Steve Bush

Microchip has announced a family of non-hermetic plastic uni-directional TVS (transient voltage suppressor) devices that meet the MIL-PRF-19500/716 for aerospace and defence. “These TVS devices are the first in the industry to achieve MIL-PRF-19500 qualification in a plastic package,” claimed the company. Voltage ratings range from 5V to 175V, and Microchip lists several variants: JANPTX1N5555UJ JANPTX1N5558UG JANPTX1N5629AUJ JANPTX1N5665AUG JANPTX1N5907UG JANPTX1N5907UJ ...

I am leaving this blog to spend more time making things in the workshop and, hopefully, finally mastering FreeCad – amongst other mountains to climb (both intellectual and physical). So this is a message to say goodbye, and to say thanks to all the generous folk who have passed wisdom to me through the comments section over the years – ...

Schott has created high-power TO-9 and SMD packages for laser diodes that have a copper slug that passes all the way through the base. The copper is brazed into position, maintaining overall hermetic sealing. From a thermal simulation that includes a laser, sub-mount and header, the company is claiming a thermal resistance around 8K/W for the TO-9 device (right). “It ...

NXP has created a read-write chip for high-volume RFID tag applications complying to Rain Alliance standards for UHF passive tags. It is branded ‘Ucode X’ and delivered in wafer form. “With Ucode X, we’re expanding what’s possible in Rain RFID,” claimed NXP director of RFID, Ralf Kodritsch. “This chip combines our most advanced RF performance with flexible memory and configuration ...

Ferroelectric capacitors can be made as thin as 30nm to add memory between the metallisation layers of ICs, according to Institute of Science Tokyo. It “demonstrates strong electric polarisation despite being just 30nm thick including top and bottom electrodes, making it suitable for high-density electronics,” according to the Institute. “This demonstrates good compatibility with semiconductor devices combining logic circuits and ...

Phoenix Contact has introduced a wave-solderable connector that carries signal, data and power contacts, alongside a protective earth. “The connectors enable the reliable transmission of signals, data, and power in just one single connector. ,” according to the company. “They have been specially designed for wave soldering processes and comply with the RoHS II directive without exemption 6c. Part of ...

Silanna Semiconductor has added onboard DSP variants to its family of ADCs. “The integration of a DSP brings several functions on-chip, including decimation, digital down-conversion, interleaving and IQ-mismatch correction – these would traditionally be undertaken by an FPGA,” according to the company. The dual-channel, 12-bit, 170Msample/s ADC version is called SD1146. “The device uses a multistage pipeline architecture to achieve ...

At CES, Nordic Semiconductor announced a wireless MCU with a 128MHz neural processing unit, 512kbyte of ram and 2Mbyte of non-volatile memory. Called nRF54LM20B, it is aimed at battery-powered local AI processing with no need for a cloud connection. It is also the company’s first large memory nRF54L processor to get the Axon NPU, acquired when Nordic bought Atlazo in ...

MIPS unveiled AI neural processor intellectual property based on RISC-V at CES, intended to support transformer and agentic language AI models at the edge. Called MIPS S8200, “it combines tightly coupled AI engines with RISC-V application cores to accelerate both vector and matrix workloads, supporting PyTorch and Tensor frameworks and scaling from tens to hundreds of TOPS via coherent cluster ...

STMicroelectronics has introduced stripped down versions of its STM32MP2 MCU family for smart factory applications. Called STM32MP21, they all get a single 1.2 or 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A35 application processor and a single 300MHz Cortex-M33 for booting and sleep-wake control. Arm’s TrustZone is available for secure code separation, and ST’s proprietary ‘resource isolation framework’ (RIF) is present to defend against tampering. ...