Category Archives: Semiconductors

SEMI, in collaboration with strategic investing groups throughout the global semiconductor industry, has announced the Silicon Innovation Forum, or SIF, to bridge funding gaps for new and early-stage companies with valuable semiconductor manufacturing and technology solutions. SIF will be held in conjunction with SEMICON West, on July 9, 2013 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.  The event will consist of a one-half day conference highlighted by investment presentations from new and emerging companies with innovative technology solutions targeted at next generation semiconductors. The Silicon Innovation Forum is being organized by leading strategic investment groups in the industry including Applied Ventures, Dow Chemical Company, Intel Capital, Micron Ventures, TEL Venture Capital, and Samsung Ventures.

“At a time when the need for new ideas and technologies has never been greater, venture capital and private funding sources for advanced semiconductor technology development has significantly declined over the past decade, threatening the future of Moore’s Law and the economic engine of today’s connected, electronic society,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “The Silicon Innovation Forum will address these funding gaps by providing a platform for new and emerging innovators, strategic investors, and venture capitalists to discuss the needs and requirements for next-generation technologies, and provide insights into technology, capital, partnership, and collaboration strategies necessary for mutual success.”

This unprecedented collaboration of leading strategic investor groups from throughout the world has formed to streamline and accelerate partnership opportunities for technology entrepreneurs to bridge the gap between R&D and product development funding.  The Forum will provide short-term business opportunities for early / mid-stage companies, R&D entrepreneurs from larger companies, and other industry innovators — while addressing long-term structural changes to the industry necessary to foster a healthy innovation pipeline.

New and emerging companies can showcase their innovations through table top and/or poster displays for one-on-one meetings with qualified investors, plus showcase their ideas during short pitches during the SiF Conference.  The SIF Conference will be free to all SEMICON West attendees, but the Innovation Showcase and Reception for one-on-one presentation and meeting opportunities will be restricted to qualified partnership and investor groups.

University at Buffalo engineers have created a more efficient way to catch rainbows, an advancement in photonics that could lead to technological breakthroughs in solar energy, stealth technology and other areas of research.

University of Buffalo engineerQiaoqiang Gan, PhD, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UB, and a team of graduate students described their work in a paper called “Rainbow Trapping in Hyperbolic Metamaterial Waveguide,” published Feb. 13 in the online journal Scientific Reports.

They developed a “hyperbolic metamaterial waveguide,” which is essentially an advanced microchip made of alternate ultra-thin films of metal and semiconductors and/or insulators. The waveguide halts and ultimately absorbs each frequency of light, at slightly different places in a vertical direction, to catch a “rainbow” of wavelengths.

Gan is a researcher within UB’s new Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics. 

“Electromagnetic absorbers have been studied for many years, especially for military radar systems,” Gan said. “Right now, researchers are developing compact light absorbers based on optically thick semiconductors or carbon nanotubes. However, it is still challenging to realize the perfect absorber in ultra-thin films with tunable absorption band.

“We are developing ultra-thin films that will slow the light and therefore allow much more efficient absorption, which will address the long existing challenge.”

In their initial attempts to slow light, researchers relied upon cryogenic gases. But because cryogenic gases are very cold – roughly 240 degrees below zero Fahrenheit – they are difficult to work with outside a laboratory.

Before joining UB, Gan helped pioneer a way to slow light without cryogenic gases. He and other researchers at Lehigh University made nano-scale-sized grooves in metallic surfaces at different depths, a process that altered the optical properties of the metal. While the grooves worked, they had limitations. For example, the energy of the incident light cannot be transferred onto the metal surface efficiently, which hampered its use for practical applications, Gan said.

The hyperbolic metamaterial waveguide solves that problem because it is a large area of patterned film that can collect the incident light efficiently. It is referred to as an artificial medium with subwavelength features whose frequency surface is hyperboloid, which allows it to capture a wide range of wavelengths in different frequencies including visible, near-infrared, mid-infrared, terahertz and microwaves.

It could lead to advancements in an array of fields.

For example, in electronics there is a phenomenon known as crosstalk, in which a signal transmitted on one circuit or channel creates an undesired effect in another circuit or channel. The on-chip absorber could potentially prevent this.

The on-chip absorber may also be applied to solar panels and other energy-harvesting devices. It could be especially useful in mid-infrared spectral regions as thermal absorber for devices that recycle heat after sundown, Gan said.

Technology such as the Stealth bomber involves materials that make planes, ships and other devices invisible to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods. Because the on-chip absorber has the potential to absorb different wavelengths at a multitude of frequencies, it could be useful as a stealth coating material.

Additional authors of the paper include Haifeng Hu, Dengxin Ji, Xie Zeng and Kai Liu, all PhD candidates in UB’s Department of Electrical Engineering. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and UB’s electrical engineering department.

ISSCC 2013: Wireless trends


February 14, 2013

Data rates for modern wireless standards are increasing rapidly and this is evident from the trend of cellular standards (shown in Figure 1). The data rate has increased 100X over the last decade and another 10X is projected in the next five years. This trend is partly contributed by using more complex modulations (e.g. using OFDM – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing – for better spectral efficiency) at the cost of digital signal processing (DSP). In addition, the expansion of channel bandwidth is also an effective way to achieve the data rate increase. This is seen in the wireless connectivity chart (e.g. 802.11) shown in Figure 2. The channel bandwidths for the WLAN standards increase from the traditional 20MHz (802.11g) all the way to 2.16GHz (802.11ad). Because the available spectrum is limited in the low GHz range, for >1GHz channel bandwidth, the carrier frequency is moving from 2.4/5GHz (802.11a/b/g/n/ac) to 60GHz (802.11ad) in the mm-Wave range. With the available spectrum in the 60GHz range, data rates up to 6.76Gb/s can be achieved. Design at mm-Wave frequencies comes with significant challenges, with academic research oriented to the reduction of the power, while industry focuses on product-quality robustness and standards compliance. A new generation of chipsets, compliant with WiGig and 802.11ad, is ready for production.

Figure 1: Data rate trend of cellular standards

Since spectrum is scarce, new carrier aggregation techniques are being developed that can combine available channels in a flexible way, e.g. combining non-contiguous channels, or even channels at different frequency bands. The new 802.11af standard aims to utilize “TV white space”, unused legacy analog TV frequency bands below 1GHz. This will first be implemented using a database of available channels per geographical location, but eventually high-sensitivity spectrum sensing will be used to confirm the availability of the spectrum. The possibility of opening up this large amount of spectrum generates radio challenges, e.g. highly linear transceivers that can cover a very wide frequency range and various channel bandwidths. As a consequence of high-linearity and wideband design requirements, distortion cancellation and tunable RF channel-selection techniques are very critical. Most transceivers in this category are adopting digital calibration and analog-feedback techniques to increase the linearity performance for a flexible and tunable front-end to cover a wide range of frequencies.

As wireless technology becomes cheaper, it can be deployed in many devices, including sensors for monitoring environmental conditions. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require ultra-low-power radio to increase battery life and minimize the battery size, or better yet, eliminate the battery altogether by using energy harvesting. To reduce the power consumption of the radio, the first approach is to use the radio only when it is requested. A “wake-up radio” that monitors the channel and alerts the “main” radio when communication is requested becomes one of the main building blocks of the WSN node. Once the radio is awake, power efficiency becomes the main target for both high- and low-data-rate communication. Another approach is to duty-cycle the radio operation, i.e. only use the radio for short communication bursts, which requires fast turn-on techniques. Such WSNs will enable electronics for sustainability.

Similar to the evolution in cellular, ultra-low-power radios are now becoming multi-standard, covering for example Zigbee, BTLE, and IEEE 802.15.6. Multi-standard implementation implies radio-block sharing, and standards management, including modulation, frequency, bandwidth, power output, sensitivity …, while maintaining the low power consumption, which is one of the key success factors of such devices. Another main concern is the price. These multi-standard radios must have small silicon area circuits in low cost packaging. NFC (Near Field Communication) is becoming more and more popular. This new secure data wireless transmission mode is now embedded in smart phones and will become a de-facto requirement in the next years.

Digital architectures implementing radio functions are very efficient in deep-nm CMOS. In the past years Digital-PLLs were developed in the radio front-ends. Now, new digital approaches are being deployed in transmitters, targeting more flexibility of the RF front-end that leverages CMOS scaling for reduced power dissipation and area, simplifying integration in large SOCs, and empowering the next generation of wireless communications.

Figure 2: Data rate trend of wireless connectivity standards

This and other topics will be discussed at length at ISSCC 2013, the foremost global forum for new developments in the integrated-circuit industry. ISSCC, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, will be held on February 17-21, 2013, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel.

ISSCC 2013: Analog trends


February 14, 2013

Analog and digital integrated circuitsThe efficient control, storage, and distribution of energy are worldwide challenges, and are increasingly important areas of analog circuit research. While the manipulation and storage of information is efficiently performed digitally, the conversion and storage of energy must fundamentally be performed with analog systems. As a result, the key technologies for power management are predominantly analog. For example, there is much interest in wireless power transmission for battery charging applications, ranging from mobile handsets to medical implants, and increased efficiency in wireless power transmission is enabling faster charging over longer distances. There is also an explosion of technologies that permit energy to be collected from the environment via photovoltaic, piezoelectric, or thermoelectric transducers. A significant focus here is on analog circuits that are able to harvest sub-microwatt power levels from energy sources at 10’s of millivolts, to provide autonomy for remote sensors or to supplement conventional battery supplies in mobile devices. To achieve this, extremely low power must be consumed by the attendant analog circuits so that some energy is left over to charge a battery or super capacitor. Similarly, the power consumption of analog instrumentation amplifiers, oscillators, and audio power amplifiers is being scaled down to meet the demands of these low power systems. Fast power-up and -down is also desired from these circuits to permit high energy-efficiency during intermittent operation. Together, these technologies will permit devices to be powered indefinitely from sustainable sources, opening the door to ubiquitous sensing, environmental monitoring, and medical applications.

Analog circuits also serve as bridges between the digital world and the analog real world. Just like the bridges in our roads, analog circuits are often bottlenecks and their design is critical to overall performance, efficiency, and robustness. Nevertheless, digital circuits such as microprocessors drive the market; so semiconductor technology has been optimized relentlessly over the last 40 years to reduce the size, cost, and power consumption of digital circuits. Analog circuitry has proven increasingly difficult to implement using these modern IC technologies. For example, as the size of transistors has decreased, the range of analog voltages they can handle has decreased and the variation observed in their analog performance has increased.

These aspects of semiconductor technology explain two key divergent trends in analog circuits. One trend is to forgo the latest digital IC manufacturing technologies, instead fabricating analog circuits in older technologies, which may be augmented to accommodate the high voltages demanded by increasing markets in medical, automotive, industrial and high-efficiency lighting applications. Other applications dictate full integration of analog and digital circuits together in our most modern digital semiconductor technologies. For example, microprocessors with multiple cores can reduce their overall power consumption by dynamically scaling operating voltage and frequency in response to time-varying computational demands. For this purpose, DC-DC voltage converters can be embedded alongside the digital circuitry, driving research into the delivery of locally regulated power supplies with high efficiency and low die area, but without recourse to external components.

This and other related topics will be discussed at length at ISSCC 2013, the foremost global forum for new developments in the integrated-circuit industry. ISSCC, the International Solid State Circuits Conference, will be held on February 17-21, 2013, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel.

Cabot Microelectronics to collaborate with SEMATECHSEMATECH announced today that Cabot Microelectronics Corporation has joined its Front End Processes, or FEP, program and will collaborate with SEMATECH to develop advanced solutions for emerging CMP applications.

“SEMATECH provides Cabot Microelectronics with excellent process capability to help identify and demonstrate emerging applications for CMP consumables,” stated Ananth Naman, Cabot Microelectronics’ Vice President of Research and Development. “We expect this collaboration to help enable Cabot Microelectronics support our customers’ emerging CMP requirements.”

As semiconductor device sizes shrink, new materials are introduced, and higher yields are targeted, achieving wafer scale planarity through CMP has become increasingly challenging. These issues are expected to continue to become more challenging in the context of low-power technologies.

“Cabot Microelectronics’ CMP processing solutions will complement our own device and process expertise,” said Paul Kirsch, SEMATECH’s director of Front End Processes. “We will work together to develop practical, manufacturable solutions to address the emerging needs of advanced transistor technologies.”

The goal of SEMATECH’s FEP program is to enable novel materials, processes, structural modules and electrical and physical characterization methods to support the continued scaling of logic and memory applications.

Headquartered in Aurora, Illinois, Cabot Microelectronics Corporation is a supplier of CMP polishing slurries and a growing CMP pad supplier to the semiconductor industry. Since becoming an independent public company in 2000, the company has grown to approximately 1,050 employees on a global basis.

SEMATECH is an international consortium of leading semiconductor device, equipment, and materials manufacturers for over 25 years.

Today, Research and Markets released the Gallium Nitride (GaN) Semiconductor Devices (Discretes & ICs) Market, Global Forecast & Analysis: 2012 – 2022. This research study on the GaN semiconductors market gives a detailed overview of the global GaN semiconductors market in the present scenario, and discusses the history, evolution, market by technology, market by products and devices, market by application segments, and by geography. Each classification done for the global GaN semiconductors market has an extensive segmentation with market estimates and forecasts till 2022 for each sub-market in terms of both – revenue and volume. The major GaN semiconductor products, namely the power semiconductors and opto-semiconductors, are analyzed in great detail throughout the research study in every type of classification.

GaN has turned out to be the choice for most of the power semiconductor applications and is quickly replacing the existing silicon technology, according to the report. The various properties of GaN,  such as wider bandgap, high break-down voltage, larger critical electric field, and higher thermal conductivity, let the GaN devices operate at higher voltages, high switching frequencies, handle higher power density, and offer enhanced power efficiency than the pure Si devices. These properties allow the GaN discretes like Schottky diodes, MOSFETs, and the other advanced transistors to operate at much higher voltage levels, which are difficult for the counterpart Si devices. GaN power semiconductors also help in reducing the conduction and switching losses, thereby offering higher efficiency in electronic systems. The major application segments of GaN power semiconductors currently are the inverters (& converters), RF devices, power supply modules, and motor drives being used across all the end user verticals.

In the aspect of opto-semiconductors, GaN has been increasingly used in LEDs, laser diodes, and optocouplers due to the primary characteristic of GaN showing much brighter emission characteristics than the other materials, such as Si, SiC, GaAs, and GaP. AlGaN, mixed with GaN, is used in opto-semiconductors designed for high-brightness and ultra-high brightness applications that operate at wavelengths <400 nm. This market is expected to have healthy demand due to the markets growing for green, blue, violet, purple, ultra-violet, and white LEDs. The growing market for solid state lighting applications in several areas of the consumer electronics, computers, automotive, industrial and military, aerospace and defense sectors is expected to boost the GaN opto-semiconductors market revenue over the years to come.

This report, based on the extensive research on the GaN semiconductors market and industry, is aimed at identifying the entire market for the GaN semiconductor devices, and all its sub-segments through extensively detailed classifications, in terms of both revenue and shipments. It focuses on giving a bird’s eye-view of the upcoming industry with regards to GaN semiconductor market with detailed market segmentations, combined with qualitative analysis at each and every aspect of the classifications done.

MEMS microphone market to doubleSilicon microphones are among a broad range of devices known as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), an emerging field in which various sensors and mechanical devices are constructed on a single wafer using processes developed for making integrated circuits (ICs). The chief advantage of micromachining silicon microphones is cost. Several sensors can be processed on a chip simultaneously and can be integrated with passive and active electronic devices.

According to a new market research study from Innovative Research and Products, or iRAP, titled MEMS Microphones – A Global Technology, Industry and Market Analysis (ET-118), silicon micro-machined microphones (also known as silicon microphones or MEMS microphones) have begun to emerge as a competitor technology to the electret condenser microphone (ECM). The global market for MEMS microphones has reached approximately $422 million in 2012. The market is predicted to increase to $865 million in 2017, with increasingly high uptake of MEMS microphones over alternatives for a variety of applications. Thanks to Apple Inc., which has spurred on this phenomenal growth by adopting MEMS microphones for their products, namely the iPhone, iPad and iTouch, hence paving the way for other smartphone and tablet manufactures to adopt the same.

MEMS microphones are more compact than traditional microphone systems, because they capture sound and convert it to a digital signal on the same chip. MEMS microphone solutions developed on the CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductors) MEMS platform frees consumer electronic device designers and manufacturers from many of the problems associated with ECMs. CMOS MEMS microphones also integrate an analog-to-digital converter on the chip, creating a microphone with a robust digital output. Since the majority of portable applications will ultimately convert the analogue output of the microphone to a digital signal for processing, the system architecture can be made completely digital, removing noise-prone analogue signals from the circuit board and simplifying the overall design.

Report Highlights

The new iRAP study has focused on MEMS microphones that can be used in mobile phones, digicams, camcorders, laptops, automotive hands-free calling and hearing aids. It provides market data about the size and growth of the MEMS microphones application segments, new developments including a detailed patent analysis, company profiles and industry trends. The report also covered the underlying economic issues driving the MEMS microphones business, as well as assessments of new advanced MEMS microphones that are being developed.

Manufacturers of MEMS microphones expect competition to persist and intensify in the future from a number of different sources. Microphones are facing competition in a new, rapidly evolving and highly competitive sector of the audio communication market. Increased competition could result in reduced prices and gross margins for microphone products and could require increased spending by research and development, sales and marketing and customer support.

Micro-machined microphone chips can match and extend the performance of existing devices, for instance, by using sensor arrays. Silicon microphones also offer advantages to the OEM in the form of improved manufacturing methods (reliability, yield, assembly cost) combined with robustness. They also offer additional functionality, such as the ability to incorporate multiple microphones into portable electronic devices for noise suppression and beam forming.

The potential for smaller footprint components and resistance to electromagnetic interference also supports new cell phone designs. Moreover, MEMS microphones meet price points set by electret microphones by leveraging established high-volume silicon manufacturing processes. This combination of size, performance and functionality, and low cost are highly desirable for OEMs and consumers alike.

Many of these new “miniature” silicon microphones for consumer and computer communication devices are approximately one-half the size and operate on just one-third the power of conventional microphones.

The range of possible applications of these microphones derives from their important advantages as compared to conventional ECM technologies. Based on silicon MEMS technology, the new microphone achieves the same acoustic and electrical properties as conventional microphones, but is more rugged and exhibits higher heat resistance. These properties offer designers of a wide range of products greater flexibility and new opportunities to integrate microphones.

Report Conclusions

Major findings of this report are:

  • The MEMS microphones market is an attractive, and still growing, 100s of million-dollar market characterized by very high production volumes of MEMS microphones that are extremely reliable and low in cost.
  • Mobile phones would consistently have the largest share through 2017, followed by laptops and tablets, camcorders, hearing aids, headphones and automotive.
  • From 2012 to 2017, hearing aids will have the highest growth rate with AAGR at 27.46%, followed by headphones at 25% AAGR.
  • Regionally, North America had about 25.3% of the market in 2012, followed by Europe at 19.7 %, Japan at 15.7% and the rest of world at 39.5%.
  • In 2012, More than ten companies and institutions worldwide are active in the field of MEMS microphones, which can be divided in two different technological concepts – single-chip and two-chip. The number of active market participants is expected to double by 2017.
  • By 2017, MEMS microphones will achieve penetrations of 92% in the mobile phone market segment and 95% in PDAs, digicams and camcorders market.
  • In terms of technology, the largest share will be for two-chip integration.

Introduction

This year has shown increased innovation, integration, and technical maturity across RF frequency bands. This document outlines emerging RF trends that will be covered at ISSCC 2013.

ISSCC 2013 authors will present an ongoing drive toward increasing levels of integration. This trend can be seen in all areas of RF design from mm-Wave, to cellular, to imaging, to wireless sensors. In mm-Wave designs, higher system complexity (front-end, synthesizer, and baseband) is increasingly being integrated onto a single die. In cellular, the push for integration has led to a strong trend of architectures allowing better linearity and co-existence of these multiple bands and standards. In a related trend, there has been much research the last few years into various ways to remove costly and bulky SAW filters and duplexers. Some of these research areas include highly linear blocker-tolerant receivers, mixer-first receivers, feedback blocker cancellation, feed-forward blocker cancellation, N-path filters, and electrical balance of hybrid transformers. Strong work continues in the effort to integrate CMOS PAs while delivering viable power/efficiency performance. Finally, a clear trend this year was a significant number of chips demonstrated in 65nm CMOS compared to other technology nodes. This observation was noted across all frequency ranges and circuit topologies. The chips presented at ISSCC 2013 confirm that RF devices will continue to see larger levels of integration at the chip- and package level for years to come.

Over the past decade, the papers submitted to ISSCC have indicated clear trends in the continuing push to higher frequencies of operation in CMOS and BiCMOS. This trend has continued this year for oscillators, mm-Wave amplifiers, and PAs. An emerging trend is the increasing complexity of systems operating in the 60-to-200GHz range. The push to ever-higher frequencies is being pursued by both industry and academia for various applications. An important application is high-data-rate communication. With the low-GHz frequency spectrum already overcrowded, researchers are continuing to target frequencies above 60GHz. Two other applications for products operating in these frequency bands are imaging and radar. These frequencies are desirable for such products due to their high spatial resolution and enablement of small antenna dimensions, allowing efficient beam-forming arrays. Another continuing trend is the integration of mm-Wave antennas into silicon substrates.

The combination of these two trends (that is, increased integration and the push to higher frequencies) has enabled a new class of fully-integrated application-driven systems. With the availability of many RF and mm-Wave building blocks in CMOS and BiCMOS, fully integrated solutions for specific emerging domains are appearing, both in the RF and the mm- Wave frequency range. These systems are built on a foundation of circuit-block innovations that have been developed over the past few years. Single-chip radars in RF and mm-Wave frequencies with improved resolution, improved efficiency, showing increasing levels of integration are being demonstrated. Similarly, new systems are being developed for ultra-wideband radar and mm-Wave wireless sensing. Demonstrations in the biomedical field are clearly moving from simple electrical measurements towards real medical measurements in realistic environments using systems-in-package (SiP).

We now discuss these two trends supported with data from chips to be presented at ISSCC 2013.

Complexity and maturity in the mm-Wave and sub-mm-Wave ranges

The high cutoff frequency of bipolar transistors and highly downscaled MOS transistors enables the realization of circuits and systems operating in the mm-Wave range. In the last few years, high-data-rate communication in the 60GHz band and car radar around 77GHz have garnered much attention. While the integration level in these domains is already quite high, we see an improvement of the performance of the building blocks (e.g. output power of PAs, spectral purity and tuning range of VCOs).

The 100GHz barrier for the operating frequency of silicon circuits has been broken a few years ago. Whereas initially elementary building blocks like a VCO and an amplifier operating above 100GHz have been realized, we now witness the trend of increasing complexity in circuits operating above 100GHz. Meanwhile, the electrical performances at the building block level improve: the output power of mm-Wave and sub-mm-Wave sources and PAs increases and VCOs can operate at ever-increasing frequencies with a higher tuning range.

Co-existence and efficiency for cellular applications

RX and TX linearization: In the past few years there has been increasing interest in techniques to improve the linearity of transmitters and receivers. Improved linearity in the receivers will ease the requirements on the RF filtering of out-of-band blockers that can be accomplished, for instance, by placing a programmable notch filter in the RF path. TX linearity improvements will benefit performance parameters such as error-vector magnitude (EVM), ACLR and spectral purity.

Efficiency: PA efficiency improvements demonstrated this year will directly impact the battery life in portable applications. These efficiency improvement techniques include analog and digital pre-distortion, dynamic biasing and envelope tracking.

Digitally-assisted RF: The trend towards digitally-assisted RF continues and is increasingly applied to mm-Wave chips. More digitally assisted calibration techniques are being demonstrated in order to improve the overall performance of the transceiver by reducing the impact of analog impairments at the system level. These techniques include: spur cancelation/reduction, IIP2 improvements, and digital pre-distortion.

VCOs: There is a continuing trend toward improvements in phase-noise figure-of-merit (FOM) and power consumption due to circuit techniques like Class-C and Class-D VCOs. This year’s ISSCC shows clear contributions to this field.

This and other related topics will be discussed at length at ISSCC 2013, the foremost global forum for new developments in the integrated-circuit industry. ISSCC, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, will be held on February 17-21, 2013, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel.

Ten product categories, led by tablet MPUs and cellphone application MPUs, are forecast to exceed the 6% growth rate forecast for the total IC market this year, according to IC Insights’ 2013 McClean Report.  This report identifies and segments the total IC market into 34 major IC product categories.  Five categories are forecast to enjoy double-digit growth.  The number of categories with positive growth is expected to more than double to 22 in 2013 from 10 in 2012.

Consumer-driven mobile media devices, particularly smartphones and tablet computers, are forecast to keep the tablet MPU (50%) and cellphone application MPU (28%) segments at the top of the growth list for the third consecutive year.  Other IC categories that support mobile systems—including NAND flash (12%) and special-purpose logic devices—are expected to enjoy better-than-industry-average growth in 2013, as well.

Due to increasing demand for higher levels of precision in embedded-processing systems and the growth in connectivity using the Internet, the market for 32-bit MCUs is also forecast to outpace total IC market growth in 2013.  Embedded applications in medical/health systems and smartcards have helped boost the 32-bit MCU market.  In the automotive world, demand for 32-bit MCUs is being driven by “intelligent” car systems such as driver information systems and semi-autonomous driving features such as self-parking, advanced cruise controls, and collision-avoidance systems.  In the next few years, complex 32-bit MCUs are expected to account for over 25% of the processing power in vehicles.

After back-to-back years of steep declines in 2011 and 2012, the DRAM market is forecast to increase 9% in 2013, three points more than the total IC market.  DRAM unit growth is expected to increase only 2%, but the overall average selling price is forecast to jump 7% this year.  In five of the past six years (2007-2012) the DRAM market declined, which took its toll on weaker suppliers.  Fewer suppliers in the marketplace mean fewer competitors trying to undercut each other’s prices in order to gain marketshare and enhances the likelihood of a more stable pricing environment in the coming year.

Interestingly, in a world that is increasingly wireless, two IC categories of “wired” telecom ICs are forecast to grow faster than the total IC market.  Wired telecom—special purpose logic/MPR and wired telecom—application-specific analog are forecast to grow by 13% and 11%, respectively.

Telecom companies and network operators have been upgrading their long-haul and metropolitan-wide communications systems, which require many high-speed transmission ICs and other circuits. New 100Gb/s technology has been ready for deployment since 2009 and is being deployed now. Next-generation transmission technology and ICs for 1 trillion bits per second ("Terabit") networks are in development.

Telecom and network operators say data traffic is increasing more than 50% per year due to growing use of the Internet and video transmissions.  All wireless traffic eventually goes through high-speed cable transmission "backbone" networks—communications are routed over long distance via optical cable before getting to the cellular network on the other end.  All the mobile Internet, data, and video traffic has to go through a cable network and that is driving up the market for wired telecom—special-purpose logic/MPR and wired telecom—application-specific analog.  To a lesser degree, the wired telecom segments are growing on account of developing country markets where the use of landline phones is increasing.

Additional details on IC product markets are included in the 2013 edition of IC Insights’ flagship report, The McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry, which features more than 400 tables and graphs in the main report.

solid state thin film batteryVarious power factors have impacted the advancement and development of micro devices. Power density, cell weight, battery life and form factor all have proven significant and cumbersome when considered for micro applications. Markets for solid state thin-film batteries at $65.9 million in 2012 are anticipated to reach $5.95 billion by 2019, according to a new report released by ReportsnReports.com. Market growth is a result of the implementation of a connected world of sensors.

The report points out that development trends are pointing toward integration and miniaturization. Many technologies have progressed down the curve, but traditional batteries have not kept pace. The technology adoption of solid state batteries has implications to the chip grid. One key implication is a drive to integrate intelligent rechargeable energy storage into the chip grid. In order to achieve this requirement, a new product technology has been embraced: solid state rechargeable energy storage devices are far more useful than non-rechargeable devices.

Thin film battery market driving forces include creating business inflection by delivering technology that supports entirely new capabilities. Sensor networks are creating demand for thin film solid state devices. Vendors doubled revenue and almost tripled production volume from first quarter. Multiple customers are moving into production with innovative products after successful trials.

A solid state battery electrolyte is a solid, not porous liquid. The solid is denser than liquid, contributing to the higher energy density. Charging is complex. In an energy-harvesting application, where the discharge is only a little and then there is a trickle back up, the number of recharge cycles goes way up. The cycles increase by the inverse of the depth of discharge. Long shelf life is a benefit of being a solid state battery. The fact that the battery housing does not need to deal with gases and vapors as a part of the charging/discharging process is another advantage of the solid state thin film battery.

Traditional lithium-ion (Li-Ion) technology uses active materials, such as lithium cobalt-oxide or lithium iron phosphate, with particles that range in size between 5 and 20 micrometers. Nano-engineering improves many of the failings of present battery technology. Re-charging time and battery memory are important aspects of nano-structures. Researching battery micro- and nanostructure is a whole new approach that is only just beginning to be explored.

Industrial production of nano batteries requires production of the electrode coatings in large batches so that large numbers of cells can be produced from the same material. Manufacturers using nano materials in their chemistry had to develop unique mixing and handling technologies.

Cymbet millimeter scale solid state battery applications are evolving. In the case of the intra-ocular pressure monitor, it is desirable to place microelectronic systems in very small spaces. Advances in ultra-low power integrated circuits, MEMS sensors and solid state batteries are making these systems a reality. Miniature wireless sensors, data loggers and computers can be embedded in hundreds of applications and millions of locations.