electronica 2012 ELECTRONICA PREVIEW
More than coffee and
sausages T
here are two ways to view large shows. One is to ignore them, as any message that is delivered is going to become lost in the thousands of other messages. The other is to embrace them, to take advantage of a large gathering of engineers from multiple disciplines all in one place, and there is no doubt that Electronica falls in this category.
The show held every two years, with the next one in Munich from 13 to 16 November, is arguably the world’s largest business-to- business electronics exhibition and conference; only Embedded World in Nuremberg in March comes close. “Electronica is a huge, huge show,” said Benjamin Jackson, senior manager for automotive power at International Rectifier, who will be speaking at the conference. “There is a risk that something will get lost, but you have such a huge gathering of experts in one space, it is very important to be there.”
He said this was growing in importance as
electronics becomes more integrated. “You have to understand how all the parts interact with each other,” he said, “so having all the disciplines in one place is not a bad thing.”
Conference and exhibition Supporting the show does not mean it is necessary to have a stand, as Fujitsu
8 CIE electronica 2012
As the industry prepares to gather in Munich for Electronica, Steve Rogerson talks to some of the speakers and exhibitors to see what will be creating a buzz this time round
Semiconductor has found. Instead, the company has taken speaker spots at the conference and will be represented on the exhibition floor by its distributors. “We will be there to answer questions on our partners’ booths,” said Dirk Fischer, senior product marketing engineer. “We decided to focus on the conference and the distributors.”
The company will be doing three linked, consecutive talks looking at USB and Ethernet connectivity with Arm Cortex-M3 based microcontrollers.
“USB is well established and you might think everyone should know about it and not need such a session,” said Fischer. “But we are finding that many need guidance and help implementing USB. Daily, there are new applications, so it is still useful to provide guidance. You can say the same with Ethernet. It is still not so well established in embedded systems.” Texas Instruments will also be having three linked talks and will be having a stand, but the faint hearted may wish to stay away. The company has just introduced its Safe IT certification scheme and the stand will have a working circular saw to demonstrate a safe control environment. As visitors approach the saw, they will have to stand on a mat that automatically reduces the speed and the saw itself is protected by a light curtain that will cause the saw to stop if broken.
“This is all about safety,” said Frank Forster, TI’s marketing and systems applications manager. “It will be protected by several mechanisms to show the safety in industrial environments.”
The talks will explain this and other demonstrations and provide more background about the technology.
Frank Forster: “This is all about safety.”
No circular saws but the promise of something out of the ordinary is being hinted at by ams for its stand. While they are being more than a little secretive, Bernd Gessner, a senior vice president at the firm, said that it
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