EngineerZone Spotlight

This is the story of an engineering breakthrough - a solution for our increasingly digital world - coming at just the right moment in time. The shift to digital monitoring and control has become so vital to manufacturing and processing that a new ter...

In this third blog post following the press day ADI hosted in Limerick, Ireland, I’d like to provide my perspective on technology innovations I shared with the media that are defining the rapidly evolving autonomous transportation and automotiv...

Like many of you in the tech industry, I am lucky to be able to work from home while the Covid-19 pandemic takes its course. To be effective and efficient, I adopted a disciplined schedule to manage internal meetings and discussions with customers. T...

In addressing the European technology media during our recent EMEA Press Day in Limerick, I discussed ADI’s efforts to advance factory automation and the trend we refer to as Industry 4.0. The term was actually coined in Germany in 2011 and has...

The story I’m going to tell today is about a very small part that plays a very big role in a large machine. This part is so small that almost a dozen could fit on a dime. The part provides the function of a DC/DC switching regulator. The large ...

I recently had the pleasure of taking part in an event attended by nearly 50 members of the media from eight European countries at our Analog Devices campus in Limerick, Ireland. During this special event, our executives informed and updated the jour...

I have written a few blogs over the past year that have mentioned robots and now I have bought one. It's probably not the sort of robot you are thinking of either. After ten years my 24hp 450kg lawn tractor has been replaced by an equally expensi...

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532) In o...

One of my favorite movies growing up was the science fiction film “Fantastic Voyage,” in which a submarine with a team of scientists are shrunk to molecular size and injected into a man in order to find and destroy a life-threatening brai...

Tell Simon Cowell to call off his lawyers, we’re not talking about that X-factor. Today’s blog is about X the unknown.* Imagine trying to navigate a curving road hugging a mountainside at night without headlights or a full moon to light y...

Clean up on aisle three, clean up on aisle three. Turn the corner for aisle three and you are faced with a robot pacing (sort of) back and forth to prevent shoppers from stepping in or on the spilled item. As you approach the robot stops well before ...

Joe Beauchemin, a 20 year ADI employee, presented an in depth look at ADI's A2B technology on Tuesday, March 12.  ADI's A2B technology is a means of simplifying audio designs and solving challenges such as reducing the cost, complexity, and weig...

The IEC 61508 standard comes in 7 parts. There is a part 0 which is a technical report and hasn’t been updated since 2005. Parts 1, 2 and 3 contain normative requirements (i.e. things you must do to claim conformance), part 4 is normative but o...

For the new year we need to get back to work and be serious again. What could be more serious than electromagnetic immunity. I spent nine years in our automotive group and several of those were spent fighting EMC issues with very little flexibility to add external protective components around our IC.

In a previous blog we learned about the concept of disruption. We saw how the challenge of reading different types of signals on a factory floor drove ADI engineers who, working hand-in-hand with a leading manufacturer, designed a solution which save...

Boston vs. Santa Clara. Red Sox vs. Giants. Fisherman’s Wharf vs. the Seaport. The comparisons are endless between these two hubs of technology innovation. But one thing the two coasts have in common is being home to an Analog Garage, the in-ho...

Unless you were with Bart Simpson when his class took its field trip to the Springfield Box Factory, who among us has ever thought about the construction of the ubiquitous cardboard box? Our story begins in a lab. About ten years ago ADI began a pro...

How do you know someone is a runner?  Don’t worry they will tell you. I will close out the blogging year on a lighter note than normal linking the topics of functional safety and marathon running and offering proof of my opening line. Lege...

Anyone who commutes by car will tell you the same thing: traffic is getting worse out there. And while some companies are open to telecommuting for certain jobs, many still prefer their employees to make it into the office. So most of us end up spend...

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog titled “Behind the Tilted Triangle,” which introduced a new JFET amplifier by way of a brief history of all amplifiers, from tubes to semiconductors.  Today I’m going to talk about another new, bu...

Not the advice one expects from a parent or advice we would give to our children, is it? Yet for many engineers at ADI, disruptive behavior is something of a mantra, one which has resulted in a number of breakthroughs in our fifty-five year history. ...

In a previous blog, see here, I discussed the existing rules from IEC 61508:2010 for software tools used to develop a safety system. In this post I will discuss the proposed rules for IEC 61508 revision 3. These rules could change depending on the co...

It is a situation to which everyone can relate; you are sitting in a favorite chair, a lamp glowing brightly above as you read a book or magazine. Suddenly, someone in your house starts vacuuming or using a hair dryer. The light, once warm and bright...

Functional safety for software is covered by IEC 61508 part 3. Typically, software than runs on uC, uP and DSP is written by the applications people who buy our chips. But what about software that runs on integrated circuits and is supplied by an IC ...

Today’s blog is about a new amplifier from Analog Devices. Amplifiers are pretty special to ADI since they were the first products we ever made, back in 1965. This is reflected in our company logo which features a tilted triangle - the schemati...