editor's blog
Subscribe Now

New lower-power transceivers

As the number of sensors and autonomous units of various flavors continues to increase, the need for them to communicate with as little power as possible continues to grow. To date, those in search of the lowest power have had to turn to proprietary communication protocols, with the obvious downside being that they’re proprietary.

Imec, in collaboration with Panasonic, recently announced that they’ve reduced the power in standard protocols like Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy, and the scheme used for body area networks (BANs) by a factor of 3 to 5, bringing energy use down to 2.7 nJ/bit. They did this by re-engineering the transmitter analog circuits, turning them into digitally-controlled analog.

While this doesn’t reduce the power to the level of the best proprietary schemes, it does bring them within a much closer range (perhaps 2x off instead of 10x).

More details can be found in their release.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Mar 18, 2024
Innovation in the AI and supercomputing domains is proceeding at a rapid pace, with each new advancement heralding a future more tightly interwoven with the threads of intelligence and computation. Cadence, with the release of its Millennium Platform, co-optimized with NVIDIA...
Mar 18, 2024
Cloud-based EDA tools are critical to accelerating AI chip design and verification; see how NeuReality leveraged cloud-based chip emulation for their 7NR1 NAPU.The post NeuReality Accelerates 7nm AI Chip Tape-Out with Cloud-Based Emulation appeared first on Chip Design....
Mar 5, 2024
Those clever chaps and chapesses at SiTime recently posted a blog: "Decoding Time: Why Leap Years Are Essential for Precision"...

featured video

We are Altera. We are for the innovators.

Sponsored by Intel

Today we embark on an exciting journey as we transition to Altera, an Intel Company. In a world of endless opportunities and challenges, we are here to provide the flexibility needed by our ecosystem of customers and partners to pioneer and accelerate innovation. As we leap into the future, we are committed to providing easy-to-design and deploy leadership programmable solutions to innovators to unlock extraordinary possibilities for everyone on the planet.

To learn more about Altera visit: http://intel.com/altera

featured paper

Reduce 3D IC design complexity with early package assembly verification

Sponsored by Siemens Digital Industries Software

Uncover the unique challenges, along with the latest Calibre verification solutions, for 3D IC design in this new technical paper. As 2.5D and 3D ICs redefine the possibilities of semiconductor design, discover how Siemens is leading the way in verifying complex multi-dimensional systems, while shifting verification left to do so earlier in the design process.

Click here to read more

featured chalk talk

Non-Magnetic Interconnects
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Samtec
Magnets and magnetic fields can cause big problems in medical, scientific, industrial, space, and quantum computing applications but using a non-magnetic connector can help solve these issues. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and John Riley from Samtec discuss the construction of non-magnetic connectors and how you could use non-magnetic connectors in your next design.
May 3, 2023
36,518 views