User Experience

As part of our utility metering focus, Sean Murphy offers a US perspective on the challenges.

John Landau According to analysts at Screen Digest, revenue from 3D theatrical releases in North America reached $1.1bn in the first six months of 2010. This was the first time that the half-year number had exceeded the billion-dollar mark and was more than double the $430m in 3D ticket sales for the same period in […]

We look at some of the findings analyst group iSuppli had hoped to present at a recent summit before a Finnish volcano intervened.

Will CES 2010 ultimately be remembered for marking the point where Asia began to drive consumer electronics? Paul Dempsey reports.

We are given plenty of reasons why we ‘should’ all buy electric cars. They will safeguard the environment. They will enhance national security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. They will create a Detroit 2.0 that can pay back the taxpayer. What we do not hear is a more free-market economic argument. “And the […]

Semiconductor vendors face increasing demands to lower power consumption. This trend has intensified in the last couple of years with the rejuvenation of the ‘green’ movement. In response, the industry has been getting smarter about low-voltage design, current-saving techniques for both the circuit and process levels, and coordinated power management. Meanwhile, programmers are concentrating on […]

Green design will be one of the enduring themes of 2009, or so we are told. As hard-faced as it might sound, though, it is hard to see this theme getting the attention it needs right now. My problem with the whole concept is that it currently seems to attract a premium at just about […]

The consumer sector has become a reliable bellwether for the state of the electronics industry. However you slice it, the latest data does not paint a pretty picture. With the publication of its latest U.S. market forecast, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) provided data that put the typical knock-on effect of a recession into concrete […]

Consumers want high-end GUIs on portable devices, but most MCUs—even those at 32bit—do not have the capacity to support embedded versions of these on their own. The article outlines the collaboration between Atmel, which has a family of customizable MCUs, and Amulet Technologies, a specialist in GUIs based on a compressed version of HTML. It […]