Qualcomm has agreed to buy Cambridge-based wireless technology pioneer CSR for £1.6billion.The cash deal is expected to close by the end of next summer. It comes just weeks after Microchip Technology's bid for the company was rejected. Commenting on the acquistion, Qualcomm's CEO Steve Mollenkopf, pictured, said the move...

Three leading digital power supply companies have formed the AMP Consortium – Architects of Modern Power. CUI, Ericsson Power Modules and Murata Power Solutions say the move has been made for a number of reasons, including supply chain security, customer choice and to accelerate innovation.The consortium's ambition is 'to define t...

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore say they have developed a battery that can be recharged to 70% of its capacity in two minutes. The team – led by associate professor Chen Xiaodong, pictured – also believes such a battery will have a lifespan of more than 20 years and be capable of more than 10,000 recharging...

Engineers at the Technische Universität München believe that future computer chips could be based on 3D arrangements of nanometre scale magnets, instead of transistors.Using a 3D stack of nanomagnets, the researchers have implemented a majority logic gate, which could serve as a programmable switch in a digital circuit. In ga...

Mouser Electronics has launched MultiSIM Blue, a PCB design integration tool developed in collaboration with National Instruments.The freely available tool integrates the Berkeley SPICE engine, as well as a preloaded library of popular components from the Mouser database. Raymond Yin, director of technical content, said: "It's...

LDRA has become a partner and trusted adviser to Microchip Technology in a move that will enable the latter's customers to meet functional safety requirements.The partnership will see the LDRA tool suite being integrated with Microchip's MPLAB X IDE and MPLAB XC compilers. Microchip will recommend LDRA tools for applications th...

A new way to control the 'spin' of an electron has been developed by a team comprised of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the US based Joint Quantum Institute. In quantum physics, a particle's 'spin' refers to its intrinsic angular momentum, which can be controlled so that it is aligned with one of two d...

Leading engineering consultancy and driveline solutions provider, Romax Technology, has won the Grand Prix prize at the 2014 British Engineering Excellence Awards (BEEAs), held today in London.Now in their sixth year, the BEEAs promote the quality of engineering design in the UK and celebrate those companies that have demonstrated the skills, i...

A tiny biomedical device has been created which, according to its developers, could detect cancer more quickly and in a less invasive way than before.The lab-on-a-chip works by detecting minuscule membrane vesicles called exosomes, which are found in most cancer cells, Until now, exosomes have been hard to separate out and test because...

The University of Oxford, a member of the Low Frequency Aperture Array consortium, which is working with the Square Kilometre Array Organisation to build the world's largest radio telescope, has signed the second phase of a study contract with RFEL. This new contract focuses on the design of an FPGA based signal processing architecture for beam...