Tag Archives: letter-pulse-tech

A new wearable ultrasound patch that non-invasively monitors blood pressure in arteries deep beneath the skin could help people detect cardiovascular problems earlier on and with greater precision. In tests, the patch performed as well as some clinical methods to measure blood pressure.

Applications include real-time, continuous monitoring of blood pressure changes in patients with heart or lung disease, as well as patients who are critically ill or undergoing surgery. The patch uses ultrasound, so it could potentially be used to non-invasively track other vital signs and physiological signals from places deep inside the body.

A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego describe their work in a paper published Sept. 11 in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Wearable ultrasound patch tracks blood pressure in a deep artery or vein. Credit:
Chonghe Wang/Nature Biomedical Engineering

“Wearable devices have so far been limited to sensing signals either on the surface of the skin or right beneath it. But this is like seeing just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the corresponding author of the study. “By integrating ultrasound technology into wearables, we can start to capture a whole lot of other signals, biological events and activities going on way below the surface in a non-invasive manner.”

“We are adding a third dimension to the sensing range of wearable electronics,” said Xu, who is also affiliated with the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego.

The new ultrasound patch can continuously monitor central blood pressure in major arteries as deep as four centimeters (more than one inch) below the skin.

Physicians involved with the study say the technology would be useful in various inpatient procedures.

“This has the potential to be a great addition to cardiovascular medicine,” said Dr. Brady Huang, a co-author on the paper and radiologist at UC San Diego Health. “In the operating room, especially in complex cardiopulmonary procedures, accurate real-time assessment of central blood pressure is needed–this is where this device has the potential to supplant traditional methods.”

A convenient alternative to clinical methods

The device measures central blood pressure–which differs from the blood pressure that’s measured with an inflatable cuff strapped around the upper arm, known as peripheral blood pressure. Central blood pressure is the pressure in the central blood vessels, which send blood directly from the heart to other major organs throughout the body. Medical experts consider central blood pressure more accurate than peripheral blood pressure and also say it’s better at predicting heart disease.

Measuring central blood pressure isn’t typically done in routine exams, however. The state-of-the-art clinical method is invasive, involving a catheter inserted into a blood vessel in a patient’s arm, groin or neck and guiding it to the heart.

A non-invasive method exists, but it can’t consistently produce accurate readings. It involves holding a pen-like probe, called a tonometer, on the skin directly above a major blood vessel. To get a good reading, the tonometer must be held steady, at just the right angle and with the right amount of pressure each time. But this can vary between tests and different technicians.

“It’s highly operator-dependent. Even with the proper technique, if you move the tonometer tip just a millimeter off, the data get distorted. And if you push the tonometer down too hard, it’ll put too much pressure on the vessel, which also affects the data,” said co-first author Chonghe Wang, a nanoengineering graduate student at UC San Diego. Tonometers also require the patient to sit still–which makes continuous monitoring difficult–and are not sensitive enough to get good readings through fatty tissue.

The UC San Diego-led team has developed a convenient alternative–a soft, stretchy ultrasound patch that can be worn on the skin and provide accurate, precise readings of central blood pressure each time, even while the user is moving. And it can still get a good reading through fatty tissue.

The patch was tested on a male subject, who wore it on the forearm, wrist, neck and foot. Tests were performed both while the subject was stationary and during exercise. Recordings collected with the patch were more consistent and precise than recordings from a commercial tonometer. The patch recordings were also comparable to those collected with a traditional ultrasound probe.

Making ultrasound wearable

“A major advance of this work is it transforms ultrasound technology into a wearable platform. This is important because now we can start to do continuous, non-invasive monitoring of major blood vessels deep underneath the skin, not just in shallow tissues,” said Wang.

The patch is a thin sheet of silicone elastomer patterned with what’s called an “island-bridge” structure–an array of small electronic parts (islands) that are each connected by spring-shaped wires (bridges). Each island contains electrodes and devices called piezoelectric transducers, which produce ultrasound waves when electricity passes through them. The bridges connecting them are made of thin, spring-like copper wires. The island-bridge structure allows the entire patch to conform to the skin and stretch, bend and twist without compromising electronic function.

The patch uses ultrasound waves to continuously record the diameter of a pulsing blood vessel located as deep as four centimeters below the skin. This information then gets translated into a waveform using customized software. Each peak, valley and notch in the waveform, as well as the overall shape of the waveform, represents a specific activity or event in the heart. These signals provide a lot of detailed information to doctors assessing a patient’s cardiovascular health. They can be used to predict heart failure, determine if blood supply is fine, etc.

Next steps

Researchers note that the patch still has a long way to go before it reaches the clinic. Improvements include integrating a power source, data processing units and wireless communication capability into the patch.

“Right now, these capabilities have to be delivered by wires from external devices. If we want to move this from benchtop to bedside, we need to put all these components on board,” said Xu.

The team is looking to collaborate with experts in data processing and wireless technologies for the next phase of the project.

Sandwiching two-dimensional materials used in nanoelectronic devices between their three-dimensional silicon bases and an ultrathin layer of aluminum oxide can significantly reduce the risk of component failure due to overheating, according to a new study published in the journal of Advanced Materials led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Engineering.

An experimental transistor using silicon oxide for the base, carbide for the 2D material and aluminum oxide for the encapsulating material. Credit: (Image: Zahra Hemmat).

Many of today’s silicon-based electronic components contain 2D materials such as graphene. Incorporating 2D materials like graphene — which is composed of a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms — into these components allows them to be several orders of magnitude smaller than if they were made with conventional, 3D materials. In addition, 2D materials also enable other unique functionalities. But nanoelectronic components with 2D materials have an Achilles’ heel — they are prone to overheating. This is because of poor heat conductance from 2D materials to the silicon base.

“In the field of nanoelectronics, the poor heat dissipation of 2D materials has been a bottleneck to fully realizing their potential in enabling the manufacture of ever-smaller electronics while maintaining functionality,” said Amin Salehi-Khojin, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in UIC’s College of Engineering.

One of the reasons 2D materials can’t efficiently transfer heat to silicon is that the interactions between the 2D materials and silicon in components like transistors are rather weak.

“Bonds between the 2D materials and the silicon substrate are not very strong, so when heat builds up in the 2D material, it creates hot spots causing overheat and device failure,” explained Zahra Hemmat, a graduate student in the UIC College of Engineering and co-first author of the paper.

In order to enhance the connection between the 2D material and the silicon base to improve heat conductance away from the 2D material into the silicon, engineers have experimented with adding an additional ultra-thin layer of material on top of the 2D layer — in effect creating a “nano-sandwich” with the silicon base and ultrathin material as the “bread.”

“By adding another ‘encapsulating’ layer on top of the 2D material, we have been able to double the energy transfer between the 2D material and the silicon base,” Salehi-Khojin said.

Salehi-Khojin and his colleagues created an experimental transistor using silicon oxide for the base, carbide for the 2D material and aluminum oxide for the encapsulating material. At room temperature, the researchers saw that the conductance of heat from the carbide to the silicon base was twice as high with the addition of the aluminum oxide layer versus without it.

“While our transistor is an experimental model, it proves that by adding an additional, encapsulating layer to these 2D nanoelectronics, we can significantly increase heat transfer to the silicon base, which will go a long way towards preserving functionality of these components by reducing the likelihood that they burn out,” said Salehi-Khojin. “Our next steps will include testing out different encapsulating layers to see if we can further improve heat transfer.”

Scientists have developed a photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods.

In the pursuit of realizing a sustainable society, there is an ever-increasing demand to develop revolutionary solar cells or artificial photosynthesis systems that utilize visible light energy from the sun while using as few materials as possible.

The research team, led by Professor Hiroaki Misawa of the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University, has been aiming to develop a photoelectrode that can harvest visible light across a wide spectral range by using gold nanoparticles loaded on a semiconductor. But merely applying a layer of gold nanoparticles did not lead to a sufficient amount of light absorption, because they took in light with only a narrow spectral range.

Left: The newly developed photoelectrode, a sandwich of semiconductor layer (TiO2) between gold film (Au film) and gold nanoparticles (Au NPs). The gold nanoparticles were partially inlaid onto the surface of the titanium dioxide thin-film to enhance light absorption. Right: The photoelectrode (Au-NP/TiO2/Au-film) with 7nm of inlaid depth traps light making it nontransparent (top). An Au-NP/TiO2 structure without the Au film are shown for comparison (bottom). Credit: Misawa H. et al., Nature Nanotechnology, July 30, 2018

In the study published in Nature Nanotechnology, the research team sandwiched a semiconductor, a 30-nanometer titanium dioxide thin-film, between a 100-nanometer gold film and gold nanoparticles to enhance light absorption. When the system is irradiated by light from the gold nanoparticle side, the gold film worked as a mirror, trapping the light in a cavity between two gold layers and helping the nanoparticles absorb more light.

To their surprise, more than 85 percent of all visible light was harvested by the photoelectrode, which was far more efficient than previous methods. Gold nanoparticles are known to exhibit a phenomenon called localized plasmon resonance which absorbs a certain wavelength of light. “Our photoelectrode successfully created a new condition in which plasmon and visible light trapped in the titanium oxide layer strongly interact, allowing light with a broad range of wavelengths to be absorbed by gold nanoparticles,” says Hiroaki Misawa.

When gold nanoparticles absorb light, the additional energy triggers electron excitation in the gold, which transfers electrons to the semiconductor. “The light energy conversion efficiency is 11 times higher than those without light-trapping functions,” Misawa explained. The boosted efficiency also led to an enhanced water splitting: the electrons reduced hydrogen ions to hydrogen, while the remaining electron holes oxidized water to produce oxygen — a promising process to yield clean energy.

“Using very small amounts of material, this photoelectrode enables an efficient conversion of sunlight into renewable energy, further contributing to the realization of a sustainable society,” the researchers concluded.

Schottky diode is composed of a metal in contact with a semiconductor. Despite its simple construction, Schottky diode is a tremendously useful component and is omnipresent in modern electronics. Schottky diode fabricated using two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted major research spotlight in recent years due to their great promises in practical applications such as transistors, rectifiers, radio frequency generators, logic gates, solar cells, chemical sensors, photodetectors, flexible electronics and so on.

The understanding of 2D material-based Schottky diode is, however, plagued by multiple mysteries. Several theoretical models have co-existed in the literatures and a model is often selected a priori without rigorous justifications. It is not uncommon to see a model, whose underlying physics fundamentally contradicts with the physical properties of 2D materials, being deployed to analyse a 2D material Schottky diode.

Reporting in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have made a major step forward in resolving the mysteries surrounding 2D material Schottky diode. By employing a rigorous theoretical analysis, they developed a new theory to describe different variants of 2D-material-based Schottky diodes under a unifying framework. The new theory lays down a foundation that helps to unite prior contrasting models, thus resolving a major confusion in 2D material electronics.

Schematic drawing of a 2D-material-based lateral (left) and vertical (right) Schottky diode. For broad classes of 2D materials, the current-temperature relation can be universally described by a scaling exponent of 3/2 and 1, respectively, for lateral and vertical Schottky diodes. Credit: Singapore University of Technology and Design

“A particularly remarkable finding is that the electrical current flowing across a 2D material Schottky diode follows a one-size-fits-all universal scaling law for many types of 2D materials,” said first-author Dr. Yee Sin Ang from SUTD.

Universal scaling law is highly valuable in physics since it provides a practical “Swiss knife” for uncovering the inner workings of a physical system. Universal scaling law has appeared in many branches of physics, such as semiconductor, superconductor, fluid dynamics, mechanical fractures, and even in complex systems such as animal life span, election results, transportation and city growth.

The universal scaling law discovered by SUTD researchers dictates how electrical current varies with temperature and is widely applicable to broad classes of 2D systems including semiconductor quantum well, graphene, silicene, germanene, stanene, transition metal dichalcogenides and the thin-films of topological solids.

“The simple mathematical form of the scaling law is particularly useful for applied scientists and engineers in developing novel 2D material electronics,” said co-author Prof. Hui Ying Yang from SUTD.

The scaling laws discovered by SUTD researchers provide a simple tool for the extraction of Schottky barrier height – a physical quantity critically important for performance optimisation of 2D material electronics.

“The new theory has far reaching impact in solid state physics,” said co-author and principal investigator of this research, Prof. Lay Kee Ang from SUTD, “It signals the breakdown of classic diode equation widely used for traditional materials over the past 60 years, and shall improve our understanding on how to design better 2D material electronics.”

By Michael Droeger

Are you ready for a shared economy where your transportation needs are no longer met by an automaker, but rather a “mobility service provider”? While smart transportation news has mostly focused on the likes of electrification (Tesla) and autonomy (Waymo), the real changes in transportation may be more fundamental than self-driving electric cars. According to presenters at this week’s Smart Automotive Summit at SEMICON Taiwan, new technologies won’t just make cars smarter: they will transform the way we see and use transportation in myriad ways.

Constance Chen, public relations general manager for forum sponsor Mercedes Benz, opened with a brief overview of parent Daimler’s evolving approach to transportation, dubbed CASE, which stands for Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Services, and Electric.

“The fundamental value of vehicles is changing,” Chen said, and car ownership is one of the biggest changes. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, and shared car services like ZipCar and DriveNow, are already addressing the transportation needs of a growing urban population that eschews car ownership. Traffic congestion, parking challenges, and a desire to improve air quality are key drivers (no pun intended) moving people away from car ownership to embrace shared transportation solutions.

Indeed, societal considerations are as challenging as some technological hurdles facing autonomous vehicle development. Robert Brown, Taiwan operations manager for Magma Electronics, listed his top five challenges for autonomous transportation:

  1. Perception (vision, sensors)
  2. Assessment (ability of systems to analyze data)
  3. Control (need for faster-than-human response)
  4. Communication (vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-everything)
  5. Expectations—specifically people’s expectations of the value autonomous transportation should deliver

As people change the way they view transportation and begin to understand what is possible when they can relinquish control of their vehicle, they’re transportation needs and expectations are likely to change. The challenges are, of course, also an opportunity to deliver a wide range of services, including information, entertainment, and retail, which opens the door for traditional carmakers to position themselves more as service providers like Mercedes Benz.

For those who have grown up with traditional car ownership and the perceived freedom that owning allows one to go anywhere at anytime, the idea of giving up their car—one that they drive themselves—might seem beyond the pale. But as ride-sharing services are already showing, a growing portion of our population seems more than ready to embrace a shared and autonomous future.

The SEMICON Taiwan Smart Automotive Summit is part of SEMI’s Smart Transportation initiative focusing on automotive electronics, a top priority for SEMI and its 2,000+ members. SEMI’s industry standards, technology communities, roadmap efforts, EH&S/regulatory activities and other global platforms and communities bring together the automotive and semiconductor supply chains to collaborate, increase cross-industry efficiencies and shorten the time to better business results.

Michael Droeger is director of marketing at SEMI. 

Originally published on the SEMI blog.

Nova (NASDAQ : NVMI ) announced today that a major foundry recently placed an order for its VeraFlex advanced X-Ray metrology solution for 5nm technology node.

Nova’s solution utilizes X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) to simultaneously measure composition and thickness of complex film stacks through the fabrication process. The integration of these film stacks is significantly more complicated than previous nodes both in terms of the materials used and their multi-layer composition, requiring sophisticated process control to minimize device variation. The VeraFlex product portfolio provides the requisite sensitivity and precision needed for these challenging measurements.

As a result of this selection, Nova expects more than $12 million in aggregate business from this customer across 2018 and 2019.

“We are excited about this selection which confirms the applicability of our technology for 5nm and emphasizes the growing need for advanced materials metrology solutions in advanced nodes,” said Adrian Wilson, General Manager of Nova’s Materials Metrology Division. “In order to achieve better performance in smaller devices, our Logic customers are required to modify their materials strategy beyond the traditional architectural changes. These innovative developments increase the need for Materials control and our available market accordingly. We look forward to additional orders as 5nm moves into volume production and further applications are qualified.”

Nova is a innovator and key provider of metrology solutions for advanced process control used in semiconductor manufacturing.

By Serena Brischetto

SEMI spoke with Christian Mandl, Senior Director for Human Machine Interface (HMI), Infineon Technologies AG, ahead of the European MEMS & Sensors Summit. Mandl discussed how the sensing capabilities of machines are getting ever closer to the five human senses, allowing machines to comprehend the environment before acting.

SEMI: What’s it like to lead the Human Machine Interface (HMI) group at Infineon?

Mandl: This example of contextually aware smart devices describes our challenge very well. Devices need to be aware of their surroundings to better adapt their configurations to each specific user. In other words, provide consumers with a more personalized experience. If machines understand the context around them better, their decision-making capabilities are improved, just like humans! Sensor fusion is the key enabler to contextual awareness. Thanks to sensor fusion, machines can provide more reliable feedback based on data from different sensors taken in the same situation, thus making the system more robust. Compared to traditional devices, false positives and false negatives are reduced to make the whole solution smarter.

The challenge we are addressing within the HMI group at Infineon is to enable systems that are aware of their surroundings by combining our best-in-class sensors with sophisticated machine learning algorithms. We create solutions that can better sense the environment around the device, to then trigger user-specific reactions. This is what we call intuitive sensing.

SEMI: Will you elaborate on this challenge? What are the greatest difficulties in combining existing technologies and devices with sensors?

Mandl:

The traditional approach to add sensors to technology has been very simplistic. For example, radar sensors for presence detection typically provide you with the distance to the closest object and trigger a specific action. This approach works but is limited in the amount of use cases it can address since it is not customizable. By using sensor fusion with the sophisticated machine learning techniques, the solutions are becoming robust and stable. When equipping smart speakers with our microphones and radar sensors, they can detect a user’s presence and track location and motion. When adding advanced algorithms such as beam-forming, the audio reception beam can be steered towards the user and filter out noises for more clear understanding of commands.

The market is demanding more of these innovative ready-to-use solutions. Delivering these solutions requires a thorough evaluation based on very strong knowledge of the sensing elements and the raw data they provide. Infineon has a leading edge here, with more than 40 years’ experience in sensing solutions and a deep-rooted system understanding, to create the ready-to-use sensor solutions demanded by the market.

SEMI: You mentioned that data is key to technological development. Re-innovating our world depends on the quality of valuable and secured data about the environment, and what is done with it. How do you make this possible?

Mandl: Indeed, collecting valuable and trustworthy information is critical for any application, as mislabeled or incorrect data reduces the accuracy of any solution. Using reliable and secured sensors is the first critical step towards high quality data. This is where Infineon´s XENSIVTMsensor portfolio plays a crucial role. Our sensors are exceptionally reliable thanks to our industry-leading technologies, and they are the perfect fit for various applications in automotive, industrial and consumer markets. With clean-labeled data in hand and a good understanding of each use-case, we can drastically improve the probability of detecting an event.

SEMI: Can you further explain the sensor fusion concepts that you are working on to connect the real world with the digital world by sensors?

Mandl: A good example is the integration of radar sensors into smart speakers, which improves tremendously the capabilities of current devices to understand the real world and enables numerous use cases that were not possible before.

Starting with keyword-less interactions with technology, the next generation of IoT devices with capabilities to locate and track users will be capable of adjusting the intelligent actions to your position. For example, when we ask our smart speaker in the living room to “turn on the lights” or “play music,” only the lights and speakers in the user´s surroundings should be activated, and not the ones in the kitchen. When walking into another room, the music and light should be capable of following the user´s position and shift flawlessly into the new room. Precise presence detection and tracking by radar will enable optimal interaction with consumers for a more clear understanding of commands and a flawless user experience. It should also create power savings for the smart home by switching off lights and other devices when no one is around.

SEMI: Machines sensing capabilities are getting closer to the five human senses as they understand the environment before acting. What will the new wave of applications include with regard to consumer markets?

Mandl: The potential of sensor fusion to enhance the sensing capabilities of machines cannot yet be imagined. There are innumerable use cases that can be enabled with the right combination of sensors, data processing algorithms and machine learning tools. Smart devices will be more aware of the situation and anticipate their actions to user commands, leading to the era of intuitive sensing. Imagine a world where you can communicate with your smart device like you talk to another human being!

Thanks to the advanced intelligence that we bring with our HMI group, devices will have a sensor brain for use case-specific matching of multiple sensor fusion data with the customer needs for each application. Not only the smart speaker market will experience this transformation, but also other IoT devices in areas such as home security or user authentication, or wearables for optimized wellbeing tracking and monitoring. Devices will be capable of achieving more if provided with the right technology combination. Sensor fusion will enable technology to take better and smarter decisions in complex situations, in some cases even better than humans would.

SEMI: What do you expect from European MEMS & Sensors Summit 2018 and why do you recommend attending in Grenoble?

Mandl: This event is a great opportunity not only to stay informed and see what is happening in the MEMS and sensors industry, but also to meet current and new partners and customers. Attending is important to observe how industry leaders are working towards the latest market trends, and discuss what else can be done to make life easier, safer and greener for everyone.

Serena Brischetto is a marketing and communications manager at SEMI Europe.

Originally published on the SEMI blog.

An international research group improved perovskite solar cells efficiency by using materials with better light absorption properties. For the first time, researchers used silicon nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles can trap light of a broad range of wavelengths near the cell active layer. The particles themselves don’t absorb light and don’t interact with other elements of the battery, thus maintaining its stability. The research was published in Advanced Optical Materials.

Perovskite solar cells have become very popular over the last few years. This hybrid material allows scientists to create inexpensive, efficient, and easy to use solar cells. The only problem is that the thickness of a perovskite layer should not exceed several hundred nanometers, but at the same time a thin perovskite absorbs less amount of incident photons from the Sun.

For this reason, scientists had to find a way to enhance light harvesting properties of the absorbing perovskite layer without increasing its thickness. To do this, scientists use metal nanoparticles. Such particles allow for better light absorption due to surface plasmon excitation but have significant drawbacks. For example, they absorb some energy themselves, thus heating up and damaging the battery. Scientists from ITMO University, in collaboration with colleagues from St. Petersburg State University, Italy and the USA, proposed using silicon nanoparticles to solve these problems.

“Dielectric particles don’t absorb light, so they don’t heat up. They are chemically inert and don’t affect the stability of the battery. Besides, being highly resonant, such particles can absorb more light of a wide range of wavelengths. Due to special layout characteristics, they don’t damage the structure of the cells. These advantages allowed us to enhance cells efficiency up to almost 19%. So far, this is the best known result for this particular perovskite material with incorporated nanoparticles,” shares Aleksandra Furasova, a postgraduate student at ITMO’s Faculty of Physics and Engineering.

According to the scientists, this is the first research on using silicon nanoparticles for enhancing light harvesting properties of the absorbing upper layer. Silicon nanoparticles have already surpassed plasmonic ones. The scientists hope that a deeper study of the interaction between nanoparticles and light, as well as their application in perovskite solar cells will lead to even better results.

“In our research, we used MAPbI3 perovskite, which allowed us to study in detail how resonant silicon nanoparticles affect perovskites solar cells. Now we can further try to use such particles for other types of perovskites with increased efficiency and stability. Apart from that, the nanoparticles themselves can be modified in order to enhance their optical and transport properties. It is important to note that silicon nanoparticles are very inexpensive and easy to produce. Therefore, this method can be easily incorporated in the process of solar cells production,” commented Sergey Makarov, head of ITMO’s Laboratory of Hybrid Nanophotonics and Optoelectronics.

Global semiconductor capital equipment manufacturer OEM Group announced a major engineering design upgrade of its Semitool Spin Rinse Dryer, a platform for removing residual chemicals from semiconductor substrates and other materials such as optical lenses. The new SRD800 series features several upgrades, including a robust Windows OS, advanced automation, an intuitive GUI, and patent-pending SmartParts™uptime technology. Along with improved ergonomic functionality, the many system upgrades enhance management capabilities and gives users the ability to track and control operations in real time in order to significantly reduce overall cost of ownership.

OEM Group acquired the Semitool IP in 2011 and has continually added quality and reliability upgrades to its best-in-class SRD product — the world standard for high-performance cleaning, rinsing, and drying with more than 25,000 units currently in use. “The latest iteration was meticulously redesigned by listening to our customers,” said Rich Maduzia, OEM’s Global Product Marketing Manager. Three models are offered: Tabletop SRD810, Roll-around SRD815, and Stacker SRD820 — all of which include low-profile cassettes that can accommodate substrates of up to 200mm (round) and 175mm (square). The SRDHP series is for high-profile cassettes and can accommodate substrates of up to 200mm (round or square).

Key upgrades include: a newly designed frame that isolates vibrations to protect wafers, reduce wear-and-tear, and extend the SRD’s lifecycle; a slide-out tray for easy access to electrical components; and uniform nozzle spraying across wafers. The brushless motor has a high-resolution encoder with programmable acceleration/deceleration that delivers precise rotational speeds and quick accurate ramp up from 0 to 2,800 RPM, as well as precision control at low speeds.

The non-contact, programmable N2 (nitrogen gas) heater and blanket chamber heater provide more control over drying to prevent warping of substrates, an N2 purge saver — now a standard feature — can save up to 23 liters/min. at idle, and an N2 regulator prevents excessive pressure to protect against window cracking. Additionally, the new system includes DI (deionized water) monitoring and regulation that tracks water consumption, detects clogged nozzles and poor water pressure, and ultimately, saves water and money. Precision monitoring and data logging for N2 and DI usage enable process engineers to fine-tune operations to lower the cost of ownership over time.

The SRD800/SRD800HP series is built with industry standard components for quick repair and replacement. A major cost-saving feature is OEM’s SmartPartstechnology providing automatic tracking of components against the manufacturer’s suggested lifetime, enabling proactive maintenanceto prevent downtime failures. “The innovative, new system has component part numbers for reordering built right into the user interface, so it’s easy to take control and plan for downtime,” said Chris Forgey, OEM’s CTO. “SmartParts is now also integrated across all of OEM’s new tool platforms,” he added.

OEM Group is a global supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services in the semiconductor industry offering a broad portfolio of products for thin film deposition, plasma etch, rapid thermal process, ion implantation, and wafer surface preparation used throughout the semiconductor manufacturing process flow and in Fabs worldwide.  In addition, OEM Group offers an Applications Lab for wet processing and Foundry Services for piezoelectric AlN and AINSc films as well as Global Services and Technical Support. For more information, visit www.oemgroupinc.com.

Leti, a research institute of CEA Tech, and VSORA, which specializes in multi-core digital signal processor (DSP) design, today announced they have demonstrated the implementation of 5G New Radio (5G NR) Release 15 on a new DSP architecture that can dramatically reduce time to market of digital modems.

Defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), 5G NR is the air interface, or wireless communication link, for the next generation of cellular networks. It is expected to significantly improve connectivity experiences in 5G cellular networks. 3GPP Release 15 of the 5G system architecture, finalized in June 2018, provides the set of features and functionality needed for deploying a commercially operational 5G system.

This first implementation of 5G NR Release 15 physical layer on VSORA’s multi-core DSP demonstrates that it can address timely and complex systems like 5G NR, while providing a highly flexible software-defined development flow. The demonstration has shown that VSORA’s development suite provided an optimized DSP architecture, able to support the concurrent reception of representative 5G quality-of-service regimes covering extreme broadband, narrowband Internet of Things and ultra-low latency systems.

“This new DSP development flow allows signal-processing engineers to evaluate different implementations of their algorithms for cost, processing power, arithmetic precision and power consumption, well before the physical implementation,” said VSORA CEO Khaled Maalej. “The same development flow lets algorithm engineers and software engineers share the same environment and source code, dramatically accelerating time-to-market for Release 15 architectures.”

“VSORA’s innovations simplify the design flow, which eliminates the need to develop HDL-based co-processors,” said Benoit Miscopein, head of Leti’s wireless broadband systems lab. “Our demonstration also shows their product can support a system as hungry in terms of computational resources as the 5G NR modem.”

“VSORA’s added value is the very high flexibility that the company offers in terms of testing various implementation architectural trade-offs,” Miscopein added. “This speeds time-to-market by reducing the time required to converge towards a suitable DSP architecture. The approach proposed by VSORA is also flexible in the sense that the DSP can fulfill the requirements of the standard evolution, e.g. Releases 16 and 17, without redesigning a complete architecture.”

“With the coming 5G mobile standard, traditional DSP technology will run out of steam on multiple levels,” added Maalej. “Our aim is to become the reference point for state-of-the-art DSP applications. VSORA’s technology has the potential to revolutionize DSP architectures, transform the design and implementation processes, and ultimately enhance go-to-market strategies.”