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.

Freescale's new family of MCU-wireless chips give engineers a way to control devices via RF4CE links. The new chips will replace infrared controllers but make the transition smooth. They have Ir capabilities, too. RF protocols include ZigBee, RF4CE, SynkroRF, and plain vanilla IEEE-802.15.4 links.

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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.