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Moore's Law is proving to be quite robust despite approaching the physical limit of minimal structural width. If you were to take a close look inside a modern chip you would see structures like subminiature skyscrapers arranged in 3D stacks. This more condensed layout results in problems with heat removal, thus limiting the power and possible stacking height. To overcome this researchers from IBM have now optimized liquid cooling technology to the point that liquid can be passed directly through chip structure and thus cool more effectively...

Whenever a standard gains traction it quickly gets polluted with sub-standards, updates, forks, extensions, and what not. The hard part—besides trying to stay up-to-date with it—is to keep all the emerging flavors compatible. The Controller Area Network, better known as CAN, is a victim of this phenomenon too.

Microchip announces the availability of the industry’s first external CAN Flexible Data Rate (CAN FD) controller. The MCP2517FD provides designers with a simplified path to upgrade from CAN 2.0 to CAN FD and benefit from CAN FD protocol enhancements.

Microchip announces the immediate availability of a precision power- and energy-monitoring chip. The PAC1934 works in conjunction with a Microchip software driver that is fully compatible with the Energy Estimation Engine (E3) built into the Windows 10 operating system to provide 99 percent accuracy on all battery-powered Windows 10 devices. Combining Microchip’s PAC1934 and Windows 10 driver with Microsoft’s E3 service can improve the measurement of battery usage from different software applications by up to 29 percent.

As one of the oldest editors at Elektor I have witnessed with horror the decline of knowledge about, and precise expressivity about, passive electronics parts, in favour of just about anything that’s programmable and having more than 8 pins. However I am not frustrated at my failed attempts, even in the Elektor Labs, to help designers develop fingerspitzengefühl for the Holy Trinity of Passives, R-C-L, and lure them away from compiler errors, ISP connectors and other microcontroller woes.

Microchip announces availability of a new 1.8V Serial Quad I/O™ SuperFlash® memory device.  The SST26WF064C, a low-voltage 64-Megabit device, combines Dual Transfer Rate (DTR) with proprietary SuperFlash NOR Flash technology, making it ideal for wireless and battery-powered applications.  DTR gives customers the ability to output data on both edges of the clock which reduces overall data access time and power consumption.  SuperFlash technology also reduces power consumption by providing the industry’s fastest erase times.  Typical chip-erase time for the SST26WF064C is between 35 and 50 milliseconds, compared to competitive Flash devices which take more than 30 seconds to erase.

A new series of MKP film capacitors optimized for use with AC voltages with high ripple currents features extreme robustness as they pass a 1,000-hour Temperature-Humidity-Bias (THB) test at 60°C with a 95% relative humidity and a rated voltage of either 250 VRMS, 275 VRMS and 310 VRMS. The new types cover a capacitance range from 1 µF to 70 µF and are intended for output filters of frequency converters, uninterruptible power supplies and variable-speed drives.

Many electronics engineers have been in the situation where they need to design a switched-mode power supply. It’s not too much of a problem these days because there are plenty of ICs around from different IC manufacturers that can do all the hard work. There are usually online design tools and simulators to assist you with the design. When it comes to the Inductive components in the design however there are many factors to take into account to optimize the design and often little help available. Now there is a new online tool called REDEXPERT from Würth Elektronik eiSos, the specialist for inductive components...

A new zero-drift opamp has been announced that draws just 1.3 μA on a 1.8 V supply and features a maximum input bias current of 15 pA a maximum input offset voltage of 5 μV at 25 °C. Even though these values increase slightly over the full temperature range from –40 °C to 125 °C, they do allow the use of large value feedback network resistors, keeping power consumption low even at high temperatures.

a NIMS (National Institute for Materials Science) research group claims a first in having developed logic circuits equipped with diamond-based MOSFETs at two different operation modes. The achievement reportedly is a first step toward the development of diamond integrated circuits operational under extreme environments, such as high temperature as well as exposure to (space) radiation and cosmic rays. Diamond is a promising material to be used in the development of current switches and integrated circuits that are required to operate stably at high temperature, high frequency, and high power.