NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Web Page sponsor Oxley Developments
www.oxleygroup.com
13 Apr 06. Oxley Release New Information on Planar Capacitor Arrays. Oxley has released a new Planar Capacitor Arrays product information sheet unveiling the latest information on part of their high-quality EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) Filter product range. Design capability and continuous process developments have added new and improved features to the Oxley’s product range. RoHS compliance where products are being redesigned to meet new regulations on the reduction of hazardous substances is one area of enhancement. Soft tooling and rapid prototyping techniques have also been introduced to enable a reduction in new product development and delivery lead times. Oxley offer a custom design service for special applications as well as providing filtering solutions and an assembly service for many types of multi-way connectors. In many instances this can now be provided without additional design costs. These high stability, multilayer capacitor arrays are used in defence, aerospace and automotive applications world wide and offer a space efficient and cost effective way of providing electrical filtering of interference signals from multiple signal and power transmission. Oxley Planar Capacitor Arrays are manufactured to the highest of specifications in clean room environments at the company’s specialist ceramic processing factory at Barrow-in-Furness. Oxley has a unique capability there that it developed more than fifteen years ago and will continue to invest in this area of the business in future. www.oxleygroup.com/components.
16 Apr 06. Bill Amelio, chief executive of Lenovo, has indicated that the company’s efforts to update the look and feel of the iconic IBM ThinkPad brand of notebooks had not been well received by customers, and were likely to be abandoned. Lenovo, which acquired the ThinkPad brand as part of its $1.75bn acquisition of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005, launched a titanium-clad oblong ThinkPad with a wide multimedia display last summer, the first non-black model in the range. However, Mr Amelio told the Financial Times that corporate IT managers, who form the core of the ThinkPad customer base, had not reacted well to changes to the classic square black design, which has remained the same since 1992. “We’ve had a lot of feedback. The CIOs [chief information officers] that we deal with like to have this system the way it is, and by putting different colours or models in can create some angst,” he said. Any further changes to the ThinkPad would be handled differently in the future, Mr Amelio said. (Source: FT)
18 Apr 06. Raytheon Company’s Project Athena successfully completed an operational demonstration along the southwest border of Texas to provide persistent multi-domain surveillance and “actionable intelligence” to a joint interagency task force in support of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) law enforcement agencies. The Athena integrated C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and sensor system was rapidly fielded to support the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Rio Grande Sector and 14 other interagency partners. During the six-week mission, Athena and CBP successfully detected, intercepted and deterred transnational threats, drugs, and alien smuggling across the U.S.-Mexican border over a large joint operations area including 160 miles of coastline, 120 miles of land border, and nine ports of entry.
Apr 06. Plextek has recently completed the design of a Class 2 Bluetooth module for Eleksen for use in it’s ElekTex™ fabric keyboard for smart phones and handheld computers. The module is one of the first 1.8V designs, and consumes less than half the power of the previous generation of Bluetooth devices, therefore prolonging battery life. 1.8V operation enables the Bluetooth module to be powered by two AA or AAA batteries without the