Category: Semiconductor
Semiconductor/IC
-
ESD on High-Frequency RF Circuits
In our recent piece on board-level ESD protection, I noted that, while the board is protected during actual usage, chip-level ESD protection is focused more…
-
Piezo… what?
The piezoelectric effect is pretty straightforward. With certain crystals, if you apply strain, the separation of dipoles in the crystal will set up a piezopotential.…
-
Fighting Fire with Fire?
Microscopy doesn’t get much attention in the general tech press (although we’re used to seeing really cool pictures taken by scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), whether…
-
Not All Logic Stages Need to Be Equal
I had a conversation with Cadence at ARM TechCon, and one of the things they’re talking about is what they call clock/data co-optimization as an…
-
“Collaboration” Has a New Nuance
You hear it everywhere you go. Press releases crow about it. People dedicate entire press briefings to congratulating themselves on it. Heck, entire conferences are…
-
Power Contributors
At the recent Si2 conference, there was an interesting presentation by IBM’s David Hathaway on what is hoped to be a better way of approaching…
-
Write Once, Read Many
When a foundry prepares a process for a designer to use, it’s got to communicate how that process works and how it can be used.…
-
Xtreme Update
We recently looked at a novel approach used by Xtreme to generate enough photons for EUV lithography. Just last week, there was a meeting of…
-
Read more about this and some ot
Read more about this and some other fun stuff from imec on Thursday.
-
MEMS over Copper
You may recall that there are various ways to approach CMOS-compatible MEMS. The one that yields the smallest die area is the CMOS-first process, where…