Matt Galla had a serious case of engineer’s block. All he needed was the push of inspiration to be able to see a legacy design in a whole new light. Eventually, that inspiration came from an unlikely source — beer. The problem “We’ve had a business in TE Circuit Protection providing safe and reliable solutions when customers need resettable devices

HARRISBURG, Pa.–Innovation is a beautiful word with an almost poetic ring to it, but actually doing it–succeeding at it–is not easy. Indeed, a lot of startups fail, but that's part of what makes progress–failure. In the electronics world, established companies have their own challenges with respect to innovation. Don't get fat and lazy is one. How do you keep your

HARRISBURG, Penn.–It’s trite but true: companies (and people) who don’t adapt are doomed to (best-case) fail or (worst-case) die. But this is particularly challenging today when the voice of the customer’s customer (or some non-customer actor) is so much louder than ever. In more consumer electronics applications, social media communications trends drove handset design for several years; today it’s apps

(Odometer: 5,810 miles) HARRISBURG, Pa.–Nearly 550 miles from here, we posed this question to Allan Dale of Lectronix. Sitting in TE Connectivity’s innovation room here, we put the same question to engineering director Steve Jackson and Galen Martin, product development engineer: What qualities make a good engineer? Martin had a similar response to Dale, and Jackson took it a step

Phoenix  and San Francisco, September 13, 2011 – Avnet Express and UBM Electronics, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry‘s decision makers, today announced that TE Connectivity (NYSE: TEL), formerly Tyco Electronics, has joined the Drive for Innovation, a multi-faceted campaign celebrating innovation in electronics engineering as a supplier sponsor.

Getting TE Connectivity to sponsor the Drive for Innovation was the easy part. They get the story line. They’re bringing really creative innovation to an area that’s usually overlooked by most people: interconnects. They’re in the Volt in a big way, as we’ve seen in the Connecting with the Volt and Innovation in Interconnects posts and segments. They’re good at

Innovation rests on innovation. In our earlier segment with TE Connectivity’s Adam Tyler, he described the company’s new HVA 280 connector and its automotive-electronics application. The HVA 280, prompted by the Chevy Volt design, was built thanks to the lessons of the TE Connectivity’s earlier HVA 400 series, Tyler said. More design resources That device was an inline connector designed

(Odometer: 2,485 miles) TROY, Mich.–When it comes to automotive design and connectors (and especially in the era of high-voltage electronics), it's all about "redundancy on top of redundancy," says Adam Tyler, development engineer at TE Connectivity's Automotive Alternative Power Systems Development Group (Troy, Mich.). (TE was formerly Tyco Electronics). It's particularly true today as we sit on the edge of