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
Process shrinks, which have served us well for most of the Moore’s Law journey, are reaching their limits. For switching transistors, the biggest problems of leakage current and gate oxide vulnerability in planar MOSFETs have led the industry to new 3D microstructures such as FinFET. For non-volatile memory, the problem is generally… Read More
Privacy is a tough enough question when using a device – but what about when we’re done with it? In a world of two year service agreements with device upgrades and things being attached to long-life property like cars and homes, your data could fall into the hands of the next owner way too easily.
“Oh, it’s OK, I wiped the phone with a factory… Read More
Maybe I’ve spent too many years whiffing solder flux fumes and absorbing doses of X-band radiation in anechoic chambers, but I’m a firm believer in the axiom: “Give me enough engineers, and I can get 10 of anything to work right, once.” We have to make this … fit into this … using only this stuff … is what legends are made of.… Read More
When I was reading the recent Daniel Payne article “Designing Change Into Semiconductor Techonomics” with commentary on a recent presentation from Aart de Geus of Synopsys, one chart jumped out at me: the most popular process node for new design starts today is 180nm.
Upon mentioning that to a few of my IoT counterparts, they quickly… Read More
Pop quiz: Name one of the hottest applications for non-volatile memory – A) processor and code configuration; B) RFID tags; C) secure encryption keys; D) all the above. The answer is D, but not in the way you may be thinking; a new approach is using all these ideas at once, combined in SoC designs targeting advanced security … Read More
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
Every once in a while, I just scratch my head and wonder just what in the wide, wide world of tech is going on. More than ever, it seems the big barriers to adoption aren’t a lack of technology – instead, barriers come from a system that staunchly defends the old way of doing things, even when the participants are battered, broken, and … Read More
For non-volatile storage in IoT devices, there is technology designed to be reprogrammed many times, and technology designed to be programmed once. The many times mode is for application code, while the once mode is for keying and calibration parameters. We are about to enter the IoT rekeying zone, in between these two extremes.… Read More
The technology headlines in 2013 were often stolen by frivolous legal actions that made little or no sense to me at all. Patent Trolling is at an all-time high inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and as a result litigation reform is coming to Silicon Valley, believe it.
Currently working its way through the legislative process… Read More
