Power and its management are the common denominators cutting across all electronic systems and circuit designs, analog or digital.

Fabricated using Maxim’s newest BiCMOS process, the MAX3600 RGB laser driver enables designers to embed pico projectors into compact consumer electronics, supporting switching times below 2ns and resolutions up to WXGA and 1080p.

Quasi-resonant conversion is a well established technology which has been extensively used in power supplies in the consumer arena. The new Green FPS family brings the working range of this versatile technology down to the low power range. This design article from Fairchild Semiconductor will describe quasi-resonant flyback and buck converters showing how they improve power supply efficiency.

The LED-based lighting market is poised for significant growth. And there’s plenty of motivation for engineers to become part of the market.

Phyworks Ltd. (Bristol, England), an eight-year-old developer of mixed-signal transceiver ICs for optical and copper communications, is on the acquisition trail, according to cofounder and CEO, Stephen King.

Tyco Electronics is dedicating a special landing page on its website for the solar and photovoltaic industry, backing the portal with the its own research, engineering and test capabilities.

Air passengers find it annoying, experts claim it is indispensible for flight safety: Entrainment of liquids and gels on board of airplanes is subject to tight restrictions. The Juelich Research Center (Juelich, Germany) has developed a promising technology to reliably discriminate explosives from harmless liquids.

Memscap SA, French provider of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), published consolidated revenues of 2.4 million euros ($3.58 million) for the third quarter of financial year 2009, ending Sept. 30, 2009. This compares to revenues of 2.2 million euros ($3.29 million) for the second quarter and 4.1 million euros ($6.13 million) for the third quarter of 2008.

Extending its family of easy-to-use SWIFT power management ICs, Texas Instruments claims the industry’s smallest single-chip, 6-A, 17-V step-down synchronous switcher with integrated FETs.

Because liquid crystal display (LCD) pixels are relatively large it is possible to integrate memory in the active memory backplane at each pixel site. Sharp Corp. has done this for a 96 x 96 pixel miniature monochrome LCD and claims a power saving of a factor of 130 compared to standard LCDs of equal size.

What is the reaction from analysts and around the Web about the changes at TSMC?