Voltage converters and regulators are a vital part of pretty much every semiconductor-based product. They play an outsized role in mobile devices such as cell phones where there are many subsystems operating at different voltages with different power needs. Many portable devices rely on Lithium Ion batteries whose output voltage… Read More
Magwel is offering a webinar that takes a deeper look at how Power Transistors can be more accurately simulated in converter circuits to provide extremely accurate information about switching efficiency. DC converter circuit efficiency has a big effect on the battery life of mobile devices and can affect performance and efficiency… Read More
PowerMOS devices play a major role in a variety of power converter and control circuits. Some examples of their applications include PMICs, or boost and buck converters. Often these are used in mobile and IoT devices to convert battery voltages to circuit operating voltages.
Due to their size and internal complexity PowerMOS … Read More
The symbol for a PowerMOS device in a converter circuit schematic looks simple enough. However, it belies a great deal of hidden complexity. A single device is actually a huge array of parallel intrinsic devices connected together to act as a single high power device. While their gate lengths are small, as with many other MOS devices,… Read More
Webinars have been a popular form of communication since even before SemiWiki existed and they are a mainstay in today’s fast-moving semiconductor ecosystem.
In the past, SemiWiki has assisted with more than a hundred webinars. Today SemiWiki can do a complete webinar from start to finish using the GotoWebinar software. SemiWiki… Read More
During my trip through Asia last week I attended the Taiwan ESD Workshop. Hsinchu is densely populated with some of the smartest semiconductor people in the world so it is well worth the trip, absolutely. As it turns out ESD is one of the top concerns in semiconductor design and manufacture. The current rule based and simulation … Read More
In the realm of ESD protection, Charged Device Model (CDM) is becoming the biggest challenge. Of course, Human Body Model (HBM) is still essential, and needs to be used when verifying chips. However, a number of factors are raising the potential losses that CDM events can cause relative to HBM. These factors fall into two categories:… Read More
Power device designers know that when they see a deceptively simple pair of PowerMOS device symbols in the output stage of a power converter circuit schematic, they are actually looking at a massively complex network of silicon and metal interconnect. The corresponding physical devices can have a total device W on the order of … Read More
The author of this article, Dündar Dumlugöl, is CEO of Magwel. He has 25 years of experience in EDA managing the development of leading products used for circuit simulation and high-level system design.
Every designer knows how tedious it can be to shuttle back and forth between their layout tool and analysis tools. Every time an… Read More
Terms like avalanche breakdown and impact ionization sound like they come from the world of science fiction. They do indeed come from a high stakes world, but one that plays out over and over again here and now, on a microscopic scale in semiconductor devices – namely as part of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. Semiconductor… Read More
