October 26, 2011, – Santa Clara, CA – At the ARMTechCon event, Tektronix’s Embedded Instrumentation Group, recently formed from the acquisition of Veridae Systems, showed their award wining Clarus and Certus tools for in-chip ASIC and FPGA validation and debugging. Today’s designs have a complexity level that leaves large numbers of block I/Os and data [...]
October 25, 2011 – At the ARM Techcon we had a chance to catch up with Marvell Semiconductor to talk abou their Avastar wireless controllers the 88W8797, 88W8787, 88W8764. As high bandwidth wireless networking extends to more and more devices in the household and SMB, advanced control technology is required. The SoC is targeted at [...]
October 27, 2011, International Solar Energy Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Bozena Kaminska from IDme and Simon Fraser University proposed nano-particles in polymers to address cost and form factor issue in cells. Printed electronics on polymers offer the potential for practical cells and batteries. One of the challenges in solar applications is that wafer-based silicon has [...]
October 27, 2011, International Solar Energy Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Homan Yuen from Solar Junction described efforts in materials processing to engineer band gaps and achieve higher efficiencies. The technology of choice for this type of material is flat plate thin film. Concentrated solar comes in two flavors; thermal and PV. Concentrators work at light [...]
October 27, 2011, International Solar Energy Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Eli Yablonovitch from UC Berkeley described the physics of photovoltaics. The physics define the ultimate efficiency limits in solar cells. For semiconductor solar cells, it’s important to optimize activities at the junctions, because holes and electrons combine at the surface. However, a PN junction is [...]
October 27, 2011, International Solar Energy Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Eric Bakke from General Electric described their efforts for utility scale management of large capacity inverters. The systems are a necessary component of any large scale solar generation facility. GE makes $38 billion in the energy sector, which includes gas, steam, and biogas plus nuclear, [...]
October 27, 2011, International Solar Energy Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Chris Norris from Alta Devices talked about solar costs dropping below those of fossil fuels. The issues and challenges facing solar costs are being addressed by advances in technology. The questions about solar have revolved around its technical merits and financing. The three basic questions [...]
October 27, 2011, Association for Corporate Growth, Santa Clara, CA–The Silicon Valley chapter of ACG looked at big data in a panel moderated by John Furrier of Silicon Angle. The trends in big data are being generated by the growing rate of data production and by consumers who are using these data in new ways. [...]
