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Schaffner Receives Accreditation from A2LA

Schaffner EMC, a leading provider of EMI/RFI components, EMC instrumentation and test systems, has been certified to perform accredited calibration services at its Edison, New Jersey laboratory, making Schaffner the only pulsed immunity manufacturer in North America with an accredited calibration lab. The American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) certified Schaffner EMC’s facility to ISO/IEC 17025:2005, General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories in March 2006.

Schaffner EMC is now accredited to perform calibration services that include contact voltage, rise time, peak current, 30ns current, 60ns current and RC time constant for ESD simulators; voltage, rise time, and pulse width for EFT/burst generators; rise time (open circuit and short circuit), pulse width (open circuit and short circuit), open circuit voltage and short circuit current for surge generators; and output voltage, phase angle and pulse rise/fall time for PQT.

“The A2LA accreditation enables us to provide a more extensive range of services and greater convenience to our customers,” said Gillis Mellen, president of Schaffner EMC. A2LA is a nonprofit, non-governmental, public service, membership society.

Laird to Open Manufacturing Facility in Mexico

Laird Technologies, a leading designer and manufacturer of electromagnetic shielding, thermal management and wireless antenna solutions, will open a manufacturing facility in Reynosa, Mexico to enable enhanced support for customers in Mexico and Central and South America. The state-of-the-art, 39,000-square-foot multi-purpose facility will open in spring 2006.

The Reynosa facility initially will support handset antenna manufacturing and later will maintain the manufacture, conversion and distribution of EMI shielding and thermal products to supply the Mexican market.

Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Laird Technologies has operations in the Czech Republic, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, the U.K. and the USA.

RTP Company Expands Sales Support in China

RTP Company, based in Winona, Minnesota, has increased sales support in China, doubling its resources in only one year. This has strengthened RTP’s global presence in the production of specialty thermoplastic compounds.

“The new RTP Suzhou operation is able to support the RTP sales team by offering nearly 100% of the company’s total product line,” says Collin Lee, sales manager, Greater China. Lee is a crucial addition to RTP Company, bringing over 17 years of experience in the plastics industry.

RTP has also supplemented its sales coverage by partnering with its primary distributor in China, NCM GZ of Guangzhou, which has annual sales of 1.2B RMB.

Wyle Laboratories Expands Iowa Facility

Wyle Laboratories has relocated its test facility in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and is offering expanded EMC/EMI and environmental test capabilities. This new facility will host the “North American Test Lab” for CAN Bus/ISOBus Compliance Testing. The additional 36,000 square-foot facility is dedicated to electromagnetic and electronic testing and has a drive-in EMC chamber, electronics, CAN Bus/ISOBus, indoor vehicle level testing and mobile testing capabilities. The new facility will continue to provide vehicle radiated emissions, vehicle immunity testing, commercial product testing, anechoic chamber testing, and various other emission and immunity EMC test capabilities.

For details, email: sales@ced-wylelabs.com.

TUV Rheinland Continues Growth Plan

TUV Rheinland of North America, a world leader in compliance testing and certification, management system auditing and certification, field evaluation services and consumer product services, has expanded the staff at its Portland, Oregon, office.

“I am pleased to announce that Mic Santiago has been named our northwest regional manager. He and I will work together to expand our operations throughout the Northwest states including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Montana and Wyoming,” says Deep Krishnan, director of sales and marketing for TUV Rheinland of North America.

Santiago has a degree from the University of California-Davis and is a member of IAEI and IEEE. He brings extensive industry experience to his new position.

Also, TUV has appointed Lisa Brown as manager, lifecycle management, in the Portland office. She will be responsible for the development and supervision of TUV Rheinland’s consumer product services.

“Lisa has almost a decade of experience in the electronics and testing industries and is a past vice-chair for IEEE’s Product Safety Engineering Society and a committee member for the International Consumer Products Health and Safety Organization,” says Krishnan.

Agilent Reorganizes Electronics Group

Agilent Technologies Inc. has reorganized its Electronic Measurements Group (EMG), merging the company’s Operations Support Systems Group (OSSG) with two other existing businesses within EMG.

David Churchill, Agilent’s vice president and general manager of the Design Validation Division (DVD), will head the new business unit, named Network and Digital Solutions (NDS). Before joining Agilent in 2005, Churchill was the senior vice president and general manager, Communications and Video Business Unit, at Tektronix.

Pat Byrne, Agilent senior vice president and president of EMG said, “The merger of OSSG with DVD and our Computing and Networking Solutions business will significantly strengthen our leadership position in the wireless-convergence and digital markets.”

Agilent’s Electronic Measurements Group, with $3 billion in revenue, is focused on providing measurement products, solutions and services to the $20 billion electronic measurement market.

IEEE 802.22™ Passes Major Milestone

The IEEE 802.22 Working Group has passed a major milestone in the development of the IEEE P802.22 standard, which aims to use geographically unused TV channels to bridge the “digital divide” between rural and outer-suburban areas and major urban centers.

The future standard is intended to increase the efficiency of spectrum use by enabling the deployment of wireless regional area networks in the “white space” between the coverage areas of over-the-air broadcast VHF/UHF TV stations on a non-interfering basis. This will facilitate the provision of fixed wireless broadband access services within 40 km or more of a transmitter in locales that cannot be served economically by more traditional wireline services, such as DSL and cable modem.

The formal title of the IEEE P802.22 project is “Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN) – Specific Requirements – Part 22: Cognitive Wireless RAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Policies and procedures for operation in the TV Bands.”

“When complete, this standard should open a large broadband market and provide significant economic and societal benefits, both in the U.S. and in developing countries,” says Carl R. Stevenson, chair of the IEEE 802.22 Working Group.

IEEE P802.22 is sponsored by the 802 Local and Metropolitan Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society.

Novel Single-Electron Device Formed, Claims NIST

Engineers from NTT Corp. have produced a novel design of silicon transistor that is controlled by the motion of individual electrons, says the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which tested devices.

The devices are experimental but may find application in next-generation integrated circuits for logic operations, as opposed to memory. At negative voltage, the transistor is off; at higher voltage, the transistor is turned on and individual electrons file through the circuit, as opposed to thousands at a time in a conventional device.

The transistors, described in the Jan. 30, 2006, issue of Applied Physics Letters, have been dubbed “single-electron tunneling” (SET) devices and are typically made with a metal wire interrupted by insulating barriers that offer the means to control electron flow. Particular voltage levels are applied across the barriers, to manipulate charge, as a means of encouraging or impeding electron flow.

A great deal of single electron device work was done at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory and at Hitachi Central Research Laboratories. Early work concentrated on compound semiconductor material and required temperatures close to absolute zero. Silicon-based devices would allow fabrication using standard semiconductor technology, but until NTT’s work no silicon SET transistor designs have been reported that are reproducible and controllable, NIST asserted.

NTT made five uniform, working silicon transistors with tunable barriers. Each device consists of a silicon channel 360 nanometers long and 30 nanometers wide, with three gates crossing the channel. The gates have two levels; the upper level turns the current on and off, while the lower level controls electron flow in small local areas, the NIST report said. The team was able to tune gate conductance properties over a wide range, by more than three orders of magnitude.

First City-Wide BPL

Communication Technologies Inc. (COMTek) will upgrade all of its 600 overhead broadband over powerline (BPL) devices in Manassas, Virginia, to the latest Mainnet second generation “G2.” This is the first commercial deployment of BPL in the nation to use a city-wide electricity grid to provide individual homes and businesses with direct “plug in” broadband access through electric sockets, rather than over phone or cable TV lines.

A COMTek report on the Manassas system filed with the FCC in April states that the company reported that an independent FCC-certified testing laboratory could find no interference attributable to BPL in the specific ham radio frequencies covered in a recent FCC filing made by an amateur radio enthusiast. The laboratory conducted rigorous FCC-mandated testing, including “on/off testing” to show the level of interference with BPL in operation and with BPL turned off. An almost identical level of interference was found in the ham radio bands covered in the complaint to the FCC, regardless of whether or not the BPL equipment was in operation.

In its FCC filing, COMTek says that it will continue testing in the coming months, including other ham radio frequencies.

Teledyne Buys KW Microwave

Teledyne Wireless Inc. has completed the acquisition of certain assets of KW Microwave, a manufacturer of defense microwave components and subsystems. Located in Carlsbad, California, the business will operate as Teledyne KW Microwave.

KW Microwave designs and manufactures high performance microwave filters and integrated filter assemblies used in military electronic warfare, communication and navigation systems. KW also recently developed and began producing a line of filters for systems designed to counteract improvised explosive devices, which are of high concern to U.S. and allied military forces.

Northrop Grumman to Supply RF Simulator

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles, California, has been selected to provide a radio frequency simulator system that will be used to test an improved version of a radar warning and jamming system to be deployed on Turkish Air Force F-16 fighter aircraft.

Under a contract with Microwave Electronic Systems Inc., the Turkey-based prime contractor for the Self-Protection Electronic Warfare Suite upgrade program, Northrop’s Amherst Systems business unit will supply an RF simulator consisting of a multi-RF channel configuration that produces radar threat signals associated with surface-to-air missile systems and anti-aircraft artillery. Designed to enable testing and verification of the F-16’s onboard self-protection electronic warfare suite, the Amherst Systems RF simulator can generate thousands of simultaneous threat signals in a moving (dynamic) simulated 3-D scenario which includes ground terrain and atmospheric effects.

The system will be manufactured at the company’s facility in Buffalo, New York. Delivery of the RF simulator is slated for February 2007.

Epcos Expands into Asian EMC Market

Passive electronic components group Epcos has established a joint venture with Chinese group Beijing Jones Co. Ltd. to manufacture EMC filters.

Epcos of Munich, Germany, already has a 20% market share in Europe for EMC filters and expects that the joint venture, Epcos-Jones of Beijing, China, will significantly increase its share of the Asian market as well. It claims to be the second largest producer of the parts in the world, with the available entire global market valued at about $400 million.

“With the joint venture we will step up our presence in the fast-growing Chinese EMC market,” said Epcos President and CEO Gerhard Pegam.

The venture will be headquartered in the economic and technical development zone of Beijing. In addition to EMC filters, Beijing Jones makes a variety of EMI shielding materials and die cut products for mobile phones.

Renault Inaugurates EMC Unit

Renault’s new EMC testing unit at the Aubevoye Technical Centre houses the facilities required for the validation of electronic equipment in vehicles. The unit has three goals: to ensure the immunity of vehicles to electromagnetic interference from external sources, to control electromagnetic emissions from vehicles and, finally, to measure the radiation performance of radio aerials.

Occupying an area of 1,800 square meters, the EMC unit houses three Faraday cages grouped around a remote control room, designed to be impervious to electromagnetic interference from external sources. A radio frequency test chamber is dedicated to testing the performance of radio aerials.

Representing an investment of 10 million euros, the EMC unit will employ a team of 30 researchers, engineers and technicians.

New NVLAP Chief & EMC Program Manager

Effective May 1, 2006, Sally Bruce became the new chief of NVLAP. She joined the calibration program staff of NIST’s National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program in the fall of 2003, initially working full-time to support the implementation of the NIST quality system.

She first cam to work at the National Bureau of Standards (NIST’s predecessor) in 1982, beginning her career as an engineering technician in the Chemical Thermodynamics Division, Center for Chemical Physics. In 1986, she transferred to the Radiation Source and Instruments in the Center for Radiation Research and in 1990 to what is now the Optical Technology Division in the Physics Laboratory.

Ms. Bruce has a strong educational background that includes lead assessor training. She has written quaity documentation and has developed and delivered training for the standard ISO/IEC 17025 and for the assessment process at NIST.

She also is the official NIST representative to the System Interamericana de Metrologia (SIM, Spanish for Interamerican Metrology System) Quality System Task Force and is chair of the Subcommittee for Laboratory Accreditation and Quality Assurance for the Integrated Consortium of Laboratory Networks.

Kurt Fischer is the new program manager of the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) and Tele-communications Laboratory Accreditation Program (LAP), succeeding Jon Crickenberger, who is now managing the Information Technology and Security Testing LAP.

Fischer has over 20 years of experience in conformity assessment services for high technology electronics, automotive electronic systems, and both wired and wireless telecommunications devices.His background includes a wide array of management and technical work experience.

Prior to joining the NVLAP staff, he served as an assessor for numerous U.S. accreditation bodies, including NVLAP. He has performed more than 200 assessments worldwide to the ISO/IEC Guide 65 (product certification) and ISO/IEC 17025 (laboratory accreditation) standards. He is a NARTE Certified Senior EMC Engineer, an ANSI and NIST Telecommunications Certification Body assessor, and a Senior Member of the IEEE (EMC, Communications and Standards societies).

Fischer was a founding chairman of the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, EMC Society Chapter of the IEEE and was vice chairman of the 1993 International Symposium on EMC, held in Dallas.

He holds a B.S. degree in physics from Millersville University of Pennsylvania and has completed graduate course work in electrical engineering.

Massari to Retire, Mehnert to Succeed at Harris

Chester (Chet) Massari, 64, president of Harris Corporation’s RF Communications Division, will retire from the company in December 2006. Dana Mehnert, 44, has been appointed president of RF Communications, effective July 1, and will have responsibility for the division’s domestic defense business and operations. Steve Marschilok, 47, vice president and general manager of International Products and Systems for RF Communications, will have expanded responsibilities for Harris defense communications in the international market.

“I’m extremely grateful for Chet’s contributions to Harris during his 36 years of service, particularly during the past five years in which the company has experienced unprecedented growth,” said Howard L. Lance, chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Mehnert joined Harris in 1985 and before this promotion he was most recently vice president and general manager of government operations for RF Communications.

He graduated from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1984 and received a master’s in business administration degree from the University of Rochester in 1991.

Marschilok joined Harris in 1981 after earning a B.S. degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master’s of science degree in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology.