Archives: Articles
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Is Open Source Hardware Growing Up?
A few weeks ago, if I had heard of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), it was only in passing. How things have changed. Kevin…
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The Triumph of Inertia
“The fault… is not in our stars, but in ourselves…” – William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. ARM-based processors were…
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Future Proofing Your FinFET Design
Building a custom chip on the latest 16nm FinFET processes is a mind-bogglingly challenging, risky, and expensive proposition. Non-recurring engineering costs have skyrocketed in recent…
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LTE for the IoT
Last year we took a look at the raft of new low-power wide-area (LPWA) protocols being deployed to handle Internet-of-Things (IoT) data traffic. Why not…
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Untangling Wireless Charging
So I saw an announcement or two about wireless power and thought it might be time to do an update. But as I looked around…
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Every PMIC You Ever Wanted
Ever notice how every catalog for power-management devices has about a gazillion items? There are buck, boost, buck-boost, multi-phase regulators, load switches, LDOs, battery chargers,…
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Quality!
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” – Aristotle There’s an old Doonesbury comic strip in which the main character tags along behind…
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Layer by Atomic Layer
Some months ago, Applied Materials (AMAT) announced an atomic-layer product. Then Lam had a couple of announcements. And finally, more recently, ALD NanoSolutions had something…
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The Changing World of Semiconductors Encapsulated at Electronica
At electronica, at the beginning of November, I was talking to an exhibitor about a module controlling a power supply: “The main part of the…
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That’s So Cool!
“All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” – Albert Einstein At this festive time of year, it is…