Power Components: ICs Address Alternative Energy Sources |
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Monday, 07 May 2007 |
Imagine a cell phone that offers endless standby power, or an MP3 player that never needs recharging. That is the promise of powering portable consumer electronics devices off renewable power sources. By harvesting power from external sources such as solar or micro fuel cells, systems can tap into what is for all practical purposes an infinite source of energy. But designers building systems capable of drawing power from such sources face daunting obstacles. First, power circuits tapping the sources must support input voltages as low as 0.3 volt. "A single solar cell usually operates between 0.4 and 0.7 V with no load. If you add a load to the output and pull out a couple of milliamps of current, your voltage drops down to between 0.5 V and 0.4 V or a little below," said Alex Friebe, product-marketing engineer for dc/dc converters at Texas Instruments....more  (0) Comments |
Nature Provides A Chip Off The Old Shell |
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Friday, 04 May 2007 |
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Taking a cue from seashells, IBM is using a pattern-creating process found in nature to manufacture its latest computer chips. The company has adapted the process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth to make trillions of holes that provide insulating vacuums around the nano-scale wires inside each chip. As a result, the new chips work 35 percent faster or consume 15 percent less energy than even the most advanced chips using conventional techniques. Although this new form of insulation is commonly referred to as “airgaps,” the gaps are really airless vacuum. Scientist see vacuum as the ultimate antidote for what is known as wiring capacitance. That occurs when two conductors, in this case adjacent wires on a chip, siphon electrical energy from one another, generating heat and slowing the data as it moves through a chip....more (0) Comments |
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Hynix Announces Industry's First DDR3 Validations |
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Wednesday, 02 May 2007 |
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Hynix Semiconductor announced it has received the industry’s first validation on its DDR3 memory components and modules from Intel. Hynix’s newly-validated DDR3 products are 1Gigabit DDR3 SDRAM component manufactured on the Company’s 80nm process technology, 1Gigabyte and 2Gigabyte DDR3 Unbuffered-DIMMs. These devices boast operating speeds of 800MHz and 1066MHz at 1.5V power supply - the fastest in the industry. These speeds are offered in latency combinations of 5-5-5 and 6-6-6 for 800MHz, and 7-7-7 for 1066MHz, to suit the needs of a wide range of PCs, workstations and other applications....more (0) Comments |
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Chemists Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel With GaP |
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Wednesday, 02 May 2007 |
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A research group at the University of California, San Diego, has shown how compound semiconductor solar cells can convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide - a useful gas for industrial chemists and, potentially, a fuel. Cliff Kubiak and graduate student Aaron Sathrum used p-type GaP and GaAsP to harness enough energy from sunlight to split carbon dioxide molecules via an electrochemical reaction....more (0) Comments |
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Compare Punch-Through IGBTs To Power MOSFETs |
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Friday, 27 April 2007 |
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Find out about IGBTs and compare the switching and conduction loss performance of punch-through IGBTs with power MOSFETs. This two part article compares the switching and conduction loss performance of the latest generation of punch-through (PT) IGBTs with power MOSFETs. Also included is a brief overview of the PT IGBT structure. Benefits due to the unique striped, metal gate IGBTs are enumerated, as well as some differences in characteristics between PT IGBTs and power MOSFETs. These IGBTs provide a lower cost alternative to high voltage power MOSFETs under many conditions, sometimes with superior performance. Part 2 discusses gate design, temperature effects and performance of IGBTs in switch-mode power supplies....more (0) Comments |
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Probing The Inner Secrets Of Multi-Layer Carbon Nanotubes |
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Tuesday, 24 April 2007 |
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Researchers at the University of Surrey have shown for the first time that knowing the structure of the surface layer of a multi-layer carbon nanotube is not enough to predict its electronic properties. The contribution of inner layers is crucial, and this has serious implications when it particularly comes to fabricating electronic devices such as transistors and molecular interconnects. The work reported in Nano Letters addresses essential issues related to the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, as an understanding of their behaviour at the atomic level is required to fully exploit the tremendous opportunities that these systems could offer in the development of practical nanoscale devices....more (0) Comments |
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