We’ve talked about Atmel’s touch activities before, both with respect to their controllers and their stylus venture (which also features their controllers). To date, they haven’t been overtly participating in the business of creating actual touchscreens.
But, behind the scenes, they’ve spent the last couple years developing a new projected capacitance (P-CAP) technology</ … Read More → "Atmel Takes On the Actual Screen"
On the heels of their Verdi3 announcement, Springsoft continues its triplication, now with Laker3. They position Laker as the “best established interoperable custom design flow.” As with all carefully-crafted positioning statements, the key qualifier they use here is “interoperable.” This refers both to the fact that they use the OpenAccess database and to their ability to integrate with Mentor’s RealTime engine for on-the-fly … Read More → "Another 3 from Springsoft"
Back when discussion CMOS-compatible MEMS, I briefly mentioned a couple tools from Coventor that are used in MEMS design. But one of them actually has use for any semiconductor process. You might think it’s another TCAD tool, but actually, it isn’t.
TCAD tools work with low-level physics to model small portions of an overall process. It’s like using SPICE to simulate a cell – very detailed, but can& … Read More → "Simulating the Whole Process"
Chips that have reached, or are approaching, their end of life have been a perennial problem for systems makers for years. And the solutions have varied over time, with lifetime buys or the selling of the chip design to another company specializing in keeping older technology alive for longer than the original maker is interested in.
I remember seeing an email years ago from a Japanese customer that had decided they needed more of a long-obsolete chip. Their simple request was, “Can you please open up that fab again and make us some more? Kthanxbai.” … Read More → "Graychip Alternatives"
With Android adoption continuing at a quick pace, there are more and more platforms available for users to choose from. But they don’t all perform equally. So how can developers (or even users) get a good sense of how the base system works?
You might think of just taking a particular app and trying it on different machines to compare. But the performance of a given app on a given system is highly dependent on the compiler optimizations used, so relying on that might amount to comparing the software builds more than the actual systems.</ … Read More → "Benchmarking Android"
EE Journal is rolling out the most fantastic contest EVER! Yes, if I do say so myself…because this year, we are unveiling the super ultra fantastic Contest “FIND AMELIA AT ESC/DESIGN WEST 2012.” The first person who finds me and mentions a MAX V CPLD Development Kit will win a kit of their very own.
Here’s the deal: I will be trolling the expo show floor at ESC/Design West this year. The first … Read More → "Find Amelia at ESC/Design West 2012"
RFID tags are everywhere, but they’re rather primitive as high-tech devices go. They’re programmed to do one thing: repeat a message over and over, like so many seagulls chanting, “Mine. Mine. Mine.” And, like a flock of seagulls, if you get a bunch of them going, then it’s hard to tell what any one of them is saying.
This can limit usage of RFID tags in situations where there are a lot of them very close together – say, in the back of a delivery truck. If you want … Read More → "Less Back-Talk"
A few weeks back we took a look at Cadence’s collaboration with Samsung in readying 28-nm technologies, with 20 nm on the way. Turns out, Samsung has been busy… Mentor has subsequently announced 20-nm DFM capabilities developed with and delivered to Samsung. The focus as announced was on identifying hot spots, pattern-matching layout checks, and yield monitoring.
Meanwhile, Cadence also announced their Encounter improvements for handling the kinds of mammoth designs … Read More → "The 20-nm Drumbeat"
In this business, I end up going to a lot of conferences on a lot of different topics. Now, I was trained as an engineer and have worked closely with technology for a long time. But it’s also been many years since I was a practicing engineer. And it’s been even longer – college, mostly – since I had to do much of anything with analog circuits or transistor device physics or any of dozens of specialized topics that come together to make our industry possible. And no, Mom, after all these years, I … Read More → "A Conference Presentation Figure of Merit"
Two releases came out within a few days of each other that make very similar claims for very different reasons, with neither of them providing the real data that would back the claim.
On Monday, Plessey announced that they were cutting the cost of high-brightness LEDs by going to 6” GaN-on-Si technology; they were acquiring CamGaN, a Cambridge spin-out. They make their cost comparison to SiC or sapphire technology.
Then, on Tuesday, Cree announced that it was doubling the lumens/dollar (or, conversely, cutting the cost of a lumen in half) for its SiC technology. … Read More → "Missing LED Details"
