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Graphene, a single-atom-thick lattice of carbon atoms, is often touted as a replacement for silicon in electronic devices due to its extremely high conductivity and unbeatable thinness. But graphene is not the only two-dimensional material that could play such a role.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have made an advance in manufacturing one such material, molybdenum disulphide. By growing flakes of the material around “seeds” of molybdenum oxide, they have made it easier to control the size, thickness and location of the material.

Unlike graphene, molybdenum disulfide has an energy band gap, meaning its conductivity can be turned on and off. Such a trait is critical for semiconductor devices used in computing. Another difference is that molybdenum disulphide emits light, meaning it could be used in applications like LEDs, self-reporting sensors and optoelectronics.

The study was led by A. T. Charlie Johnson, professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, and includes members of his lab, Gang Hee Han, Nicholas Kybert, Carl Naylor and Jinglei Ping. Also contributing to the study was Ritesh Agarwal, professor of materials science and engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science; members of his lab, Bumsu Lee and Joohee Park; and Jisoo Kang, a master’s student in Penn’s nanotechnology program. They collaborated with researchers from South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University, Si Young Lee and Young Hee Lee.

Their study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Everything we do with regular electronics we’d like to be able to do with two-dimensional materials,” Johnson said. “Graphene has one set of properties that make it very attractive for electronics, but it lacks this critical property, being able to turn on and off. Molybdenum disulphide gives you that.”

Graphene’s ultra-high conductivity means that it can move electrons more quickly than any known material, but that is not the only quality that matters for electronics. For the transistors that form the basis for modern computing technology, being able to stop the flow of electrons is also critical.

“Molybdenum disulphide is not as conductive as graphene,” Naylor said, “but it has a very high on/off ratio. We need 1’s and 0’s to do computation; graphene can only give us 1’s and .5’s.”

Other research groups have been able to make small flakes of molybdenum disulphide the same way graphene was first made, by exfoliating it, or peeling off atomically thin layers from the bulk material. More recently, other researchers have adopted another technique from graphene manufacture, chemical vapor deposition, where the molybdenum and sulfur are heated into gasses and left to settle and crystalize on a substrate.

The problem with these methods is that the resulting flakes form in a scattershot way.

“Between hunting down the flakes,” said Kybert, “and making sure they’re the right size and thickness, it would take days to make a single measurement of their properties”

The Penn team’s advance was in developing a way to control where the flakes form in the chemical vapor deposition method, by “seeding” the substrate with a precursor.

“We start by placing down a small amount of molybdenum oxide in the locations we want,” Naylor said, “then we flow in sulfur gas. Under the right conditions, those seeds react with sulfur and flakes of molybdenum disulphide being to grow.”

“There’s finesse involved in optimizing the growth conditions,” Johnson said, “but we’re exerting more control, moving the material in the direction of being able to make complicated systems. Because we grow it where we want it, we can make devices more easily. We have all of the other parts of the transistors in a separate layer that we snap down on top of the flakes, making dozens and potentially even hundreds, of devices at once. Then we were able to observe that we made transistors that turned on and off like they were supposed to and devices that emit light like they are supposed to.”

Being able to match up the location of the molybdenum disulphide flakes with corresponding electronics allowed the researchers to skip a step they must take when making graphene-based devices. There, graphene is grown in large sheets and then cut down to size, a process that adds to the risk of damaging contamination.

Future work on these molybdenum disulphide devices will complement the research team’s research on graphene-based biosensors; rather than outputting the detection of some molecule to a computer, molybdenum disulfide-based sensors could directly report a binding event through a change in the light they emit.

This research also represents first steps that can be applied toward fabricating a new family of two-dimensional materials.

“We can replace the molybdenum with tungsten and the sulfur with selenium,” Naylor said, “and just go down the periodic table from there. We can imagine growing all of these different materials in the places we choose and taking advantages of all of their different properties.”

Fairchild, a global supplier of high-performance power semiconductor solutions, today announced the FL7734 Phase-Cut Dimmable Single- Stage LED Driver, a highly integrated LED controller solution for low-cost, and highly reliable LED lighting solutions from 5 W to 30 W. The FL7734 enables designers to quickly achieve great light quality designs with high dimmer compatibility while integrating full power factor correction (PFC) circuitry to meet power factor (PF) and total harmonic distortion (THD) requirements.

The FL7734 solution uses Fairchild’s unique active dimmer driving technology to eliminate visible flicker or shimmer symptoms and deliver over 90 percent dimmer compatibility with a variety of leading edge, trailing edge and digital dimmers from a wide range of manufacturers. The solution fully meets NEMA SSL 7A-2013 & ENERGY STAR standards and provides a programmable dimming curve and input current management flexibility.

“The FL7734 driver simplifies LED light designs with broad dimmer compatibility,” said James Lee, technical marketing manager at Fairchild. “LED bulb and phase-cut dimmer suppliers are different, so a good phase-cut dimmable bulb has to operate well with many different dimmers. We developed the FL7734 with this in mind.”

The FL7734 is a Flyback (or Buck-Boost) Pulse-Width Modulator (PWM) controller that uses an advanced Primary-Side Regulation (PSR) technique, which minimizes the external components required for implementation and therefore lowers BOM. To meet stringent LED brightness control requirements, the FL7734 uses Fairchild’s innovative TRUECURRENT PSR technology for tight constant current (CC) variation with a tolerance of less than ±1 percent in the wide line voltage range.

Like the FL7733A announced last November at Electronica, the FL7734 can be used in a wide variety of lamps including GU10, candel lights, A19 and PAR30/38 bulbs, down and flat lights, and indoor and outdoor lights. Both solutions deliver a highly precise CC control with better than 1% variation over the entire universal line input operating range.

To meet safety regulations and ensure long-term reliability, the FL7734 device adds comprehensive protection features including dual overvoltage protection for both open-VS and open-VDD conditions, output diode short, and open/short protection for current sense resistor and every pin of the control IC. It also features open-LED, short-LED and over-temperature shutdown protections.

The FL7734 is available in 16-pin Small-Outline Package (SOP).

University of Toronto engineers study first single crystal perovskites for new applications Engineers have shone new light on an emerging family of solar-absorbing materials that could clear the way for cheaper and more efficient solar panels and LEDs.

The materials, called perovskites, are particularly good at absorbing visible light, but had never been thoroughly studied in their purest form: as perfect single crystals.

Using a new technique, researchers grew large, pure perovskite crystals and studied how electrons move through the material as light is converted to electricity.

Led by Professor Ted Sargent of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and Professor Osman Bakr of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the team used a combination of laser-based techniques to measure selected properties of the perovskite crystals. By tracking down the rapid motion of electrons in the material, they have been able to determine the diffusion length–how far electrons can travel without getting trapped by imperfections in the material–as well as mobility–how fast the electrons can move through the material. Their work was published this week in the journal Science.

“Our work identifies the bar for the ultimate solar energy-harvesting potential of perovskites,” says Riccardo Comin, a post-doctoral fellow with the Sargent Group. “With these materials it’s been a race to try to get record efficiencies, and our results indicate that progress is slated to continue without slowing down..”

In recent years, perovskite efficiency has soared to certified efficiencies of just over 20 per cent, beginning to approach the present-day performance of commercial-grade silicon-based solar panels mounted in Spanish deserts and on Californian roofs.

“In their efficiency, perovskites are closely approaching conventional materials that have already been commercialized,” says Valerio Adinolfi, a PhD candidate in the Sargent Group and co-first author on the paper. “They have the potential to offer further progress on reducing the cost of solar electricity in light of their convenient manufacturability from a liquid chemical precursor.”

The study has obvious implications for green energy, but may also enable innovations in lighting. Think of a solar panel made of perovskite crystals as a fancy slab of glass: light hits the crystal surface and gets absorbed, exciting electrons in the material. Those electrons travel easily through the crystal to electrical contacts on its underside, where they are collected in the form of electric current. Now imagine the sequence in reverse–power the slab with electricity, inject electrons, and release energy as light. A more efficient electricity-to-light conversion means perovskites could open new frontiers for energy-efficient LEDs.

Parallel work in the Sargent Group focuses on improving nano-engineered solar-absorbing particles called colloidal quantum dots. “Perovskites are great visible-light harvesters, and quantum dots are great for infrared,” says Professor Sargent. “The materials are highly complementary in solar energy harvesting in view of the sun’s broad visible and infrared power spectrum.”

“In future, we will explore the opportunities for stacking together complementary absorbent materials,” says Dr. Comin. “There are very promising prospects for combining perovskite work and quantum dot work for further boosting the efficiency.”

Reducing the amount of sunlight that bounces off the surface of solar cells helps maximize the conversion of the sun’s rays to electricity, so manufacturers use coatings to cut down on reflections. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory show that etching a nanoscale texture onto the silicon material itself creates an antireflective surface that works as well as state-of-the-art thin-film multilayer coatings.

Their method, described in the journal Nature Communications and submitted for patent protection, has potential for streamlining silicon solar cell production and reducing manufacturing costs. The approach may find additional applications in reducing glare from windows, providing radar camouflage for military equipment, and increasing the brightness of light-emitting diodes.

“For antireflection applications, the idea is to prevent light or radio waves from bouncing at interfaces between materials,” said physicist Charles Black, who led the research at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

Preventing reflections requires controlling an abrupt change in “refractive index,” a property that affects how waves such as light propagate through a material. This occurs at the interface where two materials with very different refractive indices meet, for example at the interface between air and silicon. Adding a coating with an intermediate refractive index at the interface eases the transition between materials and reduces the reflection, Black explained.

“The issue with using such coatings for solar cells,” he said, “is that we’d prefer to fully capture every color of the light spectrum within the device, and we’d like to capture the light irrespective of the direction it comes from. But each color of light couples best with a different antireflection coating, and each coating is optimized for light coming from a particular direction. So you deal with these issues by using multiple antireflection layers. We were interested in looking for a better way.”

For inspiration, the scientists turned to a well-known example of an antireflective surface in nature, the eyes of common moths. The surfaces of their compound eyes have textured patterns made of many tiny “posts,” each smaller than the wavelengths of light. This textured surface improves moths’ nighttime vision, and also prevents the “deer in the headlights” reflecting glow that might allow predators to detect them.

“We set out to recreate moth eye patterns in silicon at even smaller sizes using methods of nanotechnology,” said Atikur Rahman, a postdoctoral fellow working with Black at the CFN and first author of the study.

The scientists started by coating the top surface of a silicon solar cell with a polymer material called a “block copolymer,” which can be made to self-organize into an ordered surface pattern with dimensions measuring only tens of nanometers. The self-assembled pattern served as a template for forming posts in the solar cell like those in the moth eye using a plasma of reactive gases-a technique commonly used in the manufacture of semiconductor electronic circuits.

The resulting surface nanotexture served to gradually change the refractive index to drastically cut down on reflection of many wavelengths of light simultaneously, regardless of the direction of light impinging on the solar cell.

“Adding these nanotextures turned the normally shiny silicon surface absolutely black,” Rahman said.

Solar cells textured in this way outperform those coated with a single antireflective film by about 20 percent, and bring light into the device as well as the best multi-layer-coatings used in the industry.

“We are working to understand whether there are economic advantages to assembling silicon solar cells using our method, compared to other, established processes in the industry,” Black said.

Hidden layer explains better-than-expected performance

One intriguing aspect of the study was that the scientists achieved the antireflective performance by creating nanoposts only half as tall as the required height predicted by a mathematical model describing the effect. So they called upon the expertise of colleagues at the CFN and other Brookhaven scientists to help sort out the mystery.

“This is a powerful advantage of doing research at the CFN-both for us and for academic and industrial researchers coming to use our facilities,” Black said. “We have all these experts around who can help you solve your problems.”

Using a combination of computational modeling, electron microscopy, and surface science, the team deduced that a thin layer of silicon oxide similar to what typically forms when silicon is exposed to air seemed to be having an outsized effect.

“On a flat surface, this layer is so thin that its effect is minimal,” explained Matt Eisaman of Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department and a professor at Stony Brook University. “But on the nanopatterned surface, with the thin oxide layer surrounding all sides of the nanotexture, the oxide can have a larger effect because it makes up a significant portion of the nanotextured material.”

Said Black, “This ‘hidden’ layer was the key to the extra boost in performance.”

The scientists are now interested in developing their self-assembly based method of nanotexture patterning for other materials, including glass and plastic, for antiglare windows and coatings for solar panels.

Organic semiconductors are prized for light emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs) and photovoltaic cells. As they can be printed from solution, they provide a highly scalable, cost-effective alternative to silicon-based devices. Uneven performances, however, have been a persistent problem. Scientists have known that the performance issues originate in the domain interfaces within organic semiconductor thin films, but have not known the cause. This mystery now appears to have been solved.

Naomi Ginsberg, a faculty chemist with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, led a team that used a unique form of microscopy to study the domain interfaces within an especially high-performing solution-processed organic semiconductor called TIPS-pentacene. She and her team discovered a cluttered jumble of randomly oriented nanocrystallites that become kinetically trapped in the interfaces during solution casting. Like debris on a highway, these nanocrystallites impede the flow of charge-carriers.

“If the interfaces were neat and clean, they wouldn’t have such a large impact on performance, but the presence of the nanocrystallites reduces charge-carrier mobility,” Ginsberg says. “Our nanocrystallite model for the interface, which is consistent with observations, provides critical information that can be used to correlate solution-processing methods to optimal device performances.”

Ginsberg, who holds appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and its Materials Sciences Division, as well as UC Berkeley’s departments of chemistry and physics, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in Nature Communications. The paper is titled “Exciton dynamics reveals aggregates with intermolecular order at hidden interfaces in solution-cast organic semiconducting films.” Co-authors are Cathy Wong, Benjamin Cotts and Hao Wu.

Organic semiconductors are based on the ability of carbon to form larger molecules, such as benzene and pentacene, featuring electrical conductivity that falls somewhere between insulators and metals. Through solution-processing, organic materials can usually be fashioned into crystalline films without the expensive high-temperature annealing process required for silicon and other inorganic semiconductors. However, even though it has long been clear that the crystalline domain interfaces within semiconductor organic thin films are critical to their performance in devices, detailed information on the morphology of these interfaces has been missing until now.

“Interface domains in organic semiconductor thin films are smaller than the diffraction limit, hidden from surface probe techniques such as atomic force microscopy, and their nanoscale heterogeneity is not typically resolved using X-ray methods,” Ginsberg says. “Furthermore, the crystalline TIPS-pentacene we studied has virtually zero emission, which means it can’t be studied with photoluminescence microscopy.”

Ginsberg and her group overcame the challenges by using transient absorption (TA) microscopy, a technique in which femtosecond laser pulses excite transient energy states and detectors measure the changes in the absorption spectra. The Berkeley researchers carried out TA microscopy on an optical microscope they constructed themselves that enabled them to generate focal volumes that are a thousand times smaller than is typical for conventional TA microscopes. They also deployed multiple different light polarizations that allowed them to isolate interface signals not seen in either of the adjacent domains.

“Instrumentation, including very good detectors, the painstaking collection of data to ensure good signal-to-noise ratios, and the way we crafted the experiment and analysis were all critical to our success,” Ginsberg says. “Our spatial resolution and light polarization sensitivity were also essential to be able to unequivocally see a signature of the interface that was not swamped by the bulk, which contributes much more to the raw signal by volume.”

The methology developed by Ginsberg and her team to uncover structural motifs at hidden interfaces in organic semiconductor thin films should add a predictive factor to scalable and affordable solution-processing of these materials. This predictive capability should help minimize discontinuities and maximize charge-carrier mobility. Currently, researchers use what is essentially a trial-and-error approach, in which different solution casting conditions are tested to see how well the resulting devices perform.

“Our methodology provides an important intermediary in the feedback loop of device optimization by characterizing the microscopic details of the films that go into the devices, and by inferring how the solution casting could have created the structures at the interfaces,” Ginsberg says. “As a result, we can suggest how to alter the delicate balance of solution casting parameters to make more functional films.”

SAMCO has announced MOCVD demonstration capability on a new gallium nitride (GaN-on-Si) system, the GaN-550, from Valence Process Equipment Inc (VPE) of Branchburg NJ, USA. SAMCO sells and distributes the GaN-550, which is equipped with a ø550 mm carrier for mass production of GaN power devices.  The demo system will be available for customer demonstrations at SAMCO’s R&D facility in early 2015.

SAMCO is expanding its wide range of dry etching and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) systems for wide-bandgap semiconductor applications such as LEDs, laser diodes and RF devices. One of SAMCO’s strengths is the process of nitride semiconductors, which play important role in green electronics.

VPE is a start-up company, providing MOCVD systems for GaN-based LEDs. VPE’s GaN-500 MOCVD system employs a unique reaction chamber design and is highly-efficient at reducing gas consumption by up to 40 percent compared with other MOCVD systems.

SAMCO installed a new GaN-550 MOCVD system, which was developed from GaN-500, and has low process gases consumption, high-speed gas switching, and superior temperature control.  The specially designed gas injector requires fewer reactor cleanings, which increases system availability and uptime.  The GaN-550 system can grow more than 5 µm/hour GaN at the uniformity of less than one percent. While the carrier size of GaN-500 is ø500 mm, the carrier size of GaN-550 is ø550 mm for higher throughput, up to ø2 inch×72, ø4 inch×20, ø6 inch×7 or ø8 inch×4 per batch.

SAMCO utilizes the GaN-550 demo system and accelarates the sales of VPE’s MOCVD systems for GaN-power device manufacturing. Now, SAMCO provides “One-Stop Solution” to provide turn-key solutions for the nitride semiconductors – MOCVD, PECVD, dry etch and dry cleaning processes for power device manufacturing.

SAMCO was founded by Osamu Tsuji in 1979 as the Semiconductor And Materials COmpany (SAMCO). From its modest beginnings in a garage in Kyoto, Japan, SAMCO has grown into a $50 million corporation with more than 150 high-level design and production research associates at its corporate headquarters in Kyoto, Japan, sales offices in China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, New York and Silicon Valley, California as well as samco-ucp ltd.in Europe.

MagnaChip Semiconductor Corporation, a Korea-based designer and manufacturer of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products announced today that it has started to offer 0.18um automotive qualified process technology to foundry customers focused on high reliability automotive semiconductor applications.

This 0.18um automotive process technology consists of modular processes which combine 1.8V/3.3V CMOS, 52V LDMOS/EDMOS, fully isolated 32V nLDMOS and embedded MTP/EEPROM. MagnaChip’s proprietary electrical fuse OTP is also included for precision analog trimming. Full combinations of these modular processes serve a wide range of automotive semiconductor SOC products such as, but not limited to, LED lighting, motor drivers, microcontrollers and ASICs.

This process technology is specially designed for reliable operation at high temperatures and is fully AEC compliant conforming to AEC Q100 Grade 0 specification at 150 degrees C. For example, leakage current of 1.8V rated CMOS devices at 150 degrees C is reduced to ¼ of the leakage of 1.8V CMOS of baseline technologies. Endurance of MTP and EEPROM is 100K cycle and 10K cycle at 150 degrees C, respectively. SPICE model and MTP/EEPROM operation is verified up to 175 degrees C. In addition, high density standard cell libraries, SRAM and analog IPs are qualified in this process.

Namkyu Park, Executive Vice President of MagnaChip’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Services Division stated, “This is another example of our continued effort to expand our specialty technology portfolio for the automotive market. We are very proud to play an increasing role in the fast-growing automotive semiconductor foundry market and are committed to continuing to provide differentiated technology solutions for our customers.”

Headquartered in South Korea, MagnaChip Semiconductor is a Korea-based designer and manufacturer of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products, mainly for high volume consumer applications.

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has found that  stacking materials that are only one atom thick can create semiconductor junctions that transfer charge efficiently, regardless of whether the crystalline structure of the materials is mismatched – lowering the manufacturing cost for a wide variety of semiconductor devices such as solar cells, lasers and LEDs.

“This work demonstrates that by stacking multiple two-dimensional (2-D) materials in random ways we can create semiconductor junctions that are as functional as those with perfect alignment” says Dr. Linyou Cao, senior author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State.

“This could make the manufacture of semiconductor devices an order of magnitude less expensive.”

Schematic illustration of monolayer MoS2 and WS2 stacked vertically. Image: Linyou Cao.

Schematic illustration of monolayer MoS2 and WS2 stacked vertically. Image: Linyou Cao.

For most semiconductor electronic or photonic devices to work, they need to have a junction, which is where two semiconductor materials are bound together. For example, in photonic devices like solar cells, lasers and LEDs, the junction is where photons are converted into electrons, or vice versa.

All semiconductor junctions rely on efficient charge transfer between materials, to ensure that current flows smoothly and that a minimum of energy is lost during the transfer. To do that in conventional semiconductor junctions, the crystalline structures of both materials need to match. However, that limits the materials that can be used, because you need to make sure the crystalline structures are compatible. And that limited number of material matches restricts the complexity and range of possible functions for semiconductor junctions.

“But we found that the crystalline structure doesn’t matter if you use atomically thin, 2-D materials,” Cao says. “We used molybdenum sulfide and tungsten sulfide for this experiment, but this is a fundamental discovery that we think applies to any 2-D semiconductor material. That means you can use any combination of two or more semiconductor materials, and you can stack them randomly but still get efficient charge transfer between the materials.”

Currently, creating semiconductor junctions means perfectly matching crystalline structures between materials – which requires expensive equipment, sophisticated processing methods and user expertise. This manufacturing cost is a major reason why semiconductor devices such as solar cells, lasers and LEDs remain very expensive. But stacking 2-D materials doesn’t require the crystalline structures to match.

“It’s as simple as stacking pieces of paper on top of each other – it doesn’t even matter if the edges of the paper line up,” Cao says.

The paper, “Equally Efficient Interlayer Exciton Relaxation and Improved Absorption in Epitaxial and Non-epitaxial MoS2/WS2 Heterostructures,” was published as a “just-accepted” manuscript in Nano Letters Dec. 3.

Lead authors of the paper are Yifei Yu, a Ph.D. student at NC State; Dr. Shi Hu, a former postdoctoral researcher at NC State; and Liqin Su, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The paper was co-authored by Lujun Huang, Yi Liu, Zhenghe Jin, and Dr. Ki Wook Kim of NC State; Drs. Alexander Puretzky and David Geohegan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Dr. Yong Zhang of UNC Charlotte. The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-13-1-0201 and the National Science Foundation under grant number DMR-1352028.

Intel announces IoT platform


December 11, 2014

Intel Corporation today announced the Intel IoT Platform, an end-to-end reference model designed to unify and simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things (IoT). Intel also introduced integrated hardware and software products based on the new platform and new relationships with an expanded ecosystem of system integrators that promise to move IoT from infancy to mass deployment.

The new offerings and relationships will make it easier for solution providers to move IoT from pockets of pilots to mainstream deployments with a repeatable foundation of building blocks that can be customized for limitless solutions. Data will be unlocked faster to extract meaningful information and value for consumers and businesses.

For example, Rudin Management, a New York City real estate company who developed its own system software called DiBoss, has demonstrated that it can intelligently manage energy and other systems in its buildings. In one year, in one building, the company saved nearly $1 million to its bottom line, which would translate to a savings of 50 cents for every square foot of real estate it owns and manages.

“The power of IoT on our company’s business will have significant impact,” said John Gilbert, COO, Rudin Management. “We are a real estate company that used to dabble in technology, but now because of IoT, we are a technology company that dabbles in real estate.”

Horizontal Approach to IoT
The Intel IoT Platform helps deliver innovations to market faster, reducing solution complexity, and delivering actionable intelligence faster by offering a defined, repeatable foundation for how devices will connect and deliver trusted data to the cloud.

“With this platform we are continuing to expand our IoT product family beyond silicon with enhancements to our pre-integrated solutions that make IoT more accessible to solution providers,” said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager, Internet of Things Group, Intel. “IoT is a rapidly growing market but faces scalability hurdles. By simplifying the development process and making it easier to deploy new solutions that address market needs, we can help accelerate innovation.”

Expanding IoT Ecosystem
IoT has enormous potential to drive economic value and social change, but no company can do it alone. A robust ecosystem is needed to scale. To that end, Intel announced new solutions and relationships to boost the IoT ecosystem. Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Dell, HCL, NTT DATA, SAP, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Wipro and others are joining together with Intel to develop and deploy solutions using their building blocks on the Intel IoT Platform. These solutions will help provide a repeatable foundation for IoT and free up developers’ time to focus on building solutions that expertly address specific customer pain points.

“Accenture is focused on helping clients realize the business value of the IoT as quickly and easily as possible,” said Mike Sutcliff, group chief executive, Accenture Digital. “Our combined capabilities can help us achieve that, and can also help clients get around some of the biggest roadblocks to IoT adoption by offering a simpler, faster way to roll out end to end IoT solutions than currently exists. Together, we can enable clients to define a clear value strategy for the IoT, and by using Accenture’s industry experience and digital assets to complement Intel’s IoT platform, we can create robust, end-to-end frameworks designed to overcome challenges associated with security, scalability and interoperability in IoT implementations.”

Integrated Hardware and Software
Intel is also delivering a roadmap of integrated hardware and software products to support the Intel IoT Platform. Spanning from edge devices out to the cloud, the roadmap includes API management and service creation software, edge-to-cloud connectivity and analytics, intelligent gateways, and a full line of scalable IA processors. Security is fundamental to the roadmap with both dedicated security products and security features embedded into hardware and software products.

Intel is evolving and optimizing this product roadmap to work seamlessly together with building blocks from the ecosystem to address the key challenges solution providers are facing when implementing IoT, including interoperability, security and connectivity.

The new products from Intel include:

  • Wind River Edge Management System provides cloud connectivity to facilitate device configuration, file transfers, data capture and rules-based data analysis and response. This pre-integrated technology stack enables customers to quickly build industry-specific IoT solutions and integrate disparate enterprise IT systems, utilizing API management. The cloud-based middleware runs from the embedded device up through the cloud to reduce time to market and total cost of ownership.
  • The latest Intel® IoT Gateway will integrate the Wind River Edge Management System via an available agent so gateways can be rapidly deployed, provisioned and managed throughout the life cycle of a system to reduce costs and time to market. In addition, the gateway includes performance improvements, support for lower cost memory options and a broader selection of available communication options. Intel IoT Gateways are currently available from seven ODMs with 13 more releasing systems in early 2015.
  • To get value out of the data generated in deployments using the Intel® IoT Platform, developers need a powerful yet easy-to-use approach to big data analytics. Intel is expanding its cloud analytics support for IoT Developer Kits to include the Intel® IoT Gateway series, in addition to Intel® Galileo boards and Intel® Edison Modules. Cloud analytics enables IoT application developers to detect trends and anomalies in time series at big data scale.
  • McAfee, a part of Intel Security, announced Enhanced Security for Intel IoT Gateways in support of the Intel IoT Platform. This pre-validated solution adds advanced security management for gateway devices.
  • Intel Security also announced that its Enhanced Privacy Identity (EPID) technology will be promoted to other silicon vendors. EPID has anonymity properties, in addition to hardware-enforced integrity, and is included in ISO and TCG standards. The EPID technology provides an on-ramp for other devices to securely connect to the Intel IoT Platform.
  • The Intel API and Traffic Management solution utilizes Intel Mashery solutions to enable creation of building blocks that make it easy to build new software applications. Customers of the Intel IoT Platform today have access to the Intel Mashery API management tools to create data APIs that can be shared internally, externally with partners or monetized as revenue-generating data services for customers.
INTEL_01_scalingiot-01

Intel is working to create a robust, scalable IoT ecosystem.

OCEASOFT, a global provider of sensor-based solutions for monitoring environmental parameters in the health, medical, life science and cold-chain/transport sectors, today announced a partnership with Internet of Things networking pioneer SIGFOX, along with a new line of Cobalt sensors that can transmit data directly to cloud storage without the need for traditional cellular or Wi-Fi service.

The new Cobalt S3 line of smart wireless sensors is designed to take advantage of SIGFOX’s global network that is dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed exclusively for two-way, small-message device communication. This eliminates the cost and energy-use barriers to wide adoption of the IoT and greatly extends the battery and service life of connected devices.

Cobalt S3, slated to ship in January 2015, will offer all the proven monitoring capabilities of OCEASOFT’s existing Cobalt sensors, including temperature, humidity, ambient light and voltage, while providing always-on cloud connectivity via SIGFOX’s IoT network.

This approach greatly simplifies sensor installation and startup, extends battery life, and allows the sensors to maintain connectivity in isolated locations without local network or traditional cellular infrastructure. Local users can also access Cobalt S3 readings from smartphones and tablets using Bluetooth Smart.

“Working with SIGFOX to offer this new functionality to our customers is a big step forward for OCEASOFT and our commitment to provide unparalleled cloud-based access to mission-critical sensor data,” said OCEASOFT CEO Laurent Rousseau. “This is, to our knowledge, the first industrial IoT sensor-monitoring solution, and it opens new opportunities for our clients in many sectors. It’s of special interest in pollution and environmental monitoring applications, because it makes it possible to get constantly updated information from sensors in off-the-grid locations.”

OCEASOFT, which serves hundreds of clients worldwide, will initially offer Cobalt S3 in areas where SIGFOX has rolled out its network: France, Holland, the UK, and Spain, as well as several major European cities. Additional expansion is planned in Europe and the US, and plans call for extending coverage to ocean regions, which will enable new shipping and transport applications for the Cobalt S3 sensors.

Data generated by all Cobalt sensors is held securely in the OCEACloud data service, and can be instantly monitored and viewed via computer, or OCEASOFT’s ThermoClient Mobile app, which runs on iOS and Android phones and tablets.

Its wireless Cobalt sensor modules can be equipped with a wide range of internal and external sensor options, including temperature, humidity, CO2, differential pressure, ambient light and voltage. All provide continuously updated reporting, and meet demanding requirements for manufacturing, laboratory work, life sciences, cold chain/transport and other advanced industry sectors.