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By John Donovan, Low-Power Design, For Convergence Promotions
There’s hardly a cell phone on the planet that doesn’t have a Bluetooth® transceiver for connecting to a wireless headset. Most new PCs now incorporate Bluetooth chips for the same purpose, letting you type while you talk or listen. Many, if not most new cars, have Bluetooth to let you talk hands free while driving. However, while that’s all well and good, there is a wide range of applications for which Bluetooth isn’t appropriate – or at least it wasn’t until now.
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By Martin Harnevie, Free2move, For Convergence Promotions
Apart from the traditional areas of RFID deployment, such as security and attendance management, RFID has also gained inroads into work-in-process monitoring.
One such application is the tracking of printed circuit boards (PCBs). This application was, until recently, dominated by barcode and optical character recognition (OCR). The article describes some of the advantages of and requirements for tracking PCBs using RFID and how recent product offerings can make the implementation of PCB tracking throughout the complete production process economical and practical. |
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By Günther Schlegel, Sr. RF Applications Engineer, EPCOS SAW Automotive
The number of RF based Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems being deployed is steadily increasing. The RF front-ends of such AMI systems must have very good sensitivity while proving to be immune to any interference coming from different RF- based applications. These interferences must neither hinder the data transmission nor make it impossible to receive the measured data.
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By Stephen Evanczuk, Electronic Products
Based on the IEEE 802.15.4 stack, the ZigBee RF4CE specification provides an industry standard for implementing short-range bidirectional communications subsystems required for home automation applications. Designed to simplify design of end applications, ZigBee RF4CE serves as a network layer built on top of the 802.15.4 standard's PHY/MAC layer, using a subset of channels within the 802.15.4 2.4 GHz frequency band. For engineers, building flexible wireless remote control solutions has become greatly simplified thanks to RF4CE-compliant solutions from manufacturers including Atmel, Freescale Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.
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By Jon Gabay, Electronic Products, For Convergence Promotions
Reducing energy is a widespread movement in the world, and spans items like appliances, transportation, entertainment, communications, computing, medical devices, and more. Everything that uses electricity consumes power, thus energy. With energy sources being the stuff wars are made from, and costs rising, the trickle up effect makes everything more sensitive to energy efficiency, especially when it comes to the cost of energy over a products lifetime.
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Contributed by Publitek European Editors
Adding speech and sound generation to a product can greatly improve the usability and marketability of a product and it does not demand the addition of a separate digital signal processor (DSP) or specialized audio processor to implement. Microcontroller (MCU) vendors have implemented DSP extensions that bring real-time decoding for algorithms once thought too complex to implement on anything but a dedicated DSP platform.
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By Ashok Bindra, Electronic Products
Traditionally, there is a common DC input bus voltage that provides power to all non-isolated point-of-load (POL) converter modules on a printed-circuit board (PCB). Now a majority of applications have multiple POL converter modules distributed across the designer’s board. They are primarily buck converters incorporating switching techniques for higher efficiency.
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By Steven Keeping, Electronic Products
This article describes the role of the inductor and considers why it is difficult to include in a modular package. The article will then lead on to look at how power module manufacturers such as Linear Technology, Intersil, and Delta have addressed the problem in their latest power supply in package (PSIP) designs.
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By Gina Roos, Electronic Products
Pressure sensors are used in a variety of applications, ranging from medical equipment to portable devices. As a designer, there are a few general specifications to consider before selecting a sensor for your product's design, including pressure range, environmental conditions, packaging, and output type.
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By Jon Gabay, Electronic Products
The piezoelectric sensor is used for flex, touch, vibration and shock measurement. Its basic principal, at the risk of oversimplification, is as follows: whenever a structure moves, it experiences acceleration. A piezoelectric shock sensor, in turn, can generate a charge when physically accelerated. This combination of properties is then used to modify response or reduce noise and vibration.
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