June 3, 2015, Society for Information Display Symposium, San Jose, CA –Kathrin Berkner from Ricoh Innovations talked about the advances in light-filed imaging and the basic principles for designing a light-field system. The challenges for an end-to-end system are in managing the data volumes and computational tasks. Among the techniques for capture, plenoptic cameras are…
May 21, 2015, Imagination Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Sir Hossein Yassale from Imagination talked about changes in the industry and markets, driven by trends in computer vision, security, virtual and augmented realities, connectivity, and application portability. Mostly functions interact with people leading to changes in existing markets while increasing and changing them. Some of the emerging…
March 2015 – In the weekend event that was the first annual HardwareCon3, the main session was equally attended at the topic specific breakout sessions. Arranged from introduction to advanced on topics and depth, the 3-4 concurrent breakout sessions were both diverse and well attended. Some of the breakout highlights and topics follow: One of…
February 24, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Yigit Mahsereci from the University of Stuttgart presented work on a hybrid system-in-foil that takes advantage of both thin-film electronics and silicon integration. The combination provides the industry with new capabilities that neither technology can provide alone. The main trick is to thin the silicon to 10-20 um where the…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Jong Mi Lee from Postech in Korea described another possible architecture for ultra-low power reference circuits. The design addresses some of the challenges of other architectures. A CMOS reference uses the threshold voltage as a reference, and is process dependent compared to a bandgap reference which uses Eg, a more…
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,…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Sehat Sutardja from Marvell Semiconductor noted that SoC designs are getting too complicated due to the freezing of the underlying computer architectures. The future of design will have to change to allow for more innovation and flexibility for the end products. The costs of SoC mask sets are doubling with…
December 15, 2014, IEDM, San Francisco—Kaustav Banerjee from UCSB described recent work in the design, fabrication, characterization and studies of skin effect in graphene inductors. The work In many areas, inductors are used for frequency control functions in filters, oscillators, and switches. All of these applications are critical in communications operations, and many applications need…
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…
July 22, 2014, Casual Connect Conference, San Francisco—James Zhang from Concept Art House presented his views on art quality in smaller-scale games. The artwork can affect user engagement and retention, drive the design and monetization of the game, and provide a basis for branding and appeal. Starting out with ads for the game, the quality…