Jitter & Noise

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Scope showtime

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

In the news column I’ve recently posted a report on Rohde& Schwarz’ introduction of two series of digital oscilloscopes. Clearly, this is a big step for the company; in any sector, you need to think carefully about your prospects of breaking into a market which is so dominated by two major players (Tektronix, Agilent, of course) and in which the number three is al...

Related entries in: Test & Measurement |

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

"The pleasure of finding things out"**

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Why are there not more women in engineering? The question comes up time and time again, and so do many of the same answers. But I witnessed a little scenario the other day that, I think, may illustrate one small part of the reason.
The scene; a country park on a sunny weekend day. There are many families out for the day; overflow car parking is in operation using a field that that other times contains farm livestock.
As part of its farming role, the field has in it a large open tank to prov...

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Tuesdays in June; Mentor talks design process improvement.

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The first of a series of 30-minute webcasts by Mentor Graphics went out on 25th May 2010, and the series will run every Tuesday until 6th July. Timing; 09:30BST/10:30CET, repeated at 14:00 BST/15:00CET. Mentor is targeting electronic engineers located in Europe and India. The first talk was by Mentor’s Steve Collis, European specialist for high level design and functional verification, and his topic was “Process, People, and Tools” – his briefing notes say that this is about the importance of p...

Related entries in: EDA/ IP |

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Are we there yet?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I posted yesterday an update on the product plans of the new FPGA market entrant Tabula; I call it new, but the gestation of the company has in fact been prolonged, and it has figured for a while in lists of potential new players in the sector. (As in; “….and then there’s Tabula but no-one knows quite what they are up to….”). Technically, the concept is challenging, and the challenge for Tabula in gaining entry to many markets will extend to convincing some potential users about the viability of...

Related entries in: EDA/ IP | Programmable Logic/ Memory |

Friday, March 12, 2010

Is there anyone there? Probably not.

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An edition of the BBC astronomy programme The Sky at Night** this week rounded up some current thinking on the likelihood of ever detecting extra-terrestrial intelligent life. One contributor entertainingly described SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) as “making looking for fairies at the bottom of your garden seem like a serious scientific endeavour”.
One interesting thought came from a contributor who was imagining the rever...

Friday, March 12, 2010

You'll never forget you have a choice

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I ran Windows Update on one of my PCs this morning and when it rebooted I found something that in all probability many of you have seen too; a pop-up window that says, “An important choice to make: your browser” and gives you a link to click that takes you to a screen explaining that there are lots of choices of browser.

The first screen immediately arouses suspicion because it doesn’t say who created it, and it just gives you an unsigned link to click – often a very bad idea.

In fact, it’...

Friday, March 05, 2010

Money for [from] nothing - comment

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Response to the Editorial column "Brightest and Best" in the March edition of EDN Europe - follow the adjacent link... John Carver comments;

Good article, but one thing you got completely wrong.

"However clever bankers are, they cannot create money out of thin air - that's a job for governments."

You couldn't be more wrong. This is a popular misconception. In fact, governments DO NOT create money. Money IS created by banks, and only banks. Let me say that again. Money is created...

Monday, January 04, 2010

Snow job

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

For many of us, this (Monday 4th January) is the first day back at our desks after the mid-winter holiday, so please let me wish you a happy New Year, and good fortune for 2010.
What have we learned since we last convened here? For one thing, that Eurostar power cars (which apparently are little different from TGV traction units) don’t perform well in the face of very-low-temperature powder snow.
Here’s what intrigues me; and before writing any more, I should make it clear that the following m...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Where’s the hydrogen?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Today (Tuesday) was the first day of the Automotive Electronics Congress, held in Paris. Part of the first day’s conference programme was a panel discussion on the subject of “Environment and Infrastructure for EVs and HEVs (electric vehicles/hybrid electric vehicles). That covered, as you might expect, a wide range of topics including the various “degrees” of hybrid that are presently under development, extending out to the pure electric car with range-extending engine.
Notably absent from the...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Thursday, November 12, 2009

A little bit of Arizona in Berkshire

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A couple of days ago I encountered Steve Sanghi, CEO of Microchip, at the dedication of Microchip’s new European Headquarters and customer training site near Reading, UK. He paints a characteristically upbeat view of the microprocessor/microcontroller sector’s prospects for 2010 – he’s looking for a recovery in many aspects of his business, back to the product-sales-rates Microchip was achieving before the Big Downturn – within just a couple...

Related entries in: Power Management | Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Analyst fingers “grey” cellphones

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Industry analyst iSuppli has issued a press release on a report that claims to put numbers to the “grey” (or gray, as the US-English text says) cellphone market in China, and if the figures are reliable, they are pretty astonishing. “This business,” iSuppli says with no hint of irony, is “one of those things that everyone knows about—but few want to di...

Related entries in: Communications |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

TI, ARM and MSP

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

This week, I spent some time hearing the message from Texas Instruments on the progression of their ARM-based embedded processor line – some of the main news items from that, I have already posted here. There has been a sudden surge of ARM-related announcements in the last week, because several licensees used the occasion of the ARM TechCon in Santa Clara to intr...

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Who said that?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Now that we are into winter in northern latitudes, the energy-efficiency gains from more efficient lighting – at least, in our homes and offices – once again become illusory, until spring has us once again turning down our heating thermostats; but the flow of product aimed at more efficient lighting continues. On the news pages today you’ll find an announcement from NXP of a chip designed to drive compact-fluorescents for a “better user experience”.
Included in its feature set is the capability...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The power of subsidy

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Here’s a small paradox; in recent weeks I’ve spent a couple of days each in Munich, and in Nice (Sophia Antipolis, in fact) for different events. In the Munich area there is huge enthusiasm for solar energy – driven, to be fair, by a generous government subsidy for purchase, and for selling your surplus power back to the grid. It’s becoming commonplace to see substantial solar-cell arrays along south-facing motorway bankings, and covering the roofs of every type of building.
That, I remind you,...

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Launch window closed?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An encounter yesterday with John East, President and CEO of Actel; setting out his view of the programmable device sector, East says that in recent times Actel has gained some market share on the other companies in the field, albeit in a market where Xilinx and Altera between them have about 90%-market share. “There’s no [economic recovery] boom going on out there,” East says, “we have [at times] been going backwards a bit slower that the others, or growing a little more than them.” Always enter...

Related entries in: Programmable Logic/ Memory |

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Smoke and mirrors

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A press release in my in-box tells us that at the Audio Engineering Show (AES) in New York, a design consultancy called Schwartz Engineering & Design, in the person of one David Schwarz, will demonstrate a completely new principle of microphone. In the Laser-Accurate mic, a laser beam passes through a cell, crossing a laminar-flow air stream that in turn carries fine suspended particles (smoke, basically). Sound entering the cell disturbs the particles, and the disturbance is detected in the las...

Related entries in: Analog |

Friday, September 04, 2009

Light work

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

One of the struggles for industry supremacy going on right now centres around building automation, and the use of wireless controls and sensors. Some people’s automatic response to that is “Zigbee” but there are plenty of others. I wrote about this a few months ago, questioning whether now was the time for this general class of devices, including but by no means limited to those based on IEEE802.15.4, to achieve market “take-off”.
One of the a...

Related entries in: Communications | Components/ Interconnect | Power Management |

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

And another real-time thing....

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

There’s something about bus standards that seems to lend itself to longevity. Following (more or less) from the last post, I have notification today of a webcast by TTTech Computertechnik, in just a couple of days’ time (4th September) on the subject of “Ethernet Networking for Critical Embedded Systems”. Ethernet is now over 30 years old, as TTTech observes. Its repeated extension to higher and higher speeds probably tracks quite accurately t...

Related entries in: Communications | High-Speed Design | Test & Measurement |

Thursday, August 27, 2009

1million nodes of FlexRay

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An announcement from NXP today tells us that the company has shipped one million FlexRay transceivers to the automotive industry; NXP sold the part first into the 2007-model BMW X5, and depending on options, if you order a series-7 BMW, you will apparently be getting “up to” 11 FlexRay transceivers. FlexRay, you may recall if you don’t have day-to-day involvement in the automotive design area, i...

Related entries in: Communications | High-Speed Design | Components/ Interconnect |

Friday, August 21, 2009

Digital power inches forward

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Industry research group Darnell reports that its latest estimates for the worldwide digital power IC market (including controller ICs, converter ICs and system management ICs) show expected growth from over 5 billion units in 2009 to 12.3 billion units in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 19.8%. “This will be spread out over a diverse market of power supplies, including external ac-dc and em...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Monday, August 17, 2009

Who pays?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I’ve said here, and in the editorial space in EDN Europe, that I have misgivings about the economic viability of the “totally-connected” – broadband everywhere – vision of the future. I’ve observed, for example, the less-than-sparkling track record of the mobile operators in extracting revenue from their customers for advanced services. Often, they seem to end up discounting – in some cases, to zero – anything other than voice as an incentive to retain customers. I don’t mean the business market...

Related entries in: Communications |

Friday, August 14, 2009

Ørsteds for the masses

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

If you read this today (14th August 2009), Google’s home page is worth a look; its custom artwork celebrates the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted (or Oersted; MS Word has the correct character for the initial letter of his name, time will tell when I post this, if the website font has the same…..)

The artwork depicts a circuit with some turns of wire around an iron nail, and a compass, nicely depicting the discovery of the relationship between moving charge and magnetic field.

How many o...

Thursday, July 23, 2009

The emperor’s new wireless service offering

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I received an email solicitation to attend a Webinar on the subject of “Mobile Internet Data: Hype Colliding with Reality”. It is being conducted by one Andrew Odlyzko, who, the email tells me, is a Professor at the University of Minnesota. “He had a long career in research and research management at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs….. He is known for the debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every three or four months and for demonstrating that connectivity has traditionally mattered much ...

Monday, July 20, 2009

Not tweeting but chirping

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An announcement from Berlin-based Nanotron caught my eye with a product category I hadn’t noticed before; the headline refers to “Loss Protection Solutions”. Loss protection, it transpires – you are probably ahead of me on this one – means keeping track of your assets – people, animals, valuable items – using RFID-type techniques, with refinements.
A couple of years ago, Nanotron managed to get the relevant IEEE committee to accept its propo...

Related entries in: Communications |

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

No silver linings without clouds

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Semiconductor industry analyst Malcolm Penn (Future Horizons) yesterday put out an assessment of the chip industry’s latest figures; he says that in May, the industry grew 18 percent month-on-month, raising the expectation that in June, the industry may have done over $20billion in a month for the first time since the collapse of last September.
Penn calls the timing of this recovery , “‘as good as it gets’, given that third quarter seasonal demand will be on the increase just as the sales decl...

Friday, July 10, 2009

What’s bugging the rich and famous

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A story running in the Guardian newspaper in the UK revolves around large number of politicians, prominent people and celebrities who have had their phones “tapped” or “bugged” by reporters on another British paper, the News of the World.
You might think from the headline that some miscreant has spent a lot of money on a GSM analyser and is scanning the airwaves with professional signal decode kit to trace the call of the rich and famous. Nothing so sophisticated, it seems. Apparently, many of...

Monday, July 06, 2009

Curb your excitement, it's a femtocell

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I got a press release the other day with a picture that shows Doug Pulley, CTO at picoChip outside Vodafone’s Bath, UK, store, “heading the queue of people waiting to buy the new Vodafone Access Gateway”. I have suspicions that that some more of the queue might have a degree of correlation with picoChip staff, or might just have been press-ganged from passers-by in the street… but that’s another matter.
No surprise that picoChip’s CTO should be lining up to buy one of the first retail femtocell...

Related entries in: Communications |

Friday, July 03, 2009

Integrate or....not?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An interesting sidelight from the account I just posted on the news stream about NXP’s ATOP module for in-car telematics functions. As I noted there, it has four major chips on it; could you integrate those any further, I asked? We could, said an NXP spokesman, but we probably wouldn’t. Not while we are at trial-level volumes, and possibly not ever. The reasons NXP cites are familiar; the costs and risk of developing such a large mixed-signal chip; plus, the fact that the MCM approach, “leaves e...

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Getting into hot water

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A random thought on energy efficiency. We are now being preached the message on a daily basis that if our electric motors/lighting systems/etc etc had more sophisticated controllers, that the energy savings available could be very large. When you say ‘sophisticated’, you generally imply precision of regulation to a set-point, minimal hysteresis and so on. I was reminded that hysteresis is a parameter that also has an optimum value – this came to mind when I was looking at my domestic heating sys...

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Guest Blog; is your creativity at risk?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

In this guest column, Altium's Rob Evans asks the question, Have designers lost the ability to be creative?

Life is full of unassailable assumed truths and it’s an often disturbing, but always constructive exercise to challenge them.
Let’s start by questioning an easy one from everyday life: are you a good driver? Your instinctive answer is undoubtedly yes, and you would receive the same answer from anyone else you ask. But there are obviously loads of hopeless drivers on the roads. It just ...

Friday, June 05, 2009

More Intel

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I wrote recently of the mixed experience I have had over the years of being on the receiving end of Intel’s marketing and promotion output – especially as that relates to Intel’s involvement in the embedded market space. It’s been….. “variable” is a good word; there have been times when, as an outside observer, you’d never guess that Intel sold into the embedded space at all: and there have been intermissions when (like now) the company has suddenly rediscovered the embedded space, and noticed a...

Related entries in: Computers & Boards | Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Thursday, May 28, 2009

To bravely go (reconfigurably)

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I just posted a news item about a new – well, new-in-public, the company has been working on its technology since 2005 – IP company called Akya. It’s offering re-configurable logic for incorporation into ASSP/ASIC designs, or even as the basis for complete chip designs.
It has to be said; this is an area which has seen more than its fair share of crash-and-burn attempts at product launches. And to be fair, the founders of Akya seem well aware of the quicksands which have swallowed other adventu...

Related entries in: EDA/ IP | High-Speed Design | Processors/ Software/ Tools | Programmable Logic/ Memory |

Friday, May 15, 2009

TI swallows Luminary

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

More consolidation in the microcontroller business; hard on the heels of the announcement of the forthcoming marriage of Renesas and NEC, we have TI snapping up Luminary Micro. No surprise to see a venture such as Luminary being bought; something of a surprise, perhaps, to see it being bought at a relatively early stage in its development.
Not for the first time, it shows that if you have the resources, then hard times offer opportunities as well as problems. From the design point of view, we ...

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Analysis with the X-factor

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Did you have a struggle to get your head around the concepts involved in S-parameters, when first you tangled with network analysis? Now you have another set of parameters to wrestle with; X-parameters. The latest edition of Agilent’s Product and Applications Newsletter has a number of links to take you into the world of X-parameters (a name that belongs to Agilent, by the way) which, the newsletter informs us are,
“a mathematical superset of S-parameters meaning that, in the limit of a small s...

Related entries in: Analog | Test & Measurement |

Monday, April 27, 2009

NEC-Renesas

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The announcement of a forthcoming marriage between NEC and Renesas constitutes a cat set among pigeons, in no uncertain terms. It will create the third-largest semiconductor company, and by far the biggest MCU maker. The press release has some fairly terse business-speak, for example;
“The ownership ratio of the integrated company will be decided ….based on scheduled due diligence. The new company will announce the company name, the location of its headquarters, the corporate representative, th...

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The future according to Intel

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

In a presentation yesterday (22nd April) to media and analysts, Intel revealed a little more about how it sees the near future in a series of “predictions”. One of these says that “Sub-threshold ICs will enable a new class of smart, ultra-low power devices.” In fact, Intel already gave an insight into where it is heading with this, when it disclosed at this year’s ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) an attached processor that it described as a reconfigurable, 4-way SIMD acceler...

Related entries in: High-Speed Design |

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Fuzzy thinking

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

One of the unpredictable phenomena that I’ve noticed from time to time is that a particular subject will disappear for a long time, then it will pop up more than once in a short time. In exactly this way, I’ve had two readers contact me in the last few days asking about fuzzy logic and neural networks. Prior to that, I’d heard little mention of either for quite some time.
I wasn’t really able to assist either reader very much. As is well-known, editors (some of them, at least) have heavily cach...

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Better late than never

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I’ve written almost exactly this comment before, but never mind, it’s worth saying again. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, an initiative (A new one? A previous one re-branded? – It’s hard to tell) has been announced by the GSMA and 17** mobile operators and manufacturers, to implement a universal charger for mobile phones.

Well, put out the flags.

Let me quote from the statement; the grouping is “committed to implementing a cross-industry standard for a universal charger for new...

Related entries in: Communications |

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Faith in the future

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

If you needed any confirmation of the way that the mobile sector now carries the hopes of a large section of the industry, look no further than the announcement yesterday (16th February) from ARM (see news section). That ARM IP should make its way to 32-nm processes is hardly a surprise. And where does the announcement of such a step forward appear? At Mobile World Congress, naturally. Why “naturally”?
One of the recurring themes in any examination of continuing progress in silicon technology i...

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A good time to buy if you’ve got the cash

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A couple of corporate announcements this week have seen what you may – or may not – choose to see as consolidation in tough economic times and/or as companies moving to secure positions in some of the markets that might still show a bit of growth in the coming months.
For example, this week CSR, formerly Cambridge Silicon Radio, and SiRF announced that they are to merge. CSR is best known for its...

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

It is what you say, [not only] the way that you say it

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A reflection on a week at the electronica trade show: Over the course of the week there was a perceptible change in mood, or, at least, in some people’s outwardly-presented mood. At the beginning of the week, if you asked a senior executive or CEO how their company was faring in these troubled economic times, there was a fair amount of what our US colleagues call “whistling past the graveyard.” Or in British-English, “whistling in the dark.” Namely, putting on a show of bravado so as to hide ...

Monday, October 20, 2008

Measure that….

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A special mention today to ST Microelectronics; today (see the ‘latest news’ column) the company sent me a press release that, as far as I can recall, contains the first use I have seen (in a press release, at any rate) of the multiplier “atto”. The company’s new CMOS imaging chip has a per-pixel dark current measured in aA, which (I’m assuming there’s no misprint here) would be atto-Amps. To save you looking it up, that’s 10 to the power -18. That’s not very much.

...

Friday, October 17, 2008

Electronics recycling in action

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I had an outage on the line that brings me my regular telephone and broadband connections, for a couple of days at the start of this week. The cause, according to British Telecom’s fault desk, was ‘theft of copper wire’. Apparently the value of scrap copper is now sufficiently high for it to be worth cutting down sections of telephone line and (presumably) selling them to a no-questions-asked ‘metals recycling dealer’. I knew there were benefits to going wireless, but I hadn’t thought of this as...

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

What, now?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Freescale held the European presentation of its Technology Forum in Paris yesterday, and among other subjects, CEO Richard Beyer commented on the company’s proposed exit from the business of designing and making wireless handset chipsets. He confirmed that the divestiture relates only to the handset area, and that the company remains very committed to the basestation/infrastructure side of the sector, and that fits with its view of the network-access business as being fundamental to its success....

Friday, September 19, 2008

Low-cost heads towards average-cost

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Last weekend, the business section of one of the UK’s Sunday newspapers carried a story headlined, “Is China running our of steam? – cheap era is over…..”. The premise of the article was that with increased costs and rising fuel bills for transportation of materials and finished goods, some western manufacturers are moving production to other low- or lower-cost Asian countries or (even) bringing operations back from the Far East.
Who would have thought that? Well, just about anyone who stopped ...

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Semantic problem

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Day after day of extraordinary happenings in the financial world; one aspect of the commentary triggered a question in my mind. A lot of what the “investment banking” sector - that has come to grief in spectacular fashion – does is, in effect, gambling. Not only is it betting, but as far as my very limited understanding goes, some of it is betting on the outcome of other bets. The flashy name for this seems to be “financial instruments”.
If you’re going to play this sort of game, you might thi...

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

FPGAs, with a twist

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

For a market sector that ought to be taking over the world – the digital logic world, at any rate – new entrants to the programmable logic scene have a tough time. I just posted a news item about Achronix, which isn’t, in fact, all that new an entrant to the scene, but here on EDNE we try to write about things that you can go out and buy, if not today then in the very near future. And although Achronix has been around for about three years, that hasn’t appeared to be the case until now. Now, th...

Related entries in: EDA/ IP | High-Speed Design | Programmable Logic/ Memory |

Monday, September 08, 2008

Key facts

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An engineering linguistic trivia point that arose while we were preparing some content from a North American author; In his text he referred to an “Allen wrench” a device known by an assortment of names across Europe but generically, a hex key, the “L”-shaped hexagonal bar used to torque a set-bolt with an internal hexagonal recessed head. How should we refer to it for a pan-European readership? In the UK it’s generally an “Allen key”. (“Allen”, according to the occasionally-accurate Wikipedia,...

Friday, August 29, 2008

Under pressure (or not)

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

As you may have read, a UK-based airline had a decompression incident this week – a Ryanair flight had to make an expeditious descent and unscheduled landing in France. Apart from the fact that it’s a surprisingly rare occurrence, given the number of pumped-up aluminium tubes that motor around at 35,000 ft every day, in aviation incident terms this appears to have been a bit of a non-event. The crew followed standard procedures to get down to an altitude more compatible with surface-pressure asp...

Thursday, August 21, 2008

WiMax on one page

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Need something new to brighten the wall above your bench? Baffled by the intricacies of the WiMax modulation scheme? Keithley Instruments will mail you a poster that illustrates the key measurement tools and software analysis techniques required for measuring complex WiMAX signals.
The poster outlines signal creation and analysis of WiMAX signals. WiMAX – “arguably the most complex modulation scheme in the world,” Keithley suggests – encompasses multiple technologies including bandwidths in ex...

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Catch those Joules

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

When component or subsystem makers get their products designed-in to a prestige project, they like to make a fuss about it, in the hope that you, the designer, will be impressed and will also consider the product for your design. Conversely, if you are the owner of that project, you may want to keep that design-in quiet, in the hope that you can keep your rivals in the dark as to how you are getting the job done. The motor industry is particularly sensitive in this respect, and none more so than...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Monday, June 02, 2008

Still buzzing after all these years

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Travelling through several airports last week, it occurred to me that the airline industry must be the last refuge of the dot-matrix printer. Look behind the desk at any number of departure gates and what do you see? Long after the rest of the world has migrated to laser or ink-jet technology, there they are; venerable Oki Microlines, and ancient NEC Spinwriters, still hammering away, day after day. Aside from the (evident) reliability, you can see the attraction. The airlines print metre after...

Monday, May 26, 2008

Mine’s better than yours – and his

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I’ve noticed a trend in recent presentations of T&M products that I think is something of a concern. As I’m sure you are aware, from time to time the equipment manufacturers gather together the representatives of the technical press, and present their latest innovations. Standard form for these events is a slab of PowerPoint and, usually, the new product doing a star turn with some demonstration or other. The demos are of mixed success; since the editors are (mostly) some way away form being wo...

Related entries in: Test & Measurement |

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ready for an LCD speedo?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

When we go shopping for LCD monitors or televisions, one of the parameters that the sales pitch includes is contrast ratio. It’s a figure that is subject to considerable manipulation. As a subtractive technology (LCDs start with white light and filter out all but the colour you want in every pixel) there is an inherent problem in producing black. To make a bright image you need to start with a bright white light (which is why the power consumption of big LCD TVs is so high): to get black you nee...

Related entries in: Components/ Interconnect |

Thursday, March 27, 2008

For sale, biometric ID system, one owner, hardly used

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A biometric passenger verification system has been put on ice, just one day before it is due to go into service at London Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. For non-UK readers, a brief history;
Terminal 5, for all that it was, for a time, Europe’s largest construction site, is actually quite constrained for floor space. To optimise the use of lounge space and to maximise traffic through its shops and restaurants, it was designed with a single departure lounge for both domestic and international passeng...

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Minimising MIMO misery

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A conversation today with Anritsu’s Jonathon Borril, on the subject of testing MIMO. He’s been finding there’s a bit of, not so much confusion, as misunderstanding when it comes to testing MIMO systems – an increasing concern as data speeds increase in WCDMA, and looking forward to LTE. Some users, Jonathon says, expect to see multi-port RF test sets in the MIMO test context, and don’t entirely appreciate how much of the process of evaluating a MIMO configuration takes place at the algorithmic l...

Related entries in: Communications | Test & Measurement |

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The fall of night

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Today’s news bulletins tell us of the death at 90 of Arthur C Clarke. In our particular bit of technology space, perhaps his best known prediction was that of the value, to a global communications system, of geostationary satellites – in a paper published in “Wireless World” in 1945. Not the least remarkable aspect of that prediction was that Clarke’s life carried on to span not only the realisation of that technology but most of its life cycle, as far as the communications that most of use are ...

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

What’s wrong with this picture?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The following thought was triggered by a news item in an entirely different context to EDN Europe, in which operating domestic air-conditioning was depicted as a most shocking environmental extravagance (here at latitude 51.5 north, at any rate).
Simultaneously (bear with me on this) I get very many press releases from power semiconductor makers who are going to save the planet – or at least, marginally postpone its demise – by making all of the world’s electric motors run more efficiently. An...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Friday, March 07, 2008

Need to know

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

From Embedded World last week, to DATE next week. Increasingly, I don’t understand events like DATE. At least, I don’t understand the (significant) part of it that is concerned with design of leading-edge, SoC digital designs. There is the proverbial elephant in the room on this one. Or, rather the elephant has left the room. If that’s too cryptic; what is the point of going to all that trouble to promote the technology of designing in 65- or 45-nm silicon when there are only a handful of peo...

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Whatever happened to….?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An impression from last week’s Embedded World Show in Nurnberg. Whatever happened to Multicore processing? Let me quickly head you off at the pass if you were about to dash off an email telling me that your company has a range of tools and solutions for implementing numerous different multicore strategies in the embedded space. That is not quite what I had in mind, which is simply this; at Embedded World 2007 you could not walk ten paces down any of the aisles in the show without someone saying,...

Related entries in: Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Friday, February 29, 2008

No recession apparent in embedded design

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Embedded World 2008, at the Nurnberg exhibition grounds. Larger than in previous years, it was also very much busier, or so it certainly appeared. Trade shows generally last, in reality, about half-a-day less than they are officially timetabled to; if they are a three-day show, everything goes very quiet from mid-day on the last day – not this one. Either a lot of people were wasting their time, or design has not been sent offshore – At Embedded World the place was busy almost up to the moment t...

Related entries in: Computers & Boards | Processors/ Software/ Tools |

Monday, February 25, 2008

No wind when you need it

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Last week as I was traveling around the UK, it occurred to me that I was inhabiting the alternative-energy-provider’s nightmare scenario. The weather charts were dominated by large high-pressure system, largely unmoving, centred right over the UK. Leading to cold, bright days and, under clear skies (except, of course when we wanted to watch the lunar eclipse) – very cold nights. With no wind to speak of, across the whole region. Result – every outcrop of wind turbines I passed was either idle ...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Look to the skies

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I recently had a briefing on a new product that is due for launch in a few days. Can’t tell you who, can’t tell you what, it will appear in the “latest news” file next week. But its name bears a strong resemblance to that of a particular - and infrequent - astronomical event that took place in the skies early this morning (European time) or late evening (east coast US time) and was visible to most of the western world (those who could stay awake that long, anyway).
You might have thought that,...

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Evolving evolution

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Further retrospective thoughts on Mobile World Congress. The rapid progress in LTE evolution – if you can have an evolution of an evolution – is notable, no doubt hastened along by the “WiMax or LTE” debate. On the stands of each of the major test houses you could see side-by-side demonstrations of WiMax, and of complete LTE test configurations, for both channel and protocol. Exactly how you can have an end-to-end test set-up for a standard that’s only half-written is an interesting question. As...

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

What’s on TV today? Uh…nothing

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Now that the dust has settled after Mobile World Congress, what to make of it? As our correspondent Nick Flaherty notes in a column in the next edition of EDN Europe, GPS was big this year; GPS functionality is approaching the price point where its inclusion in a phone build (at least, an upper-end phone) will be automatic. Maybe then all those location-based services that providers have talked about for years will begin to really happen. There is quite a bit of it in place already; tech-savvy u...

Related entries in: Communications |

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Next; the image-projecting cellphone

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |



Coming soon to a mobile phone near you; the pocket projector. At Mobile World Congress, TI was demonstrating a DLP-technology projector housed in a handset outline. The company hopes to get the product on the market this year as a module. How good is it? Hard to judge in the environment of an exhibition hall. At the back of a stand, away from the main lighting but still fairly brightly lit, and held about 40cm from a surface it projected a reasonably bright – watchable if hardly dazzling – ...

Related entries in: Communications |

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Keep away from the edge

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The Future Horizons organisation, the chip-industry analyst group headed by Malcolm Penn, the other day released its forecasts for the semiconductor business for the coming year. Malcolm believes that the intrinsic attributes of the semiconductor business have set it up for a reasonably good year – by intrinsic I mean its own, internal factors such as capacity, inventory, pricing trends and so on. Unsurprisingly, he sets aside the over-riding external factor that isn’t amenable to analysis, at l...

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Still crazy after all these years

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I noticed this bit of technology reportage by the television reviewer of the Times (London) the other day;

“I was talking to a television engineer over the weekend – I won’t say from which company – and he confirmed to me what I long suspected: the picture quality on LCD flat screens is a joke within the industry. The future, apparently, is not even plasma but something called SED (surface conduction electron-emitter display) which uses a combination of flat panel and cathode ray tube to del...

Monday, January 21, 2008

Sleep deprivation

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Yet another study published into the supposed health effects of using mobile phones. This time, the researchers claim to have found that if you use your phone late in the evening you will have more disturbed sleep that night. (Press release here).

Really. I’ve tried to be civil about these studies in the past, accepting that you can’t prove a negative (ie no matter how much you study, you ca...

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Listen up

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I was listening to a presentation the other day on a new spectrum analyser (more of that after its official release date) and as usual there was lots of Powerpoint with examples of how clever the box is at handling complex signal environments. One of these, according to the pitch, showed the RF environment resulting from an installation in a gas (petrol) station. As far as I understood the explanation, the proprietor of the petrol station was so worried about the risk of cellphones setting off a...

Monday, January 14, 2008

Banishment for the bulb

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

In his column for the February (print) edition of EDN Europe, Darnell’s Jeff Shepard comments on the announcement that Ireland intends to, effectively, outlaw the incandescent light bulb – following the lead of countries such as Australia, but putting it into the vanguard of any such moves in Europe.

I’ve written before that I don’t expect that, if you replaced all of the domestic incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would make very much difference to our overall energy bud...

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Dream on.

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

After echoing around various newsgroups and discussion fora for a week or two, the Boeing Dreamliner 787 computer architecture scare has now made it to the pages of the daily press. If you haven’t been following this one, it appears that Boeing, having noticed that their latest products amount to a heap of computers in an aluminium can with a couple of wings and a few seats added, made some simplifications. The aircraft has a network architecture in which, it seems, some resources are shared – t...

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Someone understands

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

For most of us, today (Jan 2nd) is the start of a new working year – week 1 on the wall planner. As it’s already Wednesday, better consider that as week ‘nearly-2’, perhaps. Best wishes for all your enterprises in the 51-and-a-bit weeks left of 2008.

But before leaving the end-of-year festivities behind, I have to note a most remarkable phenomenon – a daily newspaper columnist, writing an op-ed comment column, who appreciates the technology in the products that our industry creates. This wa...

Friday, December 07, 2007

Is this what patents are for?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I have just come back from the IP07 Conference, and in the course of that, attended one of the most depressing presentations I have heard in a long time. The topic was Patent Licensing: why, you might ask, would that be depressing?
You might assume that patent licensing means something along the lines of; you invent some device or technology, secure a patent on it, then license it to someone else to develop, turn in to a product and then market - they make money, you are rewarded for your ingen...

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Would you believe…

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I have just been watching an interview on television with Eugene Cernan, the commander of the last Apollo flight to the Moon, 35 years ago, and the last man on the Moon (On BBC TV's perennial "The Sky at Night"). Part of the discussion was around the technological hurdles, and the learning process, that NASA undertook, in response to Kennedy’s famous challenge. (“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon…..”) Ce...

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Feature creatures

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A presentation yesterday by the founders of Xmos gave an update (see the ‘latest news’ pages) on the progress of that project, and clarified the market niche it is aiming for. It plays to the belief of a lot of people, not just the team from Xmos – or the ‘traditional’ FPGA makers, for that matter – that the future of large logic-based designs is in some way programmable.
We can take for granted that for all but the highest-volume consumers of silicon, the conventional digital ASIC format is de...

Monday, November 26, 2007

It’s a good thing… but what sort of good thing?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I’ve been pondering what I learned at the recent Automotive Electronics Congress about Autosar. Which in retrospect seems to be; not very much I went looking to find if Autosar is really the future of embedded software design in the automotive industry, and indeed I heard a good presentation on the subject. Which told me that the concept of having well-defined hardware/software interfaces is coming along nicely, that compliant tools are becoming available, and all those good things.

What I ...

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Power and control, or, the politics of system architecture

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The Digital Power Forum that Darnell Group ran last week, for the first time in Europe, provided some clarification. Firstly, on what digital power actually means, and on how designers view it. As so often happens, no sooner has the term entered common use than it already means several different things. There is digital power in the sense that the core control loop in the regulator device – controlling output voltage and/or current – is digital, using an ADC to sample the output, and a (software...

Related entries in: Power Management |

Monday, November 12, 2007

Power and production week

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Most of my week, this week, will be spent in Munich: there, we have the Darnell Digital Power Forum: and Productronica. Productronica is a show that I don’t usually attend – although the divide between design and production is sometimes an arbitrary one, you have to set a boundary somewhere and the content of Productronica falls on the other side. But a point that has been made more than a few times is that, as vertically-integrated companies (that is, companies that have the complete process fr...

Friday, November 09, 2007

Car audio software package impresses

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I’m generally not a good subject for audio demos. On many occasions I have found myself sitting in audio demonstration suites while some leap forward in – say – amplifier technology assaults my eardrums. Those conducting the demonstrations will enthuse about the massive improvement in the quality of the sound that I’m supposed to be hearing. Often, I find it best to smile and nod. In some of these tests, if I’m honest, I can’t perceive much difference in the “before” and “after” versions. At ...

Related entries in: Communications |

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

It’s not cheap, it’s low cost. No, it’s cheap.

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

At today’s Automotive Electronics Congress in Paris: an interesting insight into the emerging low-cost car market: this is the objective of building cars that will sell for up to €5000, or maybe €7000, depending who you listen to, primarily for what appears to be generally known as the BRIC market (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Target selling prices go as low (would you believe?) as a figure under €2000 set as an objective by Tata of India. Established names aiming to make an entry in this spac...

Friday, November 02, 2007

The EEPROM in your passport is getting bigger

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A press release from NXP announces a new generation of electronic (e-) passport chips that that company will supply to the German passport authorities. In this second phase, the on-chip memory capacity is increased to store not only your photo and textual details, but two fingerprints as well. Germany, the release tells us, is the first European country to implement an upgrade that will be an EU requirement by the end of June 2009.

That’s a fact that has been very little publicised here in t...

Thursday, November 01, 2007

MIPS to go commodity in the 32-bit MCU space?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

An announcement from MIPS Technologies says that it will add a range of IP specifically intended to build general-purpose 32-bit microcontrollers, to its IP product range. This appears only to make sense if one of two things is true; either,
1) MIPS is about to enter the ranks of fabless semiconductor manufacturers and build its own range of microcontroller chips, or 2) Somewhere in the shadows there is a ...

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

November automotive electronics gathering hears from an Autosar user

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I have been looking ahead to a conference I’m due to attend next week, the Automotive Electronics Congress in Paris. In the conference session on the Wednesday (7th) one segment that looks potentially very interesting is about Autosar; it’s actually called “Standardisation: The long term impact of AUTOSAR on development cost and quality management of tomorrow’s vehicles?”

I didn’t put that question mark there – it’s ...

Monday, October 29, 2007

Free Skype calls on 3 mobiles - what's the deal?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

The cellphone network Three has announced that it has done a deal to offer Skype calling on one of its branded phones. “Free mobile calls” is the hook. There are, as you might expect, limits. You must have a Three contract or pay-per-call SIM, and the calls are only to other Skype users, called by Skype name. Skypeout calls – calls routed out of IP into the telephone network and addressed by number – are not supported. Obviously.

Hutchison has had its problems with the Three brand; it ann...

Monday, October 29, 2007

We interrupt your call to bring you this message

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Some of the newspapers here in the UK are getting energised about a story that the mobile operators are going to adopt voice-recognition and text-recognition applications – allegedly developed by Motorola – to scan traffic on the network and use it to send targeted advertising. Apparently the principle is that if you send an SMS to your friend saying, “meet me for a pizza” the network will parse the content of your message and will use the information it has about your current location to send y...

Sunday, October 28, 2007

That one is a.....

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Just done one of my periodic night-time treks across the UK’s motorway network and as I have frequently done for some time now, I was playing the game of “spot the make of car” in my rear-view mirror. If something screams up to pass in the outside lane, with its lights blinding you in the mirror, you can say with almost total certainty - BMW or Mercedes. Other marques have the same problem, but don’t seem to be quite so bad.

The offending technology is discharge-lamp headlights. As we know, ...

Friday, October 26, 2007

Lacking in the passenger information domain

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

On a recent visit to California I took a ride on San Jose’s light rail system. The USA’s excursions into public transport (or, ‘mass transit’) are variable: in the Bay area you can see multiple variants.

At one extreme there’s the CalTrain, which is a real hoot – literally. It’s a commuter train that thinks it’s the '3.10 to Yuma', complete with hooters and bells, and it runs up the peninsula from Silicon Valley into San Francisco. It’s not quick: the essence of fast, multiple stop commuter ...

Friday, October 26, 2007

Try selling this at home

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

A presentation I attended by comms-infrastructure chip maker Gennum Corp. features a forthcoming consumer-oriented product. The will be offering the silicon to build an HDMI extender. What you’ll have is a powered cable that will take the digital video, serialise it and drive it down some suitable cable – probably coax – and then reconstruct the HDMI at the other end. Up to 30m away.

While getting the point of the technological achievement, I had (still do have) a bit of a problem with the “u...

Friday, October 26, 2007

Bluetooth? you have heard of Bluetooth, haven't you?

Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |
| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Another observation from my recent trip to California. Believe it or not, it’s only in the last few days that California has got around to making it illegal to drive while talking on a hand-held mobile phone. This is an extremely common sight there – and given the number of vast SUVs being piloted by chattering drivers, a fairly scary one. And don’t even ask about the ones who do Blackberry email messages while on the move. (I’m not making that up.)

More remarkable than that, but related, is...


 

Our Sponsors



Ads by Google



Web design and maintained by Right Intention