June 2, 2015, Society for Information Display Symposium, San Jose, CA—Robert Li Kam Wa from Rice University talked about rethinking the imaging pipeline for energy-efficient, privacy-preserving continuous mobile vision. The always-on world has been adding more and higher resolution imaging capabilities, so the industry has to consider how to protect the information. The primary changes…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Willy Sansen from Katholieke Universiteit in Belgium looked at the history of analog CMOS designs and applied some of the developments and solutions to analog designs going into the 5 nm generation. The challenges of analog design remain fairly constant independent of the underlying process technologies. In the early ’70’s,…
December 16, 2014, IEDM, Sn Francisco—Chih-Ming Hung from MediaTek talked about the changes in architectures to implement RF transceivers to minimize the effects of device variability and process variations. The added intelligence is still constrained by the need for some device matching and device level enhancements. The strong demand for high performance affordable handsets has…
December 16, 2014, IEDM, San Francisco—Ken Chang from Xilinx described their efforts in designing and characterizing analog sub-functions in advanced node CMOS technologies. The high device parametric variability of active and passive devices requires specialized design techniques for stable, high-performance circuits. The increasing speeds for data transmission is affecting storage, and computer architectures. Scaling process…
September 16, 2014, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, San Jose, CA—Jan Westra from Broadcom described their efforts in making a multi-channel 10Gbase-T chip. The alternative of copper over short distances can easily supplement the optical fiber for the rest of the 10G Ethernet network in the datacenter. One problem with copper is that the wire bundles…
September 11, 2014, Intel Developers Forum, San Francisco—A collection of audio experts talked about new approaches for improving audio. These new approaches can change how we interact with our various devices and enable novel capabilities. Novel applications for voice and audio include security, privacy, and diaries and improved transcription. The voice can be a part…
February 11, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Advanced biomedical systems are combining integrated sensors and actuators to offer better data and improved comfort and usability at the point of care. These systems not only help to reduce the cost of healthcare, but enable early diagnosis, personal point of care, and therapy outside of traditional clinical settings. This…
namm 2014 – Anaheim January 23-26 January 7, 2014, Joe Lamond presented an overview of NAMM and its upcoming show. The show takes thousands of people to make it happen and demonstrates new ideas, shares best practices, and offers an opportunity for the music merchants and industry to get together. The annual event has taken…
September 23, 2013, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, San Jose, CA—Mark Horowitz from Stanford described the steps needed to increase analog design reuse and facilitate greater design automation. As ICs grew from simple SSI chips to today’s SoCs, the tools for digital design enabled much higher levels of abstraction, which allowed for greater automation and design…
February 18, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—Session 10 offered some interesting implementations of various analog building-block functions. Contributors included university of Twente and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Toyohashi University of Technology and Electronics Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Japan, NXP Semiconductor, Broadcom, Oregon State, MIT, TI, Katholic University at Leuven Belgium, Pohang University…