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Breadboarding a new circuit is a key skill and an important step in many projects—especially early on, when you need to move wires around and substitute components. But that very flexibility also makes it easy to knock wires out. Eventually, if your project is a keeper, you’re going to want something with a bit more permanence. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) solve all those shortcomings. But most people don’t even consider translating a one-off project into a PCB design. For one thing, PCB fabrication has traditionally been expensive, viable only in commercial quantities. (One alternative is to do it yourself with etches and silk screens, a messy and time-consuming process.) Also, there are technical constraints involved with PCB designs that are daunting to the casual hobbyist. But it turns out that nowadays you can produce a professional PCB very inexpensively.

Using a programmable device to expand the capabilities of an embedded system, designers can reduce power consumption at the same time By Rahul V. Shah and Vishesh Agrawal

4 January 2010—Though flexible devices such as roll-up displays have been promised for several years, their commercialization has been stalled by a missing ingredient: a flexible form of flash memory. But researchers at the University of Tokyo have recently developed an organic, floating-gate nonvolatile memory that behaves like flash memory, which may solve that problem. While silicon-based flash memory is fine for the mass data storage found in cellphones, digital music players, and thumb drives, fabricating it requires high processing temperatures, thus ruling out its production on flexible substrates like plastic. Organic semiconductors, however, can be processed at temperatures well below the melting point of most plastics. What's more, "the cost of flash memory is too high to use in applications that require large arrays of memory," says Tsuyoshi Sekitani, an assistant professor in the University of Tokyo's department of electrical and electronic engineering and one of the researchers who developed the new memory. "But we can print our organic memory on flexible substrates and over large areas using inkjet printers. So costs will be low."

Ted Marena of Lattice Semiconductor Corp., points out that designers of digital systems are familiar with implementing the 'leftovers' of their digital design by using FPGAs and CPLDs to glue together various processors, memories, and standard function components on their printed circuit board. In addition to these digital functions, FPGAs and CPLDs can also implement common analog functions using an LVDS input, a simple resistor capacitor (RC) circuit and some FPGA or CPLD digital logic elements to create an analog to digital converter (ADC).