Low Power Design

At APEC 2024, Power Integrations‘ chairman and CEO, Balu Balakrishnan, “declared war on DC-DC post regulators”, as the company introduced the GaN-based InnoMux-2 switcher IC family. The company said that the new ICs are an example of its value and energy focus because it combines AC-DC and DC-DC stages into a single power converter, resulting in a reduction in power ...

Joe Sawicki , executive vice president, IC EDA at Siemens, challenged the mutterings that Moore’s law has run its course, and said the semiconductor industry was blighted with pessimism. At this year’s DAC (Design Automation Conference) he set about looking at the figures in a new light. “There have been morose expectations and miserable prognostics, for like 20 years,” he reasoned, ...

The first products in the adaptive compute acceleration platforms (ACAPs) are unveiled

The 55th Design Automation Conference (DAC) will cover many topics for chip and system designers

Continuing the industry’s love affair with lithium for batteries, researchers have found a way to avoid dendrites which grow on as the battery charges and discharges and which can degrade performance. Building on work began by Jiaxing Huang, professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, Jiayan Luo, professor of chemical engineering at Tianjin University ...

Normally, silicon scaling is a good thing. Except when you are making power devices, as people working in the automotive semiconductor business explained at the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference this week in Dresden. Klaus Meder, president of the automotive electronics division at Robert Bosch, explained in his keynote speech that denser devices are causing headaches when ...

The Texas Instruments MSP430 is practically synonymous with low-power processors and, although the company may not care much for the idea of clones of the architecture appearing, that is being helped by a crop of research processors that explore the limits of the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors. These designs are helping to push the MSP430 into lower-power territory than ...

Yoichi Yano, executive vice president of Renesas Electronics made energy saving the theme of his keynote at this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference, describing some of the techniques the company is putting into action to make silicon suitable for self-powered sensor nodes.

The International Solid State Circuits Conference kicks off next week and Texas Instruments, which unveiled a low-energy digital signal processor last year based on near-threshold logic circuitry, is keen to tout its involvement in more low-power work this year.

It’s no secret that the clock speeds of processors have hit a glass ceiling. But until the latest iteration of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, we still expected them to increase by close to 10 per cent a year. Not anymore. The slow rise has been replaced by a crawl that acknowledges the need to keep both cost and ...