|
Following up my colleague Stephen Hardy’s preannouncement of Portable Design 2.0 last June, I’m pleased to announce that we sampled in December and are now in volume production, starting with this issue. No, we don’t offer a development kit, but we’d like to be part of yours-hence our new tagline, “The Engineer’s Resource for Portable Applications.”
Over the past 10 years the portable arena has grown to the point were we needed to sharpen our focus. Starting with this issue, we’ll feature monthly application articles focusing on the consumer, wireless, automotive, and industrial markets, covering a range of technologies and techniques. Forthcoming consumer articles will look at advances in battery, display, and lighting technologies; flash versus rotating memory; and robotics. Wireless articles will discuss antennas and RF system design. We’ve expanded out automotive coverage from just telematics to include drive train control, bus architectures, and automotive qual standards. Industrial topics will include sensors, vision systems, process control, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The “Cover Feature” articles will focus more on emerging technologies such as micro fuel cells and software-defined radio, while also giving insights into RF propagation, memory architectures, EDA tools, mixed-signal design, programmable SOCs, and the challenges of designing with IP.
To help you with more immediate challenges, we’ve added “Design Ideas,” short articles showing how to solve specific, knotty design problems. Also among our special features we’ve added “Cool Apps.” While the rest of Portable Design focuses on applications from a design perspective, “Cool Apps” will showcase finished portable devices that we feel embody the best design ideas in an outstanding product. As with “Design Ideas,” we urge you to share both your problem fixes and the resulting finished products with your colleagues via Portable Design. “Cool Apps” will alternate with “Teardowns,” where we’ll continue to peek under the hood (or bottom cover) to see just how you did it.
We’ll also continue our news and product coverage-now renamed “News Briefs,” “Product Feature,” and “Products for Designers.” We’ll still be as opinionated as ever, with monthly views from Dave Freeman, yours truly, and occasionally whoever else wants to pipe up (“Second Opinion”).
If you haven’t checked out our website recently, please do; all the changes in the Portable Design print edition are reflected there. But there we’ve built our four application sections into full sub-sites, where you can go for detailed design and product information on consumer, wireless, automotive, and industrial applications. Each month we’ll feature Web-exclusive articles that didn’t fit into our editorial calendar but which convey valuable information for our readers. We’ll list each Web exclusive in the print table of contents to make sure you don’t miss anything.
We’ve revamped Portable Design in an effort to offer you more useful design information in a pleasant and readily accessible form. Please let us know what you think and how we might do better still. It’s all about being useful, and that’s definitely your call.
Once again, welcome to Portable Design 2.0.
John Donovan
johnd@pennwell.com
Editor-In-Chief
Portable Design January, 2006
Author(s) :
John Donovan
|
Add RSS Feed
