The Kynix Blog

SummaryA digital temperature sensor IC which offers accurate measurements in the temperature range -20 to 10°C has been introduced by ams. The performance of the AS6200C makes it easier for designers of refrigerators and data loggers in cold-chain storage equipment to meet demanding targets for system-level accuracy. The AS6200C’s measurements are accurate to ±0.2°C between -20°C and 10°C, the temperature range over which storage equipment for perishable goods operates.  AS6200C Sensor ICAS6200C sensor's accuracy is guaranteed over the device's supply voltage range of 1.8~3.6V. In temperature control and temperature logging applications, the total error budget is made up of multiple components. By minimising the error at the point of measurement, the designer gains extra headroom for other error and noise sources, such as the heat generated by board-mounted com-ponents. The use of the highly accurate AS6200C gives the designer more flexibility to modify other elements of the system design while keeping total error below a specified maximum level. The AS6200C integrates a sensor front end, 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter and digital logic in a small WL-CSP package. It provides a digital output over an I2C interface to any host microcontrol-ler. The device performs on-board digital signal processing, which means that it needs no user calibration, and its linearised output requires no compensation by an external microcontroller. The AS6200C is intended for use in equipment for storing and transporting food, pharmaceuticals, flowers and other perishable goods, as well as in domestic and commercial refrigerators. It is well suited to data loggers that comply with the EN12830:1999 class 1 standard.The new device extends the ams family of small, accurate digital temperature sensor ICs, joining the AS6200 sensor, which achieves peak accuracy between 0 and 65°C. “The AS6200C offers the market a unique combination of small size - its footprint is only 1.5mm2 - very high accuracy over the cold-chain monitoring and storage temperature range, and a convenient digital output requiring no calibration or linearisation. It provides a new example of the value of the low noise, high sensitivity, high linearity semiconductor technology underlying the outstanding performance of ams' sensor solution products,” said Nikolai Haslebner, Marketing Manager at ams. 

It has been said that spending too much time on a smartphone can negatively impact brain development or even cause damage to the neck. But don't toss yours in the bin just yet. An EU-funded project is working on smartphones' health cred by developing 'Sniffphone' - a module capable of analysing the user's breath to detect as many as 17 diseases.  Adding sensors to smartphones has been a trend lately, with the newest models being able to detect changes in the likes of temperature, humidity, hand gestures or light. But there is one thing these devices can still not do at this point: analyse our breath. Although portable devices have already been commercialised to detect blood alcohol levels and display it on smartphones, using breath analysis technology to its full potential would be a killer feature for both smartphone manufacturers and app developers.A technology called 'Na-Nose' could well be the long-sought-after Holy Grail. Presented in a study published on ACS Nano in December 2016, the device can detect the chemical patterns of exhaled volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in patients' breath. The new study does not only demonstrate for the first time that specific diseases can be linked to such chemical patterns, but it also shows how Na-Nose can rely on gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes to diagnose as many as 17 different diseases including early stage forms of some cancers.Na-Nose's story began 10 years ago when engineer Hossam Haick joined Technion Israel's Institute of Technology. There, he started developing a screening tool made up of two parts: a desktop box with a tube into which a person exhales, sending his or her breath into an array of sensors; and an attached computer equipped with machine-learning software and trained to recognise patterns from those sensors.The array's thin layers of gold nanoparticles or carbon nanotubes are coated with organic ligands. When exhaled VOCs bind to these ligands, the electrical resistance between the nanoparticles or nanotubes is changed. The resulting signal is sent to a computer which uses a pattern-recognition software to determine whether the signal matches that of a particular disease.The device was trained to recognise over 23 illnesses, after which Haick's team tested it on over 8 000 patients to teach the software how to discriminate between disease and confounding factors, such as contamination, age, gender, background disease and geography. Last year, Haick already demonstrated that the resulting tool could detect gastric cancer in a blinded test of patients with 92-94 % accuracy. But with this new study, he took things even further by using Na-Nose to detect and discriminate among 17 different diseases in the breath of 1 404 individuals across five countries.The next step now consists in miniaturising the device enough to be able to bring it onto smartphones by August 2018, thanks to funding under Horizon 2020's SNIFFPHONE project. 'We aim to catch disease at an early stage, where we can increase the survival rate,' says Haick.Reference:10027941005447-11005935-1 

As of the model year 2017, BMZ GmbH offers a warranty of four years on e-bike batteries to the customers of the bicycle purchasing cooperative. For this purpose, BMZ and ZEG have signed a service agreement. According to the agreement, BMZ offers a warranty to the buyers of ZEG e-bikes that their batteries will have a residual capacity of more than 60% after a period of 48 months.This means, if a customer rides his e-bike for a distance of 100 kilometres today, he can still ride it for 60 kilometres under the same conditions after four years. BMZ offers a warranty of 24 months to commercial dealers.The date of purchase by the end customer is key when it comes to asserting warranty claims. Proper handling of the batteries and chargers, for which there is a 24-month warranty, is a prerequisite for granting the warranty. A comprehensive warranty agreement, which will be sent to the dealers separately, specifies all the details.BMZ and ZEG are linked by a long-standing partnership. ZEG, the Zweirad-Einkaufs-Genossenschaft eG is an association of 960 independent bicycle dealers. It offers uniquely favourable sales and purchasing opportunities and maintains business relations with all renowned brands of bicycle manufacturers. For half a century, ZEG has been synonymous with quality and reliability.Process-oriented quality management and product quality have been taking centre stage at BMZ since the company was established in 1994. It is the foundation for outstanding products and business excellence. With innovative and high-quality products, BMZ is known for maximum sustainability.Reference:1215F101215F2X21215F2X4 

 A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot. This small, 3D-printed robot—nicknamed the octobot—could pave the way for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous machines.Soft robotics could revolutionize how humans interact with machines. But researchers have struggled to build entirely compliant robots. Electric power and control systems—such as batteries and circuit boards—are rigid and until now soft-bodied robots have been either tethered to an off-board system or rigged with hard components.Robert Wood, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) led the research. Lewis and Wood are also core faculty members of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University."One long-standing vision for the field of soft robotics has been to create robots that are entirely soft, but the struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together," said Wood. "This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.""Through our hybrid assembly approach, we were able to 3D print each of the functional components required within the soft robot body, including the fuel storage, power and actuation, in a rapid manner," said Lewis. "The octobot is a simple embodiment designed to demonstrate our integrated design and additive fabrication strategy for embedding autonomous functionality."Octopuses have long been a source of inspiration in soft robotics. These curious creatures can perform incredible feats of strength and dexterity with no internal skeleton.Harvard's octobot is pneumatic-based, i.e., it is powered by gas under pressure. A reaction inside the bot transforms a small amount of liquid fuel into a large amount of gas, which flows into the octobot's arms and inflates them like a balloon."Fuel sources for soft robots have always relied on some type of rigid components," said Michael Wehner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Wood lab and co-first author of the paper. "The wonderful thing about hydrogen peroxide is that a simple reaction between the chemical and a catalyst—in this case platinum—allows us to replace rigid power sources."To control the reaction, the team used a microfluidic logic circuit based on pioneering work by co-author and chemist George Whitesides, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor and core faculty member of the Wyss. The circuit, a soft analog of a simple electronic oscillator, controls when hydrogen peroxide decomposes to gas in the octobot."The entire system is simple to fabricate, by combining three fabrication methods—soft lithography, molding and 3D printing—we can quickly manufacture these devices," said Ryan Truby, a graduate student in the Lewis lab and co-first author of the paper.The simplicity of the assembly process paves the way for more complex designs. Next, the Harvard team hopes to design an octobot that can crawl, swim and interact with its environment."This research is a proof of concept," Truby said. "We hope that our approach for creating autonomous soft robots inspires roboticists, material scientists and researchers focused on advanced manufacturing."Reference:DS1260-50DS90340I-PCXM4Z28-BR00SH1 

At the 2015 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), nanoelectronics research center imec, in collaboration with Tyndall National Institute, the University of Leuven (KULeuven) and the Ghent University, demonstrated a 4x20Gb/s wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) hybrid CMOS silicon photonics transceiver, paving the way to cost-effective, high-density single-mode optical fiber links.Hybrid CMOS silicon photonics transceivers, transmitting and receiving data over single-mode optical fiber, are expected to play a key role in next-generation datacenter connectivity. By leveraging existing CMOS manufacturing and 3-D assembly infrastructure, the hybrid CMOS silicon photonics platform enables high integration density and reduced power consumption, as well as high yield and low manufacturing cost. Combined with wavelength division multiplexing capability, highly scalable single-mode optical transceivers can be constructed, satisfying the growing need for interconnect bandwidth in next-generation cloud infrastructure.Imec's CMOS silicon photonics transceiver comprises a silicon photonics (SiPh) chip, flip-chip integrated with a low-power 40nm CMOS chip. The SiPh chip, fabricated on imec's 25Gb/s Silicon Photonics Platform (iSiPP25G), comprises an array of four compact 25Gb/s ring modulators, coupled to a common bus waveguide to allow WDM transmission. On the receive side, a ring-based, low-loss (2dB) demultiplexing filter with 300GHz channel spacing is implemented and further connected to an array of four 25Gb/s Ge waveguide photodetectors. Both the ring modulators and the ring WDM filters include highly efficient integrated heating elements to tune their resonant wavelengths to the desired WDM channels. The CMOS chip includes four differential 20Gb/s ring modulator drivers and four 20Gb/s trans-impedance amplifiers. A 12 channel single-mode fiber array is packaged onto the grating coupler array on the chip, using a planar approach developed at Tyndall National Institute.Error-free operation was demonstrated in a 20Gb/s loop-back experiment for all four WDM channels as well as with two channels running together. The dynamic power consumption of the transceiver, including the CMOS driver and receiver, was less than 2pJ/bit. Thermal tuning of the WDM channel wavelengths consumed only 7mW/nm per channel. The transceiver can be further scaled to higher bandwidth capacity by adopting more advanced CMOS technology and by adding more WDM channels, enabling optical modules for 100GbE, 400GbE and beyond for future datacenter interconnects.Reference:KY59-AFBR-5805ZKY59-HFBR-7924EWZKY59-HFBR5320

Fujifilm Corporation and nano-electronics research institute imec have demonstrated full-color organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) by using their jointly-developed photoresist technology for organic semiconductors, a technology that enables submicron patterning. This breakthrough result paves the way to producing high-resolution and large organic Electroluminescent(EL) displays and establishing cost-competitive manufacturing methods.Organic EL displays are increasingly used for televisions, mobile devices including smartphones as well as wearable devices. Since they can be made thin and flexible, while also offering excellent response time and contrast ratio. It is said that today's products require organic EL displays of high pixel density, i.e. around 200ppi for 4K televisions, 500ppi for full HD mobile devices and even higher density for compact displays for wearable devices. There has been active R&D for organic semiconductors to develop a high-resolution patterning method for organic EL materials to be used in these products.In 2013, Fujifilm and imec jointly developed photoresist technology for organic semiconductors that enables submicron patterning without damaging the organic semiconductor materials, based on photolithography capable of high-resolution patterning on large substrates. There is no need for additional capital investment since an existing i-line exposure system can be used for the new technology. This is why the technology has attracted wide attention since the development announcement with anticipation of a cost-effective way of manufacturing high-resolution organic semiconductor devices.In the latest achievement, Fujifilm and imec produced full-color OLEDs with the photoresist technology for organic semiconductors and successfully verified their performance. Red, green and blue organic EL materials were patterned, each in the subpixel pitch of 20μm, to create full-color OLEDs. An OLED array of 40 x 40 dots at the resolution of 640ppi was realized and illuminated with UV rays to confirm that red, green and blue dots separately emitted light. The emission of red, green and blue lights was also confirmed in a test involving the application of voltage rather than illumination, confirming its correct performance.These results open new opportunities, such as using the novel photolithography in a multiple patterning process. An example would be creating an OLED array that adds a fourth color to red, green and blue, as well as developing previously-unseen devices such as a new sensors that integrate OLED with the organic photodetector.This research result is to be presented at the SID Display Week, one of the world's largest international exhibitions for information displays, held in San Jose, California from May 31 to June 5, 2015.Since the commencement of joint research in November 2012, Fujifilm and imec have broken through the boundary of conventional technology to contribute to the progress of technology associated with organic semiconductors, e.g., developing the photoresist technology for organic semiconductors that enables the realization of high-resolution submicron patterns. The two companies will continue to undertake cutting-edge R&D involving semiconductor materials, process technology and system integration, thereby contributing to resolving challenges faced by the organic electronics industry.