The Kynix Blog

Exar announces the XR77103 Universal PMIC, Exar's first Universal PMIC with three integrated synchronous MOSFET power stages.  This integration results in an even smaller solution than was possible before, a tiny, 4mm x 4mm IC which delivers an easy-to-use power management solution for a broad range of FPGAs, SoCs, DSPs and video processors.The XR77103 features an I2C interface allowing customers to control output voltage (from 0.8V to 6V), switching frequency (from 300kHz to 2.2MHz), power sequencing, and current limit. The XR77103 is supported by a new release of PowerArchitect™ 4 design and configuration software.The XR77103 operates from a 4.5V to 14V input supply and all three outputs are designed for 2A load currents with peak currents up to 3A.  Since the device employs a current mode control architecture, outputs can be easily paralleled to provide up to a total of 5A allowing the XR77103 to power a range of low power processors.  A selectable Pulse Skipping Mode (PSM) results in improved efficiency at light loads, a key feature in meeting standby energy requirements or extending battery life.As the device supports up to a 2.2MHz switching frequency and is packaged in a 4x4mm QFN, it requires fewer and smaller external components, saving engineers valuable board space in their next design.  This family also includes two versions of the XR77103 which offer a fixed set of features for designers not requiring the I2C interface. The XR77103ELB-A0R5 and -A1R0 are fixed at switching frequencies of 500kHz and 1MHz, respectively.  Both products feature a 0.8V, high accuracy reference (1%) and their output voltages are set by external resistors.The XR77103ELB, XR77103ELB-A0R5 and XR77103ELB-A1R0 are available in RoHS compliant, green/halogen free, space-saving 4x4 QFN packages.    

Jake Dyson, son of Dyson founder James, has staked out his corner in the engineering innovation world with a focus on LED solutions, the Jake Dyson Light. He has in turn been doing a rethink on the characteristics and function of a desk light. He proudly states his LED light solution goes past other designers who have tried to cool LEDs with "half-hearted" attempts. Jake said their lights were built to fail. Dyson and team have come up with a light that cools LEDs properly. Benefit to consumers? A light that lasts for 37 years. Conventional lights neglect to protect LEDs from heat, exposing them to temperatures of up to 130°C. This damages the LEDs' phosphorous coating and degrades brightness and color, said his site.His desk lamp solution: CSYS task lights -Operating at 55°C and making use of "heat pipe technology" the Dyson solution can direct heat away from the LEDs. They lose neither quality nor efficiency for 37 years.Eight LEDs provide 587lx of white light for 37 years. Each is in a conical reflector to eliminate glare.How does he know his product lasts for 37 years? The number was calculated based on IES TM-21-11, he said. The 37 years (or 160,000 hours) is based on 12 hours of continual use per day. (IES stands for Illuminating Engineering Society. TM-21-11 provides a method to determine when the useful lifetime of an LED is reached, a point when the light emitted from an LED depreciates to a level no longer considered adequate for a specific application.)What does he mean by heat pipe technology? "Heat is drawn away from the LEDs using technology typically found in satellites. It's dissipated through an aluminium heat sink, which forms the light's horizontal arm," according to the site.Looking back at how this was developed, he said the process involved looking at, analyzing, lighting. The key goal was not to design things that look good, he said, but to try to improve efficiency with engineering. He said he spent some months looking at problems with lighting, and the big problems that stood out were the lack of direction of light. The arm of the light was positioned by springs and pillars and those wear out over time, he said. So wherever you position your light, it would drop.Dyson initiated a mechanism —the light moves up and down and rotates and moves in and out. Where you position the mechanism for light is where it is. The LEDS were also repositioned for an even spread of light.His site said whereas "conventional lights rely on tension to stay in position, CSYS task lights use gravity." The arm moves vertically using a counterweight pulley system inspired by the construction crane. It extends 27.5 cm horizontally along anti-friction bearings. The zinc alloy base rotates through 360°, and is weighted to increase stability. One can position the light where required with the touch of a fingertip. It moves vertically, horizontally and rotationally through 360°. The LEDs use only a fifth of the energy of a conventional halogen bulb. The product prices are listed on the Dyson site.To cool LEDS is critical to the LED market, he said. Gizmag's Nick Lavars noted how "Efforts to keep LED bulbs cool has been a focus for manufacturers working to drag the technology into the mainstream. While LEDs won't get as hot as the incandescent cousins, they do still generate heat, which sees their brightness and color deteriorate over time."

Chemists at the University of Waterloo have developed a long-lasting zinc-ion battery that costs half the price of current lithium-ion batteries and could help enable communities to shift away from traditional power plants and into renewable solar and wind energy production.Professor Linda Nazar and her colleagues from the Faculty of Science at Waterloo made the important discovery, which appears in the journal, Nature Energy.The battery uses safe, non-flammable, non-toxic materials and a ph-neutral, water-based salt. It consists of a water-based electrolyte, a pillared vanadium oxide positive electrode and an inexpensive metallic zinc negative electrode. The battery generates electricity through a reversible process called intercalation, where positively-charged zinc ions are oxidized from the zinc metal negative electrode, travel through the electrolyte and insert between the layers of vanadium oxide nanosheets in the positive electrode. This drives the flow of electrons in the external circuit, creating an electrical current. The reverse process occurs on charge.The cell represents the first demonstration of zinc ion intercalation in a solid state material that satisfies four vital criteria: high reversibility, rate and capacity and no zinc dendrite formation. It provides more than 1,000 cycles with 80 per cent capacity retention and an estimated energy density of 450 watt-hours per litre. Lithium-ion batteries also operate by intercalation—of lithium ions—but they typically use expensive, flammable, organic electrolytes."The worldwide demand for sustainable energy has triggered a search for a reliable, low-cost way to store it," said Nazar, a Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials and a University Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry. "The aqueous zinc-ion battery we've developed is ideal for this type of application because it's relatively inexpensive and it's inherently safe."The global market for energy storage is expected to grow to $25 billion in the next 10 years. The bonus for manufacturers is they can produce this zinc battery at low cost because its fabrication does not require special conditions, such as ultra-low humidity or the handling of flammable materials needed for lithium ion batteries."The focus used to be on minimizing size and weight for the portable electronics market and cars," said Dipan Kundu, a postdoctoral fellow in Nazar's lab and the paper's first author. "Grid storage needs a different kind of battery and that's given us license to look into different materials."Water in the electrolyte not only facilitates the movement of zinc ions, it also swells the space between the sheets, like tiers of a wedding cake, giving the zinc just enough room to enter and leave the positive structure as the battery cycles. The electrode material's nano-scale dimensions and the battery's high-conductivity aqueous electrolyte also improve its cycling life and response times.Together with researchers at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research in the U.S., Nazar's team is also investigating multivalent ion intercalation batteries based on Mg2+ in non-aqueous electrolytes. They were the first to report highly reversible Mg cycling in the TiS2 thiospinel and layered sulfides, which represent the first new highly functional Mg insertion materials reported in more than 15 years. Their papers appeared in Energy & Environmental Science and ACS Energy Letters earlier this year. 

Researchers are making an attempt to steer us closer to comfortable touch mechanisms for operating mobile devices. A promising sign that they are on to something is evident in iSkin. A team from Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland University, Carnegie Mellon, CNRS LTCI, Telecom-ParisTech and Aalto University have authored a paper describing their work in "iSkin: Flexible, Stretchable and Visually Customizable On-Body Touch Sensors for Mobile Computing." They envision a digital life where one can use a comfortable, light wearable such as finger strap, arm sticker and even keyboard extensions on rollout paper attached to the wrist device for mobile touch input. A video shows iSkin in action. In one scene, it is an arm sticker to control a music player; the person presses various places on the sticker to play a song or adjust the volume. Another scene shows somebody using a finger overlay to accept an incoming call. The video also shows a keyboard extension that can be rolled out on demand for a smartwatch text entry. iSkin is flexible and stretchable; it can detect touch input with two levels of pressure, even when stretched by 30 percent or when bent with a radius of 0.5 cm, they said. It can be of different shapes and sizes for different parts of the body—-such as fingers, forearm, or ear. A key feature is its construction of biocompatible materials. That requirement was not taken lightly. The authors in the paper said "iSkin should be non-toxic, and easily cleanable, washable, or replaceable in order to limit the accumulation of pathogens such as bacteria. Moreover, the properties of skin vary greatly." As "wrinkliness, oiliness, and distribution of receptors, sweat glands, and hair follicles" vary across body locations and individuals, they said this presented a requirement for materials and adhesives compatible with natural skin and exhibiting a high variability of form factors. What they came up with is "based on advances in electronic skin (e-skin) and soft-matter electronics, an active research field in robotics and material science." The sensor can be thought of as a sandwich composed of multiple layers. They wrote that "iSkin is made of multiple layers of thin, flexible and stretchable silicone. The base material is polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), an easy-to-process silicone-based organic polymer. PDMS is fully transparent, elastic, and a highly biocompatible material." A Reuters report by Matthew Stock on Monday had further comments on the materials and the research from co-developer Martin Weigel, who said the technology was initially coming from robotics :where it's used to give robots kind of a feeling similar to the human body, to human skin. However, we are the first to look into how we can use it on the body to control mobile devices; so as a kind of second-skin which nicely conforms to your body." Weigel said carbon particles inside the silicone make it conductive so they can use it for electronics. The Reuters report added that the stickers are attached to the body using a medical-grade adhesive, easily peeled off after use without hurting the skin. In their paper, they said that study results showed the sensor remained functional under typical and extreme deformations occurring on the human body; also it accurately sensed touch input when worn on various body locations. Right now there are no signs that you will find iSkin sensors in the marketplace; this is a proof of concept, said the authors, of on-skin touch sensing "that bears some promise over rigid sensors and computer vision based solutions." Related products: CY8CMBR2044-24LKXI  

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. 

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, strong demand has grown for wearable and transparent displays that can be applied to various fields such as augmented reality (AR) and skin-like thin flexible devices. However, previous flexible transparent displays have posed real challenges to overcome, which are, among others, poor transparency and low electrical performance. To improve the transparency and performance, past research efforts have tried to use inorganic-based electronics, but the fundamental thermal instabilities of plastic substrates have hampered the high temperature process, an essential step necessary for the fabrication of high performance electronic devices.As a solution to this problem, a research team led by Professors Keon Jae Lee and Sang-Hee Ko Park of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed ultrathin and transparent oxide thin-film transistors (TFT) for an active-matrix backplane of a flexible display by using the inorganic-based laser lift-off (ILLO) method. Professor Lee's team previously demonstrated the ILLO technology for energy-harvesting (Advanced Materials, February 12, 2014) and flexible memory (Advanced Materials, September 8, 2014) devices.The research team fabricated a high-performance oxide TFT array on top of a sacrificial laser-reactive substrate. After laser irradiation from the backside of the substrate, only the oxide TFT arrays were separated from the sacrificial substrate as a result of reaction between laser and laser-reactive layer, and then subsequently transferred onto ultrathin plastics (4μm thickness). Finally, the transferred ultrathin-oxide driving circuit for the flexible display was attached conformally to the surface of human skin to demonstrate the possibility of the wearable application. The attached oxide TFTs showed high optical transparency of 83% and mobility of 40 cm^2 V^(-1) s^(-1) even under several cycles of severe bending tests.Professor Lee said, "By using our ILLO process, the technological barriers for high performance transparent flexible displays have been overcome at a relatively low cost by removing expensive polyimide substrates. Moreover, the high-quality oxide semiconductor can be easily transferred onto skin-like or any flexible substrate for wearable application."