Have you ever had a peanut butter and bacon sandwich? Everything goes better with bacon! Which brings me to one of my favorite sayings: “(insert two complimentary things) go together like peanut butter and jelly”. How about this: “low power and IoT”, “IoT and OTP”, and “Low Power OTP and Sidense go together like peanut butter and … Read More
Tag: otp
Jen-Tai Hsu Joins Kilopass and Looks to the Future of Memories
Kilopass has a new VP of engineering, Jen-Tai Hsu. I sat down with him last week to find out where he came from and where he and Kilopass are going.
He grew up in Taiwan and went to National Taiwan University where he studied electrical engineering. Then he came to the US and went to Case Western Reserve University to get a masters degree,… Read More
Ultra-Low Power Non-Volatile Memory Solutions for the Smart Connected Universe
DAC is a great place to gather information about products and technologies. However it can be difficult to chase down the information you need because you may need to cover a lot of ground to hear or talk to the people with the right knowledge. Fortunately there are a few places you can go to learn about a number of products at one place.… Read More
How Sidense Sees The Smart Connected Universe
Sidenserecently conducted a webinar on what they call the Smart Connected Universe. They consider the Smart Connected Universe as something that includes a collection of market segments that are both smart and connected. This casts a big net, and includes what many are calling IoT, but goes further into medical, automotive and… Read More
IoT Security: Your Refrigerator Attacks!
Every time I see a presentation on IoT the forecast for the number of devices in 2020 seems to go up by a few billion. But behind the hype there are clearly going to be a large number of devices on (and even in) our bodies, our homes and cars. Not to mention in factories and workplaces. IoT devices cover a wide spectrum. Realtors like to expand… Read More
Sidense NVM Scores Qualification on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm SLP and HPP
A tremendous number of chips being designed for today’s products require some sort of onboard data storage. The size of these needs range from a handful of bytes, for trim and calibration storage, to something much more substantial like boot code storage. In both of these examples the storage ideally should be nonvolatile, with… Read More
A Brief History of Kilopass
Kilopass was founded back in 2001 by Jack Peng, whose background was in FPGAs with his most recent position being manager of technology development at Actel (now part of Microsemi). The idea was to build a company making one-time-programmable (OTP) memories using anti-fuse technology. Fuses in home-wiring (OK, I know, we all … Read More
NVM IP now Available for On-Chip MCU Code
As of today NVM IP has been mostly used in SoC or IC to support very specific needs like analog trimming and calibration or encryption key integration for Digital Right Management (DRM) purpose. In other words small size (less than 1K-bit) few times programmable (FTP) NVM IP was enough to support these needs, thus most of the NVM IP… Read More
Did we forget non-volatile memory?
In our rush to shrink SoC nodes more and more to achieve better performance and more complex devices, we may have forgotten a passenger in the back seat: non-volatile memory. There has been little discussion of this in the pages of SemiWiki until now. Let’s give it a closer look.
Embedded flash has usually been associated with microcontrollers,… Read More
Care and trimming of MEMS sensors
My first job in electronic design circa 1981 was making analog autopilots and control devices for RPVs – the early form of what today we call UAVs. A couple of really delicate boxes with gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers, and several boards full of LM148 quad op-amps surrounded by a lot of resistors and capacitors made… Read More