Category Archives: Applications

3D NAND is poised to become the dominant NAND flash technology and promises both enhanced performance and capacity. The Innodisk 3D NAND solid state drive (SSD) series is designed to fulfill the more stringent requirements for ruggedness and endurance seen in the industrial market.

The series uses pure industrial-grade Toshiba 3D TLC NAND flash with a rated P/E cycle number of 3000, ensuring solid longevity, while the fully in-house designed firmware is geared towards industrial usage. The SSDs uses direct write, and avoids using SLC cache which eventually causes an SSD performance drop and bloated P/E cycle numbers. Furthermore, the firmware can be customized to a large degree to suit any specialized requirement.

The series includes two product lines: the DRAM-less 3TE7 and the 3TG6-P with integrated DRAM using a Marvell controller. The product lines are available in capacities up to 1TB and 2TB respectively. They can both be fitted with Innodisk’s trio of power stabilizing technologies iCell™, iPower Guard™ and iData Guard™ to further strengthen data integrity in areas susceptible to power fluctuations.

The 3D NAND SSDs also use End-to-End Power Path Protection that ensures error correction at every data transfer point with the host and within the drives themselves. For more sensitive data, drives that utilize AES encryption are available with in-house designed software for easier deployment and management.

Quantum computers that are capable of solving complex problems, like drug design or machine learning, will require millions of quantum bits – or qubits – connected in an integrated way and designed to correct errors that inevitably occur in fragile quantum systems.

Now, an Australian research team has experimentally realised a crucial combination of these capabilities on a silicon chip, bringing the dream of a universal quantum computer closer to reality.

They have demonstrated an integrated silicon qubit platform that combines both single-spin addressability – the ability to ‘write’ information on a single spin qubit without disturbing its neighbours – and a qubit ‘read-out’ process that will be vital for quantum error correction.

Moreover, their new integrated design can be manufactured using well-established technology used in the existing computer industry.

The team is led by Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, a program leader at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) and Director of the NSW node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.

Last year, Dzurak and colleagues published a design for a novel chip architecture that could allow quantum calculations to be performed using silicon CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) components – the basis of all modern computer chips.

In their new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, the team combine two fundamental quantum techniques for the first time, confirming the promise of their approach.

Dzurak’s team had also previously shown that an integrated silicon qubit platform can operate with single-spin addressability – the ability to rotate a single spin without disturbing its neighbours.

They have now shown that they can combine this with a special type of quantum readout process known as Pauli spin blockade, a key requirement for quantum error correcting codes that will be necessary to ensure accuracy in large spin-based quantum computers. This new combination of qubit readout and control techniques is a central feature of their quantum chip design.

“We’ve demonstrated the ability to do Pauli spin readout in our silicon qubit device but, for the first time, we’ve also combined it with spin resonance to control the spin,” says Dzurak.

“This is an important milestone for us on the path to performing quantum error correction with spin qubits, which is going to be essential for any universal quantum computer.”

“Quantum error correction is a key requirement in creating large-scale useful quantum computing because all qubits are fragile, and you need to correct for errors as they crop up,” says lead author, Michael Fogarty, who performed the experiments as part of his PhD research with Professor Dzurak at UNSW.

“But this creates significant overhead in the number of physical qubits you need in order to make the system work,” notes Fogarty.

Dzurak says, “By using silicon CMOS technology we have the ideal platform to scale to the millions of qubits we will need, and our recent results provide us with the tools to achieve spin qubit error-correction in the near future.”

“It’s another confirmation that we’re on the right track. And it also shows that the architecture we’ve developed at UNSW has, so far, shown no roadblocks to the development of a working quantum computer chip.”

“And, what’s more, one that can be manufactured using well-established industry processes and components.”

CQC2T’S UNIQUE APPROACH USING SILICON

Working in silicon is important not just because the element is cheap and abundant, but because it has been at the heart of the global computer industry for almost 60 years. The properties of silicon are well understood and chips containing billions of conventional transistors are routinely manufactured in big production facilities.

Three years ago, Dzurak’s team published in the journal Nature the first demonstration of quantum logic calculations in a real silicon device with the creation of a two-qubit logic gate – the central building block of a quantum computer.

“Those were the first baby steps, the first demonstrations of how to turn this radical quantum computing concept into a practical device using components that underpin all modern computing,” says Professor Mark Hoffman, UNSW’s Dean of Engineering.

“Our team now has a blueprint for scaling that up dramatically.

“We’ve been testing elements of this design in the lab, with very positive results. We just need to keep building on that – which is still a hell of a challenge, but the groundwork is there, and it’s very encouraging.

“It will still take great engineering to bring quantum computing to commercial reality, but clearly the work we see from this extraordinary team at CQC2T puts Australia in the driver’s seat,” he added.

Other authors of the new Nature Communications paper are UNSW researchers Kok Wai Chan, Bas Hensen, Wister Huang, Tuomo Tanttu, Henry Yang, Arne Laucht, Fay Hudson and Andrea Morello, as well as Menno Veldhorst of QuTech and TU Delft, Thaddeus Ladd of HRL Laboratories and Kohei Itoh of Japan’s Keio University.

COMMERCIALISING CQC2T’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

In 2017, a consortium of Australian governments, industry and universities established Australia’s first quantum computing company to commercialise CQC2T’s world-leading intellectual property.

Operating out of new laboratories at UNSW, Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd (SQC) has the target of producing a 10-qubit demonstration device in silicon by 2022, as the forerunner to creating a silicon-based quantum computer.

The work of Dzurak and his team will be one component of SQC realising that ambition. UNSW scientists and engineers at CQC2T are developing parallel patented approaches using single atom and quantum dot qubits.

In May 2018, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) addressing a new collaboration between SQC and the world-leading French research and development organisation, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA).

The MoU outlined plans to form a joint venture in silicon-CMOS quantum computing technology to accelerate and focus technology development, as well as to capture commercialisation opportunities – bringing together French and Australian efforts to develop a quantum computer.

The proposed Australian-French joint venture would bring together Dzurak’s team, located at UNSW, with a team led by Dr Maud Vinet from CEA, who are experts in advanced CMOS manufacturing technology, and who have also recently demonstrated a silicon qubit made using their industrial-scale prototyping facility in Grenoble.

It is estimated that industries comprising approximately 40% of Australia’s current economy could be significantly impacted by quantum computing.

Possible applications include software design, machine learning, scheduling and logistical planning, financial analysis, stock market modelling, software and hardware verification, climate modelling, rapid drug design and testing, and early disease detection and prevention.

As a provider of industrial-grade storage and memory, Innodisk has devoted more and more resources into the development of AI in the industrial market. In order to further this goal, the company has now entered The AIoT Alliance along with subsidiaries and partners such as SuperMicro and IronYun.

The AIoT Alliance was announced at a conference held on Wednesday, October 17 that also showcased comprehensive solutions on smart city data storage, edge computing, software, analytics, cloud-management and more.

Innodisk’s role in the alliance is not only as a provider of storage and memory but as a responsible for allover AIoT integration. Following this commitment the company is adding a new business department named IPA (Intelligent Peripherals Appliance) to better facilitate the integration different roles in an AIoT ecosystem.

Of the partners, Innodisk subsidiaries comprises industrial GPU with Aetina; all-flash arrays provided by Accelstore; 5G wireless, high-speed communication solutions from Millitronic; and IoV and CAN solutions from Antzer.

Innodisk president Randy Chien has strongly encouraged this partnership and states: “As the leading industrial-grade storage provider our next step is the AIoT market which will be major business focus for the next few years. However, realizing AI in the industrial field requires not only expertise and technology, but also a deep understanding of different vertical markets. We believe that our alliance and the total integration from cloud to edge is essential to our clients.”

Featured on Forbes’ Asia’s 200 Best Under A Billion companies, Innodisk is a provider of flash memory, DRAM modules and embedded peripheral products for the industrial and enterprise applications. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, Innodisk supports clients globally with engineering support and sales teams in mainland China, Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Finding ways to improve the drug development process – which is currently costly, time-consuming and has an astronomically high failure rate – could have far-reaching benefits for health care and the economy. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have designed a cellular interfacing array using low-cost electronics that measures multiple cellular properties and responses in real time. This could enable many more potential drugs to be comprehensively tested for efficacy and toxic effects much faster. That’s why Hua Wang, associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, describes it as “helping us find the golden needle in the haystack.”

Built on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, the cellular sensing array chip uses a standard 35 mm cell culture dish with the bottom removed to host the cells and expose them to the sensing surface.

Pharmaceutical companies use cell-based assays, a combination of living cells and sensor electronics, to measure physiological changes in the cells. That data is used for high-throughput screening (HTS) during drug discovery. In this early phase of drug development, the goal is to identify target pathways and promising chemical compounds that could be developed further – and to eliminate those that are ineffective or toxic – by measuring the physiological responses of the cells to each compound.

Phenotypic testing of thousands of candidate compounds, with the majority “failing early,” allows only the most promising ones to be further developed into drugs and maybe eventually to undergo clinical trials, where drug failure is much more costly. But most existing cell-based assays use electronic sensors that can only measure one physiological property at a time and cannot obtain holistic cellular responses.

That’s where the new cellular sensing platform comes in. “The innovation of our technology is that we are able to leverage the advance of nano-electronic technologies to create cellular interfacing platforms with massively parallel pixels,” said Wang. “And within each pixel we can detect multiple physiological parameters from the same group of cells at the same time.” The experimental quad-modality chip features extracellular or intracellular potential recording, optical detection, cellular impedance measurement, and biphasic current stimulation.

Wang said the new technology offers four advantages over existing platforms:

Multimodal sensing: The chip’s ability to record multiple parameters on the same cellular sample gives researchers the ability to comprehensively monitor complex cellular responses, uncover the correlations among those parameters and investigate how they may respond together when exposed to drugs. “Living cells are small but highly complex systems. Drug administration often results in multiple physiological changes, but this cannot be detected using conventional single-modal sensing,” said Wang.

Large field of view: The platform allows researchers to examine the behavior of cells in a large aggregate to see how they respond collectively at the tissue level.

Small spatial resolution: Not only can researchers look at cells at the tissue level, they could also examine them at single-cell or even sub-cellular resolution.

Low-cost platform: The new array platform is built on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, which is also used to build computer chips, and can be easily scaled up for mass production.

Wang’s team worked closely with Hee Cheol Cho, associate professor and the Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering, whose Heart Regeneration lab is part of the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. They used neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and cardiac fibroblasts to illustrate the multi-parametric cell profiling ability of the array for drug screening. The recent results were published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip on August 31, 2018.

Monitoring cellular responses in multi-physical domains and holistic multi-parametric cellular profiling should also prove beneficial in screening out chemical compounds that could have harmful effects on certain organs, said Jong Seok Park, a post-doctoral fellow in Wang’s lab and a leading author of the study. Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market after discoveries that they had toxic effects on the heart or liver, for example. This platform should enable researchers to comprehensively test for organ toxicity and other side effects at the initial phases of drug discovery.

The experimental chip may be useful for other applications, including personalized medicine – for example, testing cancer cells from a particular patient. “Patient to patient variation is huge, even with the same type of drug,” said Wang. The cellular interface array could be used to see which combination of existing drugs would give the best response and to find the optimum dose that is most effective with minimum toxicity to healthy cells.

The chip is capable of actuation as well as sensing. In the future, Wang said that cellular data from the chip could be uploaded and processed, and based on that, commands for new actuation or data acquisition could be sent to the chip automatically and wirelessly. He envisions rooms and rooms containing culture chambers with millions of such chips in fully automated facilities, “just automatically doing new drug selection for us,” he said.

Beyond these applications, Wang noted the scientific value of the research itself. Integrated circuits and nanoelectronics are some of the most sophisticated technology platforms created by humans. Living cells, on the other hand, are complex products produced through billions of years of natural selection and evolution.

“The central theme of our research is how we can leverage the best platform created by nature with the best platform created by humans,” he said. “Can we let them work together to create hybrid systems that achieve capabilities beyond biology only or electronics only systems? The fundamental scientific question we are addressing is how we can let inorganic electronics better interface with organic living cells.”

Rice University scientists are counting on films of carbon nanotubes to make high-powered, fast-charging lithium metal batteries a logical replacement for common lithium-ion batteries.

Rice University graduate student Gladys López-Silva holds a lithium metal anode with a film of carbon nanotubes. Once the film is attached, it becomes infiltrated by lithium ions and turns red. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour showed thin nanotube films effectively stop dendrites that grow naturally from unprotected lithium metal anodes in batteries. Over time, these tentacle-like dendrites can pierce the battery’s electrolyte core and reach the cathode, causing the battery to fail.

That problem has both dampened the use of lithium metal in commercial applications and encouraged researchers worldwide to solve it.

Lithium metal charges much faster and holds about 10 times more energy by volume than the lithium-ion electrodes found in just about every electronic device, including cellphones and electric cars.

“One of the ways to slow dendrites in lithium-ion batteries is to limit how fast they charge,” Tour said. “People don’t like that. They want to be able to charge their batteries quickly.”

The Rice team’s answer, detailed in Advanced Materials, is simple, inexpensive and highly effective at stopping dendrite growth, Tour said.

“What we’ve done turns out to be really easy,” he said. “You just coat a lithium metal foil with a multiwalled carbon nanotube film. The lithium dopes the nanotube film, which turns from black to red, and the film in turn diffuses the lithium ions.”

“Physical contact with lithium metal reduces the nanotube film, but balances it by adding lithium ions,” said Rice postdoctoral researcher Rodrigo Salvatierra, co-lead author of the paper with graduate student Gladys López-Silva. “The ions distribute themselves throughout the nanotube film.”

When the battery is in use, the film discharges stored ions and the underlying lithium anode refills it, maintaining the film’s ability to stop dendrite growth.

The tangled-nanotube film effectively quenched dendrites over 580 charge/discharge cycles of a test battery with a sulfurized-carbon cathode the lab developed in previous experiments. The researchers reported the full lithium metal cells retained 99.8 percent of their coulombic efficiency, the measure of how well electrons move within an electrochemical system.

Solar cells are a cost-effective, alternate source of energy. A subtype of these, organic solar cells make use of organic polymers inside the cell. Using these polymers makes the cells light-weight and increases their flexibility. Organic solar cells are produced by two different chemical methods: dry processing and wet processing, with the latter being a faster method. There are several parameters used to assess the efficiency of solar cells with absorption of light and transportation of charge being widely used.

A prevailing problem with the structure of organic cells is that molecules in the active organic layer responsible for light absorption and charge transport tend to face both towards the edges of cells, as well as towards the light absorbing substrate. Maximizing the number of molecules facing the substrate, however, is the key to maximising absorption and conductivity of the cell. Scientists have modified the dry processing method to achieve such an orientation, but it has not been possible with the wet method. The research team led by Tetsuya Taima at Kanazawa University, is the first to successfully do so.

The premise of their method is the introduction of a copper iodide (CuI) layer between the active molecules and the substrate. In their study, the researchers used a film of active molecules called DRCN5T and coated them onto either CuI/PEDOT: PSS (30 nm)/indium tin oxide (ITO) mixed substrates, or substrates without the CuI layer. The ratio of substrate facing to edge facing DRCN5T molecules was then compared between both. Subsequent high-resolution imaging revealed that the CuI containing cells had active molecules with a ten times higher substrate facing orientation, along with enhanced light absorption. The researchers attributed this altered orientation of the molecules to strong chemical interactions between the DRCN5T and CuI atoms. To further confirm this, DRCN5T molecules with bulky side chains that do not interact with CuI were used, and a higher substrate facing ratio was not seen.

This is the first study that effectively demonstrates a method of producing such efficient organic solar cells using the wet processing method. Besides saving time, the wet method also results in larger film areas. “This technique is expected to greatly contribute to the development of organic thin film solar cells fabricated by wet processing in the future”, conclude the authors. Their approach paves the way for producing high-performance solar cells faster.

By Nishita Rao

DARPA’s Vision of Cross-Collaboration

Ron Polcawich, program manager, DARPA Microsystems Technology Office, will give the closing keynote at MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress on October 29-30, 2018 in Napa Valley, Calif. SEMI’s Nishita Rao spoke with Polcawich about the MEMS workshop on rapid innovation that he held earlier this year and his interest in continuing that conversation with a broad audience of MEMS and sensors suppliers attending MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress.

SEMI: What is your vision for the Rapid Innovation through Production MEMS (RIPM) concept and why does the MEMS and sensors industry need it?

Polcawich: The goal behind our RIPM concept is to advance the state of MEMS device technology by creating enhanced access to mature process flows for utilization by military, academic and commercial MEMS designers.

Compare MEMS to IC development and you will see much more rapid innovation in ICs. In many cases, IC designers can get through four design cycles in a calendar year because the process technologies are so mature.

In contrast, it can take three to four years to develop the process flow for a MEMS device. I believe that we can do better. With so much process-flow development in MEMS having taken place over the past 15 years, we now have plenty of commercial designs out there. How do we capitalize on these existing production process flows so we can rapidly innovate to avoid those painfully long production cycles?

With this question in mind, we launched a campaign to solicit feedback from small, medium and large foundries, integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), systems designers and integrators, and academic stakeholders. Our effort culminated in a May workshop where we were able to bring many of the same groups to the table. During one intensive day, we discussed challenges to the RIPM concept and what we would need to make it work.

SEMI: What were some of your areas of focus?

Polcawich: We covered a range of topics, from improving access to sophisticated packaging technology, such as advanced interposer technologies, to IP entanglement and the role of process design kits (PDKs).

SEMI: In an industry historically defined by competition over collaboration, how do you hope to convince MEMS supply-chain members to work together?

Polcawich: We see benefits from the proposed RIPM concept across the board. Foundries would benefit from outputting higher volumes of devices as well as charging for more sophisticated PDKs and process flows — which would comprise a new source of revenue for them.

From our discussions at the workshop and throughout the summer, we understand that certain technology sectors are going to be more willing to engage with the community than others. Notional examples that we highlighted at the workshop include the possibility of manufacturing high-performance inertial sensors, oscillators and pressure sensors within the same process flow. The challenge to the community is having the MEMS designers work within a locked-down process flow and not requesting different material layers, gaps and critical feature dimensions for each device type, which is very common within our industry. We asked everyone the question, “If there were broader access to production process flows, would faster technology transition and innovation cycles enable a more rapid time-to-market for a wider range of products?”

SEMI: What would you like MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress attendees to take away from your presentation?

Polcawich: We welcome additional feedback on the RIPM concept to help shape any potential program ideas. Furthermore, we would like assistance in identifying tipping-point technologies on each sector’s/foundry’s/IDM’s technology roadmap. We could use that information to determine mutual investment opportunities that could shift the roadmap timelines to the left, enabling more rapid production and commercialization timelines.  

Dr. Ronald Polcawich joined DARPA as a Program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) in August 2017. His research interests include advanced materials processing, micromechanics for small-scale robotics, device designs, and miniaturized position, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems. Read more.

Polcawich will present Rapid Innovation with Production MEMS Workshop Outbrief on Tuesday, October 30 at MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress in Napa Valley, Calif.

Register today to connect with Ron and learn about DARPA’s rapid innovation in MEMS concept.

Nishita Rao is a marketing manager at SEMI.

Sensera Inc. (ASX: SE1), a provider of MEMS devices and Internet of Things (IoT) solution provider that delivers sensor-based products transforming real-time data into meaningful information, action and value, is pleased to announce it has acquired and qualified additional thin-film processing equipment including a dicing saw, a wafer bonder and an electroplating cell to meet the growing customer demand in this segment.

“We are very pleased to be able to expand our production capabilities, closely aligning ourselves with growing customer demand. This new production equipment substantially broadens our existing tool set and enables greater vertical integration and process control,” said Tim Stucchi, GM/COO of the Sensera MicroDevices Division.

The new dicing saw operates in either fully-automatic or semi-automatic mode for full wafer and custom cuts, featuring a positional accuracy down to 1 μm and a cutting speed of 300 mm/sec. It supports small pieces and allows for custom shaping of silicon, sapphire, Pyrex, quartz, ceramics and metals.

Operating under high vacuum, precisely controlled temperature and high-pressure conditions, the new wafer bonder facilitates extremely demanding applications. Eutectic, thermal compressive, adhesive and anodic bonding processes with a wafer alignment accuracy of 2 μm have been smoothly integrated into Sensera’s qualified processes, thus enabling the company to offer many wafer level packaging (WLP) solutions to its current and future customers in multiple applications and market spaces:

    • Microfluidic devices for bio-analysis, medical research and drug development
    • Pressure sensors for human implantable surgical devices
    • Precision accelerometer and gyroscope devices for geo-positioning
    Micro-mirror devices for laser based Automotive self-driving applications

The wafer bond chamber is configurable to process small coupons (from ~10 mm2) and wafer diameters from 25 mm (1”) up to 200 mm (8″).

The electroplating cell is able to plate and electroform wafers or discreet parts up to a size of 200 mm (8″). Typical applications include MEMS, Integrated Circuits (IC) on silicon, gallium arsenide and similar glass-type substrates. Sensera’s qualified processes achieve exceptionally low residual stress and enable tight thickness uniformity control.

“To drive down cycle times, improve quality control and reduce costs, our fab requires ongoing capability upgrades,” stated Ralph Schmitt, CEO of Sensera Inc. “Our objective here is to bring previously outsourced processes back in-house and to expand our internal capability to develop and produce complex MEMS products and solutions. The new dicer, bonder and electroplating cell are just some of the essential steps required to enable innovative development programs and commercial volume customer shipments.”

Gyroscopes are devices that help vehicles, drones, and wearable and handheld electronic devices know their orientation in three-dimensional space. They are commonplace in just about every bit of technology we rely on every day. Originally, gyroscopes were sets of nested wheels, each spinning on a different axis. But open up a cell phone today, and you will find a microelectromechanical sensor (MEMS), the modern-day equivalent, which measures changes in the forces acting on two identical masses that are oscillating and moving in opposite directions. These MEMS gyroscopes are limited in their sensitivity, so optical gyroscopes have been developed to perform the same function but with no moving parts and a greater degree of accuracy using a phenomenon called the Sagnac effect.

This is the optical gyroscope developed in Ali Hajimiri’s lab, resting on grains of rice. Credit: Ali Hajimiri/Caltech

What is the Sagnac Effect?

The Sagnac effect, named after French physicist Georges Sagnac, is an optical phenomenon rooted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. To create it, a beam of light is split into two, and the twin beams travel in opposite directions along a circular pathway, then meet at the same light detector. Light travels at a constant speed, so rotating the device–and with it the pathway that the light travels–causes one of the two beams to arrive at the detector before the other. With a loop on each axis of orientation, this phase shift, known as the Sagnac effect, can be used to calculate orientation.

The Problem

The smallest high-performance optical gyroscopes available today are bigger than a golf ball and are not suitable for many portable applications. As optical gyroscopes are built smaller and smaller, so too is the signal that captures the Sagnac effect, which makes it more and more difficult for the gyroscope to detect movement. Up to now, this has prevented the miniaturization of optical gyroscopes.

The Invention

Caltech engineers led by Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, developed a new optical gyroscope that is 500 times smaller than the current state-of-the-art device, yet they can detect phase shifts that are 30 times smaller than those systems. The new device is described in a paper published in the November issue of Nature Photonics.

How it works

The new gyroscope from Hajimiri’s lab achieves this improved performance by using a new technique called “reciprocal sensitivity enhancement.” In this case, “reciprocal” means that it affects both beams of the light inside the gyroscope in the same way. Since the Sagnac effect relies on detecting a difference between the two beams as they travel in opposite directions, it is considered nonreciprocal. Inside the gyroscope, light travels through miniaturized optical waveguides (small conduits that carry light, that perform the same function as wires do for electricity). Imperfections in the optical path that might affect the beams (for example, thermal fluctuations or light scattering) and any outside interference will affect both beams similarly.

Hajimiri’s team found a way to weed out this reciprocal noise while leaving signals from the Sagnac effect intact. Reciprocal sensitivity enhancement thus improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the system and enables the integration of the optical gyro onto a chip smaller than a grain of rice.

With tight supplies of widely used power transistors and diodes driving up prices and new optical-imaging applications moving into more systems, the diverse marketplace for optoelectronics, sensors and actuators, and discrete semiconductors (O-S-D) is on pace to grow by 11% for the second year in a row in 2018 and set a ninth consecutive record-high level in combine annual revenues worldwide.  An update to IC Insights’ O-S-D forecast shows total sales across the three market segments reaching $83.2 billion this year, followed by 9% growth in 2019, when revenues are expected to hit an all-time high of $90.6 billion (Figure 1).

Figure 1

In 2017, O-S-D revenues grew 11% with total unit shipments also rising 11%, but in 2018, combined sales of optoelectronics, sensors/actuators, and discretes are expected to increase by about 11% with overall unit volumes rising 9% and average selling prices (ASPs) for products in the three market segments being nearly 1.5% higher this year.  Shortages of power transistors, diodes, and other widely used commodity parts in 2018 are expected to drive up total discrete ASPs by nearly 8% this year and result in a strong 12% increase in sales to a record-high $27.6 billion from the current peak of $24.6 billion set in 2017.

Optoelectronics sales are forecast to rise nearly 11% in 2018 to reach an all-time high of $40.9 billion, with unit shipments climbing 18% this year, but the ASP in this market is expected to decline by about 6% because of falling prices for some image sensors, infrared products, lasers, optocouplers, and lamp devices, which are mostly light-emitting diodes (LEDs).  Optoelectronics sales are getting a tremendous boost from sharply higher demand for light sensors, which are used in automatic controls of displays in smartphones and other systems, heart rate monitoring, proximity detection, and color sensing.  Light sensors along with infrared and laser transmitters are also seeing strong growth in new three-dimensional depth scanning systems and time-of-flight (ToF) cameras, which use reflected light to sense distances and are appearing in more smartphones and other applications for face recognition, 3D imaging, and virtual/augmented reality applications.

Following strong growth of 16% in both 2016 and 2017, total revenues for non-optical sensors and actuators are expected to rise 7% in 2018 to a record-high $14.8 billion with unit volume being up just 5%—the lowest rate of increase in 10 years—because of inventory adjustments in several product categories, low smartphone growth, and some production constraints.  Strong automotive sensor demand has propped up total sensors/actuator sales growth and helped lift ASPs by 2%—the first rise since 2010.