DC converter circuit efficiency can have a big effect on the battery life of mobile devices. It also can affect power efficiency for wall-power operated circuits. Even before parasitics are factored in, converter circuit designers have a lot of issues ...

Terms like avalanche breakdown and impact ionization sound like they come from the world of science fiction. They do indeed come from a high stakes world, but one that plays out over and over again here and now, on a microscopic scale in semiconductor devices – namely as part of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. Semiconductor devices are highly vulnerable to the high voltage spikes that commonly occur when triboelectric ...

Mobile device designers face the dilemma of reducing power and at the same time maintaining or increasing performance. Consumers will not tolerate increased battery life at the expense of performance. If it were otherwise, designers could simply dial back clock rates. Without this simple cure, the best way to reduce power for longer device ...

Counting squares is a useful tool for calculating simple resistance in wires, but falls short in reality when wires deviate from ideal. Frequently the use of RC extraction tools for determining resistance in signal lines in digital designs can be ...

Magwel CEO Dündar Dumlugöl is well known from his days at Cadence, where I first met him, and for his more recent tenure at Magwel. At Cadence he led the team that first developed Spectre. He has come a long way from the start of his career at IMEC in Belgium. He and I had a chance to have a conversation recently where he offered insights into ESD, latch-up and power transistor modeling – all ...

Power protection chips are widely used these days to protect sensitive circuitry from over-voltage and over-current stress. However, these workhorse chips are often subjected to extraordinary thermal stress themselves and need to be protected from burning up – literally.

Power protection chips ...

It often seems that semiconductor industry coverage focuses on large digital markets like microprocessors or high frequency analog designs for RF applications. Yes, these are large markets, but power transistors like IBGT and VFETS make up a large and crucial sector. Not only do they make their ...

Often when a company starts out it takes a while for it to find the sweet spot in the marketplace. Very often it is feedback from existing customers and business success that can help point the way for small companies as they grow. This is just as true in EDA as it is in retailing or consumer products. For ...

I’ve written before about anti-fuse non-volatile memory, where the gate oxide is intentionally damaged in order to create a readable bit of data, but this is what most circuit designers never want to have happen to their logic gates. However, since the advent of MOS transistors the ...