News

Rajeev Madhavan of EDA firm Magma proposes silicon compilation as a solution to the problems posed by 65nm process rules and the huge costs and risk incurred Developing today’s increasingly large and complex digital IC and SoC devices is becoming cost-prohibitive in terms of engineering resources and development time. Packing the advanced functionality of a microprocessor, a graphics processor, or ...

Philips Polymer Vision says it has developed a five inch roll-up display with contrast similar to viewing paper. The firm, a division of Philips Electronics, said the 320×240 pixel (QVGA) display should be in production within two years. When not in use the 100µm-thick display can be rolled up into a housing with a radius of just 7.5mm. Contrast ratio ...

NTT has demonstrated a prototype micro polymer-electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) using hydrogen gas as a fuel, which the firm claims is small enough to fit in a mobile phone. The Japanese firm said the advantage of the hydrogen PEFC over the direct-methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is that carbon dioxide is not produced during power generation. The DFMC is also difficult ...

With Synopsys, ARM has defined a reference flow that accounts for multiple voltage islands in the system-on-chip. The Galaxy software tools are aware of the voltage islands, and incorporate them into the code. “Galaxy has a multi-voltage design flow and we exploit that with IEM,” said Tim Holden, head of EDA relations at ARM. The design flow includes logic and ...

Continuing professional development (CPD) always seems like a nice idea, but all too often everyone is too busy getting on with their jobs to actually take time out for the training they need to do their job even better. But updating knowledge and learning new skills during your working life is important and means time should be made to do ...

Scientists at Toshiba’s European research headquarters have developed a novel single-photon detector based on quantum dots that could dramatically improve the performance of quantum cryptographic communications. “One of the reasons we’re very excited about this work is that it could increase the bit rate in a quantum cryptographic system,” said Dr Andrew Shields, leader of the quantum information group at ...

Bernard Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM’s Systems & Technology Group, sat down with Electronic News to discuss the Cell processor, the importance of Moore’s Law and the future of electronics design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. Electronic News: What markets do you envision the Cell processor playing in and why? Meyerson: The Cell processor – or more correctly, ...

The battle lines between 3G and WiMAX are being drawn up and it could be a very bloody battle with the two technologies going head to head. But is this going to be a real fight or is it going to end with handshakes all round and an agreement to live together happily? “These two are definitely complementary – there ...

NEC Electronics is offering up to two million usable gates in structured Asics fabricated on the firm’s 0.15µm CMOS process. Called the 12M series, it also offers 2.6Mbit of embedded memory and a system clock performance of 200MHz. As a more flexible alternative to full custom design, structured Asics are intended to reduce time-to-market and lower NRE costs. According to ...

A continuous wave laser based entirely in silicon has been developed by Intel, part of its project to create optical networks purely from silicon. Using the Raman effect, the chip firm has produced an optically pumped laser, with outputs up to 9mW. “We have proved that silicon can be considered as a gain material,” said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s ...