Category Archives: Applications

Newly developed tiny antennas, likened to spotlights on the nanoscale, offer the potential to measure food safety, identify pollutants in the air and even quickly diagnose and treat cancer, according to the Australian scientists who created them. The new antennas are cubic in shape. They do a better job than previous spherical ones at directing an ultra-narrow beam of light where it is needed, with little or no loss due to heating and scattering, they say.

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, Debabrata Sikdar of Monash University in Victoria, Australia, and colleagues describe these and other envisioned applications for their nanocubes in “laboratories-on-a-chip.” The cubes, composed of insulating, rather than conducting or semiconducting materials as were the spherical versions, are easier to fabricate as well as more effective, he says.

Sikdar’s paper presents analysis and simulation of 200-nanometer dielectric (nonconductive) nanoncubes placed in the path of visible and near-infrared light sources. The nanocubes are arranged in a chain, and the space between them can be adjusted to fine-tune the light beam as needed for various applications. As the separation between cubes increases, the angular width of the beam narrows and directionality improves, the researchers say.

“Unidirectional nanoantennas induce directionality to any omnidirectional light emitters like microlasers, nanolasers or spasers, and even quantum dots,” Sikdar said in an interview. Spasers are similar to lasers, but employ minute oscillations of electrons rather than light. Quantum dots are tiny crystals that produce specific colors, based on their size, and are widely used in color televisions. “Analogous to nanoscale spotlights, the cubic antennas focus light with precise control over direction and beam width,” he said.

The new cubic nanoantennas have the potential to revolutionize the infant field of nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS). “These unidirectional nanoantennas are most suitable for integrated optics-based biosensors to detect proteins, DNA, antibodies, enzymes, etc., in truly portable lab-on-a-chip platforms of the future,” Sikdar said. “They can also potentially replace the lossy on-chip IC (integrated circuit) interconnects, via transmitting optical signals within and among ICs, to ensure ultrafast data processing while minimizing device heating,” he added.

Sikdar and his colleagues plan to begin constructing unidirectional cubic NEMS antennas in the near future at the Melbourne Center for Nanofabrication. “We would like to collaborate with other research groups across the world, making all these wonders possible,” he said.

MEMS Industry Group (MIG) is bringing its popular MEMS & Sensors Technology Showcase to MEMS Executive Congress Europe for the first time. Selected from a pool of applicants, finalist companies will demo their MEMS/sensors-based applications as they vie for attendees’ votes.

“MEMS & Sensors Technology Showcase is unique in the MEMS/sensors industry, and that’s why it’s always been a crowd pleaser at the US version of this event,” said Karen Lightman, executive director, MEMS Industry Group. “Finalists include a wide array of products that demonstrate the enabling power of MEMS and sensors: portable odor detectors, touch-free vital signs’ systems, and gas/alcohol-detection monitors that work with mobile phones as well as non-invasive oxygen readers and motion-based energy harvesters. I am excited to see which company our audience crowns as winner.”

This year’s finalists include:

1

NeOse by Aryballe Technologies — Based on the combination of nano, biotech, IT and cognitive sciences, Aryballe develops innovative technologies, databases, software and devices applied to the identification, measurement and representation of smells and tastes.

The company’s main product, NeOse, will be launched in 2016 and should be the first universal portable odor detector (e-nose) on the market. As a personal device that connects to smartphones and databases, NeOse is able to recognize a wide spectrum of different odors.

2

The Touch-Free Life Care (TLC) System by BAM Labs – The TLC System frees patients from the encumbrance of wired medical monitoring devices. This touch-free digital health solution uses Freescale’s MPXV2010 pressure sensor, MCU and applications processor to provide comprehensive hardware support for data collection, networking and communications for non-intrusive health monitoring.

The TLC System tracks bio-signals without keeping patients tethered to bedside monitors.

3

MOX Gas Sensors by Cambridge CMOS Sensors – Cambridge CMOS Sensors Metal Oxide (MOX) gas sensors use MEMS Micro-hotplate technology to provide a unique silicon platform for gas sensing, enabling sensor miniaturization, low power consumption and ultra-fast response times.

For the MEMS & Sensors Technology Showcase, Cambridge CMOS Sensors will present a MOX sensor module connected to a mobile device, demonstrating superior gas detection for indoor air quality (IAQ) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). The company will also show how its MOX sensor module supports alcohol detection via breath analysis.

4

The Demox Reader by CSEM (Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology) —

Originally developed to monitor oxygen in real time in cell and tissue cultures, the Demox reader is a versatile device that enables oxygen measurements for many different applications. CSEM will demo a new Demox reader that can be used to assess air and water quality as well as to support process control of food and beverages. This compact device can be mounted on commercial microscopes that are regularly used to investigate living biological materials.

The Demox optical reader allows the rapid, efficient and non-invasive measurements of oxygen concentration in a wide range of materials.

5

EnerBee Rv2 by EnerBee — EnerBee technology is based on research developed to produce MEMS electric generators that create electricity from all kinds of movement. This includes motion at very low speeds where traditional generators become unusable.

Enerbee Rv2 is a highly efficient motion-based energy harvester that produces electricity independently from motion speed, and powers low-power devices in Internet of Things applications such as building automation, access control and smart objects.

MEMS & Sensors Technology Showcase takes place 9 March, 2015, 16:00-17:30 at Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers, Copenhagen, Denmark.

MIG Executive Director Karen Lightman will announce the winner during her closing remarks, 10 March, 2015 at 17:15.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES, a provider of advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology, today announced a partnership with imec, a nanoelectronics research center, for joint research on future radio architectures and designs for highly integrated mobile devices and IoT applications.

A key challenge for next-generation mobile devices is controlling the cost and footprint of the radio and antenna interface circuitry, which contain all of the components that process a cellular signal across the various supported frequency bands. Today, a typical mobile device must support up to 28 bands for worldwide 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE network connectivity, and more complex carrier aggregation schemes and additional frequency bands are expected for future generations. These challenges are driving the need for an agile radio that integrates many of the separate components into one piece of silicon, including power amplifiers, antenna switches, and tuners and provides a solution which is both flexible and low cost.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES will closely collaborate with technical experts from imec to investigate low-power and compact high-performance agile radio solutions that will enable a broad range of radio architecture design–targeting improvements in area, performance and power consumption. GLOBALFOUNDRIES will also partner with imec to develop innovative ultra-low power IC design solutions leveraging GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ CMOS technology to address the demanding requirements of tomorrow’s IoT devices. Ultimately, the partnership aims to build a technology and design infrastructure that will enable future RF architectures while minimizing critical interface requirements for radio power consumption and performance.

“This collaboration expands our relationship with imec, and we’re eager to leverage their R&D expertise in RF technology to accelerate time-to-volume of designs and deliver leading-edge RF technology to our customers,” said Peter Rabbeni, director RF Segment Marketing at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “This relationship further reflects our commitment to find RF design implementations that will efficiently extend the range of wireless communication applications without increasing the form factor or cost.”

“There are advanced chip technology challenges the industry needs to address to enable a higher level of integration and lower power consumption for future wireless communication,” said Harmke de Groot, senior director Perceptive Systems for the Internet of Things. “Imec is pleased to welcome GLOBALFOUNDRIES as a partner in ultra-low power wireless design. Leveraging imec’s advanced IC technology knowhow and system design experience, and GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ CMOS technology, we will accelerate the investigation and develop new approaches.”

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a unique single-step process to achieve three-dimensional (3D) texturing of graphene and graphite. Using a commercially available thermally activated shape-memory polymer substrate, this 3D texturing, or “crumpling,” allows for increased surface area and opens the doors to expanded capabilities for electronics and biomaterials.

“Fundamentally, intrinsic strains on crumpled graphene could allow modulation of electrical and optical properties of graphene,” explained SungWoo Nam, an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois. “We believe that the crumpled graphene surfaces can be used as higher surface area electrodes for battery and supercapacitor applications. As a coating layer, 3D textured/crumpled nano-topographies could allow omniphobic/anti-bacterial surfaces for advanced coating applications.”

Graphene–a single atomic layer of sp2-bonded carbon atoms–has been a material of intensive research and interest over recent years. A combination of exceptional mechanical properties, high carrier mobility, thermal conductivity, and chemical inertness, make graphene a prime candidate material for next generation optoelectronic, electromechanical, and biomedical applications.

“In this study, we developed a novel method for controlled crumpling of graphene and graphite via heat-induced contractile deformation of the underlying substrate,” explained Michael Cai Wang, a graduate student and first author of the paper, “Heterogeneous, Three-Dimensional Texturing of Graphene,” which appeared in the journal Nano Letters. “While graphene intrinsically exhibits tiny ripples in ambient conditions, we created large and tunable crumpled textures in a tailored and scalable fashion.”

“As a simpler, more scalable, and spatially selective method, this texturing of graphene and graphite exploits the thermally induced transformation of shape-memory thermoplastics, which has been previously applied to microfluidic device fabrication, metallic film patterning, nanowire assembly, and robotic self-assembly applications,” added Nam, whose group has filed a patent for their novel strategy. “The thermoplastic nature of the polymeric substrate also allows for the crumpled graphene morphology to be arbitrarily re-flattened at the same elevated temperature for the crumpling process.”

“Due to the extremely low cost and ease of processing of our approach, we believe that this will be a new way to manufacture nanoscale topographies for graphene and many other 2D and thin-film materials.”

The researchers are also investigating the textured graphene surfaces for 3D sensor applications.

“Enhanced surface area will allow even more sensitive and intimate interactions with biological systems, leading to high sensitivity devices,” Nam said.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced that it has begun mass production of industry’s first mobile application processor using the advanced 14-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology.

“Samsung’s advanced 14nm FinFET process technology is undoubtedly the most advanced logic process technology in the industry,” said Gabsoo Han, Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, System LSI Business, Samsung Electronics. “We expect the production of our 14nm mobile application processor to positively impact the growth of the mobile industry by enabling further performance improvements for cutting-edge smartphones.”

As the most advanced technology available today, 14nm FinFET process is able to achieve the highest levels of efficiency, performance and productivity. When compared to Samsung’s 20nm process technology, this newest process enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption and 30 percent productivity gain.

By successfully incorporating three-dimensional (3D) FinFET structure on transistors, Samsung has overcome performance and scaling limitations of the planar structure used in previous 20nm and older processes and gained a significant competitive edge in advanced semiconductors for the mobile industry.

This ground-breaking accomplishment is a result of Samsung’s unparalleled R&D efforts in FinFET technology since the early 2000s. Starting with a research article presented at IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting) in 2003, Samsung has continuously made progress and announced its technological achievements in FinFET research and has also filed a pool of key patents in the field.

As for memory, Samsung has been successfully mass producing its proprietary 3D V-NAND products since 2013. Together with its 3D transistor based FinFET process technology, Samsung has strengthened its leadership in 3D semiconductors in both memory and logic semiconductors that addresses the current scaling limitations with planar designs.

Samsung’s leading-edge 14nm FinFET process will be adopted by its Exynos 7 Octa, then expanded to other products throughout the year.

A new spin on spintronics


February 17, 2015

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University is exploring new materials that could yield higher computational speeds and lower power consumption, even in harsh environments.

Most modern electronic circuitry relies on controlling electronic charge within a circuit, but this control can easily be disrupted in the presence of radiation, interrupting information processing. Electronics that use spin-based logic, or spintronics, may offer an alternative that is robust even in radiation-filled environments.

Making a radiation-resistant spintronic device requires a material relevant for spintronic applications that can maintain its spin-dependence after it has been irradiated. In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the Michigan research team presents their results using bulk Si-doped n-GaAs exposed to proton radiation.

How Does Spintronics Work?

Modern electronic devices use charges to transmit and store information, primarily based upon how many electrons are in one place or another. When a lot of them are at a given terminal, you can call that ‘on.’ If you have very few of them at the same terminal, you can call that ‘off,’ just like a light switch. This allows for binary logic depending on whether the terminal is ‘on’ or ‘off.’ Spintronics, at its simplest, uses the ‘on/off’ idea, but instead of counting the electrons, their spin is measured.

“You can think of the spin of an electron as a tiny bar magnet with an arrow painted on it. If the arrow points up, we call that ‘spin-up.’ If it points down, we call that ‘spin-down.’ By using light, electric, or magnetic fields, we can manipulate, and measure, the spin direction,” said researcher Brennan Pursley, who is the first author of the new study.

While spintronics holds promise for faster and more efficient computation, researchers also want to know whether it would be useful in harsh environments. Currently, radioactivity is a major problem for electronic circuitry because it can scramble information and in the long term degrade electronic properties. For the short term effects, spintronics should be superior: radioactivity can change the quantity of charge in a circuit, but should not affect spin-polarized carriers.

Studying spintronic materials required that the research team combine two well established fields: the study of spin dynamics and the study of radiation damage. Both tool sets are quite robust and have been around for decades but combining the two required sifting through the wealth of radiation damage research. “That was the most difficult aspect,” explains Pursley. “It was an entirely new field for us with a variety of established techniques and terminology to learn. The key was to tackle it like any new project: ask a lot of questions, find a few good books or papers, and follow the citations.”

Technically, what the Michigan team did was to measure the spin properties of n-GaAs as a function of radiation fluence using time-resolved Kerr rotation and photoluminescence spectroscopy. Results show that the spin lifetime and g-factor of bulk n-GaAs is largely unaffected by proton irradiation making it a candidate for further study for radiation-resistant spintronic devices. The team plans to study other spintronic materials and prototype devices after irradiation since the hybrid field of irradiated spintronics is wide open with plenty of questions to tackle.

Long term, knowledge of radiation effects on spintronic devices will aid in their engineering. A practical implementation would be processing on a communications satellite where without the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, electronics can be damaged by harsh solar radiation. The theoretically achievable computation speeds and low power consumption could be combined with compact designs and relatively light shielding. This could make communications systems faster, longer-lived and cheaper to implement.

Scientists from Ghent University and imec announce today that they demonstrated interaction between light and sound in a nanoscale area. Their findings elucidate the physics of light-matter coupling at these scales – and pave the way for enhanced signal processing on mass-producible silicon photonic chips.

In the last decade, the field of silicon photonics has gained increasing attention as a key driver of lab-on-a-chip biosensors and of faster-than-electronics communication between computer chips. The technology builds on tiny structures known as silicon photonic wires, which are roughly a hundred times narrower than a typical human hair. These nanowires carry optical signals from one point to another at the speed of light. They are fabricated with the same technological toolset as electronic circuitry.

Fundamentally, the wires work only because light moves slower in the silicon core than in the surrounding air and glass. Thus, the light is trapped inside the wire by the phenomenon of total internal reflection. Simply confining light is one thing, but manipulating it is another. The issue is that one light beam cannot easily change the properties of another. This is where light-matter interaction comes into the picture: it allows some photons to control other photons.

Publishing in Nature Photonics, researchers from the Photonics Research Group of Ghent University and imec report on a peculiar type of light-matter interaction. They managed to confine not only light but also sound to the silicon nanowires. The sound oscillates ten billion times per second: far more rapid than human ears can hear. They realized that the sound cannot be trapped in the wire by total internal reflection. Unlike light, sound moves faster in the silicon core than in the surrounding air and glass. Thus, the scientists sculpted the environment of the core to make sure any vibrational wave trying to escape it would actually bounce back. Doing so, they confined both light and sound to the same nanoscale waveguide core – a world’s first observation.

Dr. Zhihong LiuBy Dr. Zhihong Liu, Executive Chairman, ProPlus Design Solutions, Inc.

It wasn’t all that long ago when nano-scale was the term the semiconductor industry used to describe small transistor sizes to indicate technological advancement. Today, with Moore’s Law slowing down at sub-28nm, the term more often heard is giga-scale due to a leap forward in complexity challenges caused in large measure by the massive amounts of big data now part of all chip design.

Nano-scale technological advancement has enabled giga-sized applications for more varieties of technology platforms, including the most popular mobile, IoT and wearable devices. EDA tools must respond to such a trend. On one side, accurately modeling nano-scale devices, including complex physical effects due to small geometry sizes and complicated device structures, has increased in importance and difficulties. Designers now demand more from foundries and have higher standards for PDK and model accuracies. They need to have a deep understanding of the process platform in order to  make their chip or IP competitive.

On the other side, giga-scale designs require accurate tools to handle increasing design size. The small supply voltage associated with technology advancement and low-power applications, and the impact of various process variation effects, have reduced available design margins. Furthermore, the big circuit size has made the design sensitive to small leakage current and small noise margin. Accuracy will soon become the bottleneck for giga-scale designs.

However, traditional design tools for big designs, such as FastSPICE for simulation and verification, mostly trade-off accuracy for capacity and performance. One particular example will be the need for accurate memory design, e.g., large instance memory characterization, or full-chip timing and power verification. Because embedded memory may occupy more than 50 percent of chip die area, it will have a significant impact on chip performance and power. For advanced designs, power or timing characterization and verification require much higher accuracy than what FastSPICE can offer –– 5 percent or less errors compared to golden SPICE.

To meet the giga-scale challenges outlined above, the next-generation circuit simulator must offer the high accuracy of a traditional SPICE simulator, and have similar capacity and performance advantages of a FastSPICE simulator. New entrants into the giga-scale SPICE simulation market readily handle the latest process technologies, such as 16/14nm FinFET, which adds further challenges to capacity and accuracy.

One giga-scale SPICE simulator can cover small and large block simulations, characterization, or full-chip verifications, with a pure SPICE engine that guarantees accuracy, and eliminates inconsistencies in the traditional design flow.  It can be used as the golden reference for FastSPICE applications, or directly replace FastSPICE for memory designs.

The giga-scale era in chip design is here and giga-scale SPICE simulators are commercially available to meet the need.

At this year’s International Solid State Circuits Conference to be held in San Francisco, Calif., Feb. 22-26, imec and Holst Centre will present eight scientific papers covering groundbreaking results on ultra-low power design for wireless broadband communication, for wireless sensor networks, and organic electronics. Moreover, executives and scientists from imec and Holst Centre are prominently present as technology experts throughout the conference’s forums, evening sessions and panels and as session chairs. Throughout the event, imec and Holst Centre will issue several press releases showcasing breakthrough results in various research domains applicable to the conference.

“Imec has served as a primary research partner for companies around the globe, leading in the development of advanced solutions for next generation mobile, 5G, 60GHz mobile backhaul reconfigurable radio, mm-wave radar, and ultra-low power wireless sensor networks for a connected and sustainable world,” stated Harmke De Groot, department director of wireless technologies at imec/Holst Centre. “ISSCC is recognized as one of the major conferences in our field, and we are proud to showcase our recent work and be involved in the technical education component. It is a confirmation of imec’s achievements and the relevance of our research in pushing the technology limits toward higher performance, lower power consumption and smaller form factor.”

Among imec’s research highlights presented at ISSCC2015 are the world’s lowest power PAN (personal area network) radio, developed together with Renesas, and an electrical‑balance duplexer achieving state-of-the-art linearity and insertion loss performance in IBM 0.18µm RF CMOS SOI process realized in collaboration with Murata and HiSilicon. Such reconfigurable duplexers are key building blocks for front-end modules in next-generation communication systems. Another highlight is a 79 GHz binary phase-modulated continuous-wave radar transceiver with TX-to-RX spillover cancellation in 28nm CMOS (developed together with Panasonic), and a flexible thin-film NFC tag powered by a commercial USB reader device at 13.56MHz.

Mentor Graphics Corporation today announced the embedded systems industry’s broadest portfolio for industrial automation. In partnership with key industry vendors, Mentor Graphics now offers a solution differentiated from other marketplace products by its unique multi-platform approach and robust security architecture. Mentor Graphics new Mentor Embedded multi-platform solution enables embedded product developers to create more feature-rich, power-efficient, safe and secure systems. It encompasses a breadth of runtime platform options, customized development tools, system partitioning, power management, safety certification and system characterization tools, plus market-leading multicore support, making this the broadest solution in the industry.

The Mentor Embedded industrial automation solution includes:

  • The Nucleus real-time operating system (RTOS) with advanced power management and optional IEC 61508 safety certification and Wurldtech Achilles communications certification
  • The Mentor Embedded Linux platform with integrated industrial protocols, SELinux mandatory access control support, and Sourcery CodeBench Professional toolsuite
  • Type-1 hypervisor technology for partitioning and separation
  • Advanced Sourcery Analyzer tool for advanced debug and system characterization
  • Qt graphics optimized for embedded automation controller user interface (UI) applications
  • Customized open source toolchains to optimize hardware components, code footprint, and application performance

The Mentor Embedded solution provides developers with integrated and tested capabilities and features that enable equipment manufacturers to focus on strategic competitive differentiation across the spectrum of industrial devices (industrial controllers, process automation controllers, PLCs, data acquisition devices, and motor driver controllers, along with motion, vision, and SCADA systems).  This enables convergence of the product features and capabilities necessary to increase profitability by minimizing footprint (floor space), reducing power usage (electricity costs), and decreasing downtime (security vulnerabilities).

“Our goal is to provide our process-driven customers with three of the most important things they need to secure their futures: operational integrity, which keeps their plants up and running; operational insight, which provides the knowledge and applications they need to run their plants safely and profitably; and future-proof technology, which provides the agility they need to respond quickly to changing conditions and new business opportunities,” said Andrew Kling, Director of Technology and Process at Schneider Electric.

The solution offers support for advanced homogeneous and heterogeneous multicore System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures integrated with runtime operating platforms and tools to allow manufacturers to reuse existing IP (legacy applications) while taking advantage of leading-edge, power-efficient multicore devices. The key industrial automation partners include Icon Labs for critical security management components that enable end-to-end security, and Softing AG who provides a breadth of industrial connectivity options including OPC-UA, Ethernet/IP, and more.

“Securing critical infrastructure has been a top priority for many businesses and governments, and now with the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), the challenges will increase exponentially,” stated Alan Grau, founder and CEO of Icon Labs. “We have worked closely with Mentor Graphics to move past the legacy concept of securing the embedded device perimeter, to protecting the embedded device itself. This device protection, data protection, and advanced management and reporting capabilities provide the necessary level of protection from both external and internal threats.”

The Mentor Embedded industrial automation solution was developed to address the growing challenges of building, extending, and maintaining embedded hardware and software for a variety of industrial automation products. It provides a new way to integrate legacy applications, new technologies, comprehensive security architecture, and the latest multicore processors on the same industrial device.

“Mentor Graphics continually advances its market-leading embedded software technologies powered by Freescale devices such as i.MX applications processors and QorIQ multicore processors based on Layerscape architecture, to create a complete ecosystem to ease embedded systems development,” stated Alex Dopplinger, industrial business development manager, Freescale. “Mentor’s unique and comprehensive security framework helps manage the complexities of multicore heterogeneous systems needed for today’s secure industrial automation applications.”