Bench Talk

Recently a major LED lighting supplier, OSRAM, announced that the 2015 Ford F-150 will be the first truck to feature a full LED forward lighting system. A key performance and styling differentiator, the innovative LED lighting system is comprised of a low beam, high beam, light driver module, turn module, and park module.

When a piece of electronics fails, the manner in which that failure occurs is important and should be included in the design specification – especially for a consumer product. Most manufacturers realize that a UL (or ETL or other safety lab) Listing is a minimum requirement for product safety. But those requirements are focused on preventing fires and shock hazards. A piece of gear that fails in a plume of foul-smelling toxic fog, coupled with a few sparks or even a good ol’ firecracker report invokes a visceral reaction in the consumer that will absolutely guarantee that the replacement product will be a different brand. They just don’t want to experience that violent, scary failure again and will go out of their way to assure no repeat performances.

I recently commented to a colleague that engineers either learn by “letting the smoke out” of something (breaking it) or they can learn vicariously through another’s mistakes, if the mistake is catastrophic enough. I don’t have a lot of these, but I have noticed that engineering horror stories are effective training tools and often funny.

Throughout human history failure has been a bittersweet fact of life, and engineering is not exempt from this truth. Despite our best efforts (and sometimes, because of the lack thereof), engineering failures occur. The aforementioned examples are just some of the most highly publicized engineering disasters of the last 75 years. Sometimes, as we push the envelope in pursuit of success, things go horribly wrong. However, engineers should never use the reasons of those failures as an excuse. Instead, a failure should be viewed as a call to action, which brings with it the necessity to keep pursuing the root cause(s) of the failure. By doing this, we expand our knowledge and can reduce the likelihood of another disaster occurring in our future endeavors.

As members of the RF and microwave industry make their annual pilgrimage to IMS 2014 (this year in Tampa), I offer my opinion on the industry’s overall health at mid-year. Fortunately, it appears that it’s going to be hot in Tampa in more ways than one. Just how hot depends on many factors, many of them company-specific, so there’s no single answer to “How’s business?” Nevertheless, a realistic approach with this blog is to look at key markets in the wireless industry.

When I think of encounters with extraterrestrials I imagine them coming in their big space-traversing ships and with far more knowledge than we have. This is of course assuming that they find us. Not only do they find us, they decide to visit us.

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) has truly changed my life. It allowed me to launch my own business. How so you might ask? Well let’s take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

For most of us, it’s what we have to do to pay our bills so that we can live the lifestyle we want. We have to wake up and go to work.

The Smart Factory is driving efficient, automated, flexible, scalable and decentralized manufacturing, whereby large amounts of data have to be transported and communicated reliably in a minimum of time. The industrial network is thereby becoming very important: everything will be connected with inceasing speeds to the lowest level of the factory floor.

Consider a conference that is simultaneously transmitted to audiences in three cities. When a presenter asks the audience a survey question, they can respond by simply raising their hands. The total vote is tallied across all three cities and displayed to the presenter and the audience in real time.