For more information on these three products, read the accompanying article: Move Over, Vision Pro: ThinkReality VRX is the Newest Headset in Town.

Video transcript

Today on Tech Check, a thoughtful new VR headset, a novel way to navigate the metaverse, and a 5K display on its way to the U.S.A.

Lenovo is staking a claim on the metaverse with its latest VR headset, the ThinkReality VRX. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR chipset and offering 6 degrees-of-freedom, the VRX aims to be an all-in-one solution for enterprise VR and MR. Use cases include simulation and design, skills training, retail, and beyond.

Anyone who’s donned a VR headset knows that the experience isn’t usually comfortable for very long, but the ThinkReality VRX heads off the head strain with a slim form factor, a balanced weight distribution, and a venting system that keeps hot air away from the user’s face.

The ThinkReality VRX is not yet in wide release but Lenovo has set its starting price at thirteen hundred dollars. It will also be available as part of Lenovo’s Device-as-a-Service offering. 

Hand tracking company Ultraleap has launched the next generation of its Leap Motion Controller, a sensor that allows users to interact with 3D content using hand gestures alone.

The new controller improves upon the original with higher resolution cameras, an increased field of view, and 25 percent less power consumption. It’s also 30 percent smaller than the original, so it takes up less space when mounted to a VR headset.

The Leap Motion Controller 2 is available now from distributors such as Mouser and Arrow. It an MSRP of $139 dollars.

Samsung has revealed that its new 27-inch 5K monitor, the ViewFinity S9, will be available in the U.S. this August. The company claims the display will provide the best experience for professionals in creative and visual industries.

The ViewFinity S9 packs 218 pixels per square inch and offers a typical brightness of 600 nits. It covers 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and has a highly rated color accuracy. Plus users will be able to calibrate the display using their phones with Samsung’s SmartThings app.

The new monitor made its debut earlier this year at CES 2023, and it will finally hit shelves this August for an MSRP of sixteen hundred dollars.

For more tech, check out engineering.com.

The post An Ultra Leap for VR appeared first on Engineering.com.

Autonomous vehicles and networked consumer products continue to change the way we think of designing and developing products. If everything must be smart and connected, then everything probably needs electronics design simulation. As the demands on these systems become greater, the chips are being asked to do more things better than ever before. You can almost imagine the meeting where the managers tell chip designers: “your chips are great, but we need them to go faster, fit within a smaller footprint, use power more efficiently and be easier to manufacture.”

This is where the Solido Design Environment might be helpful. It is not doing anything completely brand new from an AI or chip design perspective—but by combining these functions together Siemens hopes to shake up the chip design process. The idea is to listen to the needs of the customer and managers in the aforementioned meeting and bring them to the Solido Design Environment to take designs to new places.

The Solido announcement also comes amid several partnerships and initiatives that Siemens is using to give IC design and verification a very customizable feeling, in a market that already seems crowded with options.

Solido, AI and Chip Design

Siemens has never been shy about making acquisitions to push into new markets or gain new capabilities. For me, the biggest and earlier impact of this was the acquisition of NX in 2007, but electronics engineers might look to 2016 and 2017 and the acquisitions of Mentor Graphics and Solido. The impact of a new company can take a while to really understand, but during the pandemic when revenues were slightly down overall, the electronic design automation (EDA) portion of Siemens was finding double-digit growth.

Solido Design Environment shows a 10-100x performance boost. (Image courtesy of Siemens.)

Now that acquisition has led to the Solido Design Environment, which uses AI to target the best possible avenues for electronics optimization. Instead of running through every possible numerical mixture of variables in a brute-force analysis, the Solido Design Environment optimizes for circuit power, performance and area and performs production-accurate statistical yield analysis. Siemens estimates that this method can be orders of magnitude faster than brute-force Monte Carlo simulations.

Prior to the Design Environment, Solido offered its Characterization Suite, a library characterization tool powered by machine learning. This included the Solido Generator, which used machine learning to produce process, voltage, and temperatures (PVTs).libs a hundred times faster than SPICE analysis.

Siemens Has Been Busy in IC Design and Verification

The Solido Design Environment isn’t the only recent Siemens news in this space. In early July, Siemens announced that its Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) was expanding to let IC development customers use the power of the cloud when working on electronics simulation projects.

This feels like an incredibly lucrative partnership for both sides, as circuits become more complicated and require more computing power to explore every possible option—or at least to figure out which possible options are the most viable and then explore and verify those options deeply.

One of the most interesting parts for me is the creation of Cloud Flight Plans, a kind of quick-start guide for new users that will show best practices for electronics designers using cloud computing.

Other recent announcements focus on the Calibre product line. First is the Calibre nmPlatform’s certification for the Intel 16 process technology. Calibre nmDRC, Calibre YieldEnhancer, Calibre PERC and Calibre nmLVS are all certified to provide 16nm class performance. Siemens is a founding member of Intel Foundry Services’ EDA Alliance, a group that works together on next-generation electronics innovation.

Calibre DesignEnhancer uses “correct-by-construction” layout methods. (Image courtesy of Siemens.)

The next announcement is Calibre DesignEnhancer, a new design layout tool intended to move the layout functions of electronics design earlier in the design process. The focus of the tool is finding voltage drop (IR) and electromigration (EM) issues early.

At this release, point three main functions exist for DesignEnhancer. The correct-by-construction modification helps designers figure out the optimized placement for vias in the layout. Power and ground enhancement add parallel runs into the system to lower the risk of ER and IM issues, with some customers reporting a 90 percent drop in complications. And, finally, filler cell insertion lets users find the best positions for decoupling capacitors to be ready for verification. Here again, runtime testing showed that the method could be up to 10 times faster than previous techniques.

How Does It All Tie Together?

Simulation is a constantly evolving field, working to meet the needs of a diverse customer base to answer a diverse set of questions. One set of simulation tools might not solve all the problems that engineers are working on. But we are in an era when simulation tools pop up every time a new problem arises. Companies like Altair, Ansys or Siemens have this fragmentation now, where one simulation segment like structural analysis or electronics design might have a dozen different tools for engineers to choose from.

It’s obvious that someone at Siemens has run the numbers and looked at the strategy to confirm that Solido Design Environment will serve its customers well by bringing in new capabilities. Pulling in additional companies and teams can be a gamble, and it’s not always a sure bet that a product’s look and functions will translate under the new parent company’s control and branding. From a 50,000-foot view, the full scope of Siemens’ resources here seems to have pushed Solido to a new level with enhanced capabilities in this fresh rollout.

The post New IC Design and Validation Tool Powered by AI appeared first on Engineering.com.

2016 file photo of an Iranian drone Shahed-129 shown at a rally in Tehran, Iran. U.S. government sources say that Russia is looking to buy additional advanced attack drones from Iran for use in the war in Ukraine after using all 400 drones it had previously purchased. Image: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP.

A swarm of 54 drones flew toward Kyiv last month in the biggest drone attack of the war to date. An incredible 96 percent of them were shot down by Ukraine’s air defense using what has been described as a “dog’s breakfast” of defensive countermeasures that include manually sighted antiaircraft guns, shoulder fired Stinger missiles and Patriot missiles on mobile launchers.

Israel guards against enemy aircraft with Iron Dome, perhaps the world’s best air defense system, which uses interceptor missiles to take down anything from a fixed-wing aircraft to an artillery shell. Each Iron Dome battery is said to cost $50 million and each interception, $100,000 to $150,000.

Realizing that Iron Dome could be overwhelmed by unsophisticated weapons in large numbers (like a drone swarm), Israel would like to complement Iron Dome with Iron Beam, a 100 kW fiber laser weapon.

Israel’s Iron Beam laser weapon in action. Image from video by the Wall Street Journal. See video on YouTube.

Iron Beam detractors say the system is only effective in good weather and at close range (due to laser beams losing their cohesiveness, and therefore their energy, after striking gas molecules in the atmosphere).

The obvious fix is to boost the power.

The U.S., which has pledged to support Israel in its defense and development of Iron Beam, has two 300 kW fiber laser systems being developed that emit 200 kW of optical power. 

Russia has claimed to have used a laser weapon against Ukrainian drones but that has been refuted by Ukraine.

Ray gun advantages are as follows:

• A line of sight = path of ray—unlike a bullet, which takes a parabolic path due to gravity. There is no sight adjustment.
• It can be directed quicker than a wink. A laser can be directed by mirrors, as is done in LiDAR devices. Military lasers are more substantial than LiDAR systems and swivel on turrets, but the turrets are far smaller than those that fire ammunition. With little mass to move, the beam can move quickly to stay on target or lock on to other targets.
• No ammunition is needed and the cost of power is relatively cheap. The cost of a “shot” would be between about $2 for an Iron Dome and between $5 and $10 for a 300 kW laser, according to Michael Perry, VP at General Dynamics, who was quoted in IEEE Spectrum.

And so, the tables (or should I say the turrets?) have turned. The low-cost attacking aircraft can be brought down with an even lower-cost laser shot. In the extreme, a high-cost threat, such as a hypersonic missile, could theoretically be shot down for the cost of a burrito. That’s enough to make military mouths water.

Shoot Down a Bullet with a Bullet—Good Luck with That

Antiaircraft and antimissile defenses have relied on interception and knockdown using bullets or missiles. With the offense getting faster projectiles, culminating in the hypersonic or ballistic missile, capable of Mach 5 speed or greater, hitting them in flight is as likely as shooting a bullet with a bullet—in other words, practically impossible. So proved the Myth Busters, busting a favorite myth of Civil War battlefield combers for whom two bullets fused together could be sold for a ridiculous sum.

The U.S. military increased the odds of hitting a fast-approaching missile, if not a bullet, with the Phalanx CIWS gun system. The Gatling-style gun turret of a Phalanx fires so many bullets that its makers claim to have made a protective “wall of lead.” However, the wall is quite porous and its lead quickly depleted.

Even if there is no hope of hitting a fast incoming missile, the military still believes in a blast that is close enough to either disable the missile control and guidance or a blast wave that can change the missile’s trajectory so it misses its target.

But tests have shown that even getting close enough cannot be guaranteed. It may be time to admit that when we had only bullets, our only hope of shooting down airborne threats was to improve the bullets. But now that directed energy weapons have started to show promise of a theoretically sure-fire land-to-air defense, it should be time to pour R&D into solving the remaining challenges of making ray guns a reality.

The post Ray Guns May Be the Only Way to Fight the Next War appeared first on Engineering.com.

For more information on these three products, read the accompanying article: Nexa3D’s Desktop 3D Printer Grew Up—Meet the XiP Pro.

The post A New Breed of Resin 3D Printing appeared first on Engineering.com.

The term, Stockholm Syndrome, stems from a 1973 attempted bank robbery in Sweden that led to a six-day siege during which the hostages developed a bond with the robbers and feared death by the police. The term was widely used in the defense of Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and helped them to rob a bank 10 weeks later.

Might we also apply the term to technologies that, despite their initial threat, have provided benefits and over time, we have learned to accept them despite their faults?

Take the internal combustion (IC) engine, for example. At the beginning of the 20th century, the IC engine was a monster that scared our horses off the road, and if we weren’t careful when we tried to crank it up, might have broken our arms. Then it would sputter and belch and shake down the road, leaving a trail of black smoke. Still, it managed to captivate a few hostages and over time, the hostages multiplied. Many came to love the IC engine, like those who polish the engine of their hot rods and antiques that thunder down every Main Street parade. The rest accepted it, respected it, and learned to appreciate what it could provide. Like the captor, the engine could feed you and protect you. You came to depend on it.

The auto industry, with the IC engine at its heart, offers economic protection and puts bread on the table for so many of us. Millions, like autoworkers, directly depend on it, and tens of millions, when one considers supporting industries such as rubber, glass, plastics, steel and oil, indirectly depend on it .

The IC engine-based economy is big enough to be worth fighting for.

And so, we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the IC engine’s faults. It still pollutes, but you can’t see it. It still makes noise, but listen to how well we have muffled it. So well behaved we believe we have made them, as we would pet the once vicious guard dog that now lies at our feet. Besides, look at all the jobs it creates.

In “Annie Hall,” Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, tells his psychiatrist a joke:

                     Patient: My brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken.

                     Doctor: Why don’t you turn him in?

                     Patient: I would, but I need the eggs.

“I guess that’s how I feel about relationships,” says Singer. “They’re totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.”

One egg in this story is the noise an IC engine makes. We need it for safety. So argue Harley Davidson riders. You will hear a Harley from blocks away. You will get out of the way. By comparison, a Tesla is a silent death.

The electric car has an electric motor whine instead of an IC engine roar. It scares or impresses no one. In economy of design, no transmission and fewer moving parts should be considered advantages, but those who make transmissions, radiators, mufflers… they need the eggs. 

About a quarter of the jobs on assembly lines would be lost if President Biden has his way and two-thirds of all cars sold in the U.S. are electric, says one source.

More jobs will be lost in the Southern states, with their economies based on oil and gas. Even more would be lost in the already poor coal mining areas. 

Coal may be the most extreme example of Stockholm Syndrome in any industry. Once the mining companies were seen as villains and the miners as indentured servants. Until miners became convinced that the mining companies were their friends (didn’t they put a roof over their heads and food on their tables?) and the government was the threat (they wanted to take their jobs away).

The Lexus champagne commercial became an advertising legend and was remade on Lexus’ 30th anniversary. Image: Wikipedia.

Even noise, an aspect of IC engines so unwanted that an engineering discipline (NVH, noise, vibration and harshness) has been created to combat it, has its fans. One of them, in a black Challenger apparently with no mufflers, roars past my office as I write this. What hot rodders and monster truckers have learned to appreciate, engineers have been determined to eradicate.

In The Perfectionists, Simon Winchester tells of the pride with which Henry Royce built the early Rolls-Royce cars. The latest Ghost is said to be so “spookily quiet” that engineers were forced to add a “whisper of noise.”

The introduction of Lexus, Toyota’s luxury brand, featured a pyramid of glasses filled with champagne—without a trace of vibration or a drop being spilled—on the hood of an LS 400 running at 145 mph on a dynamometer. Kia and Hyundai, recognizing American’s need for the big engine “feel,” thought of adding vibration to the seats of their vehicles.

There’s a story of an executive of a well-known motorcycle company who started the engine of a prototype of the company’s latest design, but since the vehicle had been designed to run quietly and smoothly—without the company’s characteristic roar—he kept trying to start it. That quiet prototype was quietly scrapped.

The Mercedes E-Class was Motor Trend’s Car of the Year in 2021. The E-Class sedan goes through its gears so smoothly you don’t notice the shifts. Engine noises don’t enter the passenger cabin — you can hear passengers whispering in the back seat. Over its 130 years, Mercedes has been able to turn a fire-breathing roaring dragon into a purring pussy cat. It only took them  7 years to create an electric car that surpassed the E-Class on every level, more power with less noise, with its first all-electric car, the 2021 EQS.

Complexity = Jobs

An IC-powered car has many more parts than an electric vehicle (EV). It takes longer to put an IC-powered car together and requires more parts and more assembly workers. There are a lot of Tier 1 automotive vendors that won’t have jobs if the roads fill with EVs: those who make mufflers, transmissions, alternators, gas tanks, fuel injection systems and radiators, for example. An automatic transmission, for example, is 800 parts all by itself. An EV needs no such device and is able to muster top torque at will, at all RPMs. Fewer parts also mean fewer parts that can go wrong or wear out. That’s fewer mechanics, fewer oil changing stations, and fewer car parts stores.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to have two-thirds of new U.S. car sales be EVs by 2032 is, of course, a threat to workers who will suffer dislocations. Those are workers who must be considered threats to elected officials who backed EV-friendly legislation.

From Thanks for Being Late, by Thomas Friedman.

So, the slam dunk that EVs ought to be judged on their technological merit encounters the relatively slower pace of social change. 

The post The Internal Combustion Engine Holds Us Hostage—And We Love It appeared first on Engineering.com.

VG Studio Max, a leading visualization, analysis and inspection tool for industrial computed tomography (CT) has been updated to a 2023.1 version. We’ll summarize the most significant changes.

A new ribbon interface replaces the old menu structure and icon bars. To ease the transition for veteran users, VG v2023.1 opens to a “What’s New” page that shows the changes and how to negotiate them. Veteran users will no doubt wonder where many of their familiar icons went. For them, Volume Graphics has a “Where do I find … ?” page.

Picking the Home tab pulls all the functions for a particular workflow into a ribbon bar. There are four predefined workflows: visual inspection, porosity analysis, metrology and material analysis. In addition, there are contextual workflow tabs that appear with certain actions.

You can minimize and maximize the ribbon interface by double-clicking a tab or by using the context menu. The new interface is customizable using a built-in editor. You can create new tabs or groups and add functions to them, such as tools from the ribbon and even keyboard shortcuts.

The most significant enhancement to VG Studio may be the machine language-based feature identification. Taking minor guidance from the user, by just outlining a feature on the screen and labeling it, LG Studio is able to identify identical and similar features from the CT scan model.

Volume Graphics calls the ability to separate a scan of an assembly into its parts segmentation. Automatic segmentation is quite challenging as the application must be able to distinguish parts or features in 3D based on a 2D image using only shades of gray.

Shown is an anode that is marked (painted) as it appears in 2D on the screen. Photoshop users may see the similarity to lassoing. In an example of a battery, LG Studio was able to pick up all the pixels that form the anode as well as pick out all the other anodes in the battery model.

“If it’s a pain to segment, use paint and segment,” says the narrator in a Volume Graphics video.

LG Studio suggests its use in several other industries.

In material science, it can be used to separate and quantify fibers from the matrix and determine the direction of fibers. It can show cracks and other defects. “With paint and segment, the three different regions—the filler, the fibers and the matrix—can be easily separated. Once you’ve drawn the labels, the tool segments the data quickly and accurately.”

Seeing is believing. We see each component of a composite “painted,” and LG Studio finds thousands of bits of filler and chopped fibers in the sample, allowing for an accurate check of volume fractions. Counting bits by hand—a task so onerous that you wouldn’t even assign it to an intern … you would have them estimate it—is done by LG Studio in seconds without protest.

In life science, it is useful for segmenting bones and organs from tissues, for segmenting areas of different thicknesses or structures in shellfish and for segmenting roots from soil in root growth experiments.

Battery Inspection Module

Inspecting the inside of a lithium-ion battery during production just got easier with the battery inspection module introduced in v2023.1, which can measure and tally the anode overhangs. Battery inspection results are put into tables and can be exported as CSV files for further analysis.

VG Studio is a 3D image analysis program that analyzes images from industrial CT scans and is able to detect internal structures. It has applications in various industries and can determine anode and cathode size inside batteries, the fibers in a composite material, rebar in concrete and voids in castings or 3D-printed parts, for example. It can be used in metrology for quality control and in the field to maintain products, buildings and structures. It can also be used forensically to determine defective materials. It cannot be used in medical applications.

CT sees the whole object—the outside and the inside. Other measurement tools, contact and scanners, such as those using LiDAR, can only see the outside. CT uses X-rays, but unlike X-rays used for medical purposes, CT X-rays are of shorter wavelengths and more energetic so they produce finer detail and go deeper into dense material, like concrete and steel.

CT scanning is nondestructive, so the part does not have to be sacrificed.

Volume Graphics offers an add-on that makes the software work as a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) but with one important improvement: it can see inside the part and get into crevices that small probes cannot reach and where noncontact CMMs cannot scan.

Several CAD formats of Creo and CATIA V5 can be imported directly into VG Studio, as can STEP and IGES formats, with their geometry serving as a reference for actual measurements.

VG Studios is made by Volume Graphics, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany. The company was acquired by Hexagon Graphics for its Manufacturing Intelligence division in 2019 for an undisclosed amount. VG Studio’s 2018 annual revenue was 25 million euros.

The post Visual Graphics Studio Update Gets Ribbon Bar, AI-Assisted Feature Detection appeared first on Engineering.com.

For more information on these three devices, read the accompanying article: Tech Check: Aston Martin Made a ThinkStation.

Video transcript:

Today on Tech Check, Lenovo’s luxurious new desktops, Dell’s premium 16-inch laptop, and NVIDIA’s tiny new graphics card is big where it counts.

Lenovo’s got three new desktop workstations, and if they look a little extra classy it’s because they were co-designed by luxury car maker Aston Martin. The ThinkStation P10, P7 and P5 aren’t just easy on the eyes, they’re the most advanced desktop workstations Lenovo says its ever built.

The top-of-the-line ThinkStation P10 is powered by dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors and up to four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics cards. The P7 and P5 use Xeon W series processors and support up to three and two graphic cards respectively.

The new ThinkStations are designed to be easily serviced by end users and to fit just as well in the data center as they do on the desktop. Lenovo hasn’t released pricing yet, but the company says the new workstations will be available starting in May.

There’s a new 16-inch mobile workstation in town, and Dell says it’s the one the beat. The new Precision 5680 is the latest and largest addition to Dell’s Precision 5000 series of premium, thin-and-light mobile workstations.

The new laptop weighs in at just four and a half pounds with what Dell says is the “the smallest footprint in the world for a 16-inch workstation.” It has a 16:10 aspect ratio with up to a 4K touch display.

Powered by 13^th-gen Intel processors and the newly announced NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation laptop GPUs, the Precision 5680 will be available on May 18, 2023, with a starting price yet to be announced.

Nvidia’s got a new graphics card, and you may have to squint to see it. The RTX 4000 small form factor, or SFF, is a low profile graphics card that NVIDIA says will provide a new level of performance for ultra-compact desktop workstations.

The new GPU is a dual-slot, 70W graphics card that NVIDIA says provides twice the performance of the company’s previous SFF offering. The new RTX 4000 is built on NVIDIA’s most recent GPU microarchitecture, Ada Lovelace, and it has 20 GB of ECC memory.

The tiny new graphics card will be available starting in April with an estimated price tag of $1,250.

The post Lenovo’s Sexiest Desktop Yet appeared first on Engineering.com.

For more information on these three devices, read the accompanying article: Intel’s New Xeon Chips Are More Like Small Pastries.

Video transcript:

Today on Tech Check, Intel’s powerhouse new processors, a dock for three 4K displays, and how to capture lighting in a Boxx.

Intel has launched the latest in its top-of-the-line Xeon family of workstation processors. Codenamed Sapphire Rapids, the Xeon W-3400 and Xeon W-2400 series of chips include what Intel calls a breakthrough new compute architecture that will provide massive performance for users such as engineers and data scientists.

The kingpin of the new launch is the Xeon w9-3495X, which offers up to 56 cores in a single socket and up to 105 megabytes of L3 cache. Intel says that adds up to improvements of 28 percent for single-thread and 120 percent for multithread performance compared to the previous generation.

The new Xeon processors are currently available for pre-order ranging from $359 to nearly $6,000.

VisionTek has launched a new 14-port docking station that supports not one, not two, but three 4K monitors. The VT7400 is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Chrome laptops and connects to the host via a single USB-C cable.

In addition to DisplayPorts and HDMI Ports, the VT7400 includes several USB-A and USB-C ports with up to 100W of power delivery for the host system. There’s also an Ethernet port, 3.5mm audio jack, and Kensington lock slot.

The VT7400 comes with a power adapter and USB-C host cable, and it’s available from VisionTek for $349.

Texas-based workstation maker Boxx has announced the latest update to its entry-level Apexx E3 desktop workstation. It now offers the latest 13^th generation of Intel Core processors.

One of the best features of the new Core chips is their clock speed, which maxes out at a lighting-fast 5.8GHz. Faster chips mean better performance for lightly-threaded applications like CAD, and Boxx says the Apexx E3 is purpose-built for users of Solidworks, Revit and more.

The Boxx Apexx E3 offers a variety of configurations and is available now for $2,400 and up.

Check out more tech on engineering.com.

The post Check Out Intel’s Sapphire Rapids appeared first on Engineering.com.

For more information on these three devices, read the accompanying article: Tech Check: Lenovo’s New Twist on Notebooks.

Video transcript:

Today on Tech Check, MacBooks get a boost, notebooks get a twist, and your desk is now a bicycle.

At CES this year Lenovo unveiled a laptop with a special twist—literally. The ThinkBook Plus Twist has a dual-sided display that swivels above the keyboard, giving users a choice of which side to use.

While one side has a fairly typical 13.3-inch OLED display, the flipside has something rather more interesting: a 12-inch e-Ink display like that found in many e-readers. e-Ink is extremely power efficient and easier on the eyes than other displays, and Lenovo thinks users will love it for reading PDFs, writing text documents, and even taking digital notes.

With its unique choice of displays, the ThinkBook Plus Twist is a genuinely novel hybrid that could allow engineers to ditch their e-books, their paper notebooks, and their ultrabooks for one versatile device. The Twist will be available this summer for $1,650.

Apple has announced two new processors based on the architecture of its M2 chip, but bigger. The new M2 Pro and M2 Max will power the upcoming iteration of Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops and Mac Mini desktops.

The new chips come with 12 CPU cores and up to 38 GPU cores in the M2 Max, which can also be configured with up to 96GB of unified memory and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple claims the new chips provide 30 percent faster graphics speeds than the previous generation M1 Pro and M1 Max.

Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max will be available in new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which start at $2,000. The M2 and M2 Pro will also be offered in the new Mac Mini, which starts at $600 for the M2 version.

What’s better than a standing desk? A riding desk. Acer’s new eKinekt BD 3 bike desk shows that work and play don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The bike desk is designed to let users stay active throughout the work day. It offers an adjustable bike resistance, seat height, and desk position so users can transition from a gentle pedal to a tour de France.

And all that kinetic energy won’t go to waste. The bike desk has two USB-A ports and one USB-C port that can be used to charge phones and other devices purely with pedaling power. Acer says that constant cycling at 60 RPM will generate 75 watts. The eKinekt BD 3 will be available in June for $1,000.

Check out more tech on engineering.com.

The post Lenovo’s Intriguing e-Ink Experiment! appeared first on Engineering.com.

Notebook with a Twist

Lenovo announced a lot of new gear at CES 2023, including a refresh of its ThinkPad X1 lineup, but perhaps none was more eye-catching than the ThinkBook Plus Twist, a dizzying new take on the hybrid laptop/tablet form factor.

The ThinkBook Plus Twist is interesting for two reasons, and the first one is in the name: the laptop’s OLED display literally twists atop the keyboard to reveal a second screen on the other side. And that second screen is the second interesting thing about the Twist: it’s no ordinary display but an e-Ink display, the same kind you’d find in an Amazon Kindle or other e-reader.

The new Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Twist. (Source: Lenovo.)

There are many advantages to e-Ink displays: they’re more comfortable on the eyes, they barely drain the battery, and they provide a natural writing experience with a digital stylus. But e-Ink has its drawbacks too, including a painfully slow refresh rate (12Hz in the Twist) and limited colors, if any (the Twist has a color e-Ink display, but don’t expect anything close to the vibrant hues of the OLED display behind it).

With the Twist, users get the best of both worlds: a comfortable, low power e-Ink display for reading and writing, and a high-res OLED for everything else. Though the Twist doesn’t offer powerhouse performance, its versatility should appeal to any engineer who enjoys digital notetaking and wants to minimize their device count.

The Lenovo ThinkBook Twist will be available in June 2023 starting at $1,649.

Apple Levels Up Again with M2 Pro and M2 Max

Apple has done it again. If you were intrigued by the California company’s custom silicon and bought yourself a new MacBook powered by the M2 chip, prepare to yearn once more for the latest model. Apple has unveiled two new processors, the M2 Pro and M2 Max, which will power the next generation of MacBook Pros and Mac Minis.

Both new chips scale up the architecture of last year’s M2. The M2 Pro comprises 40 billion transistors, twice that of the M2. It offers 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores, which share 32GB of unified memory with 200GB/s of bandwidth. The M2 Max is bigger yet, made of 67 billion transistors, up to 38 GPU cores, and 96GB of unified memory with a bandwidth of 400GB/s.

The M2 Pro and M2 Max will be available in Apple’s upcoming 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. The M2 and M2 Pro (but not the M2 Max) will power Apple’s new iteration of the Mac Mini, its compact desktop unit.

The Apple MacBook Pro is powered by the new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. (Source: Apple.)

Apple says that MacBook Pro users will see 30 percent greater graphics performance with the M2 Max compared to the M1 Max. “MacBook Pro once again pushes the limits of graphics memory in a laptop to enable intensive graphics workloads, such as creating scenes with extreme 3D geometry and textures,” said Apple’s press release.

Apple’s silicon has proven extremely popular with users since the M1 chip launched in late 2020, and the chips just keep getting better. The new M2 chips renew the temptation to trade in our PC for a Mac—but there’s still one drawback: the price. The new MacBook Pros start at $2,000 (14-inch, M2 Pro with 16GB memory, 512GB storage) and the M2 Pro-powered Mac Mini starts at $1,300.

Ride Your Desk to Work

Acer’s latest desktop isn’t the kind we’re used to from the computer company—it’s not a desktop PC but a literal desktop, and it’s attached to a bicycle. It’s the Acer eKinekt BD 3, and we can’t decide if it’s crazy or genius.

The new Acer eKinekt BD 3. (Source: Acer.)

The Acer eKinekt BD 3 is a bike desk that encourages exercise by allowing users to pedal while they work. “You don’t have to choose between your job and an active lifecycle,” Acer says. Users can adjust the bike’s resistance, seat height and desk position to transition between casual pedaling and an intense workout. A companion app allows riders to monitor their workout stats and history.

Not only does the Acer eKinekt BD 3 keep users active, it also keeps their devices powered up. The bike desk includes two USB-A ports and one USB-C port that can be used to charge devices via pedaling power. Constant cycling at 60 RPM will generate 75 watts, according to Acer.

Busy engineers with little time for exercise may find the eKinekt BD 3 to be a useful way to burn some extra calories. It’ll certainly burn some extra cash: the bike desk will cost $1,000 when it’s available in June.

Want to see more? Watch the video version of this Tech Check.

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