The Kynix Blog

Have you heard of Silicon carbide power devices yet? Researchers are rolling out a new manufacturing process and chip design for silicon carbide (SiC) power devices, which can be used to more efficiently regulate power in technologies that use electronics. The process -- called PRESiCE -- was developed to make it easier for companies to enter the SiC marketplace and develop new products.(Silicon carbide power devices, like the one shown here, are more efficient than their silicon counterparts.)"PRESiCE will allow more companies to get into the SiC market, because they won't have to initially develop their own design and manufacturing process for power devices -- an expensive, time-consuming engineering effort," says Jay Baliga, Distinguished University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper on PRESiCE that will be presented later this month. "The companies can instead use the PRESiCE technology to develop their own products. That's good for the companies, good for consumers, and good for U.S. manufacturing." Power devices consist of a diode and transistor, and are used to regulate the flow of power in electrical devices. For decades, electronics have used silicon-based power devices. In recent years, however, some companies have begun using SiC power devices, which have two key advantages. First, SiC power devices are more efficient, because SiC transistors lose less power. Conventional silicon transistors lose 10 percent of their energy to waste heat. SiC transistors lose only 7 percent. This is not only more efficient, but means that product designers need to do less to address cooling for the devices. Second, SiC devices can also switch at a higher frequency. That means electronics incorporating SiC devices can have smaller capacitors and inductors -- allowing designers to create smaller, lighter electronic products. But there's a problem. Up to this point, companies that have developed manufacturing processes for creating SiC power devices have kept their processes proprietary -- making it difficult for other companies to get into the field. This has limited the participation of other companies and kept the cost of SiC devices high. The NC State researchers developed PRESiCE to address this bottleneck, with the goal of lowering the barrier of entry to the field for companies and increasing innovation. The PRESiCE team worked with a Texas-based foundry called X-Fab to implement the manufacturing process and have now qualified it -- showing that it has the high yield and tight statistical distribution of electrical properties for SiC power devices necessary to make them attractive to industry. "If more companies get involved in manufacturing SiC power devices, it will increase the volume of production at the foundry, significantly driving down costs," Baliga says. Right now, SiC devices cost about five times more than silicon power devices. "Our goal is to get it down to 1.5 times the cost of silicon devices," Baliga says. "Hopefully that will begin the 'virtuous cycle': lower cost will lead to higher use; higher use leads to greater production volume; greater production volume further reduces cost, and so on. And consumers are getting a better, more energy-efficient product." The researchers have already licensed the PRESiCE process and chip design to one company, and are in talks with several others. "I conceived the development of wide bandgap semiconductor (SiC) power devices in 1979 and have been promoting the technology for more than three decades," Baliga says. "Now, I feel privileged to have created PRESiCE as the nation's technology for manufacturing SiC power devices to generate high-paying jobs in the U.S. We're optimistic that our technology can expedite the commercialization of SiC devices and contribute to a competitive manufacturing sector here in the U.S.," Baliga says. The paper, "PRESiCE: PRocess Engineered for manufacturing SiC Electronic-devices," will be presented at the International Conference on Silicon Carbide and Related Materials, being held Sept. 17-22 in Washington, D.C. The paper is co-authored by W. Sung, now at State University of New York Polytechnic Institute; K. Han and J. Harmon, who are Ph.D. students at NC State; and A. Tucker and S. Syed, who are undergraduates at NC State. The work was supported by PowerAmerica, the Department of Energy-funded manufacturing innovation institute that focuses on boosting manufacturing of wide bandgap semiconductor-based power electronics. ref.KY56-PZTA06KY41-SL12T1G

Wearable sensors that monitor heart rate, activity, skin temperature, and other variables can reveal a lot about what is going on inside a person, including the onset of infection, inflammation, and even insulin resistance, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.An important component of the ongoing study is to establish a range of normal, or baseline, values for each person in the study and when they are ill. “We want to study people at an individual level,” said Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor, and chair of genetics. Snyder is the senior author of the study, which was published online in PLOS Biology.  Altogether, the team collected nearly 2 billion measurements from 60 people, including continuous data from each participant’s wearable biosensor devices and periodic data from laboratory tests of their blood chemistry, gene expression, and other measures. Participants wore between one and seven commercially available activity monitors and other monitors that collected more than 250,000 measurements a day.  The team collected data on weight; heart rate; oxygen in the blood; skin temperature; activity, including sleep, steps, walking, biking, and running; calories expended; acceleration; and even exposure to gamma rays and X-rays. “I was very impressed with all the data that was collected,” said Eric Topol, MD, professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. “There’s a lot here — a lot of sensors and a lot of different data on each person.” The study demonstrated that, given a baseline range of values for each person, it is possible to monitor deviations from normal and associate those deviations with environmental conditions, illness, or other factors that affect health. Distinctive patterns of deviation from normal seem to correlate with particular health problems. Algorithms designed to pick up on these patterns of change could potentially contribute to clinical diagnostics and research. The work is an example of Stanford Medicine’s focus on precision health, whose goal is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and to precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill. On a long flight to Norway for a family vacation last year, Snyder noticed changes in his heart rate and blood oxygen levels. As one of the 60 participants in the digital health study, he was wearing seven biosensors.  From previous trips, Snyder knew that his oxygen levels normally dropped during airplane flights and that his heart rate increased at the beginning of a flight — as occurred in other participants. But the values typically returned to normal over the course of a long flight and after landing. This time, his numbers didn’t return to baseline. Something was up, and Snyder wasn’t completely surprised when he went on to develop a fever and other signs of illness.  The fact that you can pick up infections by monitoring before they happen is very provocative. Two weeks earlier, he’d been helping his brother build a fence in rural Massachusetts, so his biggest concern was that he might have been bitten by a tick and infected with Lyme disease. In Norway, Snyder persuaded a doctor to give him a prescription for doxycycline, an antibiotic known to combat Lyme disease. Subsequent tests confirmed that Snyder had indeed been infected with the Lyme microorganism. Snyder was impressed that the wearable biosensors picked up the infection before he even knew he was sick. “Wearables helped make the initial diagnosis,” he said.  Subsequent data analysis confirmed his suspicion that the deviations from normal heart rate and oxygen levels on the flight to Norway had indeed been quite abnormal. “The fact that you can pick up infections by monitoring before they happen is very provocative,” said Topol. For Snyder, the Lyme diagnosis is just the tip of the iceberg — part of very early work to begin querying massive data sets of health information. The results of the current study raise the possibility of identifying inflammatory disease in individuals who may not even know they are getting sick. For example, in several participants, higher-than-normal readings for heart rate and skin temperature correlated with increased levels of C reactive protein in blood tests. C reactive protein is an immune system marker for inflammation and often indicative of infection, autoimmune diseases, developing cardiovascular disease, or even cancer. Snyder’s own data revealed four separate bouts of illness and inflammation, including the Lyme disease infection and another that he was unaware of until he saw his sensor data and an increased level of C reactive protein. The wearable devices could also help distinguish participants with insulin resistance, a precursor for Type 2 diabetes. Of 20 participants who received glucose tests, 12 were insulin-resistant. The team designed and tested an algorithm combining participants’ daily steps, daytime heart rate, and the difference between daytime and nighttime heart rate. The algorithm was able to process the data from just these few simple measures to predict which individuals in the study were likely to be insulin-resistant. The study also revealed that declines in blood-oxygen levels during airplane flights were correlated with fatigue. Fortunately, the study showed that people tend to adapt on long flights; oxygen levels in their blood go back up, and they generally feel less fatigued as the hours go by. “The desaturation of oxygen in flight was not something I anticipated,” said Topol. “Whenever you walk up and down the aisle of a plane, everyone is sleeping, and I guess there may be another reason for that besides that they partied too hard the night before. That was really interesting, and I thought it was great that the authors did that.” Topol noted that one of the biosensors used in the study doesn’t work very well and that another has been recalled. “A few are not going to hold up,” he said. “Either they are not going to be available or they are going to be proven to not be very accurate." "But what is good about what the authors did here is that they weren’t just relying on one device. They did everything they could with the kind of sensors that are available today to get data that was meaningful.” During a visit to the doctor, patients normally have their blood pressure and body temperature measured, but such data is typically collected only every year or two and often ignored unless the results are outside of the normal range for entire populations. But biomedical researchers envisage a future in which human health is monitored continuously. “We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings,” said Snyder. In the future, he said, he expects the situation will be reversed and people will have more sensors than cars do. Already, consumers have purchased millions of wearable devices, including more than 50 million smartwatches and 20 million other fitness monitors. Most monitors are used to track activity, but they could easily be adjusted to more directly track health measures, Snyder said. We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings. With a precision health approach, every person could know his or her normal baseline for dozens of measures. Automatic data analysis could spot patterns of outlier data points and flag the onset of ill health, providing an opportunity for intervention, prevention, or cure. FAQ 1. What is wearable sensor?Wearable sensors, just as the name implies, are integrated into wearable objects or directly with the body in order to help monitor health and/or provide clinically relevant data for care. ... However, recent focus has shifted to wearable sensing platforms, exploiting stretchable and flexible electronics. 2. What can wearable sensors measure?The use of wearable sensors for sports is at its infancy, with the majority of devices currently used to measure movement-based parameters such as distance, velocity, and acceleration. 3. What are wearable sensors made of?At present, wearable temperature sensors also use a variety of nanomaterials, including conductive polymers,96, 97 graphene,89, 98 CNTs,46, 99 nickel,100 silver,101, 102 and copper metal nanoparticles and nanowires103 as thermal-sensing elements. 4. What are examples of wearable technology?Common examples of wearable technology include:Smart jewelry, such as rings, wristbands, watches and pins. ...Body-mounted sensors that monitor and transmit biological data for healthcare purposes.Fitness trackers, often in the form of wristbands or straps, that monitor things like physical activity and vital signs. 5. What are the wearable sensors used for?Wearable sensors are used to gather physiological and movement data thus enabling patient's status monitoring. Sensors are deployed according to the clinical application of interest. 6. What can wearable devices be used for?Wearables are electronic technology or devices incorporated into items that can be comfortably worn on a body. These wearable devices are used for tracking information on real time basis. They have motion sensors that take the snapshot of your day to day activity and sync them with mobile devices or laptop computers. 7. How we can monitor activity in wearable devices?Present wearable technologies include accelerometers, gyroscopes, sole sensors, and barometric pressure sensors mounted over the body. According to the purpose of the use, different body sensors have been developed with a capacity to monitor physiological and biochemical properties, posture and motion. 8. What is the value of the use of wearable microsensors?Using on-board sensors, wearable devices can provide critical information about athlete's performance and well-being. Athlete tracking is an important functionality of wearable devices that relies on positioning data which also influences the accuracy of numerous other attributes. 9. What health conditions require a wearable device?These devices will be especially important for improving the health and control of chronically ill patients and for those with conditions like asthma, COPD, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The focus of this paper revolves around wearable devices for asthma, but can be applied for any chronic condition. 10. What are the pros and cons of wearable technology?Pros and Cons of Wearable Tech:Pro: Wearable Tech is Convenient.Con: Wearable Tech is Limited.Pro: Most Wearable Tech is Discreet.Con: Some Wearable Tech is Not Discreet.Pro: Wearable Tech is Useful.Con: Wearable Tech is Expensive. Reference:EE-TP109IS471FSEIS489E

Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the industry's first differential inductive switch, with a dual-coil architecture that automatically compensates for variations in temperature and component aging. The LDC0851 detects the presence or absence of conductive material by using a simple coil drawn on a printed circuit board (PCB). This unique approach enables low-cost, highly reliable switching implementations for a variety of uses including buttons, knobs, door open/close detection, and speed and directional sensing in personal electronics, appliances, industrial equipment and communications applications. The LDC0851 provides a temperature-stable switching accuracy of better than 1 percent of the sensor coil diameter, removing the need for production calibration and minimizing part-to-part variation. Unlike alternative sensing technologies, the LDC0851's contactless and magnet-free design is immune to dirt, dust or other environmental factors, providing designers a reliable, low-cost solution. The device joins TI's distinctive portfolio of inductive-sensing integrated circuits (ICs) including the LDC1614 family of multichannel inductance-to-digital converters.  Key features and benefits of the LDC0851: ·Stable switching threshold:The differential architecture maintains the switching threshold across variations in temperature, humidity and other environmental factors, as well as providing immunity to component aging for stable, long-term performance. ·High accuracy:The device can deliver better than 1 percent switching accuracy, which is up to 10 times more accurate than magnetic sensor-based designs, reducing the need for production calibration. ·High reliability:The device's immunity to nonconductive contaminants such as oil, dirt and dust can help extend product lifetimes and reduce replacement costs. The solution is also unaffected by direct current (DC) magnetic fields, ensuring robust operation and reliability in a wide range of environments. ·Low power:Duty cycling of the LDC0851 allows for less than 20-µA average current consumption at 10 samples per second, which is up to five times lower than competitive solutions. Tools and support to jump-start design The LDC0851EVM evaluation module helps designers easily configure the LDC0851 and start designing it into a system without programming.（The LDC0851EVM evaluation module.）An incremental rotary encoder reference design (TIDA-00828) demonstrates the LDC0851 in a simple 32-position rotary-knob design. Using only two LDC0851 inductive switches, the system can track rotation position and direction, and designers can easily scale the number of encoder positions up or down.（TIDA-00828 Inductive Sensing 32-Position Encoder Knob ReferenceDesign using the LDC0851.） System designers can start their inductive-sensing design in minutes with TI's WEBENCH Coil Designer. This online tool simplifies sensor-coil design based on application and system requirements. The optimized design is exportable to a variety of computer-aided design (CAD) programs to quickly incorporate the sensor coil into an overall system layout. Ref.KY362-LDC0851EVMKY362-LDC1614EVM     

TT Electronics has announced that its sensors will be used in the NASA mission to the planet Mars in 2020. The robustness of the company’s Hall-effect sensors enables them to withstand the harsh environments found on Mars. The Hall-effect sensors from TT Electronics are key components in NASA’s new Mars 2020 Rover that will be landing on the surface of the red planet in 2021. These sensors detect magnetic fields in motors that control the speed and movement of the robotic arm of the Mars Rover.The Mars 2020 Rover will carry an entirely new subsystem to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples. This subsystem will include a coring drill on its arm, controlled partially by TT Electronics’ Hall-effect sensors. About 30 samples will be deposited at select locations for return to Earth on a potential future sample-retrieval mission.David Kertes, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Industrial Sensing and Control, TT Electronics, said, “We are delighted that our Hall-effect sensors will fly on NASA’s 2020 mission to Mars – this further underpins the high quality and integrity of our components for use in mission critical, aerospace and space applications. It is particularly exciting that the devices will be deployed as part of the system that controls the robotic arm of the Rover, the very ‘core’ of the mission, to collect Martian rock and soil samples.”TT Electronics designs and manufactures semiconductors for use in a variety of space, satellite and payload applications, in many different package options. In its Class 100,000 clean room, complete satellite harness sets and electromagnetics components are manufactured, as well as the test equipment needed for use in a clean room environment.Reference:01B1001JF01B5001JF01C1002JF 

Samsung Electronics unveiled the industry’s first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC UFS 1.0 Card Extension Standard, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 GB, Samsung’s UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics.“By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritise performance and user convenience above all.”Samsung’s new 256GB UFS removable memory card ─ simply referred to as the UFS card will provide greatly improved user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback.It provides more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 MB/s which is similar to the sequential read speed of the most widely used SATA SSDs.With this UFS card, consumers have the ability to read a 5GB, Full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 microSD card, which would take over 50 seconds with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed.Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.When it comes to writing, the new 256GB UFS card processes 35,000 random IOPS, which is 350 times higher than the 100 IOPs of a typical microSD card, and attains a 170MB/s sequential write speed, almost doubling the top-end microSD card speed.With these substantial performance improvements, the new 256GB UFS card significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs (1,120 MB-equivalent) continuously with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s.To achieve the highest performance and most power-efficient data transport, the UFS card supports multiple commands with command queuing features and enables simultaneous reading and writing through the use of separately dedicated paths, doubling throughput.As the leading memory storage provider, Samsung has been aggressive in preparing UFS solutions for the marketplace, while contributing to JEDEC standardisation of the Universal Flash Storage 2.0 specification in September 2013 and the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard in March 2016.Following its introduction of the industry-first 128GB embedded UFS chip in January 2015, the company successfully launched a 256GB embedded UFS memory for high-end mobile devices in February of this year.As of earlier this month, Samsung also completed the Universal Flash Storage Association (UFSA)’s certification program that evaluates electrical and functional specifications for compatibility of a UFS card, and Samsung’s new UFS card products were approved as UFSA-certified UFS cards with the right to use the official UFS logo for the first time in the industry.Reference:S29GL032N11FFIS42S29GL064N90FFIS30S29AS016J70BFA040  

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the big theme was the "Internet of things"—the idea that everything in the human environment, from kitchen appliances to industrial equipment, could be equipped with sensors and processors that can exchange data, helping with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.Realizing that vision, however, requires transmitters that are powerful enough to broadcast to devices dozens of yards away but energy-efficient enough to last for months—or even to harvest energy from heat or mechanical vibrations."A key challenge is designing these circuits with extremely low standby power, because most of these devices are just sitting idling, waiting for some event to trigger a communication," explains Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering at MIT. "When it's on, you want to be as efficient as possible, and when it's off, you want to really cut off the off-state power, the leakage power."This week, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Chandrakasan's group will present a new transmitter design that reduces off-state leakage 100-fold. At the same time, it provides adequate power for Bluetooth transmission, or for the even longer-range 802.15.4 wireless-communication protocol."The trick is that we borrow techniques that we use to reduce the leakage power in digital circuits," Chandrakasan explains. The basic element of a digital circuit is a transistor, in which two electrical leads are connected by a semiconducting material, such as silicon. In their native states, semiconductors are not particularly good conductors. But in a transistor, the semiconductor has a second wire sitting on top of it, which runs perpendicularly to the electrical leads. Sending a positive charge through this wire—known as the gate—draws electrons toward it. The concentration of electrons creates a bridge that current can cross between the leads.But while semiconductors are not naturally very good conductors, neither are they perfect insulators. Even when no charge is applied to the gate, some current still leaks across the transistor. It's not much, but over time, it can make a big difference in the battery life of a device that spends most of its time sitting idle.Going negativeChandrakasan—along with Arun Paidimarri, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the paper, and Nathan Ickes, a research scientist in Chandrakasan's lab—reduces the leakage by applying a negative charge to the gate when the transmitter is idle. That drives electrons away from the electrical leads, making the semiconductor a much better insulator.Of course, that strategy works only if generating the negative charge consumes less energy than the circuit would otherwise lose to leakage. In tests conducted on a prototype chip fabricated through the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's research program, the MIT researchers found that their circuit spent only 20 picowatts of power to save 10,000 picowatts in leakage.To generate the negative charge efficiently, the MIT researchers use a circuit known as a charge pump, which is a small network of capacitors—electronic components that can store charge—and switches. When the charge pump is exposed to the voltage that drives the chip, charge builds up in one of the capacitors. Throwing one of the switches connects the positive end of the capacitor to the ground, causing a current to flow out the other end. This process is repeated over and over. The only real power drain comes from throwing the switch, which happens about 15 times a second.Turned onTo make the transmitter more efficient when it's active, the researchers adopted techniques that have long been a feature of work in Chandrakasan's group. Ordinarily, the frequency at which a transmitter can broadcast is a function of its voltage. But the MIT researchers decomposed the problem of generating an electromagnetic signal into discrete steps, only some of which require higher voltages. For those steps, the circuit uses capacitors and inductors to increase voltage locally. That keeps the overall voltage of the circuit down, while still enabling high-frequency transmissions.What those efficiencies mean for battery life depends on how frequently the transmitter is operational. But if it can get away with broadcasting only every hour or so, the researchers' circuit can reduce power consumption 100-fold."Ultralow leakage energy is critical for future sensor nodes that need the transmitter to be on only a very small percentage of time," says Baher Haroun, director of the Embedded Processing Systems Labs at Texas Instruments, which helped fund the MIT researchers' work. "Working with Anantha's research team on ultralow-power circuit and system ideas has always been beneficial to TI. We learn from his team's novel approaches and depth of understanding of the ultralow-power methods that apply to multiple functions, from digital to radio frequency."