News Briefs

The Oregon Trail Chapter of the American Red Cross has begun using an Anritsu S114 Site Master cable and antenna analyzer to help maintain its disaster communications network. The chapter's Disaster Communications Center uses both commercial and amateur radio equipment to provide local, regional, and cross-country disaster communications, and the equipment is critical to the group's efforts to respond to catastrophes such as fires, hurricanes, floods, hazardous-materials spills, and explosions.

In addition to needing a reliable tester, the Red Cross, which relies on many volunteer workers, needed an easy-to-use instrument. Anritsu's S114 provides spectrum analysis and also measures return loss, standing wave ratio, and the distance to a fault at rates up to 1.6 GHz. It enables the Red Cross volunteers to solve RF system problems such as coverage and interference. www.us.anritsu.com.

Tripath Technology (San Jose, CA; www.tripath.com) has purchased an ASL 3000 test system from Credence (Fremont, CA; www.credence.com) in an effort to lower the cost of its mixed-signal testing. Tripath chose the system because it could test consumer audio and digital subscribe line (DSL) devices for less than competitive systems.

An addition to the ASL Series, the ASL 3000 includes a multi-band analog instrument set for use in wideband capture and analog source performance, an audio-video digitizer (AVD), and arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) instrument cards.

John Parsels, testing engineering manager at Tripath Technology, said, "We decided to move testing off competing ATE and onto Credence's ASL 3000 based on the system's ability to make several critical noise and distortion measurements, helping us meet our commitments to key customers."

National Technical Systems (NTS; Calabasas, CA) and TUV Rheinland of North America (Newton, CT) will work together to provide independent, third-party certification and testing services to manufacturers of telecom, medical, and IT equipment. By placing their employees in each other's facilities, the companies will be able to offer their customers a broader range of expertise.

A member of the TUV Rheinland Berlin Brandenburg Group, TUV provides independent product-safety testing, EMC certification, and other services to companies in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. NTS offers a range of test services for the aerospace, defense, telecom, and IT markets. Together, the companies say they can evaluate equipment for compliance to nearly any industry's or country's requirements. www.ntscorp.com.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) stands poised to become the technology that delivers the bandwidth and QoS that consumer electronics companies want and need. In-Stat/MDR, a high-tech market-research firm, predicts that a UWB standard (IEEE 802.15.3a) should be ratified by the first half of 2005, with products to debut at the end of 2005 and into 2006. (In-Stat/MDR and Test & Measurement World have the same parent company.)

In a prepared statement, Gemma Paolo, senior analyst at In-Stat/MDR, said, "Overall, UWB has much potential in linking together entertainment devices within a home network, and also may serve to penetrate the business market through its expected penetration in the PC market."

While it is assumed that UWB products will rollout slowly, In-Stat/MDR expects UWB to successfully enter the wireless market because IC component and processor companies, networking vendor companies, and CE companies are all interested in the technology. In-Stat/MDR predicts that standards-based chipsets will rollout near the end of 2004, when ratification of the standard is near. www.instat.com

Geotest-Marvin Test Systems (Irvine, CA) and ADLINK Technology (Taipei, Taiwan) have announced a partnership in which they will distribute each other's products. ADLINK will now sell Geotest's PXI- and PC-based automated test equipment throughout China and Taiwan. In turn, Geotest will distribute ADLINK's 3U PXI chassis and data-acquisition products. www.geotestinc.com.

The Inertial Systems Division of BAE Systems (Plymouth, England) has chosen AMI Semiconductor (Pocatello, ID) to provide the ASICs for BAE's new line of solid-state MEMS (microelectromechanical system) gyroscopes. The solid-state capacitive gyro sensors are used in mass-market products that must sense a change in direction or orientation, such as vehicle stability-control systems, wheelchairs, and model airplanes.

The gyroscopes use AMI Semiconductor's I3T80 mixed-signal technology as the basis for a low-cost ASIC that processes the data received from the gyro sensor. Based on a 0.35-µm process, the I3T80 system-on-chip IC has a gate density of 15,000/mm² and can handle voltages up to 80 V. www.amis.com.

Design engineers who must perform noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) evaluations on automotive and aerospace products can now simplify their work by integrating products from MTS Systems (Minneapolis, MN) and National Instruments (Austin, TX). Using the MTS I-DEAS Pro and Sound Engineering families of noise- and vibration-analysis software with NI's signal-acquisition hardware and LabView software, you can validate NVH applications during the design phase.

With the combination of LabView and NI's PXI 24-bit sound and vibration hardware, you can acquire acoustic, vibration, noise, and dynamic pressure-measurement data from up to 5000 channels simultaneously. The addition of I-DEAS Pro lets you perform on-line or post-processing analysis on the data. Users can download example programs for integrating the two companies' products from the NI Web site. www.ni.com.

Revenues up: Dalsa Corp. (Waterloo, ON, Canada), a manufacturer of digital-imaging and semiconductor products, has reported that its revenue improved 127% for the first quarter of 2003 compared to the same quarter in 2002. For the three months ending March 31, 2003, Dalsa reported total revenue of $33.4 million as compared to $14.7 million in the same period in 2002.

Record bookings: Mentor Graphics (Wilsonville, OR) has reported that its total bookings for the first quarter of 2003 rose 33% over the first quarter of 2002, to a new record for first-quarter bookings. Revenues were also at record levels for a first quarter, up 25% from the year-ago quarter.

Bluetooth rising: High-tech market-research firm In-Stat/MDR expects vertical markets such as healthcare, government, retail, services, transportation/communications/utilities, and manufacturing and mining to offer many opportunities for the deployment of Bluetooth technologies. In a recent report, the firm predicted that these vertical markets will grow to over 2 million deployed Bluetooth nodes worldwide in 2007. www.instat.com.

Semicon West, July 14–18. The show will be split into two parts: wafer processing—July 14–16 in San Francisco; final manufacturing (including test)—July 16–18 in San Jose. Sponsored by SEMI. 408-943-6901; www.semicon.org .

Wescon North America 2003, August 12–14, San Francisco. The show covers design, R&D test, manufacturing, and board-level components. Sponsored by IEEE. 310-524-4100; wescon@ieee.org ; www.wescon.com .

EMC Symposium, August 18–22, Boston. Sponsored by IEEE, EMC Society. 732-562-3870; www.emc2003.org .

National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) 2003, September 7–11, Orlando. Sponsored by Telcordia Technologies. 973-829-4832; info@nfoec.com; www.nfoec.com.

10th Annual International KGD Packaging and Test Workshop, September 8–10, Napa Valley, CA. The workshop will build on the progress of the past 10 years and focus on the future of semiconductor die products. Sponsored by Die Products Consortium (DPC). www.napakgd.com.

EOS/ESD Symposium, September 21–25, Las Vegas. Topics will include component- and system-level EOS/ESD and ESD standards. Sponsored by ESD Association. 315-339-6937; www.esda.org.

Autotestcon, September 22–25, Anaheim, CA. Sponsored by IEEE, the Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society, and the Instrumentation and Measurement Society. www.autotestcon.com.

To learn about other conferences, courses, and calls for papers, go to www.tmworld.com/events.