The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved a proposal to develop a standard for safety considerations in automated vehicle (AV) decision-making and named Intel Senior Principal Engineer Jack Weast to lead the workgroup. Participation in the workgroup is open to companies across the AV industry, and Weast hopes for broad industry representation. Group members will hold their first meeting in 2020’s first quarter. Industry and regulators are struggling to agree on a method for evaluating the safety of AVs, although most people agree that standards are needed to establish regulatory thresholds for granting AVs their driver’s licenses. Multiple approaches are in development even though industry consensus is lacking.
Semiconductors
North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts November 2019 Billings
North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $2.12 billion in billings worldwide in November 2019 (three-month average basis), according to the November Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Billings Report published today by SEMI. The billings figure is 1.9 percent higher than the final October 2019 level of $2.08 billion, and is 9.1 percent higher than the November 2018 billings level of $1.94 billion.
Tweaks Behind the Rebirth of Nearly Discarded Organic Solar Technologies
A solar energy material that is remarkably durable and affordable is regrettably also unusable if it barely generates electricity, thus many researchers had abandoned emerging organic solar technologies. But lately, a shift in the underlying chemistry has boosted power output, and a new study has revealedcounterintuitive tweaks making the new chemistry successful. The shift is from “fullerene” to “non-fullerene acceptors” (NFAs), terms detailed below, and in photovoltaic electricity generation, the acceptor is a molecule with the potential to be to electrons what a catcher is to a baseball. Corresponding donor molecules “pitch” electrons to acceptor “catchers” to create electric current. Highly cited chemist Jean-Luc Brédas at the Georgia Institute of Technology has furthered the technology and also led the new study.
On-Chip Light Source Produces Versatile Range of Wavelengths
Researchers have designed a new chip-integrated light source that can transform infrared wavelengths into visible wavelengths, which have been difficult to produce with technology based on silicon chips. This flexible approach to on-chip light generation is poised to enable highly miniaturized photonic instrumentation that is easy to manufacture and rugged enough to use outside the lab. In Optica, The Optical Society’s (OSA) journal for high impact research, investigators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), University of Maryland, and University of Coloradodescribe their new optical parametric oscillator (OPO) light source and show that it can produce output light that is a very different color, or wavelength, than the input light. In addition to creating light at visible wavelengths, the OPO simultaneously generates near-infrared wavelengths that can be used for telecommunication applications.
XMC Introduces 50nm High-Performance Serial NOR Flash Memory
As a world leading provider of non-volatile memory, XMC, a core subsidiary of Unigroup, today announced the mass production status of new SPI NOR Flash series – XM25QWxxC, with the industry’s advanced 50nm Floating Gate NOR Flash manufacturing process, which features wide voltage range and low power consumption, offering excellent design flexibility for IoT, wearable and other power consumption sensitive applications.
Blaize Presents Breakthrough AI Processing Architecture at CES 2020
Blaize™ today announced plans for the first public demonstrations of its Blaize Graph Streaming Processor™ (GSP™) architecture at CES 2020. A next-generation computing architecture designed for AI workloads, the Blaize offering tackles the economic and technical barriers to widespread AI adoption, addressing energy, cost and complexity challenges.
In Breakthrough Method of Creating Solar Material, NREL Scientists Prove the Impossible Really Isn’t
Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) achieved a technological breakthrough for solar cells previously thought impossible. The scientists successfully integrated an aluminum source into their hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) reactor, then demonstrated the growth of the semiconductors aluminum indium phosphide (AlInP) and aluminum gallium indium phosphide (AlGaInP) for the first time by this technique.
Renesas Electronics Collaborates with Xilinx on Versal ACAP Reference Designs
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced that its power solutions, as well as timing solutions from IDT, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Renesas, support the Xilinx Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) devices featured on the Xilinx VCK190 evaluation kit and the Renesas VERSALDEMO1Z power reference board. Built on 7nm process technology, Versal is the industry’s first ACAP platform that addresses the needs of a wide range of applications in data center, automotive, 5G wireless, and wired and defense markets.
Creating a Nanoscale On-Off Switch For Heat
Polymers are used to develop various materials, such as plastics, nylons, and rubbers. In their most basic form, they are made up of many of identical molecules joined together over and over, like a chain. If you engineer molecules to join together in specific ways, you can control the characteristics of the resulting polymer. Using this method, Sheng Shen, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and his research team created a polymer thermal regulator that can quickly transform from a conductor to an insulator, and back again. When it’s a conductor, heat transfers quickly. When it’s an insulator, heat transfer much more slowly. By switching between the two states, the thermal regulator can control its own temperature, as well as the temperature of its surroundings, such as a refrigerator or computer.
New Heat Model May Help Electronic Devices Last Longer
A University of Illinois-based team of engineers has found that the model currently used to predict heat loss in a common semiconductor material does not apply in all situations. By testing the thermal properties of gallium nitride semiconductors fabricated using four popular methods, the team discovered that some techniques produce materials that perform better than others. This new understanding can help chip manufacturers find ways to better diffuse the heat that leads to device damage and decreased device lifespans.
