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As geometries shrink, design decisions have an increasing impact on device yield, says Dr Antun Domic, so designers need to have a complete understanding of how design, lithography and process modelling interact to affect yield At today’s process nodes, it has become increasingly obvious that designers can no longer consider yield as an afterthought. At 90nm and below, design decisions ...

HP has expanded the claims of its crossbar switch architecture for future IC development, stating that the technique could result in 100 per cent yield. The team from HP Labs claims that by adding redundancy to its crossbar design, and by using coding theory, defects can be eliminated. “By using a cross-bar architecture and adding 50 per cent more wires ...

Sham Ahmed of The Mathworks reckons that engineerings old enemy – poor status – is back, and we need to do something about it I’ve become increasingly aware of the UK’s need to rethink its opinions on certain careers. When people compare their careers on the doctors-to-estate-agents scale, it is common to hear engineers comment about their lack of status, ...

Sandia Labs in New Mexico has made a precision chip crusher to help analyse the minute amount of gas, around 30nl, sealed inside hermetic micromachines. “I know of no one, anywhere else, who can do this kind of testing,” said Sandia scientist Steve Thornberg. The aim is to see how fill-gas gets contaminated after, say, a year of use. “We ...

A grouping of DC-DC voltage regulator module and chip suppliers has agreed a common bus and interface standard for digitally controlling point-of-load (POL) converters on the PCB. Suppliers behind the move, dubbed POLA, are Texas Instruments (TI), Artesyn Technologies, Astec Power and Ericsson Power Modules. National Semiconductor’s recently introduced 100V dual interleaved PWM (pulse-width modulation) controllers are designed for conventional ...

A University of Manchester researcher is developing a vision chip for a generation of highly autonomous robots. Dr Piotr Dudek has been working on a prototype chip based on the vision principles of the human retina for seven years. The chip he is developing for the five-year, five university REVERB project, which is funded by the EPSRC and also involves ...

Detailed work on buffer layers has enabled Matsushita to grow AlGaN/GaN power Mosfets on silicon substrates. The devices not only function, but out-perform conventional high-voltage power Fets. Professor Takashi Egawa of the Nagoya Institute of Technology’s microelectronics centre cooperated with Matsushita Electric Industrial’s research wing to create the devices. An AlN/AlGaN buffer layer grown at a high temperature and an ...

University of Arkansas researchers have witnessed the birth of a quantum dot. “We have changed the way people have to think about how nanostructures grow on a surface,” said Professor Gregory Salamo. “People had a different idea of how these islands formed, but until now there was not direct evidence.” The scientists combined molecular-beam epitaxy with scanning tunnelling microscopy to ...

Synthetic chemistry techniques more commonly employed in drug discovery have been used by researchers in Israel to identify organic molecules for electronic applications. The molecules are chains of amino acids called peptides, the building blocks of proteins. Thousands of peptides with different amino acid combinations were screened for semiconductor properties in automated machines. “The method is not based on us ...

UK researchers have dramatically enhanced the performance of n-channel Mosfets processed at CMOS-compatible temperatures. On-state drain current and maximum transconductance in the devices, which were built on a strained-Si-SiGe virtual substrate on a silicon wafer, were increased by up to 220 per cent over pure silicon control transistors. The researchers, at Southampton silicon technology specialist Innos and the University of ...