Category: IC

Extending battery life in portable devices up to four times longer than traditional ultra-low quiescent (Iq) LDOs, Microchip has announced a linear Low Dropout (LDO) regulator. With an ultra-low Iq of 250nA versus the approximate 1uA operation of traditional devices, the MCP1811...

Adding wireless charging to furniture and other consumer goods is a nice way to add some oomph to an otherwise boring product. NXP’s NXQ1TXH5 provides an interesting, albeit difficult-to-prototype way around the problem. Creating a Qi-compatible is as easy as assembling the example...

Process computer designs usually start out with an accelerometer. As reliability problems creep in, making the switch to a more “professional” solution is beneficial. Accelerometers are based on the MEMS principle: instead of being a purely solid-state affair, the inside of the...

Analog Devices announces the Power by Linear™ LTC4126, which expands its offerings in wireless battery charging. The LTC4126 combines a wireless powered battery charger for Li-Ion cells with a high efficiency multi-mode charge pump DC/DC converter, providing a regulated 1.2V...

Recently the hobbyist market has seen the appearance of the Air602 low-cost ARM WiFi module. This module might be a potential competitor of ESP8266, another low-cost powerful WiFi module, that took the electronics hobbyists by storm long ago and is still extremely popular. But what's...

Startup Gyrfalcon introduced the Laceli AI Compute Stick, based on the same ASIC, early in 2018 to compete with the Neural Compute Stick introduced by Intel in 2017 . [via] The Lightspeeur 2801S is the first instantiation of Gyrfalcon's APiM processing-in-memory architecture. The...

Voltage gatekeeper Vdd brownouts are among the most common antipodes of microcontroller design – they are especially annoying, as their presence is not easy to detect. Diodes Incorporated provides a new family of easy-to-use supply voltage monitor ICs. From a principal point of view,...

Ken Shirriff has a detailed write-up about the multi-level ROM in Intel’s 8087 floating point chip: The 8087 chip provided fast floating point arithmetic for the original IBM PC and became part of the x86 architecture used today. One unusual feature of the 8087 is it contained a...