Kort nieuws

Softkinetic levert motor van TI’s gebaaraansturing

Pieter Edelman

11 January 2013

Texas Instruments gaat in zee met het Brusselse Softkinetic. Op de Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, die vandaag geopend wordt, toont het halfgeleiderbedrijf een platform voor 3D-gebaarherkenning gebaseerd op de Brusselse technologie. Dat moet gebaaraansturing mogelijk maken in allerhande consumentenproducten zoals tv‘s en pc‘s. Het platform bestaat uit een beeldsensor met de Brusselse Depthsense-technologie voor het meten van afstanden en uit de Iisu-middleware van Softkinetic.

Dankzij de nieuw aangekondigde samenwerking wordt de Brusselse technologie door maar liefst twee halfgeleidergiganten vertegenwoordigd op de CES: in het najaar ging ook Intel al een samenwerking aan en dit bedrijf demonstreert nu gebaaraansturing op zijn stand. Daarnaast wordt de technologie getoond door Arm en Omnivision.

Systems Engineering Vision 2035

Recently a team of leaders from the worldwide systems community produced the Systems Engineering Vision 2035 with inputs from across industry, academia, and government for the International Council for System Engineering (Incose).

This vision is produced every 10 years and is intended to inspire and guide the strategic direction of systems engineering for the global systems community. It can be used to develop strategies to evolve the systems engineering capability of an enterprise or project. The vision can also be used to help direct investments and support collaborative efforts to advance the discipline and grow the skill base to meet current and future challenges related to systems development.

Harry van der Velde will present the 2035 version at Sysarch. After his presentation there will be ample time for discussion.

Harry van der Velde joined Shell almost 25 years ago as a process engineer. He started his career supporting offshore platforms in the central North Sea with his role as commissioning engineer of the Shearwater platform as a highlight. In 2001, he moved to Malaysia to work for Sarawak Shell Berhad where he was responsible for process engineering support for the upstream facilities that deliver gas to the Malaysia LNG facilities in Bintulu. He subsequently became lead systems engineer for the Gumusut Floating Production Systems in Kuala Lumpur ensuring an optimized and integrated design for topsides, hull and subsea systems. In 2007, he was seconded to ENI and worked in Atyrau, Kazakhstan as senior project engineer for the offshore facilities of the Kashagan EP project. He joined the Floating LNG team in 2010 as an Engineering Manager by working on Prelude, Abadi and Browse FLNG projects. The last four years he was in Shell Internal Audit as audit manager responsible for independent assurance of the Liquid Natural Gas, Gas to Liquids and New Energies portfolios. In 2021, he re-joined Shell Projects and Technology and is responsible for the implementation of Systems Engineering in capital projects and is global community lead for Engineering Management.

Harry will be the chairman of the Dutch Incose chapter from march 2023.

Yes, Agile short cycles also work in high-tech development

Developing innovative high-tech equipment is a daunting challenge, especially for startups and scale-ups. Solid systems engineering and lots of organizing are required when working with partners from different fields of expertise (which is almost always the case). Generating new ideas and validating them in your next prototype can take a lot of time. And there is always the risk of drowning in specifications, procedures and organizational issues. But your engineers want to engineer! The solution? Do it Agile! Surprisingly, an Agile approach with short development cycles will also work in high-tech development. The key is taking smaller steps, dividing the components into really small functional units, which can be either software, programmable logic, electronics or mechanics. Next, project partners quickly build and develop these units in a parallel process or they can employ third parties such as prototyping services to do this. Finally, hardware and software units are integrated into a working prototype, ready to be tested. This way, the short cycles generate quick and frequent feedback on product feasibility. With an Agile approach to high-tech development, it becomes much easier to keep the focus on the technical development of the next prototype. It allows all partners to concentrate on building the best possible components. This talk will highlight the advantages of Agile high-tech development, using as an example real-life cases, such as the development of crucial components for a multi-beam scanning electron microscope.

Remco Jager is a project manager at Technolution Advance, a company that supports startups, scale-ups, and leading innovative manufacturers to bring advanced, innovative ideas to market quickly. Building upon 18 years of experience with the development of solutions for the semiconductor industry, Jager realizes cutting-edge innovations for a wide range of customers in high tech. He has a broad and detailed technical understanding and a talent for creating overview and shaping processes.

TROPOMI: From a kitchen table idea to a world renowned atmospheric chemistry instrument

In his presentation Bryan de Goeij will focus on the early development phases of the TROPOMI instrument. The TROPOMI instrument was successfully launched on board of the Sentinel 5 Precursor satellite on 13 October 2017. Since its launch TROPOMI has delivered NO₂, CH₄, O₃, CO₂ and other trace gasses concentration maps with unprecedented spatial resolution of 7x7km². In this way new and unknown sources of greenhouse gasses were found and our insight in the climate change improved.
He will start by discussing the architecture phase, were the needs and wishes of the atmospheric scientist were identified and transformed into an opto-mechanical architecture. As part of this phase also a number of new technologies were identified and their development started.
Next Bryan will discuss the transformation of the program from the architecture phase into the next design and development phase. He will focus on the selection process of the new technologies that would continue in the next program phase and he will discuss the challenges in moving to a firm fixed price project.

Were appropriate Bryan will highlight the differences between the development process implemented in TROPOMI and the process as defined in the ESA ECSS (European Cooperation for Space Standardization) handbooks.

Before joining TNO Bryan de Goeij graduated at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the TU Delft, in the field of systems integration of spacecraft. At TNO he is now a senior systems engineer with a drive for developing cutting edge opto-mechatronical space systems and for spreading the systems engineering method to other fields within TNO.

His past responsibilities include the development of the Fine Sun Sensors that allow the ESA GAIA satellite to determine it orientation during its mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the development optical instruments for atmospheric research and global climate monitoring (like TROPOMI) and the development of laser satellite communication systems for aircraft.

Presently he is involved in TNO program to develop small cost-efficient and recurring optical instruments for atmospheric research that fit on small cube satellites, adding additional constraints to the entire SE development process.
At the same time he is involved in the further industrialization and upscaling of hydrogen production facilities.

Infrastructure embraces operational technology

Heijmans is a construction company, working in areas such as civil and construction engineering. Digitization has also become indispensable for Heijmans, but it is also a great opportunity. Johan van Rosmalen and Bilal Akdeniz want to take you along on how we deal with operational technology within infrastructural projects and what the challenges are for system architects and system engineers. Johan will provide insight into the developments in the field of system architecture of Audio and Video systems and Bilal will reflect what these developments have meant for the working method and systems engineering.

After his study Electrical Engineering at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Eindhoven, Johan started at Imtech with the engineering of complex evacuation and security installations. In 2005 Johan switched to Philips Projects / Tyco where he was involved as application manager in complex evacuation and security developments within judicial institutions. This development was driven after the fire of the cell complex at Schiphol. Johan also worked in infrastructure, especially in the field of camera systems for Rijkswaterstaat, the traffic pressure increased and the need for optimization of the national road network increased. Rush-hour lanes were used more widely to absorb peak loads. In 2009 the switch to Heijmans was made. Heijmans saw the need for integrated projects grow in the form of performance contracts, where the risks are placed on contractors. By taking (chain) control yourself, risks can be made manageable. Together with two colleagues, Johan was able to set up his own Heijmans Safety & Security division within Heijmans. Johan works here as a system architect on projects such as: RWS Rush-hour lanes, renovation RWS traffic control centres, A4 Ketheltunnel, N35 Salland-Twente tunnel, A9 Gaasperdammertunnel, Koningstunnel Den Haag, Piet Heintunnel and the renewal of the Amsterdam traffic control centre. Johan has been closely involved with RWS assignment of the building blocks audio and video. With this assignment, RWS and Heijmans enter into a development and innovation assignment for an indefinite period of time for the entire operational audio and video area within RWS.

The engineering of the James Webb Space Telescope European Instruments: challenges, lessons learned and successes

Precision, sensitive, space-borne instrumentation developments are complex endeavours requiring both specific technical knowledge as well as a fine level of systems engineering (SE) processes definition and control. When faced with additional technical, organizational and operational constraints, the solution space shrinks while the SE effort needs to grow and become more creative to address the challenges that appear.
The JWST project fits clearly this definition. In this talk we will present some of the main challenges encountered in the design, testing and deployment of the European contribution to the JWST instrument suite, the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). We will try to cover both engineering and organization elements and the lessons learned for aspects like: the limitations to design and test cryogenic instrumentation; the benefits and difficulties of working concurrently with industrial partners, research institutes, universities and different space agencies; and the constraints imposed by projects with lifetimes in excess of 10 years before even starting operations. Although JWST is probably an outlier in science space projects in terms of size and complexity, the return from experience, positive and negative, can be applied to future missions and projects with similar boundary conditions.

A Telecommunications Engineering by education, with a focus on optoelectronic systems, I worked as a Passive Photonic Specialist and as Optical System Designer in different companies before joining the European Space Agency in 2005. Since then I have developed my professional activity in Systems Engineering roles within the Science Projects department with a focus on the mission and payload aspects of space telescope missions in the visible, near and mid-infrared. I held the roles of Systems Engineer and Instrument Manager for the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission until integration in the spacecraft in 2012. From 2012 to 2018 I was the Mission Systems Engineer for the dark-matter Euclid mission and in 2018 I took my current position as Mission and Payload manager for the PLAnetary Transit and Oscillation (PLATO) project. In addition to these roles, I am active in the Systems Engineering area development in ESA, contributing to the definition of SE training programs and in the development of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) practices). I am a member of the Dutch chapter of INCOSE.

Top jobs

Field Applications Engineer /Technical sales

Assistent op de kwaliteitsafdeling (v/m/d)

Systems Engineering Vision 2035

Ultra-low-power intelligent sensing with the spiking neural processor

RF engineering for quantum technology: massively scalable signal generation and I/O

The linear power challenge for future 5G massive MIMO mobile communication systems

Hands-on GaN Doherty amplifier design

Performing quick thermal analysis of electromagnetic designs towards the optimal system-in-package sign-off

Advanced behavioral modeling methodology for complex front-end system analysis

Load-pull techniques for 5G and 6G applications – state of the art and future

Mm-wave OTA validation and test – do you really need a chamber?

Surfing on the 6G communication waves using heterogeneous integration technologies

Mm-wave CMOS as low-cost fiber alternative for 1Gb/s at home

The role of photonics for 6G and beyond wireless communications

Scaling up in photonic biosensors – applying lessons from the other side

Yes, Agile short cycles also work in high-tech development

Developing your own custom chip, is it also within your reach?

The accidental startup – from research project to mass market

Truly platform-independent and scalable real-time embedded neural network inference

Chasing bugs – Using AI (and more) for a production-quality system to count insects on glue traps

10 ways to make your startup fail

The model is the easy part

Technology organization processes: how to transform while keeping the shop open

Diagnosis and health assessment for zero unscheduled downtime

Software rejuvenation in a high-tech development environment

Preventing regressions for software changes

Resilience in evolving software systems

Managing complexity of high-tech systems – the next generation

Why you want to create a highly effective engineering environment to unleash your software engineers

Taking formal methods mainstream

Developing for safety and security

Remodeling legacy software

Why high process compliance is no guarantee for good software quality

Opportunities and challenges of high-throughput 3D metrology equipment for semiconductor process control

How we changed the world using silicon-based phased arrays: leaving the Marconi era and entering the directive communications era

High-performance dataflow and in-memory computing architecture for AI at the edge

Understanding complex embedded systems behavior

Will transformers transform computer vision at the edge?

Intelligent diagnostics meets model-based systems engineering

Patterns and antipatterns in high-tech software outsourcing

How (not) to sell technical debt?

Keeping the same organization while expecting better engineering performance? Insanity!

How do we keep the supply chain secure?

Automating maintenance: the way out of the software renovation paradox

Legacy code transformation at Philips Healthcare

Streamlining R&D and QA by eliminating wasteful recalculations​

TROPOMI: From a kitchen table idea to a world renowned atmospheric chemistry instrument

Infrastructure embraces operational technology

The engineering of the James Webb Space Telescope European Instruments: challenges, lessons learned and successes

Virtualization, digital twining, and automation fuel disruptions in systems engineering of backend semiconductor machines

Data factory setup in food processing machinery

The future of space based connectivity

Machines make people better

Life-ready AI is here

The development process of the Powder Load Tool

The path towards 6G: from millimeter waves to THz

Characterization methods for antenna-in-package applications at mm-wave frequencies

High-volume semiconductor test – where every millisecond counts

The development process of the Powder Load Tool

Secure system design

System Engineering @ ASML, practice and challenges

The system thinker – from a lone wolf to a cooperative pack

Spike-based neuromorphic computing for the edge

Liteq 500 for advanced packaging or how to build a litho stepper with a lean team

System evolution through module revolution

TinyML: enabling intelligence at the extreme edge

Data-driven availability reporting for ASML’s lithography machines

Machine learning works in practice not just theory

Digital fruits are also healthy

Mastering the edge: critical factors to enabling edge computing

Streamlining R&D and QA by eliminating wasteful recalculations