Semiconductors & ICs

As a vertical market, “defense electronics” encompasses a huge range of systems, from portable communications to transportation, avionics, and shipborne radar. While the power architectures are as diverse as they could be, all have common operational demands — they must be robust (shock, vibration, temperature extremes), highly reliable, able to power up after periods of dormancy, and based on components with minimal obsolescence.
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Recent progress in the engineering of plasmonic structures has enabled new kinds of nanometer-scale optoelectronic devices as well as high-resolution optical sensing.
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The same material that formed the first primitive transistors more than 60 years ago can be modified in a new way to advance future electronics, according to a new study. Chemists at The Ohio State University have developed the technology for making a one-atom-thick sheet of germanium, and found that it conducts electrons more than ten times faster than silicon and five times faster than conventional germanium.
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New microbatteries, developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, out-power supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

The devices offer both power and energy. By tweaking their structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale. The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Ions flow between three-dimensional micro-electrodes in the lithium-ion battery.

The rechargeable batteries could also enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther.

Source

Also: Learn about self-contained beta batteries.


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With some of the most demanding quality control regimens of any industry, semiconductor manufacturers use a variety of sophisticated metrology instruments to inspect wafers at each production step. All of these instruments have something in common: They simply will not function without precision motion stages.
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Systematic method automates the simulation and optimization of circuits.

Application-specific-integrated-circuit (ASIC) design for space applications involves multiple challenges of maximizing performance, minimizing power, and ensuring reliable operation in extreme environments. This is a complex multidimensional optimization problem, which must be solved early in the development cycle of a system due to the time required for testing and qualification severely limiting opportunities to modify and iterate. Manual design techniques, which generally involve simulation at one or a small number of corners with a very limited set of simultaneously variable parameters in order to make the problem tractable, are inefficient and not guaranteed to achieve the best possible results within the performance envelope defined by the process and environmental requirements. What is required is a means to automate design parameter variation, allow the designer to specify operational constraints and performance goals, and to analyze the results in a way that facilitates identifying the tradeoffs defining the performance envelope over the full set of process and environmental corner cases.
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The rapid evolution of commercial technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) is becoming more attractive for Software-Defined Radio (SDR) and public safety applications ^[1,2]. They have the potential to support high data throughput applications with scalable subcarriers and the use of multiple antenna techniques such as Multiple-Input Multiple- Output (MIMO) technology.
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