Editors' Blog

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 … Read More → "New lower-power transceivers"

Taking the Temperature

by Jim Turley

Three of this year’s ISSCC’s sensor papers related to temperature sensors, although with different approaches and goals.

The first of them addresses the needs of tough environments such as those that automotive and military applications require. Their main motivator was the fact that, at high temperatures, traditional on-chip bipolar junction transistor (BJT) temperature sensors become much less accurate, so designers end up opting for off-chip thermistors and such.

So their idea was not to measure temperature through transistor characteristics, but rather to measure the thermal diffusivity – how fast heat travels, … Read More → "Taking the Temperature"

Getting Away from Rare Materials

by Kevin Morris

Every couple months or so it’s not hard to find some mention somewhere in the mainstream media about the industrial world’s vulnerability with respect to rare materials. Obviously, anything that’s actually rare has a limited supply overall. In other cases, there may be lots of material, but if it’s locked up in one country, then that country has the potential to create scarcity at will. Makes everyone just a tad jumpy.

Not being a materials scientist per se, it’s always amazed me that some specific bizarre metal … Read More → "Getting Away from Rare Materials"

Next Generation Firewall and Other Apps

by Kevin Morris

Netronome is building onto their flow-processing platform by layering software over the top. They just announced several “application kits”, including intrusion detection/prevention, SSL, IPsec, and deep packet inspection, but headlining the whole thing with a next-generation firewall application.

They explained a bit of the firewall scene first by pointing out that the firewalls we think of that protect our computers or homes or businesses are a small … Read More → "Next Generation Firewall and Other Apps"

Better VIP Performance

by Bryon Moyer

As SoC designs have ballooned in size and scope, so has the effort required to verify them. A big part of what makes such large designs possible is the use of IP, especially for complex protocols. So that IP needs to play into the verification of the SoC.

But, while IP has raised the level of abstraction for design, it has lagged behind in verification. As Synopsys sees it, even just the complexity of design that’s now possible has driven up the verification burden tremendously due to what is now a scenario count twenty times … Read More → "Better VIP Performance"

Accounting for bondwire effects

by Kevin Morris

It’s ISSCC week, and I got to see some interesting things, some of which go beyond interesting and possibly to significant. My focus was on MEMS, sensors, and emerging technologies. I’ll be following up on a number of bits and bobs here over the next several days.

In the MEMS/sensor realm, as was the case last year (where we did an entire series of sensor articles), the focus at ISSCC was on the conditioning circuits for sensors rather than the sensors themselves. … Read More → "Accounting for bondwire effects"

Missing LED Details

by Amelia Dalton

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"

What Comes Around… Is Reflected?

by Bryon Moyer

With higher-frequency (GHz) signals becoming more prevalent on trusty old-school FR-4 boards, it’s become increasingly important to test the quality of the lines – specifically, their insertion loss (SDD21) – as a PCB manufacturing step. The problem is that you have to probe both ends of a trace in order to do this. Not so hard in the lab, but high-volume testers aren’t really built for that – they want to probe in one place.

Two years ago at DesignCon, Intel proposed a new method of determining the insertion loss by taking time-domain … Read More → "What Comes Around… Is Reflected?"

A Diving Board, Water Drop, and Flashlight

by Amelia Dalton

Two gentlemen at the Institut d’Electronique, de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie (IEMN) at the University of Lille in France, have demonstrating an interesting proof of concept of a new mechanical switching mechanism that relies on the interplay between mechanical and capillary forces as well as how “wet” a drop can get.

The concept is based upon the fact that the wetting properties of a droplet – that is, how easily it spreads out on a surface – can be changed capacitively. Placing a drop on a thin insulator with a semiconductor … Read More → "A Diving Board, Water Drop, and Flashlight"

Engineering GaN Wafers

by Bryon Moyer

We talked before about wide bandgap materials such as GaN and SiC, but how are the base wafers for those materials created? Full wafers of expensive material would be, well, expensive. But if you grow or somehow affix the material on a base material of some other sort, you run the risk of having thermal issues at the boundary (at the very least).

Sumitomo and Soitec announced a joint approach recently that provides a GaN layer on top of some other substrate. The key is … Read More → "Engineering GaN Wafers"