Electronics Manufacturing
« Previous EntriesCastings - Part 1: An Introduction
Friday, August 6th, 2010Almost anything your mind can conceive of that requires a product to be cast or formed can be manufactured. We will save a discussion of plastics and other materials for later, but if your design requires a mold or die and a metal casting, you have many options. Your specific application will drive the material, [...]
Exploring ITAR
Thursday, February 25th, 2010U.S. companies that develop products and intellectual property (IP) with military and defense applications are not permitted to sell or export that technology outside of the U.S. It is obviously in the national interest to not provide our enemies or potential enemies with weapons or technology that can be used against us or our allies.
There [...]
Hopeful Signs from the Global Computer Market
Monday, December 7th, 2009A newly released iSupply study on the global PC and EMS market is analyzed in this article at ventureoutsource.com. In Q3 2009 Dell dropped to third in PC shipments behind leader HP and the new #2 Acer (Taiwan).
As we all deal with the recession, the article identifies two encouraging signs about the global economy that [...]
The Reliability Cycle: Understanding the Booms and Busts of Reliability in Electronics
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009The following article was written by my colleague Craig Hillman, CEO of DfR Solutions.
The Cycle of Reliability
The Past
Those who interact closely with DfR realize that we proscribe to the theory of the ‘reliability cycle’. The early years of electronics, 1950’s and 1960’s, were disasters for reliability and led to the establishment of the organizations and [...]
Embedded Systems Q&A
Friday, February 20th, 20091. What is an “embedded system”?
An embedded system is basically any device that has an internal computing architecture designed to handle a specific application. This applies to any type of processor and operating system, so can be anything from an ARM platform running Linux or an RTOS to a full x86 implementation running Windows. This contrasts [...]