Zigbee rolled out their latest revision late last year: 3.0. I sat with Zigbee Alliance CEO Tobin Richardson right as he had arrived back in country from Europe. Alas, I didn’t manage to find a way to turn any jet lag to my advantage. (Gotta work on that…) He summed up the main contribution that this new revision brings: unification of all the profiles. The intent … Read More → "Zigbee 3.0 Released"
This one is for those of you that are interested in language. Our industry tends to take a lot of liberties with language (largely, I think, because we’re engineering majors, not English majors, and we fired all the literate production people years ago when we learned how to use Word.)
So, for instance, we routinely eliminate the spaces and hyphens between numbers and units (did you know that “5 … Read More → "Drawings as Cartoons?"
With semiconductors, we have this expectation that, at some future time, we’ll be able to integrate everything onto a single chip. Analog, digital, MEMS… you name it.
And, theoretically, we will be able to. In fact, we probably can now. Do we? Nope. And it’s even less likely as we keep moving forward.
Why? Because the most advanced wafers are freakin’ expensive. If there’s a bunch of your stuff that will work at 28 or 180 nm, you’re going to do that because it’s so much cheaper than, say, 14 nm. And if … Read More → "Monolithic Plastic… Or Not"
A while back, when looking at Elliptic Labs ultrasonic gesture recognition, we mentioned that they were able to do this based on the fact that Knowles microphones worked in the ultrasonic range. But they weren’t willing to say much more about the microphones.
With all the delicacy involved in the advanced lithography techniques we use for patterning exquisitely small features onto wafers, occasionally we come back to a brute-force approach: nanoimprint lithography (NIL). Instead of painstakingly exposing patterns onto a photoresist, we simply press a patterned die (PS this is the kind of die whose plural is “dies,” not the singulated silicon bits whose plural is “dice”) into a bed of moosh to create a pattern as if making an old-school vinyl record. Harden … Read More → "New Nanoimprint from EVG"
A couple months ago I did a survey of Internet of Things (IoT) standards – or, more accurately, activities moving in the direction of standards, since it’s kind of early days yet.
And in it, I was a bit harsh with one standard… oneM2M. I found it dense and somewhat hard to penetrate, with language that didn’t seem clear or well-explained. The status at the time – and currently (for a bit longer) was as a candidate release, … Read More → "IoT Standards: a oneM2M Follow-UP"
November would appear to be Conference Month.
Of course, no one has conferences in the summer. Oh, wait! Semicon West does! OK, well, most folks assume no one is home during summer, so they wait until fall. Can’t do December because of the holidays… September, well, everyone is getting back from summer… October? Yeah, a few sprinkled here and there. And then there’s November.
Conferences … Read More → "If This Is a Conference, then It Must Be November"
A while back, we took a look at a couple of new resonant wireless charging approaches, including PowerByProxi. Their charging pad consists of multiple coils, allowing them to energize only the coils underneath a device being charged, and allowing multiple devices to charge independently and aiding efficiency.
To help drive adoption, they’ve released an evaluation kit consisting of a transmitter and two receiver modules. It will allow testing of device charging up to the rate of 7.5 W.
Read More → "PowerByProxi Eval Kits"
We’ve seen gesture recognition before, and the two major modes, if you will, are using cameras (either 2- or 3-D) to “see” and interpret gestures and using inertial sensors to detect hand motion and infer gestures.
Thalmic is about to launch its own gesture control armband, but they rely on a completely different source of information for detecting gestures: muscle movements. Or, more accurately, the electrical signals that govern muscle movement.
The measurement technique is called “electromyography” (EMG), and the device they’re building is called the Myo. … Read More → "Muscling Up"
We recently looked at Applied Materials’ solution to the challenges of lining small vias: using cobalt. But those are through-dielectric vias. What about through-silicon vias (TSVs)? After all, they can be a thousand times deeper than a standard via, so if a standard via is hard to cover, imagine how hard it must be for a TSV.
Of course, we’re talking a wider via, but AMAT says that standard physical vapor deposition (PVD) tools do an inadequate job of coating the … Read More → "TSVs: Like Vias, Only 1000X Deeper"
