Author's Latest Posts


Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 16


Lithium-iron-oxide battery Scientists at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory developed a rechargeable lithium-iron-oxide battery that can cycle more lithium ions than its common lithium-cobalt-oxide counterpart, leading to a much higher capacity. For their battery, the team not only replaced cobalt with iron, but forced oxygen to participate in the reaction process as we... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired one-time programmable non-volatile memory IP provider Kilopass. Founded in 2001, Kilopass' 1T and 2T bitcell IP supports up to 4-Mbit OTP instances in 180-nm to 7-nm process technologies. The acquisition will add to Synopsys' growing OTP NVM portfolio: last October, Synopsys acquired Sidense, another provider of the technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 10


Rambus' Aharon Etengoff explains the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities and why they could negatively affect the semiconductor industry for decades. Cadence's Paul McLellan has an explainer on Meltdown and how it's an unintended consequence of a processor behaving as intended. Mentor's Ruben Ghulghazaryan and Jeff Wilson investigate using machine learning to predict post-deposition ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 9


Eel-inspired power Researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Fribourg, and the University of California-San Diego developed soft power cells with the potential to power implanted medical devices. Made of hydrogel and salt, the soft cells form the first potentially biocompatible artificial electric organ that generates more than 100 volts at a low current, the team says, enou... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Security Security researchers identified a major exploit of the "speculative execution" technique used to optimize performance in modern processors. The flaws allow an attacker to read sensitive information in the system's memory such as passwords, encryption keys, or sensitive information open in applications, according to Google's Jann Horn. Multiple researchers discovered the issues indepen... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 3


Ansys' Steve Pytel argues that increased signaling speeds and frequencies have led to signal integrity issues that circuit simulation alone cannot handle. Cadence's Paul McLellan dives into the details of Intel's 10nm process, including three layers of self-aligned quadruple patterning, contact-over-active-gate, and cobalt for contact fill. Mentor's Ron Press and Vidya Neerkundar argue th... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 2


Hydrogen from seawater Engineers at Columbia University are developing an ocean-based photovoltaic-powered electrolysis device that can operate as a stand-alone floating platform to split water into hydrogen fuel and oxygen. State-of-the-art electrolyzers use expensive membranes to maintain separation of the H2 and O2 gases produced by water electrolysis. The new device relies instead on an... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Altium released the latest version of its PCB design suite. Improvements include a new interface and an upgrade to 64-bit architecture combined with multi-threaded task optimizations. Other additions include a new BoM rule checker and length tuning and pin-swapping in the user-guided routing engine. Creonic announced a new line of IP for 5G forward error correction. The product line covers t... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 20


Mentor's Andrew Macleod points out five things that need to happen for autonomous and electric cars to move from R&D and test cases to mass-produced, commercially viable vehicles. Synopsys' Iain Singleton provides some tips on tackling large designs with formal and how the assume-guarantee technique helps split them without masking bugs. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares updates from the... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 19


Stabilizing perovskites Scientists at EPFL and the University of Cordoba found a way to improve the stability of perovskite solar cells. While perovskites show promising efficiencies as solar cells, they are soft crystalline materials and prone to problems due to decomposition over time. By introducing the large organic cation guanidinium (CH6N3+) into methylammonium lead iodide perovskites, t... » read more

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