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Ann Mutschler

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Ann Mutschler is senior executive editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Power/Performance Bits: March 25
By Ann Mutschler - 25 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Making flexible carbon nanotube circuits more reliable and efficient Engineers would love to create flexible electronic devices, such as e-readers that could be folded to fit into a pocket with one such approach involving designing circuits based on electronic fibers known as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) instead of rigid silicon chips -- but reliability is essential. Given that most silicon chip... » read more

System Bits: March 25
By Ann Mutschler - 25 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

A robot that is a toy at heart Two University of Cambridge alumnus have developed a small robot to help children learn programming and robotics while they play.   [caption id="attachment_11073" align="alignnone" width="300"] (Source: Robotiky.com)[/caption] Under the guise of Robotiky, and within two months of their initial idea, they secured seed funding for a prototype robot, w... » read more

Enabling Test Portability With Graphs
By Ann Mutschler - 20 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Is it time to move up again? When it comes to test portability between simulation, emulation, prototypes and silicon, as well as an easier way to create a test structure, the answer appears to be a resounding ‘Yes.’ Looking at these activities from a higher level of abstraction and using a graph-based approach should allow automation where there has been none previously, and could allow val... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 18
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Bionic plants A team of MIT researchers wants to make plants more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them new functions including environmental pollutant monitoring. The team reported that they’ve boosted the ability of plants to capture light energy by 30% by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle w... » read more

System Bits: March 18
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Bending light with a tiny chip Imagine your smartphone being able to project a bright, clear image from a presentation or a video onto a wall or a big screen – all made possible with a light-bending silicon chip developed by Caltech researchers. Traditional projectors pass a beam of light through a tiny image, using lenses to map each point of the small picture to corresponding, yet expan... » read more

IoT Creates New IP Requirements
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 2

With the rise of smart cities, cars and houses, an enhanced connectivity infrastructure bolstered by an increasingly connected culture, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an exciting opportunity for semiconductor industry players. As such, market researchers at IDC expect the installed base of the Internet of Things will be approximately 212 billion "things" globally by the end of 2020 ... » read more

Know What To Look For
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

With the number of power domains exploding in today’s ICs, it’s extremely difficult to include all different modes of complexity in the verification. “The problem was already challenging enough,” observed Mark Baker, director of product marketing at Atrenta. “Just looking at where SoC design was going was a collection of various IPs, the different communication protocols, the bus ... » read more

Automation Can’t Replace Human Intervention
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

We work in a dynamic industry where the focus is on making it easier to design and verify semiconductor chips by automating tasks for the design engineer. There is so much emphasis on this that I wonder if it is easy to forget the value of that designer’s experience. No matter how automated a process gets, there is always the fundamental assumption that the engineer knows what is happening be... » read more

System Bits: March 11
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Colored diamonds: a superconductor’s best friend Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and UCLA have figured out that colored diamonds can measure the tiny magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors, providing a new tool to probe these much ballyhooed but poorly understood materials. Diamond sensors will give us m... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 11
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Multiferroic materials In an advance aimed at making future electronic devices far more energy-efficient than current technologies, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements in computer processing using an emerging class of magnetic materials called multiferroics. The team used multiferroic magnetic materials to reduce the... » read more

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