Editors' Blog

From Conductor to Insulator

Graphene is one of those materials under vigorous study for use in future electronics. A single honeycomb layer of carbon atoms, it features high electron mobility but no bandgap, so, on its own, doesn’t work well as a semiconductor.

Add another layer, however, and, as we saw in our note on the next logic gate, interesting things may happen.

In particular, some UC Riverside researchers found that so-called bilayer graphene (BLG), which also has high mobility, can become an insulator … Read More → "From Conductor to Insulator"

MEMS Tool Upgrade

by Dick Selwood

Back when we looked at CMOS-compatible MEMS, we also included a discussion of the MEMS design tools from Coventor. Those tools have just been upgraded. A few of the improvements are natural, even prosaic – 64-bit coverage, a unified GUI, improved Python support. All in the interests of performance, accuracy, and ease of use.

One more subtle change they’ve made gets to the way they do their analysis. The guts of what they provide is a set of solvers to solve the electrostatic, mechanical, and … Read More → "MEMS Tool Upgrade"

Bad Speakers Cast a Bigger Shadow

by Bryon Moyer

Let’s face it: a lot of the speakers we have these days are crappy. I know how my laptop sounds; I used to attribute that partly to what I assumed was a cheap sound card (since, why would you put an expensive one in something with crappy speakers?). Later, I retired that laptop for use as a “gateway” for things like Netflix and Pandora, driving into a monitor that also had speakers. And those speakers also sucked.

But when I connected the laptop audio to real speakers, suddenly I got rich sound like … Read More → "Bad Speakers Cast a Bigger Shadow"

Establishing 3D IC Standards – Or Not

by Kevin Morris

For those of you watching 3D IC advancements, there’s a discussion you might want to come join next week at DesignCon in Santa Clara. Bill Bayer and Sumit DasGupta of Si2 have assembled a panel from Qualcomm, Sematech, Si2, and Xilinx, plus Jim Hogan, to discuss what, if anything, needs to be standardized in the 3D IC world in order to help it build a head of steam.

Standards cut both ways. Done well, they reduce chaos and help provide some direction for market participants. This makes folks less cautious about adopting and driving the … Read More → "Establishing 3D IC Standards – Or Not"

In some countries the cell phone

by Kevin Morris

In some countries the cell phone carrier and the land line carrier is the same company. And it is these guys who are working hard with the femtocell people, particularly as most smart phone users do the heavy downloads, such as software upgrades and adding new apps etc, at home.

… Read More →

Extending Macrocell Life

by Kevin Morris

One of the ways the mobile world is trying to expand its reach and bandwidth is by moving to femtocells. Unlike macro-, micro-, and picocells, which remain outdoors and use the mobile backhaul infrastructure, femtocells typically plug into your home DSL or cable internet, completely bypassing the typical outdoor cellular infrastructure. Makes life easier for the carrier (and harder for the landline provider).

But Ubidyne has just announced active antenna technology that they say mitigates the need to change the cell structure: instead, operators can make better … Read More → "Extending Macrocell Life"

A Faster Fourier Transform

by Dick Selwood

We all had to learn about Fourier transforms in college. That scared some of us away to the safe, contained world of digital logic. But many of you carried on with it, and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) became one of your basic tools.

In fact, at least in the FPGA world, it became the poster child for, “Look what we can do!” Whether it was IP or C-to-RTL or speed, it was always demonstrated on an FFT. Which makes sense, since many digital signal processing functions were moving into FPGAs for performance.

Speeding up FLASH

by Jim Turley

Most of what you hear about FLASH developments relates to capacity. But bandwidth is becoming more critical as we stream more data around – particularly for applications where FLASH is replacing a hard drive. Yes, FLASH is already faster than a disk, but moving to solid-state storage – especially in growing data-intensive areas like cloud computing – will ramp up expectations on how much we can shove down that poor memory’s throat. Digital fois gras anyone?

At least this is how Cadence sees things happening (well, except for the fois gras part). They’ve … Read More → "Speeding up FLASH"

Kionix IMU News 2

by Bryon Moyer

There was more MEMS news today, this time from Kionix, a Cornell spin-off that positions itself among the top 3 providers of accelerometers, along with ST and Bosch.

They announced, among other things, a new accelerator/gyro combo – their first – and a new accelerometer sense element.

Combos aren’t new; we’ve discussed the fact that some integration is monolithic, but not in this case. They use separate chips. Of course, than means that alignment is critical when packaging … Read More → "Kionix IMU News 2"

More Selective Light Sensing

by Amelia Dalton

Smartphones and other similar devices have a number of sensors on them for different purposes. In particular, there are two light-oriented ones that work differently and accomplish different things.

One is an ambient light sensor; it helps decide how bright or dim to make the screen, or perhaps whether your keyboard needs some backlight.

The other is the proximity detector. It works in conjunction with a small IR LED; the sensor measures the reflections of light from that LED to decide whether the sensor is near… something. This is typically used to shut off … Read More → "More Selective Light Sensing"