Many Happy Returns to the LED!
It was fifty years ago today, on October 9, 1962, that Nick Holonyak Jr. demonstrated a red visible-spectrum gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) LED to his colleagues at General Electric. There were...
View ArticleLighting the Home in the Internet-of-Things
Lighting the Home in the Internet-of-Things Interweb thingymawidget technology is taking over. Not content with being a communication infrastructure delivering information and content for computers,...
View ArticleHappy Birthday ZigBee Alliance
In my previous blog I wrote about the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and how it was going to revolutionize lighting in the smart home of the future. And of course it is ZigBee wireless technology that is...
View Articleelectronica goes on forever in time and space
Ok, I wasn’t actually at last week’s electronics industry extravaganza: the 25th ‘International Trade Fair for Electronic Components, Systems and Applications’, also known as ‘electronica’. And, what...
View ArticleWhere did I put that TV remote?
One line of thought currently is that smartphones (and increasingly tablets) will be the user control interface for much electronic gadgetry in the near future; and particularly so in the home. As an...
View ArticleTransistor not yet ready for pipe and carpet slippers
One of the first books that I read as a budding electronics trade journalist (more years ago than I care to remember) was ‘Accidental Empires’ by Robert X Cringely. It’s a fascinating book that treats...
View Article30 Years of the IGBT
Last month was the thirtieth birthday of another key component in the electronics world: the insulated gate bipolar transistor, or IGBT. December 1982 saw the issuing of what is commonly described as...
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My kingdom for a horse…
You know, it’s really important to know where your horse is. King Richard III of England didn’t and he ended up buried in a car park in Leicester. I know what you’re thinking: if only he’d RFID tagged...
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Digital radio – coming to a car near you
I noticed earlier this year that NXP had reached a cumulative total of 100 million units shipped of its TEF66xx automotive radio tuner family (with 30 million of them bought by JVC). Obviously, given...
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The Voyage from Coin to Contactless (and NFC)
Earlier this year, the Bank of Canada stopped distributing its one-cent coin, and apparently cash transactions are now rounded to the nearest 5 cents (while non-cash transactions continue to be rounded...
View ArticleTesla’s Legacy: Wireless Power Transfer
The concept of wireless energy transfer goes back to the late 19th century with the invention of the Tesla Coil. And today, the realization of the wireless energy concept is perhaps most readily...
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