Touch sensors might look complicated to design, but a new chip from Cypress Semiconductor should help engineers and product designers create touch controls to replace on/off switches or momentary-action pushbuttons. Design software simplifies creating the controls and specifying substrate materials.

The Wolfram Alpha Web site lets you dig into facts, figures, math, calculus, statistics, and other "computational knowledge" at a level you've never had before.  Give it a try and you're sure to bookmark it in your browser.

The five-chip family of timing and pulsing chips--TimerBlox--from Linear Technology lets engineers quickly design circuits to create pulses, modulate pulse widths, serve as one-shot (monostable) pulse sources, and create timing delays. The SOT23 packages and 12 dev boards from LTC make it easy to breadboard and experiment with these 6-pin ICs that generally need only one, two, or three external resistors.

Linear Technology had developed a technique that measures the impedance of power-supply connections and creates a proportional feedback signal that lets a switching regulator circuit overcome voltage drops between the supply and its load. The technique uses Virtual Remote Sensing, which the company uses in its LT 4180 chip.

You can manage large software projects, but you must learn how to apply a new "management" technique such as the Team Software Process (TSP) developed at Carniege-Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. Learn more about it and how to use it.