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Oct 01, 2023

What caught your eye this week? (ADI Ireland, 64bit microcontrollers, RIME antenna)

The Electronics Weekly team share some fingerposts – their picks of the week, in

The Electronics Weekly team share some fingerposts – their picks of the week, in terms of announcements, developments, product releases, quotes or anything else in the wide world of electronics that caught their eye…

David Manners, components editor

What caught my eye this week was ADI investing €630m in Ireland.

Steve Bush, technology editor

STMicroelectronics has revealed the first 64bit microcontroller in its vast ‘STM32′ family, picking for it a choice of one or two Arm Cortex-A35 cores for up to 6,000 DMIPS of performance. Aimed at industrial Linux-based computing, the ICs get a 400MHz Cortex-M33 for secured real-time processing, plus a host of other security features, and a 1.35Top/s neural processing unit. Don't hold your breath though, as volume production begins in the first half of 2024.

Alun Williams, web editor

What caught my eye was engineers at the ESA managing to remotely fix the operation of its Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, on the Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) Mission. The ESA described the action in Darmstadt: "To try to shift the pin, they shook Juice using its thrusters, then they warmed Juice with sunlight. Every day the RIME antenna was showing signs of movement, but no full release…RIME was finally jolted into life when the flight control team fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’, located in the jammed bracket. This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold."

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