Littlefuse closed their massive manufacturing facility in Mount Prospect, Il. and moved to China, so executives could continue to maintain enormous salaries. Now they are squeezing the remaining design engineers before all their work goes to China as well.
There was a post last week about a poorly chosen fuse type or value. Some of the posters had mentioned that correctly specifying a protection device can be a little difficult. Having a vendor for a partner will certainly make the selection easier and this is an excellent follow-up story to the previous posts.
Parker is right: Compressed design times are making life more difficult for all design engineers and that shows up in in areas like circuit protection, which end up being thought of as an afterthought.
Part of the trend you highlight is the importance of a vendor as a partner. This type of value add is both useful and necessary in the high speed world of design outlined in the article. When I have been involved as a field engineer in the past I found that briefing customers on new features was a great way to get new ideas. Often, while working with customers in these situations, and hearing their challenges, we were able to come up with ways to use features and functions that were not necessarily envisioned by the developers of the product, but which were valuable to the customer.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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