The standouts

This year we had more entries for the Product of the Year Awards than ever before. Our editors spent weeks of debate in closed-door meetings and narrowed the field to the best of the best. With all of the great products that came out in 2008, choosing the winners was no easy task.

Overall the year turned out to be one of real savings and innovation. We saw savings of one kind or another, such as cost, space, energy, and design time. On top of that, some products challenged traditional thinking.

A sampling

For instance, Molex’s Solder Charge surface-mount attach technology is more precise than melting a solder ball onto a metal lead. It also is designed to improve yields and decrease scrap costs.

Intel’s X25-E Solid State Disk Drives are capable of changing the economics of enterprise data centers by increasing server, workstation, and storage system performance over hard-disk drives.

And the DS 1000E Digital Storage Oscilloscopes from RIGOL Technologies has great price/performance. It offers up to the 1-Gsample/s sampling rate with up to 1 Mbyte of memory.

These are just a few of the products selected as winners for the 33rd annual Product of the Year Awards. The other were all just as impressive!

The journey

Many of these products started their journey to a Product of the Year Award in Electronic Products Magazine or on electronicproducts.com as new products or product highlights. That means some of you have already used them for your designs or even have sampled parts. Some of the technologies behind them were even covered in the Outlook section.

For those of you who haven’t, this is the prefect time to take a look at these great products.

For 2009, we look forward to covering the newest and best products and technologies out there, not to mention delivering great technical articles, to help you stay at the forefront in your design efforts.

Bryan DeLuca Managing Editor