The consumer-electronics industry needs smarter consumers—that’s the takeaway from a Wall Street Journal article titled “The War on Returns.” The article cites a study by Accenture noting that the US electronics industry last year spent about $13.8 billion to re-box, restock, and resell returned products.

The article states, “Especially galling to manufacturers is that many returns are preventable: Only about 5% of returns were because a product was truly defective. Instead, most consumers give up on products for other reasons, such as the device being too confusing to use, the study found.” A full 68% of returned items ended up with an NTF (no trouble found) result; 27% were returned because a produ...Read More

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The automotive market would appear to be an attractive target for semiconductor manufacturers. The most recent figure I’ve heard, courtesy of Tektronix, is that semiconductors represent 25% of the cost of manufacturing a new car. And as EDN's Brian Dipert reports, “Talk to any semiconductor supplier's spokesperson, ask him or her what the company's most compelling future market growth opportunities are, and there's a pretty good chance [automotive electronics] will rise to the top of the list.”

But Brian is skeptical, for two reasons. He believes that luxury features like “a dash-mounted GPS with voice recognition and response, whose color touch-screen LCD also served to display the video feed coming from a rear-view camera, an integrated Bluetooth microphone-plus-speakerphon...Read More

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Have we reached peak oil? I guess we know where Paul Rako stands on that question, but other observers don’t necessarily agree with him. Whatever your thoughts, with oil at $122 per barrel, it seems prudent to minimize its use.

In fact, soaring energy costs are one of three factors driving green engineering, according to Joel Shapiro at National Instruments. In a phone interview today, he said, “There is a huge effort now centered around green engineering,” which he defines as the process of using measurement and control techniques in the design, development, and improvement of products to yield environmental and economic benefits.

High energy co...Read More

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Now that people are finally adopting compact fluorescent bulbs, is it time to throw them out and replace them with LEDs? As I commented in an earlier post, Paul Rako got a good discussion going on this topic in his Anablog, but as far as consumers go, LEDs don’t seem to be on the radar screen as a lighting option.

Until yesterday, that is, when Salon columnist Pablo Päster addressed the topic, comparing a 7-W LED with a 10-W CFL, each of which, he says, emits 500 lumens.

If you want technical details on the LED vs. CFL debate, go back and read Rako’s post, the response of a ...Read More

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Embedded instruments have been in the news lately, most recently when Asset InterTech announced that it had hired DFx (design for whatever) expert Al Crouch from Verigy (which had in turn acquired Crouch’s service when it acquired Inovys). The Asset initiative followed a February 21 EDN cover story “As SOCs grow, test-and-measurement instruments move on-chip” by Ron Wilson and my own March 20 response (“External instruments here to stay”).

Crouch’s hiring (Asset also picked up John Potter, former principal automation architect at Inovys) indicates an ongoing interest in Internal JTAG (IJTAG), which Asset CEO Glenn Woppman articulated during an ...Read More

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Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini wants to move beyond supplying processors for conventional computers. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who visited Intel’s booth at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) earlier this month or who has taken note of recent third-party efforts to support Intel’s embedded-computing strategy. The third parties in question include MontaVista Software, which announced (at the ESC) Embedded Linux support for Intel's Atom Processor Z500 Series, and Asset-InterTech, which announced (two weeks earlier at Apex) that its µMaster is the first CPU emu...Read More

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The era of cheap goods is ending—that’s the view from sources ranging from a variety of observers. I reported recently that Alexandra Harney attributes the rise in prices to the rise of labor costs in China. Now, in the Sunday Boston Globe, Prasannan Parthasarathi, an associate professor of history at Boston College, and Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at BC and a board member of newdream.org, say other factors are involved as well in the fact that, as they put it, “Seemingly overnight, $19 DVD players, trendy T-shirts for $3.99, and $49 fares on Southwest have given way to $3 loa...Read More

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On Monday I wrote about robots as companions—robots like Alan Rath’s “I Like to Watch” and Jason Van Anden’s Neil and Iona. Such robots obey Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”:  "(1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

In a Salon article posted yesterday, Farhad Manjoo describes a robot that violates the first law. Bum Bot, the creati...Read More

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Holman W. Jenkins Jr. can’t decide “whether GM is a genius or a dolt for developing the Volt.” The Wall Street Journal columnist writes today, “America's biggest near-dead car company called in reporters this month to boast—boast!—about its willingness to lose money on its forthcoming electric car.” Jenkins says GM told the reporters it would deliver a plug-in Volt by 2010, “Whatever it takes….”

What it would take are batteries with sufficient power-to-weight ratio and life expectancy. Jenkins reports that “GM says it has a battery package in hand, and will have to squeeze 10 years of testing into two to make its schedule.” But, he adds, cost is no object, paraphrasing GM vice chairman Bob Lutz as saying ...Read More

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SAN JOSE, CA. While attending the Embedded Systems Conference I had a chance to visit an exhibit titled “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon” at the San Jose Museum of Art. While the ESC showed robotic technology as it actually is, the SJMOA exhibit presents an almost plaintive look at what might have been: “We were promised robots” is the lament of the artist Michael A. Salter in a statement that serves as a subtitle to the exhibit (which will run through October 19).

So what, exactly, was promised that wasn’t delivered? According to an exhibit handout, many people “…grew up imagining a future populated by friendly humanoid robots that would help us with our homework, mow ou...Read More

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SAN JOSE, CA. What’s the future of embedded systems design—or better yet, of the hardware and software engineers whose domain embedded system design has been? That topic was touched upon by panelists at an Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) presentation titled “Addressing Embedded Challenges with ARM Technology,” which coincided with National Instruments’ announcement of an extension to LabView that supports ARM's ARM 7, ARM 9, and Cortex-M3 microcontroller families.

Panel participants included Reinhard Keil of ARM, Geoff Lees of NXP Semiconductors, Jean Anne Booth of Luminary Micro, Stuart McLaren of ...Read More

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Giving users of mid-range oscilloscope the software tools typically found on only high-end scopes is the goal of LeCroy, which has introduced six new full-featured M-Type scopes in the 200-MHz to 2-GHz range. The scopes, reported product marketing manager Dan Monopoli at Lecroy’s booth at the Embedded Systems Conference, come standard with features such as WaveScan, a search and analysis feature; WaveStream, a fast viewing mode; and LabNotebook, a documentation and report-generation tool.

These tools, said Monopoli, have traditionally been included on high-end scopes with bandwidths beyond 2 GHz, but he said many users with modest bandwidth requirements still need advanced tools to look at the frequency spectrum, analyze jitter, or perform mixed-signal measurements. Specifically, the new scopes...Read More

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