Editors' Blog

Location Simulation

Spirent is getting involved in the sensor world as it crosses with their series of GNSS (satellite navigation) simulators. Inertial sensors, compasses, and satellites can work together, correcting each other and providing backup when the satellite signal is too weak or disappears inside a building.

Spirent’s SimSENSOR MEMS is a simulator intended to allow testing and tuning of the sensor fusion algorithms that combine the satellite and sensor signals to provide a unified location verdict. In particular, they focus on dealing with noise (use of an Allan variance model is part of what they consider … Read More → "Location Simulation"

An Internet Connection for Analog Sensors

by Amelia Dalton

The concept of sensors isn’t new; they’ve been around for a long time. Some of them might seem big and bulky as compared to some of the new MEMS-based upstarts, but they’ve long been important for logging data and monitoring processes.

Many newer sensors are typically built with connectivity in mind, but older ones weren’t. And they’re typically analog. So Lantronix has just announced their xSenso analog device server, which allows you to connect an analog sensor to the internet.

It provides datalogging and remote … Read More → "An Internet Connection for Analog Sensors"

Coast-to-Coast Nanotechnology

by Kevin Morris

Much of the early work on technology is, of course, done in universities. And schools are increasingly collaborating to be more effective. Cornell and Stanford, in particular, are effecting a bicoastal partnership (OK, to those on the East Coast, Ithaca is probably far enough west – being on the foreign side of the Hudson at a latitude where the coast proper has migrated even further east – to qualify as also being on the West Coast, but bear with me.)

They gave a bit of a presentation recently showing what they’re working on. It’ … Read More → "Coast-to-Coast Nanotechnology"

More Efficient Vectors

by Bryon Moyer

In the wake of the UCIS announcement at DAC (which we’ll cover separately later), I sat down with some of Mentor’s functional verification folks to get an update. Coverage was one of the items on their agenda as part of addressing metric-driven verification.

They talk in terms of changing the engineering mindset when it comes to evaluating verification tools. Right now engineers tend to think in terms of “cycles/second”: how fast can you blaze through these vectors? Mentor is trying to change that thought process to “coverage/cycle”: it’s ok to take longer … Read More → "More Efficient Vectors"

Photonics on Different Silicon

by Bryon Moyer

The use of photons as signal carriers has historically gone towards long-distance transport, either over the air (feels like waves more than photons) or within fiber. But the distances of interest have dropped dramatically, to the point where there are discussions of using silicon photonics even for on-chip signaling.

In a conversation at Semicon West with imec’s Ludo Deferm, we discussed their current work. At this point, and for at least 10 years out, he doesn’t see CMOS and photonics co-existing on the same wafer. The bottleneck right now isn’t on-chip; it& … Read More → "Photonics on Different Silicon"

EUV Movement Towards HVM

by Amelia Dalton

When last we talked with Cymer, they had just announced their PrePulse technology that gets more of the energy out of the droplets they blast with a laser. They had achieved 50-W output.

That’s only half-way to what’s needed for production, and, at the time, it was an “open-loop” result. That is, not something that could be repeated over and over in a production setting.

In my discussion with them at Semicon West, they now have 50 … Read More → "EUV Movement Towards HVM"

More Custom Cores

by Amelia Dalton

At DAC, there was a special event for first-time DAC exhibitors to come talk to media folks. Kind of a way for them to get better visibility. One company in particular caught my eye – a small firm called Esencia. They’ve announced their EScala Design Platform.

It’s actually reminiscent of Target Compiler, which we covered about a year ago in a piece on multicore automation. The idea is that they analyze a C or C++ algorithmic program (that is, not … Read More → "More Custom Cores"

Precipitating Out of the Cloud

by Bryon Moyer

Today we took a look at Vector Fabric’s new Pareon tool for parallelizing embedded code, and one of the things that makes it different from their prior tools is that they are no longer offering it in the cloud.

Vector Fabrics was one of the earlier tool vendors to make use of the cloud. Unlike some companies, they used the cloud as their only delivery mechanism. The entire tool GUI was a FLEX application executing in a browser.

450 In Belgium

by Kevin Morris

Changing wafer size is a big deal. You can kiss all your old equipment good-bye and usher in a whole new suite. So what happens when you’re planning to use that wafer size for a new technology node? You really don’t want to have to have two sets of production equipment, one for each side of the wafer-size shift. But it would also be rough to develop a new wafer size at the same time as developing a new technology node. That’s risk upon risk.

I talked with Ludo Deferm at … Read More → "450 In Belgium"

A Non-MEMS Magnetometer

by Bryon Moyer

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about MEMS in these pages, but not all sensors are MEMS. At Semicon West, I got to talk to Becky Oh of PNI Sensors. They make geomagnetic sensors with noise characteristics around 30 times better than Hall-effect sensors, as she tells it. But they’re not MEMS sensors.

They use a material whose permeability changes with the magnetic field. They wrap this material in a coil and then put the resulting variable inductor in an RLC tank and use the oscillation frequency as an indicator of the magnetic … Read More → "A Non-MEMS Magnetometer"