Tag Archives: letter-pulse-tech

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a developer of memory products and technology solutions, today announced A1000 PCIe NVMe SSD. The M.2 drive is Kingston’s first entry-level consumer-grade PCIe NVMe SSD utilizing 3D NAND. A1000 delivers twice the performance of SATA at near SATA pricing.

The single-sided M.2 2280 (22mm x 80mm) form factor makes A1000 ideal for notebooks and systems with limited space. The PCIe NVMe drive features a Gen 3.0 x2 interface, 4-channel Phison 5008 controller, and 3D NAND Flash. It delivers 2x the performance of SATA SSDs with read/write speeds1 up to 1500MB/s and 1000MB/s giving it exceptional responsiveness and ultra-low latency.

“Kingston is excited to release its newest SSD for the entry-level PCIe NVMe market. Designed with 3D NAND Flash memory, A1000 is more reliable and durable than a hard drive, and doubles the performance of a SATA SSD. Now we can give consumers the benefit of PCIe performance at about the same price as SATA,” said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. “Consumers can replace a hard drive or slower SSD with A1000 and have the storage needed for applications, videos, photos and more.”

A1000 is available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB2 capacities and is backed by a limited five-year warranty, free technical support and legendary Kingston reliability.

AKHAN Semiconductor, a technology company specializing in the fabrication and application of lab-grown, electronics-grade diamonds, announced today that it has obtained official notifications from both the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) for the Miraj Diamond trademark registration and patent allowance.

The official registration of the Miraj Diamond mark by the USPTO (Registration No. 5,438,740) follows nearly six years of completed filings fulfilled by the Illinois-based technology company following its launch in December 2012. The TIPO issued patent I615943 is the second AKHAN patent to be granted by the country– well-known to be strategic in the global semiconductor marketplace. The patent is a foreign counterpart of other issued and pending patents owned by AKHAN Semiconductor, Inc. that are used in the company’s Miraj Diamond® products. The claims protect uses far beyond the existing applications, including microprocessor applications. Covering the base materials common to nearly all semiconductor components, the intellectual property can be realized in everything from diodes, transistors, and power inverters, to fully functioning diamond chips such as integrated circuitry.

“The official declarations from both the USPTO and TIPO significantly add to the critical protections of the Miraj Diamond intellectual property portfolio and brand,” said Adam Khan, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of AKHAN Semiconductor. “Less than six years after our founding, the Miraj Diamond trademark is not only gaining global attention from the consumer electronics and semiconductor market places, but is also synonymous for next-generation performance, breakthrough capability, and flagship technology with diamond.”

“The notices of these issuances are very timely as we complete the construction of our cleanroom pilot production facility in northern Illinois,” added Carl Shurboff, AKHAN President and Chief Operating Officer. “With the targeted 2019 launch of our Miraj Diamond® Glass products for Smartphone devices and the concurrent development of our Miraj Diamond® electronics products for aerospace and defense, the brand equity we deliver in diamond continues unparalleled.”

“Safeguarding the technology and trademark from infringement, improper use, and other challenges, benefits not only our OEM Customers, by preserving their market value and time-based exclusivity, but also our shareholders, corporate development partners, and technology partners around the world,” said company Sales Advisor to the Board, Jeffrey G. Miller.

Graphene is a two-dimensional nanocarbon material, having unique properties in electronic, optical and thermal properties, which can be applied for optoelectronic devices. Graphene-based blackbody emitters are also promising light emitters on silicon chip in NIR and mid-infrared region. However, although graphene-based blackbody emitters have been demonstrated under steady-state conditions or relatively slow modulation (100 kHz), the transient properties of these emitters under high-speed modulation have not been reported to date. Also, the optical communications with graphene-based emitters have never been demonstrated.

Square graphene sheet is connected to source and drain electrodes. Modulated blackbody emission is obtained from graphene by applying input signal. Credit: Keio University

Square graphene sheet is connected to source and drain electrodes. Modulated blackbody emission is obtained from graphene by applying input signal. Credit: Keio University

Here, a highly integrated, high-speed and on-chip blackbody emitter based on graphene in NIR region including telecommunication wavelength was demonstrated. A fast response time of ~ 100 ps, which is ~ 105 higher than the previous graphene emitters, has been experimentally demonstrated for single and few-layer graphene, the emission responses can be controlled by the graphene contact with the substrate depending on the number of graphene layers. The mechanisms of the high-speed emission are elucidated by performing theoretical calculations of the heat conduction equations considering the thermal model of emitters including graphene and a substrate. The simulated results indicate that the fast response properties can be understood not only by the classical thermal transport of in-plane heat conduction in graphene and heat dissipation to the substrate but also by the remote quantum thermal transport via the surface polar phonons (SPoPhs) of the substrates. In addition, first real-time optical communication with graphene-based light emitters was experimentally demonstrated, indicating that graphene emitters are novel light sources for optical communication. Furthermore, we fabricated integrated two-dimensional array emitters with large-scale graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) method and capped emitters operable in air, and carried out the direct coupling of optical fibers to the emitters owing to their small footprint and planar device structure.

Graphene light emitters are greatly advantageous over conventional compound semiconductor emitters because they can be highly integrated on silicon chip due to simple fabrication processes of graphene emitters and direct coupling with silicon waveguide through an evanescent field. Because graphene can realize high-speed, small footprint and on-Si-chip light emitters, which are still challenges for compound semiconductors, the graphene-based light emitters can open new routes to highly integrated optoelectronics and silicon photonics.

Case Western Reserve University researchers achieve cat-like ‘hearing’ with device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum

CLEVELAND-Researchers at Case Western Reserve University are developing atomically thin “drumheads” able to receive and transmit signals across a radio frequency range far greater than what we can hear with the human ear.

But the drumhead is tens of trillions times (10 followed by 12 zeros) smaller in volume and 100,000 times thinner than the human eardrum.

The advances will likely contribute to making the next generation of ultralow-power communications and sensory devices smaller and with greater detection and tuning ranges.

“Sensing and communication are key to a connected world,” said Philip Feng, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and corresponding author on a paper about the work published March 30 in the journal Science Advances. “In recent decades, we have been connected with highly miniaturized devices and systems, and we have been pursuing ever-shrinking sizes for those devices.”

The challenge with miniaturization: Also achieving a broader dynamic range of detection, for small signals, such as sound, vibration, and radio waves.

“In the end, we need transducers that can handle signals without losing or compromising information at both the ‘signal ceiling’ (the highest level of an undistorted signal) and the ‘noise floor’ (the lowest detectable level),” Feng said.

While this work was not geared toward specific devices currently on the market, researchers said, it was focused on measurements, limits and scaling which would be important for essentially all transducers.

Those transducers may be developed over the next decade, but for now, Feng and his team have already demonstrated the capability of their key components-the atomic layer drumheads or resonators-at the smallest scale yet.

The work represents the highest reported dynamic range for vibrating transducers of their type. To date, that range had only been attained by much larger transducers operating at much lower frequencies-like the human eardrum, for example.

“What we’ve done here is to show that some ultimately miniaturized, atomically thin electromechanical drumhead resonators can offer remarkably broad dynamic range, up to ~110dB, at radio frequencies (RF) up to over 120MHz,” Feng said. “These dynamic ranges at RF are comparable to the broad dynamic range of human hearing capability in the audio bands.”

New dynamic standard

Feng said the key to all sensory systems-from naturally occurring sensory functions in animals to sophisticated devices in engineering-is that desired dynamic range.

Dynamic range is the ratio between the signal ceiling over the noise floor and is usually measured in decibels (dB).

Human eardrums normally have dynamic range of about 60 to 100dB in the range of 10Hz to 10kHz, and our hearing quickly decreases outside this frequency range. Other animals, such as the common house cat or beluga whale (see illustration), can have comparable or even wider dynamic ranges in higher frequency bands.

The vibrating nanoscale drumheads developed by Feng and his team are made of atomic layers of semiconductor crystals (single-, bi-, tri-, and four-layer MoS2 flakes, with thickness of 0.7, 1.4, 2.1, and 2.8 nanometers), with diameters only about 1 micron.

They construct them by exfoliating individual atomic layers from the bulk semiconductor crystal and using a combination of nanofabrication and micromanipulation techniques to suspend the atomic layers over micro-cavities pre-defined on a silicon wafer, and then making electrical contacts to the devices.

Further, these atomically thin RF resonators being tested at Case Western Reserve show excellent frequency “tunability,” meaning their tones can be manipulated by stretching the drumhead membranes using electrostatic forces, similar to the sound tuning in much larger musical instruments in an orchestra, Feng said.

The study also reveals that these incredibly small drumheads only need picoWatt (pW, 10^-12 Watt) up to nanoWatt (nW, 10^-9 Watt) level of RF power to sustain their high frequency oscillations.

“Not only having surprisingly large dynamic range with such tiny volume and mass, they are also energy-efficient and very ‘quiet’ devices”, Feng said, “We ‘listen’ to them very carefully and ‘talk’ to them very gently.”

Plastics are excellent insulators, meaning they can efficiently trap heat – a quality that can be an advantage in something like a coffee cup sleeve. But this insulating property is less desirable in products such as plastic casings for laptops and mobile phones, which can overheat, in part because the coverings trap the heat that the devices produce.

Now a team of engineers at MIT has developed a polymer thermal conductor — a plastic material that, however counterintuitively, works as a heat conductor, dissipating heat rather than insulating it. The new polymers, which are lightweight and flexible, can conduct 10 times as much heat as most commercially used polymers.

Researchers at MIT have designed a new way to engineer a polymer structure at the molecular level, via chemical vapor deposition. This allows for rigid, ordered chains, versus the messy, 'spaghetti-like strands' that normally make up a polymer. This chain-like structure enables heat transport both along and across chains. Credit: MIT News Office / Chelsea Turner

Researchers at MIT have designed a new way to engineer a polymer structure at the molecular level, via chemical vapor deposition. This allows for rigid, ordered chains, versus the messy, ‘spaghetti-like strands’ that normally make up a polymer. This chain-like structure enables heat transport both along and across chains. Credit: MIT News Office / Chelsea Turner

“Traditional polymers are both electrically and thermally insulating. The discovery and development of electrically conductive polymers has led to novel electronic applications such as flexible displays and wearable biosensors,” says Yanfei Xu, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Our polymer can thermally conduct and remove heat much more efficiently. We believe polymers could be made into next-generation heat conductors for advanced thermal management applications, such as a self-cooling alternative to existing electronics casings.”

Xu and a team of postdocs, graduate students, and faculty, have published their results today in Science Advances. The team includes Xiaoxue Wang, who contributed equally to the research with Xu, along with Jiawei Zhou, Bai Song, Elizabeth Lee, and Samuel Huberman; Zhang Jiang, physicist at Argonne National Laboratory; Karen Gleason, associate provost of MIT and the Alexander I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering; and Gang Chen, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering.

Stretching spaghetti

If you were to zoom in on the microstructure of an average polymer, it wouldn’t be difficult to see why the material traps heat so easily. At the microscopic level, polymers are made from long chains of monomers, or molecular units, linked end to end. These chains are often tangled in a spaghetti-like ball. Heat carriers have a hard time moving through this disorderly mess and tend to get trapped within the polymeric snarls and knots.

And yet, researchers have attempted to turn these natural thermal insulators into conductors. For electronics, polymers would offer a unique combination of properties, as they are lightweight, flexible, and chemically inert. Polymers are also electrically insulating, meaning they do not conduct electricity, and can therefore be used to prevent devices such as laptops and mobile phones from short-circuiting in their users’ hands.

Several groups have engineered polymer conductors in recent years, including Chen’s group, which in 2010 invented a method to create “ultradrawn nanofibers” from a standard sample of polyethylene. The technique stretched the messy, disordered polymers into ultrathin, ordered chains — much like untangling a string of holiday lights. Chen found that the resulting chains enabled heat to skip easily along and through the material, and that the polymer conducted 300 times as much heat compared with ordinary plastics.

But the insulator-turned-conductor could only dissipate heat in one direction, along the length of each polymer chain. Heat couldn’t travel between polymer chains, due to weak Van der Waals forces — a phenomenon that essentially attracts two or more molecules close to each other. Xu wondered whether a polymer material could be made to scatter heat away, in all directions.

Xu conceived of the current study as an attempt to engineer polymers with high thermal conductivity, by simultaneously engineering intramolecular and intermolecular forces — a method that she hoped would enable efficient heat transport along and between polymer chains.

The team ultimately produced a heat-conducting polymer known as polythiophene, a type of conjugated polymer that is commonly used in many electronic devices.

Hints of heat in all directions

Xu, Chen, and members of Chen’s lab teamed up with Gleason and her lab members to develop a new way to engineer a polymer conductor using oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD), whereby two vapors are directed into a chamber and onto a substrate, where they interact and form a film. “Our reaction was able to create rigid chains of polymers, rather than the twisted, spaghetti-like strands in normal polymers.” Xu says.

In this case, Wang flowed the oxidant into a chamber, along with a vapor of monomers – individual molecular units that, when oxidized, form into the chains known as polymers.

“We grew the polymers on silicon/glass substrates, onto which the oxidant and monomers are adsorbed and reacted, leveraging the unique self-templated growth mechanism of CVD technology,” Wang says.

Wang produced relatively large-scale samples, each measuring 2 square centimeters – about the size of a thumbprint.

“Because this sample is used so ubiquitously, as in solar cells, organic field-effect transistors, and organic light-emitting diodes, if this material can be made to be thermally conductive, it can dissipate heat in all organic electronics,” Xu says.

The team measured each sample’s thermal conductivity using time-domain thermal reflectance — a technique in which they shoot a laser onto the material to heat up its surface and then monitor the drop in its surface temperature by measuring the material’s reflectance as the heat spreads into the material.

“The temporal profile of the decay of surface temperature is related to the speed of heat spreading, from which we were able to compute the thermal conductivity,” Zhou says.

On average, the polymer samples were able to conduct heat at about 2 watts per meter per kelvin – about 10 times faster than what conventional polymers can achieve. At Argonne National Laboratory, Jiang and Xu found that polymer samples appeared nearly isotropic, or uniform. This suggests that the material’s properties, such as its thermal conductivity, should also be nearly uniform. Following this reasoning, the team predicted that the material should conduct heat equally well in all directions, increasing its heat-dissipating potential.

Going forward, the team will continue exploring the fundamental physics behind polymer conductivity, as well as ways to enable the material to be used in electronics and other products, such as casings for batteries, and films for printed circuit boards.

“We can directly and conformally coat this material onto silicon wafers and different electronic devices” Xu says. “If we can understand how thermal transport [works] in these disordered structures, maybe we can also push for higher thermal conductivity. Then we can help to resolve this widespread overheating problem, and provide better thermal management.”

Mattson Technology introduces Novyka product family, an innovative technology for atomic level surface treatment and ultra-selective etching of extremely thin and delicate materials for continued scaling of 3D logic and memory devices.

“There are significant challenges in scaling with 3D structures for advanced memory and logic chips that include small, narrow, deep and complicated features composed of thin layers of different materials. Among these manufacturing challenges is selective removal of certain layers without damaging or removing other layers and without affecting other features,” said Dr. Subhash Deshmukh, Chief Business Officer of Mattson Technology. “Another challenge is cleaning of these complex structures, as wet chemistry is no longer able to meet the requirements of cleaning the very bottom of the high-aspect ratio features while maintaining device structure integrity.”

“Our new Novyka™ products offer proprietary chemistries in surface cleaning, surface treatment and surface modification. The unique designs of Novyka™ products further extend to enable ultra-high selectivity in removal of thin and delicate layers in 3D device structures,” said Dr. Michael Yang, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Mattson Technology. “In addition to delivering the most innovative process solutions to some of the key technical challenges in the industry, Novyka™ products have the lowest running cost, or the best total cost of ownership in their class.”

“We are very excited about the potential of Novyka products as we are working closely with several of our most advanced customers on a variety of leading edge applications. With Mattson Technology achieving record revenue and profit in 2017, we continue to relentlessly drive technology innovations and provide uncompromising service to our global customer base,” commented Dr. Allen Lu, CEO and President of Mattson Technology.

Mattson Technology, a Delaware Company, headquartered in Fremont, California, designs, manufactures, markets and supports semiconductor wafer processing equipment. Mattson’s dry strip, plasma etch, rapid thermal processing and millisecond annealing equipment are used in high volume manufacturing by leading memory and logic chip makers around the world.

Mobile Semiconductor today announced the introduction of its three new 40nm ULP memory compilers which are available immediately.  The 40nm ULP compilers allow the engineer to create memory designs that maximize battery life while occupying the smallest amount of expensive silicon real estate. Mobile Semiconductor’s silicon-proven embedded memory technology offers these compilers on Taiwan Semiconductor’s 40nm ULP process.

These solutions are available in a range of formats that include:

  • Single Port, High Speed, Ultra Low Power
  • Single Port, Low Voltage (dual supply), Ultra Low Power
  • Single Port, High Speed, Ultra Low Power with a Reduced Mask Set

Founder and CEO Cameron Fisher states, “Mobile Semiconductor is one of the leaders in providing low power solutions.  The new 40nm ULP with flash allows the engineers to build products that may, for example, need periodic security updates and/or benefit from field updates to improve functionality.  Having on-board flash also serves to reduce the chip count on a board which is a further saving.  We support the process version with or without embedded Flash in any variant.”

The ULP process can lower power consumption by up to 30% while at the same time cutting leakage current by as much as 70%.  Overall performance is improved at virtually no cost to the customer.  Further, the high density 0.242 um2bit cell allows for reduced geometries, further reducing costs.

“The 40nm process technology has been around for a few years but the addition of Flash makes it applicable to a wider range of devices”, Fisher continued, “and the price points we are offering our 40nm ULP compilers sets Mobile Semiconductor apart from other memory compiler solutions. We are confident that our new 40nm ULP compliers are the perfect choice for wide range of new designs in the high-performance battery powered products market space.”

No dust mops needed here. The inside of a chip factory is cleaner than about any other place you can visit on Earth. To avoid contaminating the chip-making process, the air in an Intel fab clean room is filtered to 1,000 times fewer airborne particles than a sterile hospital operating room.

The “Team Room” inside Intel’s Fab D1X in Hillsboro, Oregon, is unique.

It’s the sole conference room inside this entire multibillion-dollar factory. Though the fab sprawls over four football fields, every square foot is supremely expensive and valuable. That’s why Intel designed leading-edge Fab D1X with one and only room like this.

Intel operations leaders gather for the daily "8:20" – a morning huddle inside Fab D1X to ensure that the Hillsboro, Oregon, chip factory is running smoothly. Up to 30 people may squeeze into this room to confer on factory tool status, parts availability, operating forecasts, experts who may be needed or other urgent issues. The fab – the size of four football fields – runs 24/7/365. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

Intel operations leaders gather for the daily “8:20” – a morning huddle inside Fab D1X to ensure that the Hillsboro, Oregon, chip factory is running smoothly. Up to 30 people may squeeze into this room to confer on factory tool status, parts availability, operating forecasts, experts who may be needed or other urgent issues. The fab – the size of four football fields – runs 24/7/365. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

Anything entering the fab – including the Fab D1X Team Room – must be thoroughly scrubbed or swabbed. Human skin and hair must be almost entirely covered. Workers wear head-to-toe bunny suits, protective glasses, two pairs of gloves, booties, hoods, and face masks. Workers often recognize one another by their build or their gait, not their face.

In the D1X Team Room, anything that could shed particulates is verboten. No makeup, for example. Common supplies like paper and pencils are off-limits too – they both can create micro-dust. Only ink pens and special fab-approved synthetic paper are allowed in. This is the first photo inside the D1X Team Room ever shared externally. See more images from Intel’s fabs: Intel Manufacturing Images

A novel invention by a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) holds promise for a faster and cheaper way to diagnose diseases with high accuracy. Professor Zhang Yong from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the NUS Faculty of Engineering and his team have developed a tiny microfluidic chip that could effectively detect minute amounts of biomolecules without the need for complex lab equipment.

Diseases diagnostics involves detection and quantification of nano-sized bio-particles such as DNA, proteins, viruses, and exosomes (extracellular vesicles). Typically, detection of biomolecules such as proteins are performed using colorimetric assays or fluorescent labelling with a secondary antibody for detection, and requires complex optical detection equipment such as fluorescent microscopy or spectrophotometry.

One alternative to reduce cost and complexity of disease detection is the adoption of label-free techniques, which are gaining traction in recent times. However, this approach requires precision engineering of nano-features (in a detection chip), complex optical setups, novel nano-probes (such as graphene oxide, carbon nanotubes, and gold nanorods) or additional amplification steps such as aggregation of nanoparticles to achieve sensitive detection of biomarkers.

“Our invention is an example of disruptive diagnostics. This tiny biochip can sensitively detect proteins and nano-sized polymer vesicles with a concentration as low as 10ng/mL (150 pM) and 3.75μg/mL respectively. It also has a very small footprint, weighing only 500 mg and is 6mm³ in size. Detection can be performed using standard laboratory microscopes, making this approach highly attractive for use in point-of-care diagnostics,” explained Prof Zhang.

His team, comprising Dr Kerwin Kwek Zeming and two NUS PhD students Mr Thoriq Salafi and Ms Swati Shikha, published their findings in scientific journal Nature Communications on 28 March 2018.

Novel approach for disease diagnosis

This novel fluorescent label-free approach uses the lateral shifts in the position of the microbead substrate in pillar arrays, for quantifying the biomolecules, based on the change in surface forces and size, without the need of any external equipment. Due to the usage of lateral displacement, the nano-biomolecules can be detected in real-time and the detection is significantly faster in comparison to fluorescent label based detection.

“These techniques can also be extended to many other types of nano-biomolecules, including nucleic acid and virus detection. To complement this chip technology, we are also developing a portable smartphone-based accessory and microfluidic pump to make the whole detection platform portable for outside laboratory disease diagnostics. We hope to further develop this technology for commercialisation,” said Prof Zhang.

Following three years of extensive research, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) physicist Dr. Uriel Levy and his team have created technology that will enable our computers–and all optic communication devices–to run 100 times faster through terahertz microchips.

Until now, two major challenges stood in the way of creating the terahertz microchip: overheating and scalability.

However, in a paper published this week in Laser and Photonics Review, Dr. Levy, head of HU’s Nano-Opto Group and HU emeritus professor Joseph Shappir have shown proof of concept for an optic technology that integrates the speed of optic (light) communications with the reliability–and manufacturing scalability–of electronics.

Optic communications encompass all technologies that use light and transmit through fiber optic cables, such as the internet, email, text messages, phone calls, the cloud and data centers, among others. Optic communications are super fast but in microchips they become unreliable and difficult to replicate in large quanitites.

Now, by using a Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon (MONOS) structure, Levy and his team have come up with a new integrated circuit that uses flash memory technology–the kind used in flash drives and discs-on-key–in microchips. If successful, this technology will enable standard 8-16 gigahertz computers to run 100 times faster and will bring all optic devices closer to the holy grail of communications: the terahertz chip.

As Dr. Uriel Levy shared, “this discovery could help fill the ‘THz gap’ and create new and more powerful wireless devices that could transmit data at significantly higher speeds than currently possible. In the world of hi-tech advances, this is game-changing technology,”

Meir Grajower, the leading HU PhD student on the project, added, “It will now be possible to manufacture any optical device with the precision and cost-effectiveness of flash technology”.

Coming soon to a chip near you…