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Special Issue: What's New @ IEEE Year-in-Review
This month's issue of What's New @ IEEE in Circuits will take a look back at the most popular news stories for the past year, ranked in order of popularity based on the number of clicks received.
Shortage of Analog Designers Sends Manufacturing Scrambling
The perception that digital is cutting-edge technology while analog is
outdated, and the fact that it takes analog engineers five to seven
years longer than their digital counterparts to begin making
significant contributions to industry, is making for a dire global
shortage of analog engineers. According to analysts, new digital
devices have to interface with the real world—which is analog—and
analog engineers are necessary to create those interfaces. Experts say
the United States leads the world in electrical engineering graduates,
but digital engineering has become so popular that new graduates
specializing in analog electronics are greatly outnumbered. Digital
chip manufacturers are scrambling to recruit and groom analog engineers
in the "black art" of mixed-signal processing, analysts say, calling
analog circuitry on a digital chip the “secret sauce” that can make a
proprietary semiconductor uniquely qualified for high-volume
applications. Analysts say analog designers have to be comfortable in
both analog and digital design, a demanding task that makes these
designers rare, highly regarded and well paid.
Read article
Learn more about analog electronics in IEEE Xplore
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Self-Assembling Organic Circuits Tested
A quick and simple way to make arrays of high-performance electronic
devices from organic semiconductor material has been developed by
researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), USA, who say the technology could lead to a simple, low-cost
method to manufacture large, flexible electronic circuits. In the
process, organic semiconductor molecules self-assemble around
chemically pretreated electrodes to form field-effect transistors. This
results in an array of transistors with good electrical properties that
are insulated from one another. While the technique was demonstrated on
a hard silicon substrate, it should be transferable to flexible
substrates, researchers say, adding that such circuits could pave the
way for roll-up displays, foldable electronic readers, large screens
that can be rolled up and tucked into cell phones and smart bandages
that monitor wounds and sense the need for drugs.
Read article
Learn more about organic circuits in IEEE Xplore
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HP Scientists Debut Electrical Engineering’s ‘Fourth Element’
The creation of a “memristor,” a memory resistor that can retain a
history of the information it has acquired, has been announced by
researchers at Hewlett-Packard, who say the breakthrough could make it
possible to develop computer systems with memories that do not forget,
do not need to be booted up, consume far less power and associate
information in a manner similar to the human brain. The existence of
such devices had been theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit
element in electrical engineering 37 years ago by researchers at the
University of California-Berkeley, USA . Hewlett-Packard announced the
creation of both a mathematical model and working device, and speculate
that memristor-based computers might replace those using dynamic random
access memory (DRAM), since the former would retain its information
after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, saving
both time and energy.
Read article
Learn more about memristors in IEEE Xplore
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IBM Developing New Technology for Cooling Chips
As chips get smaller and smaller—cramming more processing power into
ever-tinier spaces—the heat created by the miniature circuits becomes
harder to manage. As a result, cooling measures currently used may not
be enough in future generations of computer chips. One microprocessor
design already being researched by IBM—in which chips are stacked
vertically to save space and enhance performance, rather than arrayed
next to each other—has a heat-to-volume ratio exceeding that of a
nuclear reactor. To address this, IBM researchers are developing a way
to pipe water in between chips that are sandwiched together. The system
uses specially sealed pipes, just 50 microns wide, to prevent leaks and
electrical shorts.
Read article
Learn more about chip cooling in IEEE Xplore
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New CMOS Harmonic Oscillator Released
Claiming to have removed the last moving part from electronics
circuitry, Mobius Microsystems unveiled its new CMOS Harmonic
Oscillator earlier this month. The innovative technology eliminates the
need for quartz crystals by integrating an oscillator onto an ordinary
complementary metal oxide semiconductor chip. According to Tunc Cenger,
Director of Marketing at Mobius, the company’s new technology is “the
most accurate CMOS oscillator ever built” and “adds proprietary
compensation circuitry that meets the requirements of a wide variety of
timing-chip applications.”
Read article
Learn more about CMOS in IEEE Xplore
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Human Body Heat Could Power Energy-Efficient Chip
A new chip design that consumes 10 times less power than traditional
chips and can run implantable medical devices using human body heat as
an energy source was recently unveiled by Massachusetts Institute of
Technology researchers, who say it will take approximately five years
for the chips to be used in production devices. The chip's improved
energy efficiency is achieved by making it work at about 0.3 volts, as
opposed to the current 1 volt standard, which gives it the complexity
to handle more functions and increases battery life. The voltage
required by a device depends on what it is doing; if the chip is idle,
0.3 volts would be enough to operate it, but if the device is doing
something that requires high speed, the chip would need to use more
voltage. The chip is designed to scale between higher and lower
voltages, while additional transistors within the design will make it
harder to disturb data within the cell when a read operation is
performed.
Read article
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Shrinking Chip to Keep up With Moore's Law Developed
Thanks to a new approach that produces grids of parallel lines 25
nanometers (nm) wide using light with a wavelength of 351 nm, silicon
chips could become even more densely packed with transistors. The
breakthrough, which carves features in silicon that are many times
smaller than the wavelength of the light used to make them, could keep
the computing world on track with Moore’s Law. While the grids are not
functional circuits, they could be made into working chips by adding
extra small features.
Read article
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New Microscope-on-a-Chip Debuts
Today’s current bulky, expensive microscopes could become a thing of
past now that researchers have found a way to combine pinhole optics,
microfluidics and a charge-coupled device (CCD) to assemble a working
microscope on a single chip. Small enough to fit in a mobile phone or
similar handheld device, the optofluidic microscope developed by
engineers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA,
requires only sunlight for illumination and could be mass-produced for
US$10. Possible applications for the device include malaria screening
or identifying pathogens on the battlefield. The device is also small
enough to be implanted in the body, constantly monitoring blood
circulation to help slow the spread of cancer and other diseases. The
primary developer, Caltech engineering professor Changhuei Yang, said
it could replace focusing optics in a normal microscope with pinhole
optics, microfluidic channels, submicron-scale etching and
image-processing algorithms.
Read article
Learn more about microfluidics in IEEE Xplore
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Electronics ‘Missing Link’ Predicted in 1971, Found in 2008
Nanoscale circuits that can remember the amount and duration of the
last voltage applied to them have been created by the Hewlett-Packard
laboratory in Palo Alto, California, USA. The device, dubbed a
“memristor,” was predicted in 1971 by Leon Chua, a circuit designer
from the University of California-Berkeley, USA. The device could help
develop denser memory chips and possibly electronic circuits that mimic
the synapses of the human brain. The circuits are based on titanium
dioxide, the active ingredient in sunscreen. In 1971, Chua, using
non-linear mathematics, realized something was missing from standard
circuit calculations, a link between flux and charge, which led him to
theorize what he dubbed the memristor. The way memristors handle
current and voltage is startlingly similar to the way synapses between
brain cells do, says Chua: both build up voltage to a threshold before
firing and letting a current pass. Memristors will make future chips
smaller while helping to minimize power-up time.
Read article
Learn more about memristors in IEEE Xplore
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Company Rolls Out Transistor-Level Noise Analysis Software
A noise analysis tool for complex analog and RF circuits has been
debuted by Berkeley Design Automation, which says its Noise Analysis
Option handles every type of complex circuit, including all
analog-to-digital converters, phase-locked loops, DC/DC converters,
frequency synthesizers and voltage-controlled oscillators. The Noise
Analysis Option uses FastSpice and RF FastSpice technology and is fully
compatible with existing flows, produces true Spice accurate results
and is already silicon-proven. The company says this is the first
transistor-level noise analysis tool, including analysis of the impact
of white and flicker noise, with true Spice accuracy for every type of
circuit. Until now, it has been either impractical or impossible to
perform transistor-level analysis of the impact of device noise for
many complex analogue and RF circuits. The Noise Analysis Option allows
transient-noise analysis five to 10 times faster and with a much higher
capacity than any other tool.
Read article
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