Taking the Measure

May 9, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (10)

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

May 7, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

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

May 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

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

May 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

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

May 5, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

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