For more than a decade now, Australia has had mandatory regulations in place for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) for the majority of electric and electronic devices.

At the invitation of the Taiwanese government, the assistant editor of What's New in Electronics, Elizabeth Latham, joined a party of international journalists to visit factories where some of the latest technical advances were being made by some of the companies in this highly developed industry. Here is what she found:

The new electronics industry expo ‘Electronex’, which is being held at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney from 8-9 September, has been welcomed by electronics suppliers that are excited about the opportunity to have their own dedicated trade event in Australia.

Imec is a non-profit European research organisation specialising in the study of nanoelectronics, using the expertise of its global partners in ICT, healthcare and energy. Founded in 1984, its headquarters are in Leuven in Belgium with offices in the Netherlands, Taiwan, the US, China and Japan. Its staff of more than 1750 includes over 550 industrial residents and guest researchers. Here are some highlights from recent research projects.

In RF testing, an essential attribute of every signal generator is the maximum output power it can supply to a device under test (DUT) while maintaining spectral purity and level accuracy.

A one-day seminar on designing for manufacture, a course on EMI control and a review of PCB technologies are among the events at the Surface Mount 2010 conference that is being held in conjunction with Electronex in Sydney.

The differences among the types of signals that a test system’s switching hardware must handle are not always well understood. Unless these differences are taken into account in switch system design, they can degrade signal integrity and affect overall test system performance. This article reviews switching techniques for maximising the integrity of current signals.

Over the past 20 years, data acquisition has evolved from a limited, inaccessible set of technologies into an integrated and intuitive platform for high-performance measurements. With the software-centric approach of graphical programming and modular, PC-based hardware, engineers and scientists can rapidly develop powerful, flexible and highly customisable DAQ systems.

Picoprojectors will drive the green laser market and the ideal light emitting device would be lasers due to their capability to deliver highly saturated colours in the widest possible gamut.

Imec has shown that the presence of hydrogen and/or inert species during Ge deposition significantly improves the quality of the Ge layers grown on Si by solid phase epitaxy (SPE). The resulting layers have excellent crystalline quality and low surface roughness, making SPE a valuable alternative for conventional heteroepitaxy which is performed typically at much higher temperatures.

Telematics is on the edge of significant changes. A number of markets are emerging due to the strong interest of governments and government organisations or are being pushed by legislation.

DC/DC converters offer galvanic (input to output) isolation of typically at least 1 kVDC that means the converter will withstand a test voltage of 1000 VDC for one second placed across the input and output pins without the insulation across the transformer breaking down.

Stress induced by thermal cycles causes power electronic systems to have a finite service life. To estimate this service lifetime, accurate information on the thermal profile in the chips under the given operating conditions is required.

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 5.3% increase from IT spending of $3.2 trillion in 2009, according to Gartner.

Today’s manufacturers are using a mechatronics-based approach to integrate the electronic, mechanical and software components of their increasingly complex products. Digital prototyping allows disparate engineering teams to work from a single digital model, saving time and reducing errors throughout the design process.