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Design News

Details: Written by Staff; Category: Design News; Published: 28 February 2008

SAN JOSE, CA - Sigrity Inc. will present a seminar entitled Improving Power Delivery Performance at the Double Tree Hotel in San Jose on March 19. The company reports that presentations at the event will include technologists with hands on experience in identifying power delivery system problems, such as excess current density and power/ground plane resonance.

The seminar will highlight strategies to analyze power delivery performance against design specifications, highlighting techniques to understand and solve these issues. The three hour afternoon seminar starts at 1 p.m. For additional information, visit www.sigrity.com.

Details: Written by Staff; Category: Design News; Published: 28 February 2008

MUNICH, GERMANY and ORLANDO, FL – MunEDA and Technical Systems Integrators Inc. have completed a distribution agreement for the Southeast US and Texas.

"We are very excited about our relationship with MunEDA and are anxious to present their innovative DFM-DFY tool suite WiCkeD to our customers in the Southeast and South central United States,“ stated Chuck Reynolds, CTO of TSI.

“Technical Systems Integrators… is a very strong and desirable partner for MunEDA. TSI has a very long and successful track record in distributing and supporting leading edge EDA solutions to the US South East and Texas markets”, stated Harald Neubauer, CEO & President of MunEDA.

TSI will distribute and support MunEDA’s products in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Details: Written by Staff; Category: Design News; Published: 28 February 2008

ALBUQUERQUE, NM - Innovasic Semiconductor has released two new reference designs for its fido 1100 real-time communications controller family.

The company reports that PCB modules based on these designs will offer deterministic real-time response, fail-safe operation and programmable I/O, and can be used for rapid prototyping and performance evaluation. In addition, the small footprint modules can be directly integrated into customer products.

Two modules are available, one for embedded real-time Ethernet and one for embedded control applications.

The Real-Time Ethernet Module (RTE) reference design includes schematics, circuit board layout, bill of materials and software to enable embedded devices to be interfaced to a 10/100 Ethernet network. Company information indicates that packets are received and transmitted with extremely low jitter, and the fido architecture also allows fail-safe operation, immunity from system crashes and denial of service attacks.

The company has also released Embedded Control Module (ECM) reference design for the fido1100 which reportedly has programmable I/O, allowing the ECM module to be with a wide range of serial and parallel interface types, such as UARTs, GPIO, LCD, SPI, I2C and CAN.

Details: Written by Staff; Category: Design News; Published: 26 February 2008

NEENAH, WI – Industry reports indicate that contract electronics maker Plexus Corporation said that its board has approved a financial recapitalization, in which it will borrow $150 million to buy back up to $200 million of its common shares.

"Over the last several months we have conducted a comprehensive review of our capital structure, and believe that a moderate amount of debt at the current favorable interest rates strikes the right balance for Plexus," said CFO Ginger Jones in a statement.

The company will pay $100 million to Morgan Stanley to buy back approximately 2.2 million shares, with expectation of buying back another $100 million shares on the open market by the end of 2008.

Plexus reported that it will fund the share repurchase with existing cash and a new long-term debt of $150 million, saying that the recapitalization will add to 2008 earnings per share.

WESTFORD, MA – Zuken’s CADSTAR Express 9, a limited downloadable version of the company’s PCB design tool CADSTAR, has been awarded second place in the “Best Product 2007 - Design Tools and Software Category," listed in E&E Best Product Guide for 2007.

The award will be presented on February 26 during the Embedded World 2008 Exhibition and Conference in Nürnberg, Germany.

“Zuken is proud to receive this recognition. We welcome all PCB engineers and designers to try CADSTAR,” said Jeroen Leinders, company distribution manager.