Apple CarPlay and Google Android Auto: Usage impressions and manufacturer tensions

What happens to manufacturers when your ability to differentiate whose vehicle you’re currently traveling in, far from piloting, disappears? My wife’s 2018 Land Rover Discovery: not only now has upgraded LED headlights courtesy of yours…

Solar flares and Airbus glitch: software, hardware, both, or what?

You may have seen this news item in late November, but it came quickly and disappeared even more quickly. On October 30, 2025, an Airbus A320 was forced to abort its flight when one of the control computers malfunctioned, apparently due to a…

Round pegs, square holes: Why GPGPUs are an architectural mismatch for modern LLMs

The saying “round pegs do not fit square holes” persists because it captures a deep engineering reality: inefficiency most often arises not from flawed components, but from misalignment between a system’s assumptions and the problem it…

Emerging trends in battery energy storage systems

Battery energy storage systems (BESSes) are increasingly being adopted to improve efficiency and stability in power distribution networks. By storing energy from both renewable sources, such as solar and wind, and the conventional power grid,…

Tune 555 frequency over 4 decades

The versatility of the venerable LMC555 CMOS analog timer is so well known it’s virtually a cliche, but sometimes it can still surprise us.  The circuit in Figure 1 is an example.  In it a single linear pot in a simple RC network sets the…

Designing edge AI for industrial applications

Industrial manufacturing systems demand real-time decision-making, adaptive control, and autonomous operation. However, many cloud-dependent architectures can’t deliver the millisecond response required for safety-critical functions such as…

Choosing power supply components for New Space

Satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) face a harsher environment due to plasma, trapped electrons, solar particles, and cosmic rays, with the environmental effect higher in magnitude compared with low Earth orbit (LEO)-Low Inclination, LEO-Polar,…

Another silly simple precision 0/20mA to 4/20mA converter

A recent Design Idea (DI), “Silly simple precision 0/20mA to 4/20mA converter,” by prolific DI contributor Stephen Woodward uses the venerable LM337 regulator in a creative configuration along with a few passive components, to translate…

A battery charger that does even more

Multifunction devices are great…as long as you can find uses for all (or at least some) of those additional functions that you end up paying for, that is. All other factors being equal (or at least roughly comparable), I tend to gravitate…

The shift to 800-VDC power architectures in AI factories

The wide adoption of artificial-intelligence models has led to a redesign of data center infrastructure. Traditional data centers are being replaced with AI factories, specifically designed to meet the computational capacity and power requirements…

Delay lines demystified: Theory into practice

Delay lines are more than passive timing tricks—they are deliberate design elements that shape how signals align, synchronize, and stabilize across systems. From their theoretical roots in controlled propagation to their practical role in…

CES 2026: AI, automotive, and robotics dominate

If the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a benchmark for what’s next in the electronic component industry, you’ll find that artificial intelligence permeates across all industries, from consumer electronics and wearables to automotive and…