Blog Review: Dec. 15


Arm's Hannah Peeler, Joshua Randall, and Zach Lasiuk examine the carbon cost of data centers and introduce a tool that allows users to make informed decisions about the carbon impact of their compute workloads. Synopsys' Kenneth Larsen provides a primer on the fundamentals of quantum computing, the role of photonics in building quantum systems, and the future potential impact on chip design.... » read more

A Novel Multifunctional Single-Layer Adhesive Used For Both Temporary Bonding And Mechanical Debonding in Wafer-Level Packaging Applications


Temporary bonding (TB) and debonding (DB) of wafers have been widely developed and applied over the last decade in various wafer-level packaging technologies, such as package-on-package (PoP), fan-out integration, and 2.5D and 3D integration using through-silicon vias (TSVs). The materials used to achieve TB and DB are extremely critical and the industry's current best practice is the use of tw... » read more

The Return Of DAC In-Person


Apart from masked faces everywhere, you could be excused for not knowing that there was a pandemic going on. Sure, the numbers were down, the show floor was smaller, and most of the parties didn't happen, but everyone was so happy to be able to bump elbows with their colleagues. Buttons were available for attendees to show the level of comfort they had with various types of greetings, from "... » read more

Securing Short-Range Communications


Short-range wireless communication technology is in widespread use and growing rapidly, adding conveniences for consumers while also opening the door to a whole range of cyberattacks. This technology is common across a variety of applications, from wireless key fobs to unlock a car and start the ignition, to tags used to help drivers find misplaced items such as car keys. RFID also is starti... » read more

Radiation Hardening Chips For Outer Space


What’s the difference between radiation tolerant and radiation hardening, and where is each one used? Minal Sawant, director of the aerospace and defense vertical market at Xilinx, talks about different striations in the Earth’s atmosphere, how those various levels can affect radiation, and what impact that has on the functionality of increasingly dense chip circuits over extended periods o... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 14


3D-SOCs At this week’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), a plethora of companies, R&D organizations and universities presented papers on the latest and greatest technologies. One of the themes at IEDM is advanced packaging, a technology enables an IC vendor to boost the performance of a chip. Advanced forms of packaging also enables new 3D-like chip architectures. Fo... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 14


Improved digital sensing Researchers from Imperial College London and Technical University of Munich propose a technique to improve the capability of many different types of sensors. The method addresses voltage limits in analog-to-digital converters and the saturation that results in poor quality when an incoming signal exceeds those limits. “Our new technique lets us capture a fuller ra... » read more

Revving Up SiC And GaN


Silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) are becoming more popular for power electronics, particularly in automotive applications, driving down costs as volumes scale up and increasing the demand for better tools to design, verify, and test these wide-bandgap devices. Both SiC and GaN are proving essential in areas such as battery management in electric vehicles. They can handle much ... » read more

Motional narrowing, ballistic transport, and trapping of room-temperature exciton polaritons in an atomically-thin semiconductor


Abstract "Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide crystals (TMDCs) hold great promise for semiconductor optoelectronics because their bound electron-hole pairs (excitons) are stable at room temperature and interact strongly with light. When TMDCs are embedded in an optical microcavity, excitons can hybridise with cavity photons to form exciton polaritons, which inherit useful properties from... » read more

Efficient Ohmic contacts and built-in atomic sublayer protection in MoSi2N4 and WSi2N4 monolayers


Abstract "Metal contacts to two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors are often plagued by the strong Fermi level pinning (FLP) effect which reduces the tunability of the Schottky barrier height (SBH) and degrades the performance of 2D semiconductor devices. Here, we show that MoSi2N4 and WSi2N4 monolayers—an emerging 2D semiconductor family with exceptional physical properties—exhibit stron... » read more

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