Electrocomp and its subsidiaries recently flew in specialists from a number of the overseas companies they represent, and took them on a tour of South Africa’s major regions to speak at a series of seminars attended by many of the country’s leading electronic engineering companies.
Co-sponsored by Deman Manufacturing and Cirtech Electronics, the Spring 2014 edition of the ‘SA Best Technical Training Seminar’ series spent two days in Centurion before heading to Durban and Cape Town for one day each. By securing the services of presenters from Antenova, Bluegiga, Fibocom, Maxim Integrated, Pervasive Displays and Silicon Labs, Electrocomp ensured that attendees could gain insight into a broad selection of technologies and product types. Farnell and Sensirion were also represented at the seminars, by Electrocomp employees.
The overseas speakers shared with Dataweek their thoughts on the knowledge they travelled all the way to the southern tip of Africa to share, as well as what they in turn learned from the experience.
Antenova
Rather than expounding the virtues of the company’s products, Antenova’s Colin Newman spent his speaking time sharing his insights into the technical challenges faced by designers in the area of the company’s particular expertise: antennas.
Headquartered in the UK, Antenova designs and manufactures high-performance standard antennas and radio antenna modules for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) and consumer electronic devices.
Newman advises that the antenna should be considered first in any new design because its positioning is vitally important. “When an engineer has limited experience with using antennas, they often leave this part of the design until last, which then results in most cases in sub-optimal positioning,” he explains. “Then both the engineer and ourselves have to work harder to try and achieve some level of satisfactory performance. The other fundamental point that people forget about with an embedded antenna is that the entire RF layout, host PCB, surrounding components, outer case etc. effectively form part of the antenna.”
Newman recommends that customers engage with Antenova and its local distributor, CST Electronics, at the early stage of a design. In this way, these specialists can provide advice on architectural design, layout and schematics free of charge. “Our support engineers also designed the antennas originally,” he says, “so not only do they know exactly how the antenna functions, but they have also worked on numerous customer designs and can quickly and accurately give the best advice.
“There are a number of antenna suppliers in the market that don’t design their own antennas but have them badged from some Asian manufacturer. Support engineers at these companies don’t understand the antenna fundamentals because they did not design it.”
The reason Antenova pays this much attention to detail despite the extra time and effort it requires, is that it results in less overall support time than a customer who has a hit-and-miss design that must then later be debugged, and is already constrained by design and deadline pressures. The company can also carry out passive and pre-compliance active testing for customers in its anechoic chamber at rates lower than third-party test houses.
Newman was impressed by the attendance at his talks: “Of all the seminars I have ever attended I was absolutely amazed at how many people turned up for each one. I have seen this amount for a one-day seminar, but across four days this was wonderful. It also showed a keen interest from the companies in South Africa and the great relationship that CST and Electrocomp have with their local customers.
“I also liked the way the seminar was broken into two groups and the group that I was in had fellow companies that I know well and with products that our antennas would need to communicate with. Over the four days I probably presented to over 100 people. Where else could you do this?”
Bluegiga
Established in Finland at the turn of the century, Bluegiga is committed to providing innovative and easy-to-use, short-range wireless connectivity solutions to OEMs, device manufacturers and system integrators. Currently covering Bluetooth and Wi-Fi protocols, the company’s products include a wide range of wireless modules, varying from ultra-low-power Bluetooth Smart modules to long-range Bluetooth Classic and Wi-Fi products.
Commenting on the wireless M2M industry’s continued push towards mixed-technology wireless modules, such as those integrating Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Bluegiga’s Sami Kaislasuo says that this is highly dependent on the application. “Of course size and maybe cost constraints are driving combined solutions over two-device selection in use cases where both technologies are needed, but still I see a lot of cases where it is preferred to work with just one technology to reduce complexity, current consumption and cost.”
Bluegiga has established itself in the Bluetooth market and seen the technology evolve, and Kaislasuo expects this resilience to continue. “I think Bluetooth is a very established technology, especially in the handheld devices across the spectrum,” he explains. “It is suitable for many use cases that other technologies are not, for example audio and voice streaming, and point-to-point data connections. The latest development in the form of Bluetooth Smart keeps the technology alive and kicking by enabling additional possibilities for Bluetooth.”
It was evident to Kaislasuo that there was a wealth of engineering know-how attendant at his talks, with plenty of skill at creating solutions from scratch. He sees particular potential for Bluegiga’s products in the security sector, for fleet management, asset tracking, industrial sensor networks and home automation. He was impressed by how self-sustained South Africa is but believes that, if anything, local developers could do with learning lessons from their global counterparts in terms of focusing on time to market and core added value of their products.
Also impressed by attendance figures, Kaislasuo proclaimed, “This was the first time Bluegiga attended a seminar in South Africa and although we were informed beforehand that there was going to be good attendance, it was still a positive surprise how many interested attendees there were. I think the uniqueness of our products, from a feature and ease of use perspective, was acknowledged and we had a lot of good feedback. Also, it was great to interact with attendees from different industries to really understand the potential of the market.”
Maxim Integrated
Maxim was founded in California, USA in 1983 and has become a semiconductor manufacturing giant with $2,4 billion in annual global revenue. Its product range includes a wide range of analog, mixed-signal, power and communications ICs.
Speaking on behalf of the company, Germany’s Konrad Scheuer shared the other presenters’ enthusiasm for the attendance at his seminars. “I think it was well attended. Lots of questions came back so customers were also really interested in the product. Many detailed questions were asked, especially in the Johannesburg sessions; the types of questions that I received showed that these people prepared prior to the seminar. This was a very good experience.”
The types of application in which Scheuer sees the most potential for Maxim’s products are control and monitoring applications that require high voltage and need more than just a single analog-to-digital converter (ADC) or digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and could also benefit from level translators and analog switches.
One of the main thrusts of Maxim’s presentations was the innovative PIXI technology powering its new programmable, high-voltage, mixed-signal I/O ICs. “The new thing about PIXI is that it is fully configurable and can replace multiple discrete devices,“ explains Scheuer. “Configurability helps because every board has a different number of discrete ADCs, DACs switches and so on. Customers notice that instead of stocking many different discrete devices, they simply need one PIXI. Also the way PIXI supports high voltages in most cases removes the requirement for external op-amps for signal adaption or output drive.”
Pervasive Displays
Pervasive Displays’ Kara Atchison, in describing the Taiwanese company’s core offering, explains that what makes its E-paper displays special is their ability to retain an image even after power is removed. “It is a perfect fit for applications where you want to make information available over long periods of time,” she says. “The image will remain on the display for years and be crisp enough to use a bar code scanner to read information.”
The company’s display is based on TFT technology and is literally electrophoretic ink laminated onto the TFT with the addition of a chip on glass. Pervasive Displays designs and manufactures electrophoretic ink displays using front plane laminate from its supplier and partner E Ink, with driving methods developed in-house.
“The most common application that I see today for E-paper is ESL: electronic shelf labels,” explains Atchison. “In contrast, the most unusual application that I have seen is jewellery called Zazzi by FashionTEQ which interfaces with a mobile phone application.”
In terms of local potential from projects currently underway, Atchison is most excited by identification badge systems. “These type of products solve many issues for companies including access control, locating personnel within a large working area, efficient utilisation of human resources, and information sharing. For the future, metering applications will also have great potential, along with payment or money transfer systems.
“It was a pleasure to participate in these well attended and organised sessions,” she says. “Electrocomp’s support was fantastic and the attendees were also very interactive. The most common feedback from attendees was that the goal was met because they now have a working knowledge of E-paper, and also know about the support that Pervasive Displays can provide. I heard from several attendees that understanding how E-paper works will help them find applications in new or existing projects.
“This was my first visit to South Africa, and I am impressed with the beautiful landscapes and friendly people. I learned that engineers in South Africa face similar challenges to engineers in other countries related to costs. Customers want locally made products, but unfairly compare local products with cheaply made imports. In terms of the technology itself, South African engineers are highly skilled, and can develop any product that they choose to design.”
Silicon Laboratories
Amongst the products covered by Silicon Laboratories’ Scott Cooper in his seminars was the company’s range of ‘Wireless MCUs’. He clarified how their integration of radio and MCU helps not only in terms of size reduction, but also in fewer components and an overall reduction in bill-of-materials and sourcing costs. “We also see that more integrated solutions can help to improve reliability and quality of applications and products in many use cases,” he says.
While this combined approach is ideal for space-constrained applications, Cooper has found that for certain applications, there is still a preference for a separate deployment. He points out that Silicon Labs also provides separate RF and MCU solutions, and that both approaches are yielding positive interest.
In his opinion, attendance at the seminars was very healthy, with “some very good interaction with some great questions from the attendees. There was definitely interest in the various standards being proposed for the wireless arena and which standards were expected to be the dominant players internationally. Providing good performance connectivity and functionality for battery powered applications is being addressed across the globe, and it is important to share those use cases to help further understanding.”
Cooper noticed that there is great deal of local interest in providing high-performance radio communications for applications that use the short-range ISM wireless band. These are typically low-power applications where power efficiency and long battery life are vital.
An overwhelming success
Andrew Dixon, Electrocomp’s manager of product development and the man responsible for bringing all these overseas experts and the South African engineering community together, says it required little convincing to get the buy-in from the companies represented, following the success of last year’s seminar tour. “Attendance was even better than expected, with a lot of customers praising the event,” he says.
Over the last few years, Electrocomp has been on a strong growth path, having acquired NuVision Electronics which joins CST Electronics under the Electrocomp Holdings Group umbrella. The recent launch of its Electrocomp Industrial Supplies division follows the inception of Electrocomp Express, the latter serving as the local representative for Farnell’s extensive global catalogue.
“With the addition of all the new companies, we as the Electrocomp Holdings Group have been able to fill the gaps where we were not that strong previously. We still work as independent companies, each with its own strengths. Rather than competing with each other we try and share intelligence which helps us to serve all our customers faster and better with complete solutions.”
So what’s next for Electrocomp? First on the agenda is to actively improve and refine its recently launched online purchasing platform, following which it will be rolled out to CST and NuVision. “We believe this is the future and more and more of our customers are already using these methods of getting info and buying parts,” Dixon concludes.
Dataweek gave two delegates kalahari.com vouchers to the value of R1000 each. The lucky winners were Durban’s Rob Goldblatt of Runrite Electronics, and Christopher Gauton from Emiline, Cape Town.
For more information contact Andrew Dixon, Electrocomp, +27 (0)11 458 9000, andrew@electrocomp.co.za, www.electrocomp.co.za
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