A knowledge center worth bookmarking.

No model recovers a defect the camera never caught

Machine-vision accuracy is won in the lighting, optics and exposure, not the model. Why a defect with no contrast cannot be detected, and why imaging is designed before the model.

The false call, not the missed defect, is what kills AOI

Automated optical inspection is judged on trust. Why flagging every cosmetic deviation loses the operator, and how fully learning a good joint drives the false-call rate down.

The material decides the camera before anything else

Continuous web needs a line-scan camera locked to an encoder; discrete parts suit area-scan. When each is right, and what each demands of the system.

Catching the defect you have barely seen

The defects that matter most are the hardest to train for. How anomaly detection — learning normal from plentiful good parts — catches rare, safety-critical faults a classifier cannot.

Inside the die it's clean; the trouble starts at the pins

A high-speed link degrades the moment it crosses a package and board — loss, reflections, jitter. How equalisation reopens the eye over a real channel, not an ideal one.

A chip isn't verified because the tests pass

Verified means the untested space is shown empty, not that the regression is green. Functional coverage, constrained-random stimulus, and when only formal can close a property.

When the satellites vanish, the position can't

Satellite positioning fails in tunnels, canyons and indoors. How fusing GNSS with inertial and motion sensors holds an accurate position through the gaps — dead reckoning, multipath rejection, dynamic trust.

The band decides the private network you can build

Licensed, shared or unlicensed; low, mid or millimetre-wave — the spectrum you can use sets the coverage, capacity and cost of a private 5G network. Why the regulatory regime is the first design input.

A failing machine says what is wrong, in frequency

Predictive maintenance reads early failure in vibration. The signatures a bearing, imbalance or gear defect leaves, why the sensing chain decides if they survive, and separating degradation from normal running.

The battery is spent where you don't look

Battery life in a field device is set by sleep current and location, not the radio. How to build an energy budget, hunt quiescent draw to microamps, and prove multi-year life without a multi-year test.

A fleet is only as connected as its worst dead zone

Fleet telematics is not the dashboard — it is keeping data flowing and correct across the coverage a vehicle loses: tunnels, remote routes, borders. Bearers, store-and-forward, dead-reckoning and roaming.

A tired driver looks fine until the moment they don't

Detecting driver fatigue from eye closure, head pose, gaze and steering — why it runs in the cab, works in darkness, tells fatigue from distraction, and lives or dies on its false-alarm rate.

The vehicle already knows everything; telematics is getting it out

Tapping a vehicle's buses safely over OBD-II or CAN, decoding signals that differ by make, detecting events on the device, and shipping only what matters — without disturbing the bus or opening a security hole.

Bluetooth Channel Sounding: measuring distance, not guessing it

Signal strength was never a distance sensor. Channel Sounding, added in Core 6.0, measures true physical distance to centimetre scale with phase-based ranging and round-trip time — accurate, and hard to spoof.

Bluetooth qualification, and what it takes to ship

You cannot ship a product using the Bluetooth marks until it is qualified and listed. You inherit most of it from a pre-qualified module; the effort is proportional to what you add — a profile, new RF, or a Core feature like Channel Sounding.

Rail intrusion detection with LiDAR, from point cloud to alert

A LiDAR returns millions of points; a safety system has to return one bit. Ground-plane calibration, dynamic rail detection, classification by size and density, tracking, and a train alert bounded by response time.

Routing congestion, and why place-and-route fails

A block can meet timing on paper and still be unroutable. When routing fails, the cause sits in floorplan and placement — not the router.

VCD and eVCD: managing activity, and what it drives

Value Change Dump and its extended form are the currency of power analysis — but a full-chip dump reaches hundreds of GB. What you dump decides whether numbers arrive on time.

Passive intermodulation: the fault with no active component

Two carriers meet a corroded joint, the joint behaves like a diode, and the site desensitises. Nothing in the electronics has failed.

Latency in a drone video link, measured honestly

A radio quoted at twenty milliseconds can sit inside a system that takes four hundred. Glass to glass is the only figure that matters.

Choosing the camera, the lens and the trigger

Most inspection systems that fail were decided at the lens, not at the model. Resolution runs backwards from the defect.

RFID, NFC and UWB: what each one is actually for

Three technologies answering three different questions. Choosing on the wrong axis is the expensive error here.

How UWB actually measures distance

Thirty centimetres per nanosecond, so sub-metre accuracy is a sub-three-nanosecond timing problem. Everything hard follows from that.

How 5G NR redefined the cell

A cell is now a synchronisation block and an identity, not a transmitter — which is why moving across a building need not generate a handover.

Radio cascading: how deep can you daisy-chain radio units?

Bandwidth, timing accumulation and failure domain each bound the chain. The tightest one wins, and it is usually bandwidth.

The user plane function, and where it should actually sit

Central, edge or cell site — the placement sets the latency floor. It is also the anchor where 5G and Wi-Fi converge on one session.

EVM: what it measures, and what it hides

Six mechanisms degrade a constellation, they add in power, and the largest dominates — so decompose before optimising.

Linearisation in 5G: why the amplifier decides the power bill

CFR and DPD exist because OFDM peaks sit where amplifiers are least efficient. That efficiency is a recurring operating cost.

MOCN, MORAN and neutral host: three ways to share a radio network

What each model shares, the broadcast identity limit that caps tenants, and why sharing fails on operations rather than radio.

N3IWF: bringing Wi-Fi into the 5G core

Reaching the 5G core over a network the operator does not own — and where that is cheaper than building coverage.

Anchor bands and EN-DC: why 5G still needs LTE

In non-standalone deployment 5G coverage cannot exceed the LTE anchor, which explains much of what users actually experience.

Choosing cellular for smart metering: NB-IoT, LTE-M and RedCap

Decided by coverage in the worst basement in the estate, not by throughput — and by whether the network still exists in year twelve.

Connected point of sale: where the engineering actually is

A payment terminal is a security product that happens to take payments. Tamper response and certification govern the schedule.

Item-level tracking for high-value goods in distribution logistics

Density, custody handovers and tamper evidence — and why DECT NR+, with no operator and no base station, changes the arithmetic.

When does FPGA-to-ASIC conversion make business sense?

The volume arithmetic, the thresholds, the hidden costs estimates miss, and the cases where the honest answer is no.

How AI visual inspection integrates with PLC and MES

Trigger and encoder, verdict timing, part tracking, reject actuation, the fault protocol and traceability.

Technology

Cellular-first tracking with NTN satellite fallback

How coverage continuity is architected, what escalation policy should look like, and what a satellite message actually costs.

Reference

Choosing a wireless link for asset tracking

NFC, RFID, BLE, UWB, LoRaWAN, cellular and satellite compared on range, accuracy, battery life and infrastructure.

Designing a crypto-mining ASIC: the economics are in the floorplan

A mining chip competes on energy per hash and cost per hash. Why the win is in the micro-architecture, the power delivery and the floorplan — not the algorithm.

Process node selection for mixed-signal and secure silicon

Why 180 nm is frequently the right answer, and when an advanced node genuinely earns its mask cost.

Designing over-the-air update before you ship

Partition layout, bootloader design, signing and staged rollout — decisions that cannot be retrofitted into a deployed fleet.