarks. This device intrinsically delivers the galvanic isolation mandated by high voltage applications, while simultaneously eliminating the additional sources of power loss that are found with shunt technology.

david manners

Melexis introduces elevated current version of its Hall-effect sensors

Melexis has an elevated current version of its MLX91208 series of programmable Hall-effect current sensors.imageT

Optimised for the very high fields of hybrid and electric vehicle (HEV) applications, the MLX91208CAV can cope with up to 1000A of primary current. This device complements the existing MLX91208 products which cover low field and high field functions.

Thanks to the proprietary integrated magnetic concentrator (IMC) technology employed, the sensors in the AEC-Q100-qualified MLX91208 series can accurately measure current without the need for inclusion of the bulky external ferromagnetic cores that are required for conventional Hall-effect current sensors.

The IMC structure concentrates the magnetic flux and thereby enhances sensor performance. Melexis’ IMC-Hall devices thus enable significant savings in board real estate and simplify the assembly process as they are housed in compact surface mount standard SOIC8 packages.

Based on the Hall-effect, the MLX91208CAV provides a contactless current sensing mechanism that meets required performance benchmarks. This device intrinsically delivers the galvanic isolation mandated by high voltage applications, while simultaneously eliminating the additional sources of power loss that are found with shunt technology.

david manners