Two Constraints-Based Techniques To Address Power-Related Challenges In SoC Design


Power scheduling, power integrity targets, voltage drop—these are just a few of the power-related challenges you’re no doubt managing in your SoC designs. There aren’t any easy answers, but there are some emerging—and promising—techniques. Two such techniques, according to University of Toronto Professor Farid Najm, are constraints generation and constraints-based verification. “... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 21


Hybrid crystals for efficient LEDs A team from the University of Toronto combined two promising solar cell materials together for the first time, creating a new platform for LED technology. The team designed a way to embed strongly luminescent nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots into perovskite. Perovskites are a family of materials that can be easily manufactured from solution, a... » read more

New Approaches To Imaging For Both Large And Small


Imaging is the common theme for everything at Photonics West this year, and two new ideas caught my attention—a near field very small microscope and a new way of collecting images that separates reflected light from indirect light. IMEC has presented papers about its near field microscope before. This year the research house has reduced it to a product. The idea is to illuminate a object w... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 8


Light in lieu of wires In a development that could eventually lead to computers that use optics rather than electricity to carry data, Stanford engineers have designed and built a prism-like device they call an ‘optical link’ that can split a beam of light into different colors and bend the light at right angles. The optical link is a tiny slice of silicon etched with a pattern that res... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 10


Cheaper, lighter solar cells Think those flat, glassy solar panels on your neighbor’s roof are the best solar technology has to offer? Not so. Engineers in the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering have designed and tested a new class of solar-sensitive nanoparticle that they say outperforms the current state of the art. Based on a new form of solid... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 25


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: Dec. 3


Tagging is a way of organizing information and today’s System Bits looks at two aspects of tagging. The first is an algorithm associated with social media and the second about how the brain geotags information. New Algorithm Finds You, Even in Untagged Photos You cannot hide on the Internet anymore. Anything posted online can be found, although in the past photos that were untagged may ha... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 19


Practical Invisibility Anyone who has read Harry Potter or watched Star Trek knows how powerful invisibility can be—at least in science fiction or the world of magic. But now, two researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto have demonstrated an effective invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable and adaptive to diff... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 22


Untangled nanotubes Carbon nanotubes are lightweight, strong and conduct electricity, which make them ideal components in new electronics devices, such as tablet computers and touchscreen phones, but cannot be used without being separated out from their natural tangled state. Researchers from Imperial College London have developed a way to unravel and apply carbon nanotubes in the laboratory a... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 10


Enabling flexible touchscreens While transparent conductors make touchscreens possible, the cost and the physical limitations of the material these conductors are usually made of are hampering progress toward flexible touchscreen devices but a research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University has shown a new a way to design transparent conductors using metal nan... » read more

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