What caused Florida's February blackout that left millions without power? The St. Petersburg Times reports that a field engineer working at a substation mistakenly disabled both levels of relay protection. He then asked the control center to send a test fault. That started a chain reaction disabling substations and power plants.

Renewable power from sun and wind is limited by the need for conventional backup power generation. The solution is cheap, efficient renewable energy source storage. Power Engineering International says Australian researchers are developing a hybrid battery with 50% greater charge and discharge power than lead-acid batteries and 3x the life.

Knowing power requirements is the first step in specifying connectors. Careful examination of other requirements, according to ElectronicsWeekly.com, can save money while meeting application needs. For example, 360 degree shielding is optimum for signal connectors. But more specific EMI shielding or RFI shielding may be sufficient and will be cheaper.

Unlike conventional counterparts, organic semiconductors can be manufactured at room temperature and built on flexible polymers. Research on an organic field effect transistor uses chemical pretreatment of electrical contacts to induce self-assembly of molecular crystals. Applications include flexible displays, intelligent paper, and flexible sheets of biosensor arrays for field diagnostics.

An ordinary red LED can function as a low-cost photosensor. EDN shows how to pulse the LED and use the on-time to light it and the off-time to sense the photovoltaic current from ambient light. The application described is for a night-light where the LED will stay off during daylight and turn on when the ambient-light level drops.

Guidelines for positioning temperature sensors on printed circuit boards can improve performance. Good layout is important because low level analog sensor output signals can be affected by digital noise. Good design separates analog traces from digital circuitry and digital traces, and avoids routing digital and analog traces in parallel.

Manufacturers are successfully producing flexible, printed, and organic electronics for mini-displays. But making integrated, low-power, full-color flexible display modules, plastic memory, and logic circuits is a much more daunting task. SmallTimes says that progress is being made with fabricating printed devices through the use of Nanoparticle inks deposited by gravure, flexographic, and other offset techniques.

How fast is MEMS demand growing? George Liu, director at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., thinks research firm estimates of 14% annual growth are low; he thinks growth will be 30-40%. Liu's company is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry and a huge MEMS user. Do you agree with Liu? What will drive MEMS growth?

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Mechanical Dog is Engineer's Best Friend

Great news for engineers, high-tech toys are getting a lot cheaper. Technology development in cell phones and other areas has prices dropping. In fact, the prices of the toys are 60% to 70% less than when they were going to be introduced just a few years ago. Star-Telegram.com says that powerful night vision goggles will be available this fall for $80. Also coming this fall is a $30 mechanical dog that responds to 16 oral commands and doesn't eat expensive dog food.

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If We Make Them, Will They Be Used

Applications for organic semiconductors include flexible displays, intelligent paper, and flexible sheets of biosensor arrays for field diagnostics. What other uses would you anticipate?