Each year, Semiconductor Digest turns to industry leaders to hear viewpoints on the technological and economic outlook for the upcoming year. Read through these expert opinions on what to expect in 2020.
MEMS
ISS: The 2020 Outlook for Consumer Electronics
At SEMI’s 2020 Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS), held January 12-15th at Half Moon Bay in California, Shawn DuBravac, CEO, Avrio Institute, gave his insights on major trends in consumer electronics, with specific examples from the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Rice Lab Turns Trash Into Valuable Graphene in a Flash
That banana peel, turned into graphene, can help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials. While you’re at it, toss in those plastic empties. A new process introduced by the Rice University lab of chemist James Tour can turn bulk quantities of just about any carbon source into valuable graphene flakes. The process is quick and cheap; Tour said the “flash graphene” technique can convert a ton of coal, food waste or plastic into graphene for a fraction of the cost used by other bulk graphene-producing methods.
Integrate Micro Chips for Electronic Skin
Researchers from Dresden and Osaka present the first fully integrated flexible electronics made of magnetic sensors and organic circuits which opens the path towards the development of electronic skin.
Designer-Defect Clamping of Ferroelectric Domain Walls for More-Stable Nanoelectronics
A UNSW study published today in Nature Communications presents an exciting step towards domain-wall nanoelectronics: a novel form of future electronics based on nano-scale conduction paths, and which could allow for extremely dense memory storage. FLEET researchers at the UNSW School of Materials Science and Engineering have made an important step in solving the technology’s primary long-standing challenge of information stability.
Colloidal Quantum Dot Photodetectors Can Now See Further Than Before
Optical sensing in the mid to long infrared (5microns – um) is becoming of utmost importance in different fields since it is proving to be an excellent tool for environmental monitoring, gas sensing, thermal imaging as well as food quality control or the pharmaceutical industry, to name a few. The amount of information hidden within this very rich spectral window opens new possibilities for multi or even hyperspectral imaging. Even though there are technologies that can address these challenges, they are very complex and expensive.
How Sensitive Can a Quantum Detector Be?
Quantum physics is moving out of the laboratory and into our everyday lives. Despite the big headline results about quantum computers solving problems impossible for classical computers, technical challenges are standing in the way of getting quantum physics into the real world. New research published in Nature Communications from teams at Aalto University and Lund University hopes to provide an important tool in this quest.
CyberOptics Unveils WaferSense Auto Resistance Sensor (ARS) at SEMICON Korea
CyberOptics® Corporation (NASDAQ: CYBE), a leading global developer and manufacturer of high-precision 3D sensing technology solutions, will exhibit at SEMICON Korea from February 5-7th, 2020 at the COEX in Seoul, booth #C236. During the show, the company will unveil and demonstrate its new WaferSense® Auto Resistance Sensor™ (ARS) with CyberSpectrum™ software for semiconductor tool set-up and diagnostics.
Tuning Optical Resonators Gives Researchers Control Over Transparency
Researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have devised a fully contained optical resonator system that can be used to turn transparency on and off, allowing for a measure of control that has implications across a wide variety of applications.
SmartSens Wins Semiconductor Solution of the Year Designation in 2020 IoT Breakthrough Awards Program
SmartSens, the leading supplier of high-performance CMOS imaging systems, today announced that its SmartSens SC132GS product has been selected as the winner of the “IoT Semiconductor Solution of the Year” award in the 4th annual IoT Breakthrough Awards program from IoT Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market today. As 5G and AI-enabled applications accelerate toward industry-wide ‘intelligent’ system upgrades, SmartSens’ global shutter image sensor SC132GS is built specifically to power these applications.
