April 2008 Archives

Bath is the centre for the UK’s latest basestation conference which is taking place this week, and among the early movers at the event are Nitronex, a GaN-on-Silicon RF power IC specialist and Nujira who are teaming up to create a WiMAX power amplifier reference design.

The interesting point about this is the choice of GaN technology which should help the power efficiency which can be an issue with WiMAX transmissions.

NEC first showed a gallium nitride (GaN) power transistor amplifier in 2006, which it claimed had the world's highest output power level of 400W with low-distortion characteristics.

According to the companies, using a 4 channel WCDMA waveform it has been possible to realise over 44dBm of linear power with 45% efficiency at a linearity of -55dBC.

There are still not enough graduates with the rights skills coming out of UK universities.

That seems to be the worrying finding of new research in the jobs market published by the CBI.

Inevitably is it graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects which are in highest demand.

According to the survey, 92% of firms want people with these skills. By 2014, it is expected that the UK will need to fill over three-quarters of a million extra jobs requiring highly numerate, analytical people with STEM skills, making a net total of 2.4 million of these jobs in six years' time.

Those clever guys at ARM in Cambridge seem to have come up with another winner with the Cortex-M3 processor core.

Not only are the big name licensees, such as NXP, Toshiba and TI, developing new lower power silicon based on the 32-bit Cortex-M3 core, but the really interesting thing is that the core is also defining a whole new business for a couple of newer companies.

That puts it in the same sentence with 8051 and x86. But with a difference. These comapnies want to use Cortex-M3 to create new types of energy-friendly MCUs and so save the planet in the process.

IBM and its process technology partners may have found the Holy Grail in their search for a high-k dielectric material which is practical at the 32nm process node and below.

The high-k/metal gate (HKMG) material when used in evaluation circuits registered performance improvements on 32nm technology circuits of up to 35 per cent over 45nm technology circuits at the same operating voltage.

Professor David Payne of the University of Southampton has been named as a finalist for the world's most prestigious technology awards.

The fact that many people in the UK will not have heard of Professor Payne is yet another sad indictment of this country's wayward approach to scientific and engineering achievements.