The Kynix Blog - IC Chips

The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards "the Internet of things"—the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes—or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous experimental ultralow-power converters had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.Moreover, the researchers' chip achieves those efficiency improvements while assuming additional responsibilities. Where its predecessors could use a solar cell to either charge a battery or directly power a device, this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.All of those operations also share a single inductor—the chip's main electrical component—which saves on circuit board space but increases the circuit complexity even further. Nonetheless, the chip's power consumption remains low."We still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage," says Dina Reda El-Damak, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. "We need to regulate the input to extract the maximum power, and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best. And we want to do it without compromising the performance, at very limited input power levels—10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt—for the Internet of things."The prototype chip was manufactured through the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's University Shuttle Program.Ups and downsThe circuit's chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery, and the device the cell is powering. If the battery operates for too long at a voltage that's either too high or too low, for instance, its chemical reactants break down, and it loses the ability to hold a charge.To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering, use an inductor, which is a wire wound into a coil. When a current passes through an inductor, it generates a magnetic field, which in turn resists any change in the current.Throwing switches in the inductor's path causes it to alternately charge and discharge, so that the current flowing through it continuously ramps up and then drops back down to zero. Keeping a lid on the current improves the circuit's efficiency, since the rate at which it dissipates energy as heat is proportional to the square of the current.Once the current drops to zero, however, the switches in the inductor's path need to be thrown immediately; otherwise, current could begin to flow through the circuit in the wrong direction, which would drastically diminish its efficiency. The complication is that the rate at which the current rises and falls depends on the voltage generated by the solar cell, which is highly variable. So the timing of the switch throws has to vary, too.Electric hourglassTo control the switches' timing, El-Damak and Chandrakasan use an electrical component called a capacitor, which can store electrical charge. The higher the current, the more rapidly the capacitor fills. When it's full, the circuit stops charging the inductor.The rate at which the current drops off, however, depends on the output voltage, whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip. Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance. El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes. As the current drops, it charges a subset of those capacitors, whose selection is determined by the solar cell's voltage. Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor's path are flipped."In this technology space, there's usually a trend to lower efficiency as the power gets lower, because there's a fixed amount of energy that's consumed by doing the work," says Brett Miwa, who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at the chip manufacturer Maxim Integrated. "If you're only coming in with a small amount, it's hard to get most of it out, because you lose more as a percentage. [El-Damak's] design is unusually efficient for how low a power level she's at.""One of the things that's most notable about it is that it's really a fairly complete system," he adds. "It's really kind of a full system-on-chip for power management. And that makes it a little more complicated, a little bit larger, and a little bit more comprehensive than some of the other designs that might be reported in the literature. So for her to still achieve these high-performance specs in a much more sophisticated system is also noteworthy."Related products:XC7Z100-2FFG900IXC7Z010-1CLG400IA2F200M3F-1FGG256 

Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe today announced a new arrival to its FerVID family of chips for RFID tags. As with all members of the FerVID family, the MB89R112 series uses ferroelectric memory (FRAM) for fast write speeds, high-frequency rewritability, radiation tolerance and low-power operation. With industry-leading 9 KB memory, the series offers tailored solutions for factory automation and medical equipment as well as for embedded and industrial applications.  Since 2004, Fujitsu has developed FRAM products as part of the FerVID family with two frequency bands, for use as chips in high-functionality RFID tags operating in the HF band (13.56 MHz) and UHF band (860 to 960 MHz). Today, its products serve a wide range of applications, including chips for data-carrier tags in the factory automation and maintenance sectors, chips capable of withstanding gamma radiation or electron beams for the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, and chips with serial interfaces for embedded applications.The new MB89R112 series includes 9 KB of FRAM, the greatest density available in an RFID chip operating in the HF band as defined in ISO/IEC 15693. Of this 9 KB, 8 KB is provided as user memory, enabling access by read/write operations to the entire 8 KB region as defined in ISO/IEC 15693. The series will be offered in two variants, with 24pF and 96pF input capacitance. Writing 8 KB of data takes approximately four seconds, a high-speed operation that is six times faster than speeds achieved by E2PROM products. The greater data volume available on RFID tags enables greater efficiency for applications such as product lifecycle traceability management – from manufacturing to logistics, use and disposal – or on-site data logging for equipment maintenance records.The market is demanding higher-capacity memory, plus RFID connectivity to sensors and microcontrollers, so as to facilitate the wireless modification of product operating parameters or the logging of environmental factors during distribution. These features would benefit production control in automotive and electronics manufacturing, as well as maintenance applications in aviation, road-building, construction and civil engineering.The MB89R112QN products enable these features by supplementing the HF RFID interface with an additional SPI serial interface for microcontroller connectivity. Since the 8 KB of user memory in FRAM can be accessed from the microcontroller via SPI, shared memory regions can be used both for data logging and as a parametric area for changing the microcontroller's operating parameters.Application examples include logging environmental readings for logistics, detecting equipment errors, modifying electronic displays, altering sensor threshold values, changing firmware settings, plus many other novel and innovative applications that were previously unworkable. 

Stream video on your smartphone, or use its GPS for an hour or two, and you'll probably see the battery drain significantly. As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features, battery life has become a concern. Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone's battery last perhaps twice as long, and help to conserve energy in cell towers.The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier, a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones' antennas. Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations, where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time, the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage, eating away power—more than any other smartphone component, and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations—and wasting more than half of that power as heat. This means smartphone batteries lose longevity, and base stations waste energy and lose money.But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones) and a shoebox-size module (for base stations)—based on nearly a decade of MIT research—to essentially "switch gears" to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed, cutting the waste."You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that, every few nanoseconds, modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery," explains Joel Dawson, Eta Devices' chief technology officer and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology. "That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high."When trialed in a base station last year, Eta Devices' module became the first transmitter for 4G LTE networks to achieve an average efficiency greater than 70 percent, Dawson says. "The highest number we've heard before that was 45 percent—and that's probably being generous," he says.Backed by millions in funding, Eta Devices—co-founded by David Perreault, an MIT professor of electrical engineering, and former MIT Sloan fellow Mattias Astrom—has partnered with a large base-station manufacturer. The goal is to deploy the technology in live base stations by the end of 2015. The savings could be substantial, Dawson says, noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.Eta Devices has also entered conversations with major manufacturers of LTE-enabled smartphones to incorporate their chips by the end of next year. Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life.Besides battery life, Dawson adds, there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency. Eta Devices' approach could lead to smaller handset batteries, for example, and even smaller handsets, since there would be less dissipating heat. The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world, where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power.And ultimately, it could impact the environment: If all midsized carrier networks were to replace current radio amplifiers with Eta Devices' technology, he says, the reduction in greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking about 5 million cars off the road. "There are so many ways to leverage high efficiency if you have it," Dawson says.In August, the World Economic Forum named Eta Devices the 2015 Technology Pioneer, a designation awarded previously to Dropbox, Spotify, and Twitter, to name a few.In the mobile marketEta Devices' commercial success is, in part, a product of engineering ingenuity intersecting with business acumen at MIT.In 2008, Dawson and Perreault, who directs the Power Electronics Research Group, submitted an early concept of the Eta technology—then called asymmetrical multilevel outphasing (AMO)—to an Innovation Teams (i-Teams) class that brought together MIT students from across disciplines to develop commercial products.The AMO technology was a new transmitter architecture, where algorithms could choose from different voltages needed to transmit data in each power amplifier, and select the optimal choice for power conservation—and do so roughly 20 million times per second. This could be done on the transmitting and receiving end of data transfers.This caught the eye of Astrom, who had come to MIT after working in the mobile industry for 10 years, "looking for the next big thing." With help from Astrom, the professors started designing the technology for the mobile market—initially leaning toward base stations."At the time, I was suffering, as everyone else was, from my iPhone running out of battery at lunchtime," Astrom says. "The iPhone was only a year old, but you could see how much data traffic would explode."Fleshing out a business plan from an i-Teams draft, the two professors earned a Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation grant in 2009, allowing for the first demonstration of the hardware, showing a 77 percent gain in efficiency over standard systems. (A paper detailing the technology was presented at that year's IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.)"That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding and connecting us with local venture capitalists, and really helping with being in that business mindset," Dawson says.Spinning out a company has been the best way to validate the technology—especially with novel power-electronics hardware, Dawson says. "People in our industry take ideas a lot more seriously when there's a company behind it," he says. "We had impressive performance at MIT, but now we have a team of professionals working on the technology full-time. The resulting performance numbers are jaw-dropping. Now people are going back and frantically studying the original MIT research papers."Luckily, Dawson says, several significant changes were made to those old research projects in order to develop today's ETAdvanced—so the secret ingredients of the technology are safe. "The joke I like to tell is: When I was a professor, I was going around the world trying to give the technology away," Dawson says, laughing. "If I had succeeded, then there'd be no business."Future-proofing technologyToday, Eta Devices' major advantage is that its technology is able to handle ever-increasing data bandwidths.A few major smartphone manufacturers are now using envelope tracking (ET), which adjusts voltage to power amplifiers on the fly. But by adjusting that voltage continuously, ET efficiency falls apart for 4G/LTE and 802.11ac (WiFi) wireless standards, even up to 20 MHz bandwidth. ETAdvanced, in contrast, already accommodates ultrahigh bandwidths used by newer communication standards, such as LTE Advanced (up to 80 megahertz), and the next-generation WiFi standard (up to 160 megahertz).Prepping for future communication standards is one thing that's helped the company thrive, Dawson says. "As a small company, you'll lose a fair fight with another technology—you have to have some overpowering advantage that they can't match you on," he says. "In introducing new hardware, you not only have to be better than the product of today, but also have to make compelling case for being future-proof."  

IBM today introduced the fifth generation of semiconductor technology specialized for high performance communications. The company's latest silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip-making process is designed to enable ever-increasing amounts of data to flow through network backbones in applications such as Wi-Fi, LTE cellular, wireless backhaul and high speed optical communications.Since its introduction in 1995, IBM's SiGe semiconductor technology has helped spur a revolution in radio frequency (RF) performance, enabling engineers to develop breakthrough devices such as satellite global positioning systems, WiFi radios and high speed optical links. IBM's new "9HP" SiGe technology continues to put advanced capability in the hands of engineers who design chips for LTE cellular base stations, millimeter-wave wireless communication links, and next generation short and long-haul optical communications. Outside of communications, 9HP performance will advance the state of the art in other applications such as high-performance test equipment, automotive radar and security imaging."Silicon-germanium is one of the key technologies that have enabled wireless operators to keep up with the explosive growth in data traffic generated from mobile handsets," said David Harame, IBM Fellow. "Before SiGe, the high-performance chips used in base stations and optical links were built using expensive, esoteric processes. SiGe provides the necessary performance as well as integration and cost savings via its CMOS base."Open Collaboration is Key to SuccessOver the years, a number of leading technology companies have come to rely on the benefits and advantages of SiGe, working closely with IBM to develop and refine new versions of the chip-making process. IBM believes that open collaboration among companies will drive future breakthrough innovation in semiconductors."As early adopters of IBM's SiGe technology, Semtech has consistently pushed the envelope on what can be achieved in high-speed wired and wireless communications systems and in high performance analog devices," said Charles Harper, Senior Vice President of Semtech's Systems Innovation Group. "With today's technology, Semtech is a leader in 40Gbps and 100Gbps Communications Systems and with IBM's latest SiGe technology we believe we can emerge as a leader in several new analog segments where performance, integration and power are critical requirements.""Our long collaboration with IBM on SiGe technology has enabled Tektronix to break new barriers on what can be achieved in high-fidelity, high-bandwidth oscilloscopes," said Kevin Ilcisin, chief technology officer, Tektronix. "We utilized IBM's SiGe 9HP for our patent-pending asynchronous interleaving approach, and expect to break new ground by providing customers bandwidth capabilities of 70 GHz and beyond while significantly improving our signal-to-noise ratio."Key Technology Details, Specs9HP will be the first SiGe technology in the industry featuring the density of 90nm CMOS which will enable the highest level of integration in a fully production qualified SiGe BiCMOS technology. IBM's new SiGe BiCMOS technology delivers higher performance, lower power and higher levels of integration than current 180nm or 130nm SiGe offerings.The technology maintains compatibility with IBM's 90nm low power CMOS technology platform, enabling foundry clients to port a wide range of intellectual property circuit blocks and standard cell library elements. The 90nm foundry platform also includes an RF CMOS technology option, giving IBM foundry customers a broad range of technology choices for RF and mixed-signal applications.Additional technical specifics include:90nm Lithography based SiGe BiCMOSAdvanced SiGe HBT NPNs, Ft = 300GHz, Fmax > 350GHz90nm CMOS FETs, 1.5, 2.5v/3.3vThick Dielectric Add-On Modules – Low-K, Cu, AlFull Suite of Passives-Resistors, Varactors, MOS and MIM Capacitors, High Q Inductors, mmWave elementsPIN and THz Schottky Barrier DiodesProcess Design Kits featuring precision RF device models 

It's only a centimeter long, it's placed under your skin, it's powered by a patch on the surface of your skin and it communicates with your mobile phone. The new biosensor chip developed at EPFL is capable of simultaneously monitoring the concentration of a number of molecules, such as glucose and cholesterol, and certain drugs.The future of medicine lies in ever greater precision, not only when it comes to diagnosis but also drug dosage. The blood work that medical staff rely on is generally a snapshot indicative of the moment the blood is drawn before it undergoes hours - or even days - of analysis.Several EPFL laboratories are working on devices allowing constant analysis over as long a period as possible. The latest development is the biosensor chip, created by researchers in the Integrated Systems Laboratory working together with the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Group. Sandro Carrara is unveiling it today at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Lisbon.Autonomous operation"This is the world's first chip capable of measuring not just pH and temperature, but also metabolism-related molecules like glucose, lactate and cholesterol, as well as drugs," said Dr Carrara. A group of electrochemical sensors works with or without enzymes, which means the device can react to a wide range of compounds, and it can do so for several days or even weeks.This one-centimetre square device contains three main components: a circuit with six sensors, a control unit that analyses incoming signals, and a radio transmission module. It also has an induction coil that draws power from an external battery attached to the skin by a patch. "A simple plaster holds together the battery, the coil and a Bluetooth module used to send the results immediately to a mobile phone," said Dr Carrara.Contactless, in vivo monitoringThe chip was successfully tested in vivo on mice at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona, where researchers were able to constantly monitor glucose and paracetamol levels without a wire tracker getting in the way of the animals' daily activities. The results were extremely promising, which means that clinical tests on humans could take place in three to five years - especially since the procedure is only minimally invasive, with the chip being implanted just under the epidermis."Knowing the precise and real-time effect of drugs on the metabolism is one of the keys to the type of personalised, precision medicine that we are striving for," said Dr Carrara.  

Engineers at PARC, a Xerox company, have come up with a chip that will self-destruct on command; it was demonstrated at DARPA's Wait, What? event in St. Louis on Thursday.The chip was developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the latter's Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program.Last year, PARC spoke of DARPA's goal, to demonstrate electronic systems capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner. In April 2014, PARC issued a news release, "PARC Awarded Up To $2 Million from DARPA to Develop Vanishing Electronics" in which it revealed its contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a "disappearing electronics" platform called DUST, which stands for Disintegration Upon Stress-Release Trigger."Sophisticated electronics can be made at low cost and are increasingly pervasive throughout the battlefield," the announcement said. "Large numbers can be widely proliferated and used for applications such as distributed remote sensing and communications. However, it is nearly impossible to track and recover every device, resulting in unintended accumulation in the environment, potential unauthorized use, and compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage."The chip, demonstrated at the Thursday event, could be used to store data such as encryption keys but, on command could shatter into pieces so small that it would be it impossible to reconstruct.Military applications come to mind; also, commercial and scientific could find use for the DUST technology.The 2014 announcement noted how in environment science DUST sensors could find use to measure weather patterns such as hurricane predictions or vibrations preceding earthquakes but then be removed from the environment with no footprint. PARC's Sean Garner, part of the DUST project, "Imagine," said Garner, "being able to cover a large area, like the ocean floor, with billions of tiny sensors to 'hear' what is happening within the earth's crust, and have them quickly disintegrate into, essentially, sand, leaving no trace and not harming the planet or sea life."Martyn Williams, senior U.S. correspondent, IDG News Service, reported on the Thursday event; he quoted Gregory Whiting, a PARC senior scientist:"We really wanted to come up with a system that was very rapid and compatible with commercial electronics."A chip is fabricated on a glass substrate. "We take the glass and we ion-exchange temper it to build in stress," said Whiting in the IDG News report.The glass was stressed to breaking point by heat. Reported Williams: "When a circuit was switched on, a small resistor heated up and the glass shattered into thousands of pieces. Even after it broke up, stress remained in the fragments and they continued breaking into even smaller pieces for tens of seconds afterwards." (The self-destruct circuit was triggered by a photo-diode, which switched on the circuit when a bright light fell on it. In the demo, the light was provided by a laser, but the trigger could be anything from a mechanical switch to a radio signal, said Williams.)Beyond a future in security and environmental sciences, Popular Mechanics' John Wenz offered his suggestion for its future. He said it could make for "a great hackathon for people to figure out how to break into a system and shatter the chips (supposing a triggering element is installed internally) in order to either further strengthen the security, or just to be a butthead.