#ISPD: "3-D Integration on Center Stage"

3-D has crept into every aspect of technology, and will revolutionize the semiconductor industry too, according to presenters including Xilinx here at the annual International Symposium on Physical Systems (ISPD): R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Xilinx's Virtex-H580T combines two FPGAs with a high-speed transceiver and the necessary analog functions on in a single package by virtue of a 3-D silicon interposer.Further Reading

#MATERIALS: "How-To Unveil Green Chemistries"

Green chemistries will be essential to the continued progress in semiconductor manufacturing, as green-house gases continue to fuel global warming debates. To the rescue is the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) which has convinced the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) that computer simulations can discover new green chemistries faster than trial-and-error. Using supercomputer simulations, the SRC-funded Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing (ERC) at UCLA promises to unveil safer materials: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog

Further Reading

#MEMS: "Movea/ST create motion-aware TV"

STMicroelectronic--the Swiss electronics giant--has added motion-awareness to it Orly set-top box system-on-chip. By licensing the SmartMotion Server from Movea, ST's motion-aware TV now simplifies adding motion awareness to set-top boxes, thereby enabling users to control their TVs using free-air gestures: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Movea's SmartMotion Server has been integrated with ST's "Orly" set-top box systems-on-chip enabling OEMs to easily create motion-aware apps for TV.Further Reading

#CHIPS: "Automotive Weight Cut by In-Vehicle Net"

First it was drive-by-wire which cut the mechanical linkage between the gas pedal and the engine, now all the rest of the subsystems on a car are getting networked, thus eliminating the need for dedicated wires, potentially saving up to 150 pounds by nixing the need for four miles of copper wire. By using Freescale's smarter Qorivva processors--announced today at Semicon China 2013--connected by Ethernet to satellite 12-MagniV microcontrollers, almost every electronic subsystem in a vehicle can be networked: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Freecale's latest Qorivva MPC5748G provides support for Ethernet with Audio Video Bridging, FlexRay, Media Local Bus, USB, CAN FD and up to 18 LIN controllers, allowing its MagniV devices to reduce printed circuit board sizes by as much as 30 percent.Further Reading

#DESIGNWest: "Android certification gets hands-on"

Android--the Google operating system based on an open-source Linux kernel--is turning everybody's smartphone and tablet into a control-panel for embedded systems. Learn how to integrate Android into your next embedded system design at DESIGN West, where its Android Certification Program will give you the knowledge a credentials you need: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


The Android Certificate Program is a hands-on tutorial showing engineer how to design embedded systems using Google's popular application framework.
Further Reading

#QUANTUM: "Harnessing a MEMS mechanical memory"

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, Boulder, Colorado) has demoed a MEMS version of a delay-line memory which it claims will be a viable scratchpad memory for future quantum computers. By converting quantum encoded microwave photons into acoustic phonons in a mechanical medium--and back again--the MEMS memory can store intermediate quantum-bit (Q-bits) values during calculations: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


MEMS micro-drum and circuit on a sapphire backing. JILA researchers demonstrated that the drum might be used as a memory device in future quantum computers.
Further Reading

#AWARDS: "Turing Award Goes to MIT Cyptographers"

Moving cryptography into the modern age, MIT pioneers Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali were given the Turing Award today. Before Goldwasser and Micali, cryptography was based on secret code-books that held absolute keys to decoding encrypted data, but by introducing the concept of computational security depending on difficult calculations that provide various levels of security, Goldwasser and Micali modernized cryptography for the Internet age: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


Shafi Goldwasser (left) and Silvio Micali of MIT.Further Reading

#CHIPS: "Renewable Energy Lab Water-Cools Xeon Phi"

The newest supercomputer at the National Renewable Energy Lab will be water-cooled by HP using Intel's Xeon Phi massively parallel processors. As the Department of Energy (DoE) showcase for renewable energy, NREL's new $10 million supercomputer was designed in collaboration with Intel and HP to be the world's first peta-scale supercomputer to use warm-water liquid cooling: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog


NREL director of its Computational Science Center, Steve Hammond, at its Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) where warm-water liquid cooled HP servers housing Intel Xeon processors and Xeon-Phi coprocessors were designed to reduce its annual average power usage effectiveness (PUE) to 1.06. Credit: Dennis SchroederFurther Reading