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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.today announced a successful network processor tape-out based on Samsung’s 14LPP (Low-Power Plus) process technology in close collaboration with eSilicon and Rambus. This achievement is built on Samsung’s cutting-edge foundry process and design infra for network applications, eSilicon’s complex ASIC and 2.5D design capability with its IP solutions, and Rambus’ high-speed 28G SerDes solution.

Samsung’s 14LPP process technology based on 3D FinFET structure has already been proven for its high performance and manufacturability through mass production track record. The next generation process for network application is 10LPP process which is based on 10LPE (Low-Power Early) of which mass production was started from last year for the first time in the industry. 10LPP process’ mass production will be started in this year end.

Additionally, Samsung named its newly developed full 2.5D turnkey solution, which connects a logic chip and HBM2 memory with an interposer, as I-CubeTM (Interposer-Cube) solution. This 14LPP network process chip is the first product that Samsung applied I-CubeTM solution together with Samsung’s HBM2 memory. The I-CubeTM solution will be essential to network applications for high-speed signaling, and it is expected to be adopted into other applications such as computing, server and AI in the near future.

“This successful 14nm network processor tape-out was combined with eSilicon’s proven design ability in network area and Rambus’ expertise in SerDes and Samsung’s robust process technology along with I-Cube solution,” said Ryan Lee, Vice President of Foundry Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. “Our collaboration model will have a great influence on a network foundry segment and Samsung will keep developing its network foundry solution to be a meaningful total network solution provider aligned with its process roadmap from 14nm and 10nm to 7nm.”

“This project was a true collaboration between Samsung, Rambus and eSilicon. eSilicon is proud to bring its FinFET ASIC and interposer design skills along with our substantial 2.5D integration skills to the project,” said Patrick Soheili, Vice President of Product Management and corporate development at eSilicon. “Our HBM Gen2 PHY, custom flip-chip package design and custom memory designs also helped to optimize the power, performance and area for the project.”

“Networking OEMs are looking for high-quality leadership IP suppliers that can bring 28G backplane SerDes in advanced FinFET process nodes to market,” said Luc Seraphin, senior vice president and general manager of Rambus Memory and Interfaces Division. “Our success with Samsung and eSilicon is a testament that these industry-leading solutions are attainable when you bring leading companies together. This is the first of several other offerings we plan to bring to networking and enterprise ASIC markets around the globe.”

 Imec, the research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technology, announces that Jan Genoe, one of its distinguished scientists, has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. With the grant of 2.5 million euros for a five-year period, Genoe’s team will develop and integrate the breakthrough technology needed to prove the possibility of high-quality video-rate holographic projection. ERC Advanced Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to allow outstanding scientists to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects.

Today, despite many efforts by researchers worldwide, there are no holographic projectors that allow video-rate electronically controlled projection of complex holograms. Optically rewriteable holograms exist, but they are too slow; acoustically-formed holograms can be switched fast but the image complexity is very limited. With a breakthrough combination of smart electronics, optics and materials, imec’s Jan Genoe aims to clear the roadblocks and enable next-generation video holography.

Jan Genoe: “At imec, we have most of the underlying technologies and expertise that are needed to advance holography. Advanced CMOS technologies enable to write huge hologram patterns at data rates beyond 10 Gbit/s, we can design a front end that can control charges and voltage patterns at sub-wavelength resolution. Moreover,  we can grow the necessary waveguides, couple laser light into them, and integrate transparent semiconducting oxides to bring charges close to a waveguide. This grant offers us the opportunity to merge all the necessary technology to make this giant leap in holography.”

The ERC Advanced Grants are earmarked for scientists who are leaders in their field of research with at least a decade of significant achievements. Imec’s CTO Jo De Boeck comments “Adding to the other ERC grants that our researchers already received, this one again proves that we are investing in long-term, high-quality research needed to solve this generation’s R&D challenges. This radical combination of innovation in architecture, materials and driving schemes will be the driver for many future innovations and applications in domains such as augmented reality, automotive, optical metrology, mobile communication, education, or safety, innovations with a high economic and social impact.”

Jan Genoe is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff of imec’s Large Area Electronics (LAE) department and part-time professor at KU Leuven (ESAT, Technology Campus Diepenbeek). He received an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. from KU Leuven in 1988 and 1994 respectively. Before joining imec, Jan Genoe worked at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble (France) as a Human Capital and Mobility Fellow of the European Community. His current research interests are with designing circuits with organic and oxide transistors, but also with organic photovoltaics and piezo-electric devices. Jan Genoe is the author and co-author of more than 150 papers in refereed journals. He is reviewer for a broad range of journals and is member of the Technology Directions international program committee of the ISSCC.

For several years, a team of researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas has investigated various materials in search of those whose electrical properties might make them suitable for small, energy-efficient transistors to power next-generation electronic devices.

They recently found one such material, but it was nothing anyone expected.

In an article published online March 10 in the journal Advanced Materials, Dr. Moon Kim and his colleagues describe a material that, when heated to about 450 degrees Celsius, transforms from an atomically thin, two-dimensional sheet into an array of one-dimensional nanowires, each just a few atoms wide.

An image caught in mid-transformation looks like a tiny United States flag, and with false colors added, is arguably the world’s smallest image of Old Glory, Kim said.

This tiny US flag -- just a few nanometers wide and invisible to the naked eye -- is arguably the world's smallest image of Old Glory, according to its creators at the University of Texas at Dallas. In an experiment, the nanoflag pattern emerged unexpectedly as sheets of the "stripe" material -- molybdenum ditelluride -- were heated to about 450 degrees Celsius, at which point its atoms began to rearrange and form new structures -- the 'stars' in this false-color image. Each star consists of six central atoms of molybdenum surrounded by six atoms of tellurium. Stacked on top of one another, the stars form nanowires that might power advanced electronics. The transformation from stripes to stars is reported in the journal Advanced Materials. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas

This tiny US flag — just a few nanometers wide and invisible to the naked eye — is arguably the world’s smallest image of Old Glory, according to its creators at the University of Texas at Dallas. In an experiment, the nanoflag pattern emerged unexpectedly as sheets of the “stripe” material — molybdenum ditelluride — were heated to about 450 degrees Celsius, at which point its atoms began to rearrange and form new structures — the ‘stars’ in this false-color image. Each star consists of six central atoms of molybdenum surrounded by six atoms of tellurium. Stacked on top of one another, the stars form nanowires that might power advanced electronics. The transformation from stripes to stars is reported in the journal Advanced Materials. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas

“The phase transition we observed, this new structure, was not predicted by theory,” said Kim, the Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor of materials science and engineering at UT Dallas.

Because the nanowires are semiconductors, they might be used as switching devices, just as silicon is used in today’s transistors to turn electric current on and off in electronic devices.

“These nanowires are about 10 times smaller than the smallest silicon wires, and, if used in future technology, would result in powerful energy-efficient devices,” Kim said. The lead authors of the study are Hui Zhu and Qingxiao Wang, graduate students in materials science and engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Just a Phase?

When certain materials are subjected to changes in external conditions, such as temperature or pressure, they can undergo a phase transition. A familiar example is when liquid water is cooled to form a solid (ice), or heated to form a gas (steam).

For many materials, however, a phase transition means something a little different. As external temperature and pressure change, these materials’ atoms rearrange and redistribute to make a material with a different structure and composition. These changes can affect the new material’s properties, such as how electrons move through it. For scientists interested in new applications for materials, understanding such transitions is paramount.

In most cases, a type of graphic called a phase diagram helps researchers predict structural and property changes in a material when it undergoes a phase transition.

But nothing predicted what Kim’s team observed as it conducted experiments on a material called molybdenum ditelluride.

Nanoflags and Nanoflowers

Using a transmission electron microscope, the researchers started with atomically thin, two-dimensional sheets of molybdenum ditelluride, a material made up of one layer of molybdenum atoms and two layers of tellurium atoms. The material belongs to a class called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), which show promise in replacing silicon in transistors.

“We wanted to understand the thermal stability of this particular material,” Kim said. “We thought it was a good candidate for next-generation nanoelectronics. Out of curiosity, we set out to see whether it would be stable above room temperature.”

When they increased the temperature to above 450 degrees Celsius, two things happened.

“First, we saw a new pattern begin to emerge that was aesthetically pleasing to the eye,” Kim said. Across the surface of the sample, the repeating rows, or stripes, of molybdenum ditelluride layers began to transform into shapes that looked like tiny six-pointed stars, or flowers with six petals.

The material was transitioning into hexa-molybdenum hexa-telluride, a one-dimensional wire-like structure. The cross section of the new material is a structure consisting of six central atoms of molybdenum surrounded by six atoms of tellurium.

As the phase transition progressed, part of the sample was still “stripes” and part had become “stars.” The team thought the pattern looked like a United States flag. They made a false-color version with a blue field behind the stars and half of the stripes colored red, to make a “nanoflag.”

Not in the textbooks

“Then, when we examined the material more closely, we found that the transition we were seeing from ‘stripes’ to ‘stars’ was not in any of the phase diagrams,” Kim said. “Normally, when you heat up particular materials, you expect to see a different kind of material emerge as predicted by a phase diagram. But in this case, something unusual happened — it formed a whole new phase.”

Each individual nanowire is a semiconductor, which means that electric current moving through the wire can be switched on and off, Kim said. When many of the individual nanowires are grouped together in bulk they behave more like a metal, which easily conducts current.

“We would want to use the nanowires one at a time because we are pushing the size of a transistor as small as possible,” Kim said. “Currently, the smallest transistor size is about 10 times larger than our nanowire. Each of ours is smaller than 1 nanometer in diameter, which is essentially an atomic-scale wire.

“Before we can put this discovery to use and make an actual device, we have many more studies to do, including determining how to separate out the individual nanowires, and overcoming technical challenges to manufacturing and mass production,” Kim said. “But this is a start.”

To realize the next generation of devices for information processing based on new phenomena such as spintronics, multiferroics, magnetooptics, and magnonics, their constituent materials need to be developed. Recent rapid progress in nanotechnology allows us to fabricate nanostructures that are impossible to obtain in nature.

However, complex magnetic oxides are one of the most complicated material systems in terms of development and analysis. In addition, the detailed mechanism is unknown by which changes in atomic composition that do not affect overall structure lead to drastic changes in material characteristics even though the material structure is similar.

Now, researchers at Spin Electronics Group at Toyohashi Tech and at Myongji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, University of California, San Diego, and Trinity College Dublin found that nanoscale pillar-shaped distribution of iron in strontium titanate (STF) changes its magnetic and magnetooptical response drastically. Surprisingly, the polycrystalline sample showed stronger magnetism than single crystalline film.

Image of nanopillar-like poly-crystalline STF film obtained by transmission electron microscopy. Credit: TOYOHASHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY.

Image of nanopillar-like poly-crystalline STF film obtained by transmission electron microscopy.
Credit: TOYOHASHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY.

“In usual oxide systems, magnetic and magnetooptical effects are stronger in highly ordered structures. In other words, single crystalline material is better for obtaining better magnetic properties,” explains Assistant Professor Taichi Goto, “However, iron-substituted strontium titanate deposited at certain oxygen pressure is different.”

The STF films were prepared by pulsed laser deposition at various pressures directly on silicon substrate, and crystalline structure and magnetic properties were characterized systematically. A sample deposited at a certain pressure showed significantly stronger magnetism and larger Faraday rotation angle (magnetooptical effects) at room temperature. Several tests analyzing the oxygen stoichiometry and the corresponding Fe valence states, the structure and strain state, and the presence of small-volume fractions of iron revealed that the nanostructure and clustering of the elements enhanced magnetism.

These results show the broad possibility of polycrystalline films being used in silicon-based devices. In this paper, the integration of STF film with 0.1 mm scale optical resonator was demonstrated. Further, the integration of such novel oxides with conventional device concepts would pave a way for interesting systems in the future.

In electronics, the race for smaller is huge.

Physicists at the University of Cincinnati are working to harness the power of nanowires, microscopic wires that have the potential to improve solar cells or revolutionize fiber optics.

University of Cincinnati physicist Hans-Peter Wagner is exploring nanowire semiconductors to harness the power of light at the nano level. Credit: Andrew Higley/UC Creative Services

University of Cincinnati physicist Hans-Peter Wagner is exploring nanowire semiconductors to harness the power of light at the nano level. Credit: Andrew Higley/UC Creative Services

Nanotechnology has the potential to solve the bottleneck that occurs in storing or retrieving digital data – or could store data in a completely new way. UC professors and their graduate students presented their research at the March 13 conference of the American Physical Society in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Hans-Peter Wagner, associate professor of physics, and doctoral student Fatemesadat Mohammadi are looking at ways to transmit data with the speed of fiber optics but at a significantly smaller scale.

Wagner and lead author Mohammadi are studying this field, called plasmonics, with researchers from three other universities. For the novel experiment, they built nanowire semiconductors with organic material, fired laser pulses at the sample and measured the way light traveled across the metal; technically, the excitations of plasmon waves.

“So, if we succeed in getting a better understanding about the coupling between the excitations in semiconductor nanowires and metal films, it could open up a lot of new perspectives,” Wagner said.

The successful harnessing of this phenomenon — called plasmon waveguiding — could allow researchers to transmit data with light at the nano level.

Universities around the world are studying nanowires, which have ubiquitous applications from biomedical sensors to light-emitting diodes or LEDs. Four UC papers on the topic are among more than 150 others by nanowire researchers around the world to be presented at the March conference.

“You’re trying to optimize the physical structure on something approaching the atomic scale. You can make very high efficiency devices like lasers,” said Leigh Smith, head of UC’s Department of Physics. Smith and UC Physics Professor Howard Jackson also presented papers on nanowires at the conference. Virtually everyone benefits from this line of research, even if the quantum mechanics underlying the latest biosensors exceed a casual understanding. For example, home pregnancy tests use gold nanoparticles – the indicator that turns color. People use technologies all the time that they don’t understand,” Smith said.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp., observed that the number of transistors used in a microchip has roughly doubled every two years since the 1970s. This phenomenon, now called Moore’s Law suggests that computer processing power improves at a predictable rate.

Some computer scientists predicted the demise of Moore’s Law was inevitable with the advent of microprocessors. But nanotechnology is extending that concept’s lifespan, said Brian Markwalter, senior vice president of research and technology for the Consumer Technology Association. His trade group represents 2,200 members in the $287 billion U.S. tech industry.

“It’s not a race to be small just to be the smallest. There’s a progression of being able to do more on smaller chips. The effect for consumers is that every year they get better and better products for the same price or less,” he said.

Nanotechnology is opening a universe of new possibilities, Markwalter said.

“It’s almost magical. They get better, faster, cheaper and use less power,” he said.

Markwalter said UC professor Wagner’s research is exciting because it shows promise in using optical switches to address a bottleneck in data transmission that occurs whenever you try to store or remove data.

“It’s really a breakthrough area to merge the semiconductor world and the optical world,” Markwalter said. “[Wagner’s] working at the intersection of fiber optics and photonics.”

But even nanotechnology has its limits, Smith said.

“We’re running toward the limits of what’s physically possible with present technologies,” Smith said. “The challenges are pretty immense. In 10 or 20 years there has to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we make structures. If we don’t we’ll be caught at the same place we are now.”

How one UC experiment works:

UC graduate student Fatemesadat Mohammadi and Associate Physics Professor Hans-Peter Wagner fire laser pulses at semiconductor nanowires to excite electrons (called excitons) that potentially serve as an energy pump to guide plasmon waves over a coated metal film just a few nanometers thick without losing power, a nettlesome physical property called resistivity

They measure the resulting luminescence of the nanowire to observe how light couples to the metal film. By sending light over a metal film, a process called plasmonic waveguiding, researchers one day could transmit data with light at the nano level.

“The luminescence is our interest. So we coat them and see: How does the photoluminescence characteristic change?” Mohammadi said.

To make the semiconductor, they use a technique called high-vacuum organic molecular beam deposition (pictured above) to spread organic and metal layers on gallium-nitride nanorods.

The use of organic film is unique to the UC experiment, Wagner said. The film works as a spacer to control the energy flow between excitons in the nanowire and the oscillation of metal electrons called plasmons.

The organic material has the added benefit of also containing excitons that, arranged properly, could support the energy flow in a semiconductor, he said.

Coating the nanorods with gold significantly shortens the lifetime of the exciton emission resulting in what’s called a quenched photoluminescence. But by using organic spacers between the nanorod and the gold film, the researchers are able to extend the emission lifetime to nearly the equivalent of nanorods without a coating.

Once the gold-coated sample is prepared, they take it to an adjacent lab room and subject it to pulses of laser light.

Mohammadi said it took days of painstaking work to arrange the small city of mirrors and beam splitters bolted at precise angles to a workbench for the experiment (pictured above left).

The reactions in the nanowire take just 10 picoseconds (which is a trillionth of a second.) And the laser pulses are faster still — 20 femtoseconds (a figure that has 15 zeros following it or a quadrillionth of a second.)

The UC project used a gold coating so that experiments could be replicated at a later date without risk of oxidation. But traditional coatings such as silver, Mohammadi said, hold even more promise.

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:  SNPS) today announced that TSMC has certified the complete suite of products in the Synopsys Galaxy Design Platform for the most current version of 12-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology. This 12nm certification brings with it the broad body of design collateral, including routing rules, physical verification runsets, signoff-accurate extraction technology files, SPICE correlated timing and interoperable process design kits (iPDKs) for this latest FinFET process. Synopsys Custom Compiler design solution support is enabled through an iPDK.

To accelerate access to this power-efficient, high-density process, IC Compiler II place-and-route system has been enabled to support new standard cell architectures seamlessly co-existing with 16FFC intellectual property (IP). Recent collaborations have resulted in enhancements to IC Compiler II’s core placement and legalization engines ensuring maximum utilization while minimizing placement fragmentation and cell displacement. The 12nm ready iPDK enables designers to use Custom Compiler’s layout assistant features to shorten time in creating FinFET layouts.

“This power-efficient, high-density node offers a broad set of opportunities to our customers, enabling them to deliver highly differentiated products,” said Suk Lee, TSMC senior director, Design Infrastructure Marketing Division. “Our ongoing collaboration with Synopsys is helping expedite designer access to 12-nm process technology.”

“The long-standing collaboration between Synopsys and TSMC continues to be key in bringing accelerated access to new process technology nodes,” said Bijan Kiani, vice president of product marketing for the Design Group at Synopsys. “With the Galaxy Design Platform certified for 12nm readiness, our mutual customers are enabled to speed up development and deployment to accelerate their time-to-market.”

A silicon optical switch newly developed at Sandia National Laboratories is the first to transmit up to 10 gigabits per second of data at temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero. The device could enable data transmission for next-generation superconducting computers that store and process data at cryogenic temperatures. Although these supercomputers are still experimental, they could potentially offer computing speeds ten times faster than today’s computers while significantly decreasing power usage.

The fact that the switch operates at a range of temperatures, offers fast data transmission and requires little power could also make it useful for transmitting data from instruments used in space, where power is limited and temperatures vary widely.

“Making electrical connections to systems operating at very cold temperatures is very challenging, but optics can offer a solution,” said lead researcher Michael Gehl, Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico. “Our tiny switch allows data to be transmitted out of the cold environment using light traveling through an optical fiber, rather than electricity.”

In The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica, Gehl and his colleagues describe their new silicon micro-disk modulator and show that it can transmit data in environments as cold as 4.8 Kelvin. The device was fabricated with standard techniques used to make CMOS computer chips, which means it can be easily integrated onto chips containing electronic components.

“This is one of the first examples of an active silicon optical device operating at such a low temperature,” said Gehl. “Our device could potentially revolutionize technologies that are limited by how fast you can send information in and out of a cold environment electrically.”

Optics excels at low temperatures

For low-temperature applications, optical methods provide several benefits over electrical data transmission. Because electrical wires conduct heat, they often introduce heat into a system that needs to stay cold. Optical fibers, on the other hand, transmit almost no heat. Also, a single optical fiber can transmit more data at faster rates than an electrical wire, meaning that one fiber can do the job of many electrical connections.

The micro-disk modulator requires very little power to operate — around 1000 times less power than today’s commercially available electro-optical switches — which also helps reduce the heat the device contributes to the cold environment.

To make the new device, the researchers fabricated a small silicon waveguide (used to transmit light waves) next to a silicon micro-disk only 3.5 microns in diameter. Light coming through the waveguide moves into the micro-disk and travels around the disk rather than passing straight through the waveguide. Adding impurities to the silicon micro-disk creates an electrical junction to which a voltage can be applied. The voltage changes the material’s properties in a way that stops the light from moving into the disk and allows it to instead pass through the waveguide. This means that the light signal turns off and on as the voltage switches on and off, providing a way to turn the ones and zeroes that make up electrical data into an optical signal.

Although other research groups have designed similar devices, Gehl and his colleagues are the first to optimize the amount of impurities used and the exact placement of those impurities to allow the micro-disk modulator to operate at low temperatures. Their approach could be used to make other electro-optical devices that work at low temperatures.

Low error rate

To test the micro-disk modulator, the researchers placed it inside a cryostat — a small vacuum chamber that can cool what’s inside to very low temperatures. The micro-disk modulator converted an electrical signal sent into the cryostat to an optical signal. The researchers then examined the optical signal coming out of the cryostat to measure how well it matched the incoming electrical data.

The researchers operated their device at room temperature, 100 Kelvin and 4.8 Kelvin with various data rates up to 10 gigabits per second. Although they observed a slight increase in errors at the highest data rate and lowest temperature, the error rate was still low enough for the device to be useful for transmitting data.

This work builds on years of effort to develop silicon photonic devices for optical communication and high performance computing applications, led by the Applied Photonics Microsystems group at Sandia. As a next step, the researchers want to demonstrate that their device works with data generated inside the low temperature environment, rather than only electrical signals coming from outside the cryostat. They are also continuing to optimize the performance of the device.

Jülich researchers have succeeded in controlling the growth of organic molecules using a special trick. Molecules that repel each other play a key role in this process: due to their opposing forces, they always keep a certain distance from their neighbours. Therefore, they mix easily with a second, mutually attracting type of molecule that enters the spaces in-between and acts as a sort of “glue”. Tailored surface structures can thus be put together like pieces in a puzzle – in a seemingly self-solving manner. Applications in the field of organic electronics in particular could stand to benefit from this method.

Organic electronics is considered a pioneering technology of great promise. Organic light-emitting diodes, known as OLEDs, are today used all over the world. Further applications such as solar cells, sensors, and transistors are gradually finding their way into everyday use. However, as many fundamental correlations and processes have yet to be fully understood, these systems are still the subject of intensive ongoing research. In this context, the search for better mechanisms for the controlled and targeted production of active layer systems is one of the most important topics. Mixing molecules with opposing intermolecular interactions represents a possible new way of producing such structures in a targeted fashion.

Eutectic regions

In the system under study, the scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich were able to observe three different monocrystalline mixed structures at different mixing ratios. Curiously, it is particularly interesting to study the system beyond the correct mixing ratio for these mixed crystalline phases. The scientists headed by Prof. Christian Kumpf from the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-3) found that in this case two phases coexist in equilibrium. In the phase diagram, this corresponds to eutectic regions, in which the equilibrium between the existing phases can be shifted in a large coverage regime by changing the mixing ratio, and thus the properties of the molecular layer can be tuned as desired.

In phase diagrams of conventional three-dimensional systems, usually no eutectic regions occur, but only eutectic points. This is, for example, the case for a number of metallic alloys, with soldering tin being a notable example. The large eutectic regions that occur in the heteromolecular layers investigated here are ultimately the result of the predefined size of the surface on which the molecules are adsorbed. The authors of the study were not only able to observe this behaviour experimentally, but also to explain it using fundamental thermodynamic considerations, and thus demonstrate that the existence of eutectic regions is a generic property of such two-dimensional mixed structures formed by molecules with opposing intermolecular interactions.

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor and a top MEMS supplier, and iFLYTEK (SHE: 002230), a voice-recognition cloud service provider in China, have introduced the market’s first IoT development platform that enables voice-recognition cloud services in Chinese. The joint solution is on display at electronica China 2017, Shanghai New International Expo Center, Hall E4 Booth 4102, March 14-16, 2017.

The new platform combines ST’s SensorTile multi-sensor module, STM32 ODE (Open Development Environment), and Open.software package with iFLYTEK’s voice-recognition technology. It gives designers a complete toolset for the development of voice-enabled Smart-Home, Smart-Driving, IoT, and robotics applications.

The SensorTile module captures voice inputs through the digital MEMS microphone (MP34DT04) and transmits them using the Bluetooth Low Energy network processor (BlueNRG-MS) to iFLYTEK’s cloud through a smartphone with the voice-recognition result back within seconds.

“ST’s SensorTile is a perfect match for developers integrating voice-control capabilities in applications across Smart-Home, Smart-Industry, and Smart-Driving segments. iFLYTEK has been empowering developers with the best performing and easy-to-use speech-recognition service,” said Jidong YU, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK Co., Ltd. “We have been working with ST to enable the SensorTile platform with a high-performance Chinese-language recognition. Leveraging iFLYTEK’s more than 270,000 developers on xfyun.cn and ST’s smart IoT development tools, we look forward to creating more designs together in future.”

“The implementation of iFLYTEK’s automatic speech-recognition services on SensorTile accelerates and simplifies voice-enabled IoT design,” said Collins Wu, Marketing Director, Analog and MEMS Group, Greater China & South Asia, STMicroelectronics. “Leveraging a powerful open-software ecosystem, including the STM32(TM) Open Development Environment, shortens time to market and makes IoT design simple and cool.”

ST’s Analog and MEMS Group has also played an active role in nurturing the Innovator Community and Smart Hardware Development Platform in China, establishing a Chinese-speaking engineer community, st_AMSchina, a service subscription on Wechat, as well as the MEMS QQ Group.

STMicroelectronics’ 13.5mm x 13.5mm SensorTile is currently the smallest turnkey sensor board of its type, containing ST’s MEMS accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor, and MEMS microphone. With the on-board low-power STM32L4 microcontroller, it can be used as a sensing and connectivity hub for developing products such as wearables, gaming accessories, and smart-home or Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.

Common sense might dictate that for an object to move from one point to another, it must go through all the points on the path.

“Imagine someone driving from Kansas City to Topeka on I-70 — it’s safe to say that he must be in Lawrence at some point during the trip,” said Hui Zhao, associate professor of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. “Or in basketball, when KU’s Josh Jackson receives an alley-oop pass from Frank Mason III and dunks the ball from above to below the rim, the ball must be in the hoop at some point in time.”

Not so for electrons in the quantum world, which don’t follow such common-sense rules for the most part.

“Electrons can show up on the first floor, then the third floor, without ever having been on the second floor,” Zhao said.

Zhao, along with KU physics graduate student Frank Ceballos and Self Graduate Fellow Samuel Lane, has just observed the counterintuitive motion of electrons during experiments in KU’s Ultrafast Laser Lab.

“In a sample made of three atomic layers, electrons in the top layer move to the bottom layer, without ever being spotted in the middle layer,” said the KU researcher.

Because this sort of “quantum” transport is very efficient, Zhao said it can play a key role in a new type of manmade material called “van der Waals materials” that could be used someday in solar cells and electronics.

Their findings were just published in Nano Letters, a premier journal on nanoscience and nanotechnology.

The KU research team fabricated the sample by using the “Scotch tape” method, where single-molecule layers are lifted from a crystal with tape, then verified under an optical microscope. The sample contains layers of MoS2, WS2 and MoSe2 — each layer thinner than one nanometer. All three are semiconductor materials and respond to light with different colors. Based on that, the KU researchers used a laser pulse of 100 femtosecond duration to liberate some of the electrons in the top MoSe2 layer so they could move freely.

“The color of the laser pulse was chosen so that only electrons in the top layer can be liberated,” Zhao said. “We then used another laser pulse with the ‘right’ color for the bottom MoS2 layer to detect the appearance of these electrons in that layer. The second pulse was purposely arranged to arrive at the sample after the first pulse by about 1 picosecond, by letting it travel a distance 0.3 mm longer than the first.”

The team found electrons move from the top to the bottom layer in about one picosecond on average.

“If electrons were things that followed ‘common sense,’ like so-called classical particles, they’d be in the middle layer at some point during this one picosecond,” Zhao said.

The researchers used a third pulse with another color to monitor the middle layer and found no electrons. The experimental discovery of the counterintuitive transport of electrons in the stack of atomic layers was further confirmed by simulations performed by theorists Ming-Gang Ju and Xiao Cheng Zeng at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who co-authored the paper. According to Zhao, the verification of quantum transport of electrons between atomic layers connected by van der Waals force is encouraging news for researchers developing new materials.

“The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age — materials have been the defining element of human history,” he said. “The modern information-technology age is largely based on silicon, which is a result of many decades of material research focused on finding new materials and developing better techniques to make them with high quality and low cost.”

Zhao said in recent decades researchers have learned to tune properties of materials by changing their size and shape on a nanometer scale. A new form of nanomaterials, known as two-dimensional materials, was discovered about a decade ago. “They are formed by single layers of atoms or molecules,” he said. “The most well-known example is graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms. So far, about 100 types of two-dimensional materials have been discovered, such as the three used in this study. Because these atomic layers can be stacked by using van der Waals force, they opened up an entirely new route to make new functional materials.”

The researcher said his team’s work focused on a key requirement for such materials to be ideal for electronic and optical applications: Electrons must be able to move between these atomic layers efficiently.

“This study showed electrons can transfer between these layers in a quantum fashion, just like in other conductors and semiconductors,” he said.