Electro-ramblings

Welcome to the Electronics Weekly blog devoted to the website. I'll try and give you a flavour of what's happening on the site, in terms of the exclusive industry news we're breaking and new features of the site.

Top stories on the site today include the comments from an NXP vice-president that the new owners of the former Philips Semiconductors division are planning at least a seven year plan for NXP, which could involve more mergers.

Mobile TV is a hugely significant topic at the moment, and the news that Samsung is joining Alcatel to push transmissions in the S-band is important. S-band spectrum is already available in Europe.

Finally, an interesting bit of analysis from IC Insights suggests that optoelectronic devices will outsell discretes in 2006. The sectors are worth $16.8bn and $16.5bn respectively.

Over at Electronic News, the US-based sister publication of Electronics Weekly, they've got a run down of the week's winners and losers in the electronics industry.

It's interesting to note that the EDA firms are doing well, due to increased design activity - which can only bode well for the future of the whole industry. The piece also points out that Sony's lithium battery fiasco is likely to cost it well over $400m.

Another story on ENews is of the losing variety: Intersil has lost Lou DiNardo, its president and COO of just nine months. That seems rather careless of them:

Follow up calls to the company made today by Electronic News to see if DiNardo left on his own will or was asked to leave were answered with “no comment” by Intersil. “We’re not really commenting on the reason he left,” a spokeswoman for the company said.

On the subject of redundancies, UK PR agency Publitek reports that Dave Bursky has been laid off by CMP. Dave, semiconductor editor at EETimes, had only been with CMP for eight months, after about 30 years at Penton - not such a good move after all.

Cambridge in the UK is another loser this week, as Intel announces it is closing its optical and wireless design centre there. Another chapter in Intel's phased withdrawal from the comms market which has cost it so dear. Thanks to the Inquirer for that story.

Back to the winners, and there's a nice story from our friends at New Electronics on the winner of the Galileo GPS competition, with UK firm Genesys Consultancy winning the 2006 European Galileo Masters Competition, beating more than 200 submissions from across Europe.

Finally, an article on PhysLink hints at increased efficiency of solar cells, by making better use of the lower energy light at the red to green end of the spectrum. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and at the Sony Materials Science Laboratory in Stuttgart managed to combine photons to shorten their wavelength and hence increase their energy.

The image shows green light being converted to blue by passing it through a pair of substances in solution, platinum octaethyl porphyrin and diphenylan-thracene. Wow.

Costs, and not just performance, may be the driving factor behind the uptake of silicon-on-insulator, according to an interesting piece by Richard Wilson on Electronics Weekly, where he asks Is silicon-on-insulator technology mainstream?

SOI on a chip from IBM

Microprocessor developer ARM is quickly establishing itself as the core provider of libraries to the semiconductor industry, and has recently signed a deal with SoI wafer provider Soitec, and this week bought SoI firm Soisic which develops standard cell libraries, embedded SRAM memory compilers and I/Os.

The article points out that one of the really interesting things about SoI is that it can reduce manufacturing costs, rather than increase them as is the received wisdom:

According to a report by Semico Research, SoI as a substrate can reduce the cost of ownership of some silicon by up to 40 per cent.

This is leading several firms to adopt SoI:

... the number of firms adopting the technology is steadily growing. AMD and IBM have already made the switch for specific processors, while Freescale, Renesas and Atmel are also SoI adoptors.

As production capacity of raw wafers slowly increases, (Soitec is constructing a 300mm fab in Singapore) then expect more and more companies to start switching to SoI for cost reasons - not just performance.

A recent round table discussion brought together a group of LED lighting experts, with the talk centred around the possibility of high power LEDs replacing the general purpose market for bulbs.

..the use of higher power LEDs as general purpose lighting sources, which have the potential to replace filament bulbs and even fluorescent tubes, has now become one of the most interesting component markets in the industry

Organised by Electronics Weekly, the expert opinion came from firms such as Osram, Dialight Lumidrives, EBV Elektronik and PixelRange.

Opinion was mixed on how quickly LEDs would, for example, start to replace fluorescent tubes in general lighting applications.

“That is the Holy Grail for manufacturers, that white LEDs will enter the traditional consumer lighting markets,” Allan Morris from PixelRange.

“The Chinese took the cost out of compact fluorescent lights and they will do the same in the white LED lighting market. I won’t say the domestic market won’t happen, but for us it is a long way down the list,” Gordon Routledge, managing director of Dialight Lumidrives

Unfortunately for white LED makers, they still need to double the efficiency of their emitters to rival fluorescent tubes, which can reach 100 lumen/Watt.

Do you want to work more than 48 hours a week?

The European Union wants to abolish long working hours for employees and end a fine tradition of abusing employees and milking them for all they're worth.

Which all sounds very laudable and is warmly received by various trade unions. But it seem that abolishing the opt-out that currently allows long hours would not be welcome by employees in the UK.

Research from Manpower suggests that only a quarter of UK workers want restrictions on the number of hours they work in a week.

Rather than being pressured to do longer hours, it seems that most employees want the opportunity to earn overtime beyond the 48 hour limit.

Out of over 2,000 firms polled in the study, 85% who use the opt-out say ending it would adversely affect their business.

Here's more information on the Working Time Directive from the Business Link, from the Department of Trade and Industry and here's a good outline from the BBC.

There's a great interview with Tony Blair over at New Scientist, a sister publication to Electronics Weekly, where the Prime Minister says science is vital to society.

New Scientist editor Jeremy Webb managed to get into number 10 to speak to the PM - no mean feat for a consumer science publication - and the result is the Tony Blair Interview.

Blair, who professes to know little about science, nevertheless seems to hold the discipline in high regard:

"For the future of the British economy, it [science] is as important as economic stability. If we do not take the opportunities that are there for us in science then we are not going to have a successful modern economy."

Blair reckons links between academia and industry are vital - and this is something the electronics industry in the UK is becoming much better at.

"You need a certain amount of pure research, and the excitement and creativity of scientific discovery. But if you also have universities and research centres sufficiently in tune to what is going on in the private sector, then hopefully discoveries will be made that have a real utility."

From the interviewer's position, Jeremy describes the PM as coming across as well-meaning and sincere:

"There’s no doubt that the Labour government have poured lots more money into publicly-funded research, and they've made funds available to modernise university labs. They’ve created a much more positive attitude within academia and given tax breaks to firms that conduct research. It helps when Blair says things like 'science is almost as important as economic stability'."

Maybe there's hope for science, engineering and technology yet!

Electronica is packed - really packed. Getting to the halls on the U-Bahn was a nightmare, and people were still streaming in through the doors late in the morning.

Journalists on half hour interview slots are struggling to make their appointments becuase of the crowds and getting some lunch could be a non-starter.

There's a stready stream of visitors through the International Rectifier stand to see the Playstation 3 they've got. It's connected to a 1080i monitor and the quality of the graphics is stunning. Not that you'd know it from my pathetic attempt to take a photo.

Many thanks to the executive v-p from IR who allegedly cradled the machine on the plane all the way from Japan to get it to the show on time.

Playstation 3 is also part of the presentation from Chipworks, the reverse engineering people from Canada. They've just started a teardown of the machine, looking at the 65nm Cell processor, emotion engine and graphics chip inside. Expect more on this soon.

Ed Sperling at Electronic News has written an interesting blog comment suggesting the chip industry in the US is waking up to the fact that George Bush's policies have not done the country any favours on the world stage.

For six years, most of the electronics industry sat stoically and grumbled while one bad decision after another was thrown in its face. Research funding is now scarce. The tax research credit wasn’t renewed. H1-B visas are being doled out for all the wrong reasons in the wrong places. Stock options were slashed for most workers and others got clobbered for repricing.

I'm not sure whether the final point is worth complaining about as fraud is fraud, but you get the point.

During the years of the Bush administration, most other countries involved in high-tech have surged forward. The UK, Ireland, France and a host of Asian economies have benefited from technology, to a certain extent leaving the US behind.

However, since the mid-term electrions in the States, industry leaders have started to complain a bit more loudly:

The days of complaining behind closed doors are over. Oil and defense interests are no longer in total control. Now the question is whether this industry can rebuild fast enough to keep up with some very tough global competition, which has dug in deeply since the current administration first came to power.

As an industry exec pointed out to me last week, although perceived wisdom says that a Republican government in the US is best for business, in recent years it is the periods of Democrat control that saw the biggest gains for the tech industry. The next two years should be interesting.

Techie blogger Dick James has put some initial information about the Playstation 3 teardown on his Chipworks blog.

Chipworks were showing a PS3 with the top taken off at Electronica. Over the coming weeks they'll strip down the system, remove the chips and then look inside to see what they're made of.

So far Dick says the PS3 has four main devices, including the eight core Cell Broadband Engine from IBM/Sony/Toshiba and the RSX (reality synthesiser) graphics chip from Nvidia.

We also seem to have the EE+GS [emotion engine] chip that was used in the PS2. I have heard that NEC got the design win for their embedded DRAM to go with the graphics processor; so maybe that’s the fourth big chip we can see on the board.

Dick reckons the Cell processor and DRAM are fabbed on 90nm. The emotion engine chip presumably gives backwards compatibility for PS2 games.

Looking at the pieces as they come out, the most impressive bit to me is the thermal engineering. There’s a cooling fan the size of a dinner plate, and some hefty heat tubes, all to get the heat way from the core chips.

Meanwhile, iSuppli has revealed that Sony is losing up to $300 on every PS3 it sells. The analyst says the $499 20Gbyte version has a bill-of-materials and manufacturing cost of $805, while the 60Gbyte version costs $840, a loss of just $240 on the $599 retail price.

An interview at Green Supply Line with Chris Smith, head of the UK RoHS enforcement at the National Weights and Measures Laboratory, says most products they have tested are not RoHS compliant.

Even though companies are trying to meet the standards, they will overlook mechanical items or plastics that might contain brmoine for example.

Smith sounds like he's trying to accommodate firms wherever possible:

If you have a product not quite compliant and are working towards it, we will open dialog with you. Be honest with us. If you're honest with us, we have avenues to explore to work in a more cooperative manner.

He does, however, have a warning for firm's trying to avoid RoHS compliance:

If you evade or try to mislead us, and we're aware of the problem, doors will be closed.

You have been warned, as they say.

One of the problems with the electronics industry is that if you're good at something - like making DRAM or graphics cards - then eventually the authorities will want to know why you're making so much money.

This week the graphics cards makers AMD (which now owns ATI) and Nvidia have come under the US Department of Justice spotlight.

The DoJ has subpoena'd the two firms in an antitrust probe of the graphics card market.

So now they'll be dragged through a very expensive process with lawyers being the only winners. It's unlikely the DoJ will find any real wrongdoing on the part of the companies (unlike its recent DRAM probe).

Mobile chipset firm Qualcomm looks like it has begun a spirited fightback against CSR in the Bluetooth market.

Qualcomm has bought the Bluetooth assets of RF Micro Devices, and the wireless LAN firm Airgo Networks.

The San Diego firm will put both the wireless LAN and Bluetooth technologies into its mobile phone chipsets, presumably with the hope of cutting CSR's runaway success in the Bluetooth arena.

CSR has so far garnered over 50 per cent of the Bluetooth market, and has chipsets for wireless LAN.

ABI Research's principal analyst Stuart Carlaw noted:

Outside the cell phone, Qualcomm now effectively owns a stake in the Bluetooth market that will enable it to expand into the CE environment with greater ease, due to the growing profile of Bluetooth in the gaming, PMP and music player markets.

Meanwhile, Maury Wright at EDN speculates in his blog about the IP strategy of Qualcomm, now that it owns the Airgo patents on multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) technology.

The Chipworks blog is proving to be a rich vein of information at the moment. The firm's Jim Morrison has posted a story about a 65nm Nokia baseband processor, which although designed and packaged by Texas Instruments looks like it was manufactured by UMC.

The picture on the left shows the overall package and the TI logo on a metal layer. Morrison said:

The die marking certainly shows that TI provided the mask set... However, this has turned into a particularly interesting project because there is evidence that this device was fabricated by UMC, showing evidence of an increasing trend for IDMs to outsource certain products.

The Chipworks team used SEM analysis to look at the back end process used on the Nokia chip, concluding it could only have come from UMC's fabs.

However, the transistors look more like TI's design. So TI either gave its transistor design to UMC for this project, or the front end was manufactured in a TI fab and the back end at UMC.

The image below shows a TI tranny on the left and a UMC version on the right. Both designs use TI's differential offset spacer technology.

A really sad story today is Atmel's decision to sell-off its North Tyneside fab.

The plant has had a chequered history, a bit of a rollercoaster ride really. First built by Siemens, the plant came on line in 1997, with the Queen in attendance for a 'majestic opening'.

In late 1997 the firm said it planned to fully equip the fab and increase capacity to 20,000 wafer starts per month

Unfortunately the writing was already on the wall for much of the memory industry, and in July 1998 Siemens said it would cut back on DRAM production, including at North Tyneside. It then immediately announced the closure of the fab.

Thereafter followed a period of uncertainty, with various mystery groups being touted as potantial buyers of the fab, including the Blackfriars group and a Chinese telecoms firm.

The whole sorry saga dragged on through 1998 as Siemens Semi changed to Infineon, and Fujitsu AMD was considering the fab.

Incidentally, at that time the fate of all three of the UK's big foreign owned fabs was wide open.

Eventually Atmel emerged as the white knight, buying the plant with the promise of creating 1,500 jobs.

Unfortunately, this was six months before the crash of May 2001, so it wasn't long before Atmel was itself announcing huge job cuts and a freeze on the UK fab. By 2003, a recovery meant Atmel could start to take people back on, a process that continued through 2004.

Finally, as recently as August 2005 the firm said it was committing to the plant with the promise of 0.13µm technology.

The fact that the plant has rebounded so many times is testament to staff and local management of the fab. With the buoyancy and promise of good growth in electronics, let's hope a buyer can be found.

The BBC has a great story covering news that the Planetary Society is offering a $50,000 prize for the most innovative way of tagging or tracking an asteroid that will pass close to Earth.

The problem is an interesting one:

Apophis is an approximately 400 meter near-Earth object (NEO), which will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. On that pass, the asteroid will be gravitationally perturbed to an unknown orbit, one that could cause it to hit Earth in 2036.

Thus the Society wants to find a neat way of tracking Apophis if it changes its course following its first fly-by of Earth. According to the Society:

Such precise tracking may require “tagging” the asteroid, perhaps with a beacon -- a transponder or reflector -- or some other method. Exactly how an asteroid could best be tagged is not yet known, nor is it obvious.

Here is the original press release from the Planetary Society.

My friends over at Design News in the US have a Gadget Freak Elves' Workshop on their site.

Design News readers have sent in their best gadgets with a Christmas theme:

Each project includes a parts list and complete build instructions to guarantee this December is one of endless fun for you and your family and friends.

Choose from such gems as:

• Holidazzle Lights Flasher Circuit


• Simple tester checks Christmas-tree lights - for people too tight to spend a couple of quid on a new set of lights


• Flame Flicker Effect - actually might be quite useful


• Automatic Tree Watering System - a recipe for disaster if ever I saw one.

Design News is also offering $250 to readers who come up with festive circuits that use electronics, motion control, and/or sensing devices. Email Karen Field if you have a circuit idea.

EDN magazine has just posted its yearly rundown of its top 100 products, ranging from Allegro Microsystems' ACS760 series Hall-effect hot-swap controller to Zilker Labs' ZL2105 digital power conversion and management IC.

The EDN top 100 always proves popular, and some companies that get on the list will tout their selection for years to come.

As EDN itself says:

Our editors mercilessly cull the herd of new-product announcements they see during the year, resulting in this distillation of the most innovative and significant offerings. You'll find process technologies, power sources, storage devices, processors, IP (intellectual-property) cores, communication controllers, test instruments, embedded boards, EDA tools, and more. If they advanced the state of the art in electronics, they're here. And not a movie star in sight.

Go here to find EDN's top 100 electronics products.

Electronic design automation pioneer Richard Newton, a professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley, has died aged just 56.

Newton was instrumental in helping to develop many of the basic techniques used in EDA, such as Spice, timing and circuit simulation, and logic synthesis.

He helped set up Cadence and Synopsys, among others, and many of the EDA industry's leading lights passed through his department at Berkeley.

It's fair to say he was one of the cleverest blokes on the planet.

There's a well-written obituary at EETimes EDA icon Richard Newton dies.

Meanwhile, Electronic News has some comments from Cadence executives.

The incredible story of Amr Mohsen, former chief executive of EDA firm Aptix, has finally come to an ending of sorts, with a US judge sending him down for 17 years.

Electronic News has the full story here: Aptix founder sentenced to 17 years for perjury, obstruction of justice, but the beginnings go back nearly ten years.

Aptix, known for its FPGA prototyping tools, sued emulator maker Quickturn for patent infringement. However, the judge in that trial found that evidence was falsified in the patent lawsuit.

Mohsen had added pages to his engineering notebook to make it look like he invented key claims in a Quickturn patent.

With a plot that would not disgrace a Hollywood blockbuster, forensic testing determined the notebooks were written well after Mohsen claimed. The notebooks were then mysteriously stolen from Mohsen's car.

Lying in court obviously got Mohsen charged with perjury, which he compounded by attempting to flee the US, thereby getting himself incarcerated in Santa Rita jail.

While on remand waiting for the trial (by the same Judge Alsop), Mohsen got a fellow inmate to intimidate witnesses and allegedly hatch a plot to kill the good judge (Ex-CEO on murder plot charge).

Mohsen was found guilty in March last year on 17 counts, including conspiracy, mail fraud, perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, contempt, attempted intimidation of witnesses, and solicitation of the arson of a government witness's car.

Luckily for Mohsen he was acquitted of soliciting the murder of the judge, as 17 years would have seemed a brief instant in time compared to his sentence.

The Inquirer has a story titled The three reasons why AMD acquired ATI, based on an interview with AMD's Mario Rivas, executive vice-president in its computing products group.

AMD, so the article says, had three reasons for buying ATI: getting into graphics in a big way; getting ATI's consumer business, which is growing fast; and combined graphics processor and microprocessors.

The third point is further in the future and it is called Fusion. It is a GPU on CPU integration scheduled for late 2008 if not even later. This is the way to go, he explains, as it will make a more power efficient processor for all of the tasks. It is all about increasing the overall computational speed.

HP's announcement that it plans to use its cross-bar technology for a field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been commented on in Cross bar for next generation FPGA by Nick Flaherty.

The technology calls for a nanoscale crossbar switch structure to be layered on top of conventional CMOS (complementary metal oxide silicon), using an architecture HP Labs researchers have named “field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)” – a variation on the well-established FPGA technology.

However, so far it's all modelling simulation - a real life chip doesn't yet exist. As Nick points out:

One of the challenges will be yield, as the small size of the cross bar on the upper layers will make it sensitive to defects, and that will also hit the cost, so don't write off traditional CMOS and Xilinx and Altera just yet.

According to this story floating around the wires Intel to sell Israel fab, build China plant, Intel is going to build a fab in China.

How the firm is expected to get around export restrictions to China for any technology below 0.25micron will be a major blockage to any deal of this sort.

Supermarket retailer Tesco is spending around $13m to cover the roof of a distribution centre with solar photovoltaic cells.

The building in the US will be capable of generating up to 2MW of power, and is believed to be the biggest of its type yet built.

Solar Integrated Technologies is supplying the 46,000m² PV system, which has a total output of 2GigaWatt hours a year.

The firm said:

Our BIPV roofing system at this distribution center will produce over 2.6 million kilowatt hours per annum, provide a fifth of the depot’s power supply, and save 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The image shows a 230kW roof on Coco-Cola's Los Angeles bottling plant, also supplied by Solar Integrated Technologies.

Distributor Digi-Key's first visit to Electronica last November has proven to be lucky for Svend Kristensen, who has won a Harley Fatboy in the firm's raffle.

Svend, an analogue hardware engineer with TC Electronic in Denmark, seems very laid back about the whole business:

Visiting Electronica 2006 with my firm, I was admiring the bike in your display when I got ‘caught’ by two pretty young girls who asked me to participate in a lottery. Of course, I agreed.

Live the dream Svend, live the dream.

When it comes to public relations, you'd think Intel would have a learnt a thing or two over the past few decades. Though not, it would seem, about timing.

Late on Friday (actually Saturday in the UK), when all self-respecting journalists were down the pub, the chip behemoth released details of its 45nm process for the next generation of microprocessors.

This isn't some thrupenny-bit, "we punt these out every day" type release - this is one of Intel's biggest press events of the year.

Anyway, it seems the Penryn processor will use a high-k gate dielectric based on Hafnium and metal gates for transistors, although the latter will differ for NMOS and PMOS transistors.

The combination offers 20% more drive current, or one-fifth of the source drain leakage, or a tenth of the gate leakage.

Lithography remains at 193nm, and Intel will not be using immersion, it said.

To read some of those tedious facts about how many billions of transistors fit aongside the angels dancing on a pin, see Intel's Fun Facts pdf. (I kid you not)

There's loads more proper detail on the release from these quality sites:
The Register: Intel 45nm CPUs to use metal gates, high-k dielectric
ZDnet: Intel shows off Penryn chips
The Inquirer: Intel does High-K and metal gates
EETimes: Intel tips high-k, metal gates for 45-nm

Richard Goering from EETimes has spotted that Mentor is about to move back into the chip packaging market.

At the FSA's SiP Conference, Per Viklund from Mentor apparently said he was charged with getting Mentor back into the market:

Viklund said the packaging tool will let users manage I/O planning, interconnect, functional verification, signal and power integrity, thermal and mechanical analysis, and manufacturing and test, all in a collaborative environment with IC design.

What's interesting is the origins of the project - from Mentor's purchase of Dansk Data Electronik. DDE was known for its high end (ish) PCB tools from the late '90s, although used internally at the firm for a lot longer, with Ericsson said to be one of its bigger customers.

And guess who used to be product and technical support manager at DDE? Yep, one Per Viklund.

An article at New Electronics from Graham Pitcher reminds manufacturers and importers of electronic equipment that registration on a WEEE recycling scheme is mandatory by March 15 - just six weeks away.

Update: Richard Wilson has also written the story as Firms must act to meet WEEE compliance deadline at Electronics Weekly.

Producers have to cough up a registration fee to a compliance scheme and state how much electrical and electronic equipment they placed on the market in 2006, and whether it was for household or business use

According to Liz Parkes of the Environment Agency:

We have now started to approve the compliance schemes that applied to us during January. Producers of EEE in England and Wales have until 15 March 2007 to join an approved scheme.

Graham's story comes on the same day that a firm called WeeeCare said it has received a licence from the Environment Agency to become a recycler.

The firm reckons recycling under WEEE could cost just £6 per tonne.

There's tons (ha ha) of data on the Directive at the Environment Agency website.

Greenpeace has given the electronics industry a complete kicking in a report on its environmental impact.

In a report called Cutting Edge Contamination: A study of environmental pollution during the manufacture of electronic products, the pressure group said big name firms are polluting rivers and wells with hazardous chemicals.

Greenpeace sampled water from industrial estates in China, Mexico, the Philippines and Thailand, from factories carrying out PCB manufacture, IC fabbing and component assembly.

Analysts said they found polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants, at the majority of sites, organic compounds such as tetrachloroethene and metals such as nickel, copper and zinc in groundwater or aquifers.

Dr. Kevin Brigden from the Greenpeace Research Laboratories said:

Over recent years we have seen an increasing concern over the use of hazardous chemicals in electronic products but attention has focused on the contamination released during disposal or 'recycling of electronic waste'. Our findings of contamination arising during the manufacturing stage make it clear that only when we factor in the complete life cycle will the full environmental costs of electronic devices begin to emerge.

Firms tested by Greenpeace included IBM, HP, Intel, Sony and Sanyo, On Semi, Kemet, Flextronics, Jabil, Solectron, and Sanmina.

IBM was singled out for attack as Greenpeace claimed it had released specific hazardous compounds such as nonylphenol, said to be a "potent hormone disruptor", into groundwater.

Greenpeace wants more traceability between the manufacturer and the supplier of branded goods:

There is shockingly little information on precisely which major brand companies are supplied by which manufacturing facilities. Responsibility for the contamination lies as much with those brands as with the facilities themselves. There has to be full transparency regarding the supply chain within the electronics industry, so that brand owners are forced to take responsibility for the environmental impacts of producing their goods.

A copy of the report can be found at http://www.greenpeace.org/electronicsproductionreport

The patent lawsuit between industry behemoth Apple and plucky little innovation firm Quantum (guess who's side I'm on) is really on a roll.

The story kicked off in January with Apple facing a patent claim over iPod touch sensor technology.

That was good stuff, but it got even better earlier this month as the sensor firm warned Apple over its iPhone design.

Duncan Bryan, licensing director at Quantum Research (QR), told Electronics Weekly:

The description of the iPhone suggests it uses a rear-surface touch screen, and has proximity sensing which can tell if it is held to the ear. That's a QR capability.

It's the charge transfer technology invented by Quantum that is at the heart of the lawsuit.

However, now it seems Quantum is playing down the iPhone issue, and will wait until the iPhone goes on public sale before taking it any further.

"Quantum has no knowledge of any infringement by Apple of Quantum's patents in regard to the iPhone or any other product other than those products alleged to be infringing in our 2005 lawsuit against Apple and Cypress Semiconductor, specifically the Powerbook trackpad, Mighty Mouse, and iPod Nano scroll wheel"

The rise in importance of consumer electronics, and the increasing relevance of environmental issues, are forcing more people to take note of the power electronics market.

According to an editorial piece on EDN, the power electronics market was worth more than $70bn last year, which is a very significant chunk of the electronics industry.

While this industry is typically thought of as providing a product that is a "necessary evil," it must be extremely important to generate that type of revenue. Instead of the "necessary evil" perception that this industry is given, power electronics is in fact the great enabler of the overall electronics industry.

Another article on EDN today looks at milestones in the power market, going back over 50 years to 1954 when Motorola's Dan Noble brought the first germanium power transistor to market.

Other milestones include the silicon controlled rectifier, or thyristor; the planar process; Carver Mead's work which led to the Schottky diode; the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) developed at General Electric; and several developments from the 1990's such as Li-ion batteries, and integrated power conversion ICs.

It's worth taking a look at EDN today, as they have contributed articles from three influential people in power: PWM controller expert Robert Mammano; Patrizio Vinciarelli, founder of Vicor and creator of the high-density dc-dc converter bricks; and Alex Lidow of International Rectifier, the first firm to successfully commercialise the Mosfet.

Chipworks, the nice reverse engineering people from Canada, have an analysis blog on their site looking at how DRAM capacitors are made.

The snappy headline So you thought DRAM capacitors are made of only polysilicon and oxide or nitride...? looks at a Powerchip 512Mbit DDR2 SDRAM.

Hopefully you can see a micrograph of the device on the left.

Chipworks notes a change in construction of the stacked capacitors:

They are still made inside deep narrow holes that have been etched in inter-metal dielectrics, but their electrodes and the capacitor dielectric layer are more complex than they used to be.

Powerchip seems to have increased the surface area of their caps by using a layer of hemispherical grain (HSG) polysilicon which has formed bumps and niches - clearly visible in the image:

Since the charge stored in a capacitor can be expressed as Q = AVKε/t, where A - capacitor area, V - voltage on the capacitor, K - capacitor dielectric layer constant, ε - permittivity of vacuum, and t - capacitor dielectric layer thickness, the increased area A results in more charge being stored in the capacitor, with the same bitline voltage and the same dielectric layer thickness.

Go to the Chipworks' page for nice big images and a fuller description.

Despite