Bench Talk

In this week's New Tech Tuesday, we'll look at new products from Bourns, Microchip Technology, and Kyocera that are crucial in developing remote health monitoring solutions.

Keeping modern industrial automation humming requires a multitude of products for businesses and developers. We review an actuator, switch gear, and sensors—diverse products that help developers maintain this hum.

High reliability is paramount in our always on, hyper-connected world. Application downtime or failure runs the gamut from frustrating to incredibly expensive. That is why overvoltage protection remains a consistent requirement.

Protecting interface connections from overvoltage conditions and transient events is more important than ever with the proliferation of embedded electronics. Bourns clamp and crowbar protection is effective at protecting circuit interfaces in silicon and ceramic electronic components.

Engineers today are asked to design applications with increasing power densities, which directly correspond to the demand for resistors. Leading manufacturers of these mighty passive components are answering current application requirements with new power resistor designs that can tolerate higher amounts of power in small and smaller form factors.

High sulfur environments play havoc with everything from IT industry server farms and data/storage centers and telecommunication base stations to industrial control equipment and rubber, paper, and oil manufacturing plants. In standard film resistors, their internal silver (Ag) or silver palladium (AgPd) terminal is only protected by the epoxy passivation layer making the device very susceptible to sulfur-based gases. Realizing how sulfur gases can affect the reliability of its film resistors, Bourns developed a specialized Palladium (Pd) layer that removes the chance for corrosion and the formation of silver sulfide.

The 2014 South by Southwest Festival was this past weekend, and I was able to attend with some of my Mouser colleagues. March 13-15 was the Music Gear Expo, where we set up our booth. We were showcasing our Pro Audio line, which includes Bourns' guitar potentiometers and Neutrik's super-cool silentPlug.