Bacteria can grow optically-active tellurium nano-rods, according to the University of Houston. Optoelectronic and photonic devices could benefit. The current discovery grew out of 30 years of basic research, stemming from an initial discovery of selenite-respiring bacteria that form discrete packets of elemental selenium. “From there, it was a step down the periodic table to learn that the same could ...
Communications
Atomic demodulator works at 19GHz
Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used atoms to decode digital signals encoded by phase modulation. The atoms, cesium in this case, are ‘Rydberg atoms’ – atoms that have been wound up into a high energy state that is extremely sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. In this case the atoms were in a vapour cell, pushed ...
Cellular IoT prototyping platform includes GNSS and works near-globally
Thingy:91 is a cellular and GNSS IoT prototyping platform with world-wide coverage across 700MHz to 2200MHz, created by Nordic Semiconductor and Fractus Antennas. Based on Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT system-in-package with GPS, the battery-powered Thingy:91 comes with a roaming SIM card, 16 sensors and a nRF52840 for short-range wireless communication with Bluetooth 5, Thread, Zigbee and ANT. The SIM is a Nano ...
‘Cloud kit’ links sensors to Amazon for secure IoT
The Renesas RX65N Cloud Kit is aimed at those prototyping sensor-based IoT end-points with secure links to the cloud
More on: Rockley Photonics’ technology
Rockley Electronics is a silicon photonics start-up that recently raised $52m in a funding round, bringing its total to $165m. With all this investor interest, it was time to find out exactly what the company is offering, so Electronics Weekly spoke to its founder and CEO Andrew Rickman – and industry veteran with some history in photonics. In 1988, Rickman founded pioneering ...
42 Technology advocates Rust for secure IoT
UK consultancy 42 Technology has ported a Rust programming language application to a single-chip IoT device, claiming it as a world first. “Rust is a very-high-performance alternative to systems programming languages such C and C++, which avoids the memory safety issues that plague those languages, and without the complexity and overhead of Java,” according to the firm. “It is the ...
Quad 1000Base-T transformer is SMD
Würth is offering a surface-mount single port for 1000Base-T Ethernet industrial LAN connections. Each device contains four sets of inductive components, one for each twisted pair within the Ethernet cable. “WE-LAN AQ transformer convinces in an exemplary fashion in terms of crosstalk, insertion loss, return loss, differential and common-mode rejection,” claimed the firm. This data sheet gives the numbers as: crosstalk ...
Stretchy stick-on monitor sends vital signs long-term
Long-term health monitoring of adults, babies and small children without concern for skin injury or allergic reactions is the aim of a project at Georgia Tech, which has produced a stretchy patch that can broadcast electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, respiratory rate and motion activity data. Connections are to gold skin-like electrodes through printed conductors that can stretch with the medical ...
Mouser signs global agreement with Formerica to stock Fiber Channel and 100G optical range
Following the signing of a global distribution agreement with Formerica Optoelectronics, Mouser announces that the former’s product range for data centres, enterprise IT, networking, 5G, IoT and broadcast applications are now available from the distributor. Mouser now stocks the company’s optical transceivers, active optical cables,Fibre Channel protocol products and serial digital interface (SDI) transceivers. The Taiwanese manufacturer’s Fibre Channel optical ...
Next-generation IoT wireless modules accelerate development, says Arrow
Radio modules using STMicroelectronics’ STM32WB55 wireless microcontroller are available from Arrow Electronics. The Sharky modules were co-developed with Italian designer, Midatronics. The microcontroller integrates a 2.4GHz RF transceiver supporting Bluetooth 5 (including Bluetooth Low Energy), Thread, and ZigBee stacks. Its dual Arm Cortex-M core architecture enables real-time secure application performance running on the 64MHz Cortex-M4F core, and concurrently managesthe radio ...