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, Ryohei Funatsu from NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories described a 133 M pixel, 60 fps CMOS image sensor for use in the coming 8k TV systems. This next-generation system is expected to start test broadcast services next year, with initial 8k rollout starting in 2018, to iron out…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Atsushi Suzuki from Sony presented details of a large 20 M pixel image sensor. The goals for the new sensor include low noise, high speed and resolution, and simultaneous video and still outputs. Some of the key technologies for implementing this design were double column ADC, parallel multiple sampling, data…
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 2015 – The cost of developing new process nodes and validating the libraries is getting prohibitive. As a result, the processor groups are slowing down Moore’s law by holding on the same node as last year and now moving to design and layout optimization to improve power and performance characteristics. This theme was repeated…
February 2015 – At the ISSCC conference in San Francisco, AMD presented their latest APU architecture on their new processor codename “Carrizo”. The Accelerated Processing Unit (APU)is designed for notebooks and low-power desktop designs and features an advanced power management technology. It is expected that the Carrizo to reduce the power consumed by the new…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Aatmesh Shrivastava from PsiKick detailed the workings of a 32 nW bandgap reference that is operational from 0.5 V. The IoT will need to have very low power reference sources to help the rest of the device(s) meet realistic battery life requirements. Reference voltage is used in many analog blocks…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Long Xu from Delft University described a current sensing ADC with +/- 30 V input common-mode input range. The likely applications include remote sensing, motor control, and current monitoring where weak differential signals are in a very high common-mode voltage setting. The basic technology is to have a load at…
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…