Alum Notes

As readers of our magazine know, we publish about 100 new products each issue. Each one of these products has been designed for use in some kind of electronic end product. During the course of our write-up of the product, we may even give some indication as where it might end up, for example, in battery powered products, cellular base stations, hand tools, and so forth.

Until this issue, we have never commented on where a product that we published—in a sense one of our alumni—actually did end up. So we decided to institute a new feature, which we call "Design Win." This name may not be accurate in every case—maybe we should have used the name at the head of this column—but I think it conveys the correct message. We are describing the actual use of one of the products we wrote about in these pages.

Sometimes, these are referred to as design wins, in other cases I'm sure, it is just a matter of a design engineer reading about the product and then calling the company and ordering a few samples, with the eventual goal to create a prototype of his or her design idea and then to manufacture a finished product.

Why would we publish this information? We thought it would be interesting to revisit a product published in these pages and tell our readers what kind of creative use it was put to. After reading "Design Win," you might slap your forehead and say: "Why didn't I think of that." Or, it might get your own creative juices flowing, knowing what the possibilities are. In any case, you can find "Design Win" on page 14. We think we picked a very interesting application for our first alum note. Let us know what you think.

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