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LCD Market, Manufacturers, Sharp MEG 04/02/2018 0

Leading Manufacturers In US and China

As electronics companies continue to expand, semiconductor companies are reaping the gains of their investment from the growing demand on their products by the electronic companies. Today’s electronic gadgets are all driven by microelectronics.

Many may not be familiar with these manufacturing companies because their products are hidden in minute forms in smartphones, tablets, TVs and other electronic devices that use them but they are quietly making it big with microelectronic solution manufacture.

For a list of leading manufacturers of semiconductor components, here are the leading companies in the USA and China.

Intel

Intel Corporation manufactures integrated devices. They design and produce motherboards chipsets, integrated circuits, and network interface controllers. The company was established in 1968 with an initial capital of $2.5 million sourced by Arthur Rock. With its headquarters in California, USA, Intel was the first producer of the metal oxide semiconductor. They are well known for the development of Pentium microprocessor in 1993. Their products can be found in HP and Dell computers. Intel’s sales have risen to about $56.31 billion.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm, Inc. is a designer and marketer of wireless telecommunications devices.

Telecommunication companies globally use Qualcomm’s patented CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technologies that have played an important role for wireless communication standards.

Headquartered in the USA, Qualcomm has sales of about $15.44 of its products.

Texas Instruments

Based in Dallas, Texas Instruments is a company that started as an oil and gas focused company but went into semiconductor investment in 1958 and right now has over 40, 000 patents to their name in the electronics sector. It designs and manufactures semiconductors for different manufacturers of electronic products on a global scale.

Texas Instruments is a famous manufacturer of chips for digital processors, mobile devices, and analog semiconductors. The company is famous for the manufacture of calculators. The company has made sales in the region of about $12.35 billion.

Micron Technology

Micron Technology is a company with headquarters in the USA. The company markets semiconductor products globally. The products are used in consumer electronics, computers, automobiles servers and communications. Some of its other manufactured products are rewritable storage products and flash products. It has got a sales volume worth $12.84 billion.

The story in China is no different from what holds in the growth of the semiconductor market in the US. There is much competition in China in this industry. In the last five years, the manufacturers of chips have increased from 500 to 1, 300. In 2016 alone they generated $24.1 billion in revenue to the Chinese economy. Here are the leading companies to take note of in China.

Hisilicon Semiconductors

Hisilicon Semiconductors is a subsidiary of the smartphone company, Huawei, which is also the largest telecommunication gear maker in the world. Located in Shenzhen, the company sells silicon for display technology, surveillance cameras and wireless modem, among others.

The company has a financial base of $3.87 billion

Tsinghua Unigroup

Tsinghua Unigroup is a government backed and China’s strategy to boost the domestic production of semiconductors. The company bought two large companies with technology transfer deals with Intel, RDA Microelectronics and Spreadtrum communications in 2013. With about $1.86 billion worth, the company intends to expand further with an investment of $30 million to build a factory for memory chips.

Also in the plans is the investment plan by its chairman, Zhao Weiguo to invest $47 billion in the coming three years to make it the third biggest chipmaker after Intel and Samsung.

OmniVision

OmniVision is a company that designs image sensors used in tablets, smartphones and cameras. Though founded in the US, OmniVision has its revenue base in China.

It is the biggest smartphone maker in the world. It was sold to Chinese investors in 2015 for about $1.9 billion.

ZTE Microelectronics

ZTE Microelectronics is a subsidiary of ZTE, a telecommunication giant. It is a company that specializes in chip design. In 2016, the company was sanctioned and fined $1.9 billion by the US government for selling telecommunication products containing American components (parts) to Iran.

Semiconductors can hardly be done withoout in today’s world. They are important components in automobiles, communication device, elevators, phones, and computers, just to mention a few.

With the growth of other cutting-edge technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and others, products will always have semiconductors in them.

Innovations, Research, Sharp MEG 13/01/2018 0

Innovations In Display Technology

Now in the 21st century, image display takes different patterns and are increasingly changing with new developments.

The history line of display method started from the cathode ray tube.

Cathode Ray Technology

CRT (Cathode ray tube) is a big vacuum tube that is common with the bulky TV sets of the 20 century.

To display an image, CRT uses an electron beam which scans rows of phosphors line after line on the surface of the tube. The electron beam is deflected continuously.

Digital Light Processing (DLP) Technology

Texas Instruments invented and developed DLP for rear-projection TV displays. DLP uses a chip (Digital Micro-mirror Device) for its image display technique. DMD is made up of a number of tilt-able tiny mirrors.

Each micro-mirror stands for a pixel which tilts in a rapid motion.

A gray-scale type of image results here. Colors are added when light passes through the color wheel and reflect off the micro-mirror on the chip. This reflection is formed on the screen to produce the image.

Plasma Televisions use a technique just like CRT which makes images via phosphors lighting

Plasma Technology

The characteristics of this technology are the flat, thin and wall-mount capability that it presents. It was introduced in the early 2000s. In 2014, Panasonic, LG, and Samsung that were left in the production of this display mode have all discontinued its manufacture, though the products are still in use today.

Plasma Televisions use a technique just like CRT which makes images via phosphors lighting. In this case, the phosphors are lit by superheated gas and not electron beam.

They can be lit all at once, unlike CRT which does that in rows.

LCD is not limited to backlighting technology.

LCD Technology

LCD Technology is the most used display type in TVs. They share a thin design structure as Plasma TVs. For image display, phosphors are not lit up but turned on and off at a particular refresh rate. The most common refreshed rate of LCD TVs is 120 or 60 of a second. To display an image, the LCD’s pixels must be backlit. When the pixels are ON, they allow the backlight through but when off they don’t allow backlight through. The backlight system for LCD TVs can be from any source of HCL or CCFL (fluorescent) or LED.

LCD is not limited to backlighting technology. To improve LCD TVs color, quantum dot technology is a new development on LCD technology improvements.

After the release of Retina Display in 2010, enhancing screen resolution and quality of display has seen lots of changes on our smartphones, TVs, other handheld devices and wearable displays that is still new on the market. The adoption of this newfound display technology is no doubt an improvement on the conventional designs.

Most of the display applies quantum dot technology including highly bright reflectance and high ambient displays.

Integrating quantum dots into LCD backlight results in highly saturated and bright primary colors like those of OLED displays.

Impact Of Quantum Dot Technology On LCD

Quantum dot enhances to a great measure the performance of LCD display with the aid of quantum physics. Integrating quantum dots into LCD backlight results in highly saturated and bright primary colors like those of OLED displays.

Also, quantum dots enhance brightness and power efficiency by converting blue LED lights into a greatly saturated band of primary colors for the LCD display.

A good advantage of quantum dots is that it can bring out the exact colors for images that are extremely high and accurate picture colors without the white-point errors and lopsided color range. With the incoming of quantum dots technology, the future of LCD display technology is greatly enhanced to see many more years at least in the next five years. This outstanding technology is being adopted and integrated into many LCD smartphones, TVs, and other handheld devices.

Likewise, display quality is also improved by highly bright, low reflectance great ambient light displays. Every screen acts like a mirror that reflects everything that gets illuminated in front of it. Before this form of display technology was utilized, images produced were of low output and quality of degraded contrasts and interference that makes it difficult for viewing on the screen

Today’s technology adopted by manufacturers introduces bright and non-reflective displays.

OLED Technology

OLED is the most recent in display technology designed for consumers. It combines great features of past technologies. OLED technology uses various techniques in its implementation. LG uses the WRGB process. This process brings together white OLED’s pixels with green, red and blue color filters.

LCD Market, Manufacturers, Microelectronics, Sharp MEG, Technologies 20/12/2017 0

Top Ten Trusted Microelectronics Technology

Just as governments are pressing on companies to manufacture eco-friendly technologies in their products, consumers of electronic products are yearning for low cost and small-sized devices. This requirement keeps driving the innovation that is seen in the new technologies of microelectronics.

Emerging technologies in microelectronics have a strong potential of efficiency in this area thus creating lots of opportunities in different areas of applications in electronics using microelectronics.

Here are the top ten trusted microelectronic technologies you should know about.

1. Flexible Electronics

Flexible electronics is a promising and emerging industry that is hoped to have a stronger impact on the electronic industry in the nearer future. For flexible electronics which can also be described as lightweight implementation, they have good potential to create flexible electronics products such as in lighting, displays, memory storage and sensors, among others. The technology presented by flexible electronics makes it possible to easily implement new applications that were sometimes not feasible to attain before now. This includes applications such as smart textiles and informative human interfaces.

2. 3D Integration

The 3D integration technology refers to various applications. The technology allows several traditional device layers to be placed on stacks and interconnected electronically. As an emerging technology, the trend is its support for more functional and powerful devices that are smaller and of low cost. Stacking of many layers of a device can improve performance of the circuit and lower power consumption. The 3D integration principle provides manufacturers the flexibility to combine other heterogeneous devices into a single circuit.

3. Haptic & Touch

The touch technology has brought a new approach to interacting with our devices. This allows human-computer relationship using various physical contacts with a device such as gestures and touch.

The major applications of this technology are in consumer electronics, medical, automotive, in industry and in-home automation.

4. Advanced Display

The ever-dynamic digital content of today in addition to the growth of portable devices, is a strong influence to the shift towards modern display technologies like LCD display, 3D displays, on mobile phones, cameras and on computers.

These technologies have enhanced performance, great color gamut, faster response, better image quality and low power consumption. This gives a good user experience for viewers in contrasts to conventional designs.

5. Smart Grids

A smart grid provides an electricity network which intelligently integrates all actions of users linked to it, that is, the generators and the consumers. This is in a bid to deliver economical, secure and sustainable supplies. A smart grid creates enhancement in grid reliability by cutting down on the rate of power outages and the amount of power quality inadequacies.

With various sources of power generation such as solar and wind generation to switch to, smart grid provides a seamless integration for the alternative sources of energy.

6. Green Electronics

The push by the government for green manufacturing is a driver to the innovations in microelectronics for product design.

Production are tailored towards energy efficiency, green and clean solutions. This technology incorporates power saving capability, eco-friendliness such as reduced carbon emissions using microelectronics.

7. Wireless Charging

The use of electric cars and adopting smart devices are motivation for advancement in microelectronic technology.

Wireless charging of automotive device and electronics are possibilities through microelectronics. Companies are gearing up to fully adopting wireless charging methods.

8. Smart Antennas

Smart connection devices have opened up the manufacture of other smart application.

Communication via smart devices such as antennas is made feasible through the application of microelectronics and semiconductor implementation.

9. Data Storage

With microelectronics technology, utilization in the development of cloud-based and enterprise storage systems are the future of data storage.

Software-based storage solutions are frantically pursued. The transformation in the digital sector encourages the adoption of such data storage solutions that are driven by microelectronics.

10. Wearable Technology

The application of microelectronics has helped tremendously in the design of devices that we attach on our bodies.

As a great innovation from this implementation, wristbands, wearable displays, pendants and other fashionable healthcare products are designed to monitor an individual’s wellbeing.

Using sensors and embedded systems that are driven by microelectronics makes this possible to attain the feat in wearable electronic devices.

DC Motor, Research, Sharp MEG 28/11/2017 0

Speed Control Of Dc Motor Without Microcontroller

The speed of DC motor can be varied by applying various techniques. The drive system comprising the drive and the DC motor is vital to speed control in DC motor.

This is to regulate the amount of energy produced by the machine and the amount of work required to be done by the system at a given time duration.

DC Motors And Drives

The DC drive is a simple device that regulates the amount of electrical current sent to a DC motor. It supplies electrical energy in varying frequencies and quantities, hence controlling the speed of the electric motor.

The use of DC motor is increasingly growing in the metal industries, in mining, printing and in crane implementation. Though the current trend is the replacement of DC motors with more efficient AC drives, the task of getting this implemented is however not time and cost effective. Using the existing motor and improving on the drive is often the best option for industries.

DC drives provide great benefits to the DC motor such as control techniques, improved motor performance, system integration and reliability of the drive system which is a key component of DC motor speed control.

The speed of a DC motor can be varied by means of mechanical or electrical methods.

Speed Control Without Microcontroller

Designing and developing a circuit without a microcontroller integrated into it lowers costs and other downsides like the limited range in the circuit design.

Methods

The speed of a DC motor can be varied by means of mechanical or electrical methods. The use of a microcontroller for speed control is gradually fading away. The disadvantage of utilizing a microcontroller in system design is the somewhat large size of the implementation.

Using Direction Control And Microprocessors

Without using microcontroller, speed control can be achieved through direction control. This is done by reversing the input voltage terminals of the motor to have the required output of energy. Two-wheeler designs are often used to implement this method. Microprocessors are other devices used to achieve speed control in a DC motor.

In this approach, sensing the current and terminal voltage is implemented. This results in comparing the reference speed of the motor to its actual speed to generate an appropriate control signal which goes into the triggering unit to cause a required output.

Pulse Width Modulation Method

PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is a technique for producing an analog signal using a digital source. A Pulse Width Modulation signal is made up of two components namely; the frequency and the duty circle. These describe the behavior of the signal.

The duty circle defines the quantity of time the signal is in ON (high) state. It is shown as a percentage of the period it takes to make a complete circle.

The frequency of the signal defines how fast a complete circle is completed by the PWM and hence how fast it switches between Low and High states. By cycling a signal at Low and High state at a fast rate with the specified amount of duty circle, the output’s behaviors can be compared to be a frequent voltage analog signal when sending energy to devices.

Pulse Width Modulation refers to the process of varying the duty cycle. This reduces the terminal voltage with a heat loss. 555 timer can be used to implement this technique. Double Pole Double Through (DPDT) switch can be used to change the direction of the voltage. A semiconductor-type H-bridge is preferable to implement this aspect of the design on speed regulation.

Factors Affecting The Speed Of Dc Motor

The operation of a DC motor is typically designed such that when a current carrying conductor is placed within a magnetic field, there is bound to be the mechanical force that goes through the conductors. A permanent magnetic DC motor, however, does not have field circuit. It has just the armature circuit. This differentiates it from other DC motors.

The factors affecting DC control are therefore:

The applied voltage
The flux
The voltage across an armature

Considering these factors, speed control can then be achieved through the following techniques:

Flux control method: This is done by varying the current via the field winding, thus altering the flux.
Rheostatic control: changing the armature route resistance which also changes the applied voltage across the armature.
Voltage method: changing the applied voltage

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