Synopsys plus Ansys: The making of an EDA giant?

The big three of the EDA industry—Cadence, Siemens EDA, and Synopsys—largely owe their ‘big boys’ status to a plethora of small acquisitions. However, the news about Synopsys acquiring Ansys seems to be a different affair. While Synopsys…

End-of-year tech-hiccups redux

Last time, in introducing this blog post series, I mentioned that as the year was drawing to a close, I seemed to be dealing with an ever-increasing number of tech hiccups, big and small alike. I focused specifically on two classes of issues: Those…

AI assistant for hardware design gets a vision upgrade

Copilot, an AI-based hardware design assistant that understands a project context automatically, now has a vision version, and that makes it the first multi-modal AI tool for hardware design. According to Flux, a startup based in San Francisco,…

Partners demo PCIe 6.0 64-GT/s interoperability

Alphawave Semi and Keysight joined forces to accelerate PCIe 6.0 compliance testing and bolster interconnectivity across AI compute infrastructure. The companies demonstrated interoperability between Alphawave’s PCIe 6.0 PHY and controller…

Image sensors facilitate machine vision tasks

Joining Samsung’s ISOCELL Vizion sensor lineup are the Vizion 63D time-of-flight (ToF) sensor and the Vizion 931 global shutter sensor. Tailored for robotics and extended reality (XR) applications, the sensors leverage the company’s ISOCELL…

Hall latches meet AEC-Q100 requirements

Automotive-compliant Hall-effect latches in Diodes’ AH371xQ series have an operating voltage range of 3 V to 27 V, with 40-V load dump protection. Resistant to physical stress, the parts are qualified to the AEC-Q100 Grade 0 standard and operate…

Resettable fuses save space in 1206 packages

Bourns has added 20 new devices to it MF-NSMF series of Multifuse polymer positive temperature coefficient (PPTC) resettable fuses in 1206 size packages. By combining higher power ratings in a smaller footprint, these surface-mount devices give…

MCUs optimize BLDC motor applications

Microchip’s AVR EB family of MCUs provides complex waveform control in systems that employ brushless DC (BLDC) motors. Aimed at a wide range of cost-sensitive applications, the microcontrollers can adjust speed, timing, and waveform shape,…

A simple, accurate, and efficient charge pump voltage inverter for $1 (in singles)

Keeping op-amp outputs “live” at and below zero volts, generating symmetrical output signals, and processing bipolar analog inputs, are all examples of design situations where a few milliamps of negative voltage rail can be a necessity.…

Distortion Factor as a function of total harmonic distortion

Coming to grips with the semantics and vocabulary that apply to “distortion” takes a little discipline, but it isn’t all that intimidating. All you need is a little patience to go over the relevant algebra and not scribble. Two phrases…

Figuring out a dimmable filament LED light bulb

As also noted previously, I’ve done a lot of LED light bulb teardowns over the years, not even counting LED illumination sources that aren’t bulb-shaped, like touch-activated and motion-sensing panels: Conventional Zigbee-controlled Wi-Fi-augmented Bluetooth-enhanced Multicolor Three-way,…

Proper function linearizes a hot transistor anemometer with less than 0.2 % error

A recent Design Idea presents a circuit to measure an airflow rate up to 2000 fpm using two transistors in a Darlington configuration. One transistor works as a self-heated thermal sensor and the other one compensates for ambient temperature…