By Karen Lightman, Executive Director, MEMS Industry Group My favorite kind of business travel is when I can combine it with either a visit with friends/family or a site visit to a MEMS Industry Group (MIG) member company. This month, before I headed to Copenhagen to host MEMS Executive Congress Europe 2015, I had the pleasure of doing both. In the immortal words of the Beatles, I went to Hamburg because…
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Batteries? We don’t need no stinking batteries.
We’re still used to thinking that low-power chips for “mobile” or “Internet-of-Things (IoT)” applications will be battery powered…but the near ubiquity of lithium-ion cells powering batteries could be threatened by capacitors and energy-harvesting circuits connected to photovoltaic/thermoelectric/piezoelectric micro-power sources. At ISSCC2015 in San Francisco last week, there were several presentations on novel chip designs that run on mere milliWatts (µW) of power, and the most energy efficient circuit blocks now…
IoT and The ConFab 2015
I’m delighted to announce the keynotes and other key speakers for The ConFab 2015, to be held May 19-22 at The Encore at The Wynn in Las Vegas. Our first keynote, on Wednesday, will be Ali Sebt, President and CEO of Renesas America, who will provide his insight on monetizing the Internet of Things. He’ll discuss how intelligent and connected platforms will enable new value chains based on a platform…
Oscar for DMD Inventor Hornbeck
Kudos to Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck, the extended team at Texas Instruments (TI) that has worked on Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) technology, and to the TI executives who continued to fund the R&D through years of initial investment losses. Hornbeck has been awarded an Academy Award® of Merit (Oscar® statuette) for his contribution to revolutionizing how motion pictures are created, distributed, and viewed using DMD technology (branded as the DLP®…
Reframing the Roadmap: ITRS 2.0
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductor (ITRS) is being reframed to focus more on end applications, such as smartphones and micro-servers. Labeled ITRS 2.0, the new roadmap is a departure from a strong focus maintaining the path defined by Moore’s Law. The original ITRS was published in 1992 at the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors; it became the ITRS in 1998. In an IEEE paper published late last year titled…
Micro-Buckled 3D Silicon Scaffolds
A new silicon microstructural solution announced this month is so powerful in creating 3D patterns from 2D surface machining that I just have to share. The figure shows 3D silicon microstructures formed by compressive buckling. The method can be used to create objects with features as small as 100 nm that could be useful for developing new technologies for medicine, energy storage and even brain-like electronic networks. Note that the…
Exponentially Rising Costs Will Bring Changes
Scott McGregor, President and CEO of Broadcom, sees some major changes for the semiconductor industry moving forward, brought about by rising design and manufacturing costs. Speaking at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) in January, McGregor said the cost per transistor was rising after the 28nm, which he described as “one of the most significant challenges we as an industry have faced.” He said that in the past, it was…
Wearable Devices and the Search for the Holy Grail at 2015 International CES
By Karen Lightman, Executive Director, MEMS Industry Group Several years ago, I coined the phrase “MEMS frickin’ everywhere.” I shared my vision for MEMS enabling a smarter and better world. This was before the term Internet of Things (IoT) had taken hold. My catchphrase got me into a bit of trouble with those offended by my use of a modified expletive as well as skeptics of the potential of MEMS.…
Ferromagnetic Room Temperature Switching
Bismuth-ferrite could make spin-valves that use 1/10th the power of STT A research team led by folks at Cornel University (along with University of California, Berkeley; Tsinghua University; and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) have discovered how to make a single-phase multiferroic switch out of bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) as shown in an online letter to Nature. Multiferroics, allowing for the control of magnetism with an electric field, have…
NanoParticle Self-Assembly at UofM
Theory and Practice synergize R&D Sharon C. Glotzer and Nicholas A. Kotov are both researchers at the University of Michigan who were just awarded a MRS Medal at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in San Francisco for their work on “Integration of Computation and Experiment for Discovery and Design of Nanoparticle Self-Assembly.” Due to the fact that surface atoms compose a large percent of the mass of nanoparticles,…
