By Douglas Alexander, Component Engineer
Special to NewTechPress

A few years back, an employee of a capacitor manufacturer left the company and stole the formula for a low equivalent series resistance electrolytic capacitor. He brought the formula to a black market operation and began to produce the capacitors using the same markings as the original company.

As it turns out, his bogus operation did not get the formula right and produced millions of bad capacitors that were sent all over the world. My company was one of the unfortunate recipients of the bad caps and we had to spend thousands …

An article from Texas Instruments discusses the use of isolated 3.3 to 5V converters in long distance data-transmission networks.

The article states that although isolated DC/DC converter modules for 3.3 to 3.3V and 5 to 5V conversion are readily available on the market, 3.3 to 5V converters in integrated form are still hard to find. Even if a search for the later proves successful, these specific converters— in particular, those with regulated outputs—often possess long lead times, are relatively expensive, and are usually limited to certain isolation voltages.

A low-cost alternative to integrated modules is a discrete design, if an …

This week, a free, online community for components engineering (CE) professionals has been launched at www.componentsengineering.com. This new site offers a forum for engineers to resource information, as well tools to create and maintain a CE department within their respective organizations.

The site includes free, downloadable content of procedures, processes, flowcharts, and guidelines, as well as tools and resources for learning the basic disciplines of components engineering. The site also provides resources for both fundamental and advanced component-specific education.

Douglas Alexander, the founder and principle consultant, created this website to capture and increase the knowledge of experienced of CEs.  …

By Lou Covey

NewTechPress Editorial Director

The establishment of the smart grid is an inevitability, according to experts speaking at the Smart Power Grid Technology Conference, but depending on power utilities, government and “field of dreams marketing” will only delay it.  That’s why the latent industry needs the help of the electronic design community, according to speakers at the event put on by ISQED.

Edward Cazalet, CEO of the Cazalet Group, and Tom Tamarkin, CEO of EnergyCite, painted a picture, for 100+ design engineers at the fledgling conference, of an industry that is ready to spread …

The Embedded Systems Conference, especially the Silicon Valley edition, is an eclectic collection of cutting edge technology. This year, ESC-SV 2011 was no exception. Yes, there were the regular software, RTOS, component and design services companies, but there was also significant presence of distributors like DigiKey and element14 that were drawing a lot of attention.

On the periphery of the exhibition were the companies that lack the marketing resources of the major players and while most were satisfied by the amount of customer traffic, they were a little wistful about the lack of attention they were getting from the press. …