It’s ISSCC week, and I got to see some interesting things, some of which go beyond interesting and possibly to significant. My focus was on MEMS, sensors, and emerging technologies. I’ll be following up on a number of bits and bobs here over the next several days.

In the MEMS/sensor realm, as was the case last year (where we did an entire series of sensor articles), the focus at ISSCC was on the conditioning circuits for sensors rather than the sensors themselves. … Read More → "Accounting for bondwire effects"

Two gentlemen at the Institut d’Electronique, de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie (IEMN) at the University of Lille in France, have demonstrating an interesting proof of concept of a new mechanical switching mechanism that relies on the interplay between mechanical and capillary forces as well as how “wet” a drop can get.

The concept is based upon the fact that the wetting properties of a droplet – that is, how easily it spreads out on a surface – can be changed capacitively. Placing a drop on a thin insulator with a semiconductor … Read More → "A Diving Board, Water Drop, and Flashlight"

We talked before about wide bandgap materials such as GaN and SiC, but how are the base wafers for those materials created? Full wafers of expensive material would be, well, expensive. But if you grow or somehow affix the material on a base material of some other sort, you run the risk of having thermal issues at the boundary (at the very least).

Sumitomo and Soitec announced a joint approach recently that provides a GaN layer on top of some other substrate. The key is … Read More → "Engineering GaN Wafers"

Graphene is one of those materials under vigorous study for use in future electronics. A single honeycomb layer of carbon atoms, it features high electron mobility but no bandgap, so, on its own, doesn’t work well as a semiconductor.

Add another layer, however, and, as we saw in our note on the next logic gate, interesting things may happen.

In particular, some UC Riverside researchers found that so-called bilayer graphene (BLG), which also has high mobility, can become an insulator … Read More → "From Conductor to Insulator"