Building a simple test rig to unravel the mysteries of IV-11 VFD tubes.

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel like I need to run twice as fast just to keep up with everything that’s happening in AI space (where no one can hear you scream). No sooner do I wra…

Things were different back in the early part of the 20th century. There was a much stronger do-it-yourself culture, with people routinely building and repairing things themselves. It was an age of …

It just struck me that—although we don’t yet have things like Jetson-style flying cars—some of the technologies we do have go way beyond what was considered to be in the realm of science fiction wh…

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t pay much attention to business announcements about funding, mergers, acquisitions, promotions, partnerships, or other corporate comings and goings. But there’…

The thermionic technology behind that beautiful blue-green glow.

As I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, I’m constantly amazed by my ongoing discoveries of all the things I don’t know, and that’s just in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…

I love all that modern technology has to offer, and I’m blown away by how far we’ve come so fast. For example, I commenced my career in 1980 as a member of a team designing central processing units…

I get to hear a lot of things in my self-appointed role as collector, curator, and communicator of technological information. Sometimes things seem too good to be true, causing me to raise a quizzi…

When you come to think about it, many of the early ages of human development were defined by the materials people used, such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Much later came the …

I just received a phone call from a famous company whose name we shall not speak lest they turn their corporate frowny face in my general direction. At first, I thought I was talking to a person, b…

In Part 1 of this 2-part mini-series, we cogitated, contemplated, ruminated, and reflected on our increasing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, we pondered what might happen…

An EE Journal editor on how he triages his inbox, why buzzword-stuffed press releases get deleted in seconds, and what a pitch needs to earn his attention.

I was chatting with a friend the other day (stop laughing, it’s true, I do have friends). We were discussing the ever-increasing use of AI. A couple of topics particularly piqued my interest: what …

Why logos, style guides and consistent branding decide what editors and buyers think of your technology long before they look at the engineering behind it.

Max Maxfield on the four-legged stool: engineering, marketing, PR and sales each hold up a leg, and removing any one of them puts everybody on the floor.

What goes wrong when a company briefs the press without preparing: no slides, no clear message, a 150-slide deck, and the coverage that never happens.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been blessed with a cheerful and optimistic disposition. I fully relate to the classic Always Look on the Bright Side of Life song from Monty Python’s Life of Bri…

If you cast your mind back to the 1980s and 1990s, the electronic design automation (EDA) landscape was a very different place to the one we find ourselves in today. There were lots and lots of sma…

The folks at NetcoreNetwork think it’s time to rethink how our increasingly powerful devices can discover, authenticate, and communicate directly with each other without needing to go through…

For the past three years, almost every discussion I’ve had about AI processors and accelerators has eventually devolved into someone jumping up and down (metaphorically speaking) waving aroun…

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but things of a workforce nature are in flux, and not in a good way. Currently, the US population is estimated to be around 342 million people, give or take. Of…

One of the many things I haven’t really thought much about before is how people test websites these days. I know how we used to do it in the early days of the public-facing internet (when dinosaurs…

I can’t believe that the Design Automation Conference (DAC) has rolled around once again. Also, I can’t believe that, in conversation, some people remain blissfully unaware that you can pronounce t…

I’ve just seen the future of test and instrumentation and test, and it’s awesome, let me tell you! Yes, I know I said, “test and instrumentation and test.” Do I look like the sort of man who wouldn…

Explore the weird and the wonderful in vintage display space.

I must admit that I was tempted to title this column “It’s RAINing RFID! Hallelujah!” But then I thought you’d probably spend the rest of the day with the Weather Girls song rattling around i…

I bet you woke up this morning saying something like, “I wonder what the latest and greatest interconnect technologies are for System-on-Chip (SoC) devices and multi-die system (MDS) solutions.” We…

My first column on EEJournal, The Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse (Part 1), was posted on September 19, 2019. That’s almost seven years ago as I pen these words. Things are moving so fast these …

Explore displays from moving mechanisms to glowing segments and electronic elegance.

Close your eyes and imagine the following scene. No. That won’t work, will it? Let’s try doing this a different way. Keep your eyes open and imagine they’re closed. Visualize a future timeline wher…

On the one hand, I think I’m taking the incredible advances we’re currently seeing in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools in my stride, striving to maintain a dignified persona as the latest a…

Engineers tend to be traditional. Once we’ve found a way of doing something that works, we can happily keep on doing it the same way for decades. Loudspeakers are a perfect example. Whether t…

It’s a bit embarrassing to realize that you’ve been wrong about something for several years, but that’s the position in which I currently find myself (don’t tell my dear old mum or I’ll never hear …

I was just chatting with Tim Morin, who is Senior Director of Marketing and Applications at Microchip Technology. Unlike many of my conversations with technology companies, Tim didn’t have a partic…

When pixels clicked into place and scoreboards became performance art.

Suppose you find yourself on a battlefield facing an incoming swarm of drones. Let’s assume you’re reasonably confident that most of them are decoys or spoofing drones, while only a sel…

In some cases, AI can speed things up tremendously; in other cases, not so much. Take protein folding, for example. A highly simplistic view of the way things work is that human DNA contains roughl…

Do you remember when you were a kid, and you were first taught that humans have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch? I remember how this all seemed so obvious when I first heard ab…

When I was starting out in my career, I was blissfully unaware of the problems associated with cooling electronic systems down. This really wasn’t an issue with handheld and wearable devices becaus…

Just when I think I’ve seen everything, I find myself being introduced to an AI-powered hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing framework that lets any embedded design team build a fully automated pipel…

When information was served up with clicks, clacks, and whirrs.

The following glossary provides a quick-reference guide to many of the terms, acronyms, concepts, and technologies that we discussed in my previous column. Some of these definitions are necessarily…

From galvanometers to gravitas: why old-school displays retain the power to captivate.