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…
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…
February 11, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Low-power wireless for short-range communications is becoming widely in demand for such devices as personal area networks, ID cards, and medical applications. The newest radios are operating in a wide range of frequencies and bandwidths to address many diverse applications. for wireless, low power is the key factor. Wee Liang…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—This session focused on RF building blocks that can minimize or eliminate external component in radio systems in wireless systems. The first half of the session looked at the transmission side, mainly for cell phones, and the remainder offered receivers. One interesting paper from David Murphy at Broadcom is a…
October 24, 2012, Renesas DevCon, Anahiem, CA—We talked with Nick Mori and Denis Keeley about the emerging markets for wireless charging and secure MCUs. It turns out that you have to have both characteristics to enable a smart wireless charger that won’t allow external access to the embedded processor in the rechargeable device. NFC devices…
May 24, 2012, MEMS Business Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Jeffery Hilbert from WiSpry discussed the drivers for better performance in mobile devices. Adding RF MEMS and changing driving software can be a cost-effective solution to the problems of current architectures. Mobile phones represent a multi-billion unit market for the RF front-end components. Smart phones are forecast…
In order to address the growing need for computing and electronic processing in portable and high functionality design, TSMC, the worlds largest independent semiconductor manufacturing foundry, released their reference flow 11 for 28nm/22nm processes. The technology driver for these processes has shifted from the historic memory designs, and then processors, to the current System-On-a-Chip (SOC)…