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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...

Monday, November 12, 2007

Power and production week

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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 from product conception through to manufacture, under one roof) become ever more of a rarity in Europe, we have fewer and fewer design engineers who have a close acquaintance with the people and processes that build the products they conceive. And that, if you don’t see the production process, your design-for-manufacture skills are bound to suffer. For that reason alone, it will be interesting to take a high-level view of the exhibits at Productronica.

At least there is the prospect of travelling via a reasonably civilised airport (Munich): it has seemed recently that there is an undeclared competition in progress for the title of “European airport with the fastest-deteriorating level of customer service”. The decline of London’s Heathrow is undeniable, with its absurd quasi-security processes, chronic understaffing and sullen officials. If you can, and unlike my trip today, avoid Heathrow’s Terminal 2 – when the new Terminal 5 opens next year, Terminal 2 will be closed and demolished. What this means for the weary traveler is that right now in Terminal 2, anything that breaks down, that can’t be fixed with a staple gun and a roll of duct tape, stays broken. But if my trip through Paris’ CDG last week was anything to go by, the competition is being closely contested. Despite having quite a few flights still to despatch, by 9.00 pm CDG is, basically, shut. This being France, 9.00 pm closing seems to mean, in practice: counter cleared, cash counted, shutters down, and staff on the bus home by 9.00. So if you go for the 21.40 flight and you want to kill the time at 20.30 by browsing the shops…non. A light meal? Non. Fermé. Un café, then? Better be quick…. That, coupled with the bare-concrete architecture dimly lit by mercury-vapour street lamps, half of which don’t work anyway, makes for a feeling of being held in some sort of limbo, rather than in any part of the “city of light”.

This week, then, I hope to find out a bit more about how “real” digital power techniques are right now, and which types of design are – or should be – using them; take a look at production test-and-measurement technology (one part of Productronica that certainly is in our remit); and get an overview of the state-of-the-art in the back-end processes of the industry.

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