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 This is your last
chance to get your Mechatronic newsletter mailed automatically
Greetings, readers. We hope that you're finding our interdisciplinary newsletter
useful. Please sign up to be placed on the continued circulation list because there's no better,
single source for mechatronic news and technical articles.
History lessons, too: In addition to the latest technical guides,
we'll also continue posting archives of our original series on
mechatronics. These are PDF files, as the articles predate digital
print media -- in my opinion, some interesting evidence, in and of
itself, of electronic improvement of mechanical processes. Click here and here for both parts of a January 1992 piece that details the birth of
mechatronics -- specifically, the division of many companies into
parts serving individual industries, something that's commonplace
today. It's also interesting to note that many original mechatronic
designs were for the automotive industry. We invite your comments on that.
-- Elisabeth
Eitel
Editor
Motion System Design
Anticipating
every move
Does this sound familiar? Your team has designed a fast new machine,
only to find that you cannot use it at anywhere near full speed. Well,
here's one fix. Digital motion control is boosting output on everything
from high-end machining centers to simple signmaking devices. But often,
these systems aren't used to their full dynamic capacity, because tight
corners and sudden stops are too much of a challenge to navigate safely,
within machine limits.
Mechatronics
in semiconductor fab automation
Historically, the semiconductor industry has been driven by physics
and chemistry. These are the disciplines that have led to perfecting
manufacturing processes that, in turn, have brought remarkable advances
in microelectronic technology. In semiconductor manufacturing, the focus
has mainly been on the process -- essentially in the deposition and
etching chambers. What happened outside was far less important.
With this sort of emphasis, the industry has long existed with low
levels of automation outside its core processes: Wafers were manually
transported between tools. But that has changed in recent years as
wafers became larger and feature widths smaller. Chipmakers were forced
to give issues like productivity, throughput, reliability, and
automation a much larger share of mind.
 Micropositioning
meets Mechatronics
Mechatronics, with its multidisciplinary engineering approach
integrating electrical, control, software, and mechanical elements, is
well matched to the design of complex micropositioning devices.
Compared to traditional methods, the mechatronic design approach is more
of a holistic approach to product design, where the tradeoffs between
different functional components (software, hardware, user interface,
etc.) are carefully considered for their impact on overall performance.
The goal of the process is to arrive at an optimal solution at the
conclusion of product design. Mechatronic principles have been
successfully deployed in numerous applications such as hard drives,
robotic manipulators, temperature control, and automotive systems. Here
we consider mechatronics in micropositioning stages.
Talk
To Multiple Devices With One UART
The Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit (UART) interface is
found on a variety of peripheral devices. Consider, for instance, a
microcontrollerbased system with four such peripherals. Ideally, in
low-cost embedded applications, you would like to connect multiple
peripherals to a single UART. However, a lack of chip-select signals in
UARTs complicates such a task. This is a common design problem, and
there are a few conventional ways of solving it. The most obvious
approach is to use an MCU with as many hardware UART modules as you
need.
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