2013 – Page 4 – EEJournal

Germanium-Tin Channel

October 16, 2013

Imec recently issued a press release that, early on, mentioned a “junctionless transistor.” Now… as far as I can remember back, transistors always had junctions. So I completely locked up on the question of what a junctionless transistor even means.

I got a chance to ask them when visiting their site last week. Not only is it simple, but it’s beside the point of the release. What they’re calling a junctionless transistor might simply have been called a JFET back when I was in school. Just made differently. They laid … Read More → "Germanium-Tin Channel"

SPICE-ing It Up

by Kevin Morris

October 15, 2013

SPICE is pretty fundamental to circuit design. That’s obvious for cell and custom designers; for you digital folks, you get exempted only because a cell designer already did the work for you. And, as with everything EDA, things are getting harder to compute with each process node.

Part of it is incremental. New nodes come with increasingly important parasitic modeling. That’s always been the case from generation to generation, not because of new parasitics, but because of old ones that used to be ignored that now mattered. But with FinFETs, you have those < … Read More → "SPICE-ing It Up"

Coding standards-you wait years for a new one and then two come along at once

by Jim Turley

October 6, 2013

Earlier this year MISRA announced a new version of the C coding guidelines, the first for nearly nine years. Now PRQA | Programming Research has produced a major revision of its High Integrity C++ Coding Standard (HIC++) The company is celebrating the tenth birthday of its standard by covering C++11 and revising parts of the standard to reflect user experience and make the standard even more compatible with automatic code analysis tools. And, unlike MISRA, HIC++ is free.

PRQA lists the changes as

Overall consolidation of rules to a more manageable size & … Read More → "Coding standards-you wait years for a new one and then two come along at once"

Triple Patterning Explosion

by Bryon Moyer

September 30, 2013

The type of patterning to be used at a given technology node is determined layer-by-layer. At 10 nm, SADP is planned for metals, but contacts are looking like they’ll require triple patterning, according to Mentor’s David Abercrombie.

We’ve talked about LELE coloring before, and algorithms exist to automatically color a circuit with linear scaling – twice as big a circuit takes twice as long to … Read More → "Triple Patterning Explosion"

Isn’t Sensor Fusion CPU-Agnostic?

by Kevin Morris

September 25, 2013

Sensor fusion is algorithms. And these algorithms are typically executed as software. So that should be simple, right?

Just get your sensor fusion libraries from whomever you prefer (could be the sensor vendor, could be one of the sensor-agnostic folks), and then run it in the processor of your choice.

That processor could be the AP in a phone, although more and more that’s deprecated in favor of sensor hubs and other local, less power-hungry resources. Largely microcontrollers. And there shouldn’t really be any dependence on the specific computing platform chosen & … Read More → "Isn’t Sensor Fusion CPU-Agnostic?"

What is a Maker?

by Kevin Morris

September 24, 2013

They call themselves “Makers.” As far as I can tell, up until a few years ago, the verb “to make” was an everyday garden-variety word used for a million different innocuous things. Like “to get” or “to do.” But somehow the verb – and in particular, those agents of the activity it denotes, got elevated to capitalized status. They’re not “makers”; they’re “Makers.”

What does that mean?

Well, the first thing you notice about it is a certain self-satisfaction. As in, “We aren’t simply sheep that use things; we Make things, and that … Read More → "What is a Maker?"

Comparing Oscillator Temp Compensation

by Kevin Morris

September 19, 2013

MEMS oscillators are making a serious challenge to quartz these days. We looked at Sand 9’s approach recently, but as I thumbed back through other recent announcements, I came back across one that, in retrospect, had some relevant bits to discuss.

Silicon Labs’ earlier announcement focused on the CMOS+MEMS aspect of their work. At the time, I didn’t see anything I could add to the discussion, so I let the announcement</ … Read More → "Comparing Oscillator Temp Compensation"

Why Is Plastic Package News?

by Kevin Morris

September 18, 2013

A new device available in a plastic package. Big news! Wow, no one has ever done that before, right?

In so many other cases, this might be a reasonable reaction to a press release announcing a new plastic package. Except when the topic is MEMS. You can never take anything for granted with MEMS, it would seem. Least of all packaging.

So why is this news? It was a pressure sensor from STMicroelectronics. And here’s the deal: pressure sensors have to be open to the environment. That’s how they access the … Read More → "Why Is Plastic Package News?"

Palladium Hybrid

by Jim Turley

September 17, 2013

Cadence has announced its latest upgrade to their Palladium emulator family. It has many of the usual improvements you might expect – faster execution, higher capacity, better debug, and such. But there are two other new features that are more than incremental.

The first hybridizes verification between a virtual platform and the emulator. This is not the same as, say, simulation acceleration, where a simulator is running a cycle-accurate model and using the emulator to speed up the particularly intensive bits. In that model, the emulator is “slave” to the simulator.

In the … Read More → "Palladium Hybrid"

Intel to Close Fab, Lay Off 700

by Amelia Dalton

September 13, 2013

Intel is closing its Hudson, Mass. fab and will lay off all 700 employees, according to the Boston Globe. Intel first acquired the Hudson fab when it acquired Digital Semiconductor (part of DEC at that time) back in 1998. At the time, Digital Semiconductor was making the amazing StrongARM chip, the fastest ARM-based microprocessor of its day, by a wide margin. After the acquisition, many of StrongARM’s designers fled to PA Semi, which was later acquired by Apple. Thus, many of the … Read More → "Intel to Close Fab, Lay Off 700"