February 25, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Ingrid Verbauwhede from Katholieke Universiteit in Belgium talked about the need for different design approaches and device libraries to address security challenges in the IoT. The growing numbers and types of attack vectors call for changes in design methodologies to take advantage of Moore’s law. The growth of the IoT…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Jaehyuk Choi from Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology described a low-power, 15 fps image sensor for always-on mobile and wearable devices. The ability to run on minimal power opens many new applications for smart sensors beyond taking pictures on a mobile device. This image sensor has two operating modes; ultra-low…
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 17, 2014, IEDM, San Francisco—Tung-Huei Ke from Imec demonstrated the results of an ultra low power (ULP) transponder chip (XPDR) with sub 1V operation This organic CMOS thin film circuits TFTs on foil shows promise for low power operation in IoT applications. . Ubiquitous sensing applications such as body area network (BAN) and environmental…
September 15, 2014, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, San Jose, CA—A team from Stanford EE and CS departments is working out the kinks in Carbon Nanotube (CNT) designs. Their efforts have resulted in the demonstration of a high-energy efficiency computer. The projected values for CNTs are due to their superior electro-static parameters versus Si, and high…
February 13, 2014, Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium, UC-Berkeley, CA—Ana Arias presented work on flexible electronics that can change forms and shapes to provide different measurements for health, medicine, and imaging. These platforms will use other substrates than standard semiconductors, but may be hybrid integration of organic and silicon circuits. Flexible circuits usually are processed…
February 12, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—New materials and technologies are starting to move beyond the lab into new applications. The different semiconductor materials are being deposited on many types of substrates and the component libraries are now rich enough to make microprocessors and PROMs and well as display drivers and analog circuits. Kris Myny from…
August 22, 2013, Hot Interconnects Symposium, San Jose, CA—George Papen from UC San Diego talked about the mixed optical-electrical datacenter and the changes in workloads that can benefit from this infrastructure. Current research indicates that the control plane and optical circuit switches can live together and work well. Scaling out the datacenter in big systems…
February 18, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—Session 6 demonstrated emerging medical and sensor technologies. Contributors included KAIST in Korea, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in UAE, National Chiao Tung Universtiy and China Medical University and ASE in Taiwan, University of Tokyo in Japan, EDA-LITEN in France, Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, ST Microelectroincs…
December 1,2011, Printed Electronics USA 2011, Santa Clara, CA—Janos Veres from PARC detailed the developments in printed logic and memory devices. Their approach is to create technologies and systems in building-block form. PARC has extensive experience in printed sensors, logic, memory, and active matrix backplanes. They continue to push capabilities and limits in all areas…