Finance for Android App

Just over a year ago, during a user experience research trip for Google Finance, we were at the home of a stay-at-home mom / day trader. She was frustrated that there were "personal blackout periods" in the trading day when she was entirely disconnected from the stock market -- for example, while she was ferrying kids around or at lunch with friends. Her situation wasn't unique. During our research visits, we had been hearing similar concerns from people who need to stay connected to the market. With the hope of resolving this dilemma, we started to design and build a finance application for the Android platform in our Google 20% time.

As the Finance for Android application took shape, and the team of 20% engineers grew, we added more features with the aim of allowing users to get stock quotes, market data, and news as fast as possible. If you are following the markets throughout the day, check out the real-time streaming quotes in your portfolio, fast stock look-ups with search auto-suggestion, and 'recent quotes' to make it even easier receive quotes on-the-go. For each stock, you can see detailed quotes, charts and news, and any change you make to your portfolio automatically syncs up with the Google Finance website. So now you don't have to worry about setting up a separate portfolio on your phone.

If you're in the US, you can now download Finance for Android from Android Market.











Posted by Arun Mathew, Lead engineer, and Nick Fey, User experience designer

Fifth Annual Device Packaging Conference

The Fifth Annual Device Packaging Conference (DPC2009) will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona, on March 9-12, 2009. It is an international event organized by the International Microelectronics And Packaging Society (IMAPS). The conference provides a focused forum on the latest technological developments in 6 topic areas related to microelectronic packaging: 3D Packaging; Flip Chip; Wafer Level Packaging; MEMS; BioMedical Devices; and Power LED Devices. While the majority of technical sessions seem to be focused on fabrication, reliability and thermal issues (i.e. Impact of Underfill Design on Package Reliability), advanced packaging technology certainly impacts multi-chip manufacturers. A couple of talks from the technical sessions caught my eye, including:

Tunable Millimeter-Wave Device Based on Waveguide-Packaged MEMS

Compact Square Patch Antenna for Mobile Application

In the poster sessions, look for:

RF and Thermal Analysis of Packaged TGA4046 Q Band Amplifier

Design of Tunable Filter Structures using Multilayer Low Temperature Cofired Ceramics (LTCC)

A Unique Process for Hermetic Wafer Level Packaging


The full conference and exhibition information is at:

http://www.imaps.org/devicepackaging

RF SoP Co-design

This month's lead story in Microwave Journal looks at the state of System on Package technology as package device features move to the nano-scale. With such high density, the co-design of RF System on Package (SoP) is an evolving concern among multi-chip module manufacturers and the EDA companies that support this complex technology. Our editors posed a number of related questions to AWR, Agilent and Mentor Graphics on co-design, simulation and design flows for multi-chip modules and advanced packaging. The following MWJ exclusives take a look at this evolution.

Mentor Graphics:EDA/RF SoP Co-Design>


Agilent:EDA/RF SoP Co-Design>


AWR:EDA/RF SoP Co-Design>