January 2012 – Page 2

Moving Up a Different Channel

January 4, 2012

LDRA continues to move upstream in the design flow with its certification tools. We saw not long ago that they were interconnecting with Simulink to push testing further up that modeling path; now they’ve announced similar arrangements with National Instruments’ LabView platform.

The idea here is that, when modeling safety-critical systems – especially those that have to pass regulatory muster – you can get a jump start by testing the early snippets of code that might be modeled long before the … Read More → "Moving Up a Different Channel"

Broadcast TV Lives… With Multiple Incarnations

by Jim Turley

January 3, 2012

With the prevalence of cable in many parts of the world, you might think that broadcast TV is on the way out. For people dropping cable, it’s not like they’re going back to receiving the signal over the air; they’re getting their content via the internet instead.

So you might be surprised to hear that there are multiple standards for digital broadcast TV – including even versions intended for mobile platforms like tablets and phones. When you think “mobile” you might be thinking things like handoff and such (more … Read More → "Broadcast TV Lives… With Multiple Incarnations"

News from the Inside

by Bryon Moyer

January 2, 2012

We all know that process control is everything. And this is true more than ever before at each node. That is, if there is a notion of “more than everything.”

Of course, one of the critical parameters in pretty much any process is temperature. Monitoring it to make sure nothing is going awry is, to put it mildly, a good thing. How to do that then?

Most wafer-processing equipment involves one or more chucks to which a wafer is secured (usually by a vacuum). And those chucks often have temperature sensors in them, … Read More → "News from the Inside"