Imperial College has designed a novel semiconductor structure to extract the power of a capacitive energy scavenger. “The design criteria were an extraordinary combination of specifications,” said designer Dr Tim Green. “There truly wasn’t anything we could buy. Commercial devices could do the voltage and current, but not the other properties.” The vibration scavenger generates 4nC per cycle at about ...

The industry furore on whether structured Asics are a profitable business, or just another opportunity to lose money, has been joined by Altera. “Absolutely it’s profitable,” Danny Biran, v-p for product and corporate marketing at Altera, which has a structured Asic product called HardCopy, told Electronics Weekly. “It is a good business for us, and its profitability does not negatively ...

Georgia Tech in the US is investigating conductive adhesives as part of its programme to develop alternatives to tin-lead solder. “In certain applications that require high current densities, conductive adhesives still do not measure up to metallic solders,” said Professor CP Wong at the university’s school of materials science. “However, progress is being made at improving the properties of these ...

Philips is developing pre-shaped lithium ion batteries to enable more design freedom in handheld electronic products. The cells are based on conventional lithium ion technology, but are ‘riveted’ together using a polymer. The batteries are built by stacking double-sided electrodes made from standard LiCoO2 material between a single-sided cathode and a single-sided anode. Each electrode is pre-punched with a pattern ...

The men who enforce the law in the land of EMC are not out to prosecute but help businesses help themselves. However, some...

Edinburgh-based start-up Spiral Gateway claims to have come up with the electronics industry’s Holy Grail, a reconfigurable silicon fabric programmed at the algorithmic level in C. “It removes the need for mapping software completely, requiring only an open source C compiler allowing any existing or new C code to load straight onto the fabric,” Professor Tughrul Arslan, CTO of Spiral ...

Commercial-off-the-shelf computer boards are big business in the military market It is open systems standards which are the key to making the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) successful for military specification computer boards. According to SBS Technologies, this is because open standards permit the COTS supplier to take advantage of new technology to upgrade individual modules, while maintaining backward compatibility. This is all ...

Intel has revealed it is using physical layer technology from Bath-based wireless processing specialist PicoChip Designs in its WiMAX demonstration board. Apart from a few named customers, notably Airspan, PicoChip has been unable to name a number of its partners. Strictly speaking it is still under a non-disclosure agreement with Intel. “Lots and lots of people are using us, some ...

Silicon Hive, from Philips’ Technology Incubator, has demonstrated a DTV receiver chip based on three special purpose processors from its intellectual property (IP) portfolio. “They are very simple VLIW processors,” Geoffrey Burns, director of product management at Silicon Hive told Electronics Weekly. “The compiler generates microcode understood by the particular processor, and the processors can be simple because the compiler ...

An industry group aimed at developing standards to aid a ‘design-for-debug’ methodology had its inaugural meeting here at DAC. Members of the Design-for-Debug (DfD) Consortium are of the opinion that putting standards in place will enable people to use familiar debug techniques for silicon, which is currently approached in something of an ad hoc manner. “The problem is that when ...