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 2014 – At the 60th IEDM conference in San Francisco, IMEC presented a talk on using traditional CMOS processing for enhancing imaging systems. The presentation focused on the the creation of an integrated hyperspectral and multispectral imager. Typical consumer imagers have a three color spectral pickup – Red, Green, and Blue. Many industrial, medical…
July 7, 2014, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—An Steegen from IMEC described the requirements and readiness of next-generation processes for semiconductors. The production of semiconductors beyond 14nm is going to challenge our existing design and manufacturing flows and will take new devices and technologies to replace out CMOS infrastructure. The general industry directions are for…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Mark Horowitz from Stanford talked about the need to change our views of computing and energy use. Even though Moore and Dennard promised lower costs and higher performance with every generation, we are hitting some fundamental limits. Computers, or microprocessors are showing up everywhere, even in disposable greeting cards. But…
February 3, 2014, Photonics West, San Francisco—Roger Howe from Stanford described his work in electrical-mechanical switches. This work will allow further investigations into alternatives to CMOS. Relays can be used to it is logic elements, since they have discrete on and off properties. Some applications for MEMS switches include RF filters and charge-based measurements One…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA—Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems technology office at DARPA and former Intel manager, sees the end of Dennard scaling within the next decade, resulting in Moore’s Law becoming a purely economic function. The coming end of Moore’s Law is something that the industry looks at like watching…
May 2012 – With the launch of the new Intel core processors including Thunderbolt (TB) as a native interface, the availability of the connector and socket is rising. Intel identified at least 100 TB products by end of year 2012, and a quick rise in 2013. To address this market and the power constraints brought…
April 26, 2012, GSA Silicon Summit, Mountain View, CA—Roawen Chen from Marvell Semiconductor moderated a panel on extending the life of CMOS. Panel members included Jim Aralis from Microsemi, Paul Boudre from Soitec, Shung Chieh from Aptina Imaging, Matt Crowley from Tabula, and Pushkar Ranade from SuVolta. Chen noted that the topic has been around…
November 15, 2011, Nanotechnology Council Symposium, Santa Clara, CA–Hughes Metras from LETI described research results for nanotechnology optical communications. The photonics on silicon and 3-D integration in CMOS will help to address the power issues. Leti is a research organization in Grenoble, France that is working on some of the main challenges facing industry and…