New Challenges For Wearables


It was Dick Tracy’s wristwatch communicator that triggered the public’s appetite for wearable electronics. Introduced in a 1946 syndicated comic strip, the idea was so compelling that it inspired the release of hundreds of wrist-based devices ranging from walkie-talkies to calculators to GPS trackers, heartbeat and movement monitors. Yet despite the public’s fascination with this kind of ... » read more

Big Memory Shift Ahead


System architecture has been driven by the performance of [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"]. Processor designers would have liked all of the memory be fast [getkc id="92" kc_name="SRAM"], placed on-chip for maximum performance, but that was not an option. Memory had to be fabricated as separate chips and connected via a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). That limited the number of available I/O ports ... » read more

Engineering For Next-Gen Memory Performance


When only a few electrons mean the difference between the ON and the OFF state, it’s difficult to manufacture [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"] elements with consistent, reliable performance. This is the situation conventional capacitance-based memories face as critical dimensions drop to just a few nanometers. As a result, device designers are considering a wide range of alternative memory... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 17


Low-power tunneling transistor to enable high-performance devices To make fast and low-power computing devices possible for energy-constrained applications such as smart sensor networks, implantable medical electronics and ultra-mobile computing, a new type of transistor is needed. To this end, researchers at Penn State, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and specialty wafer fo... » read more

Getting Ready For 15nm


By David Lammers The trends towards vertical transistors, non-silicon channel materials, and resistive RAMs promise to hold center stage at the 2010 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), set to begin Dec. 6 in San Francisco, Calif. (www.ieee-iedm.org) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan) will present a 22/20nm technology platform based on a FinFET arc... » read more

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