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Do you want to measure extremely low currents? Then this new current-to-digital converter may be just the thing for you. The new device is intended to help Computed Tomography (CT) scanners to produce sharper, more detailed images that in turn will help physicians to produce more accurate diagnoses while subjecting patients to lower doses of radiation.

Pickering Electronics has introduced single-pole reed relays with vertical mounting that enables extremely high mounting density and is good for automatic placement. Two switch types are available, a general purpose sputtered ruthenium switch rated for up to 20 W, 1 A and a low level sputtered ruthenium switch rated at 10 W, 0.5 A...

Panasonic Automotive & Industrial Systems Europe has recently introduced a new series of miniature aluminium electrolytic capacitors (radial lead type) for applications such as Unit Power Supply Output, Noise Filtering, DC/DC Converter and Back-Up Power. New FS series capacitors benefit from low ESR values (down to 12mΩ), a small footprint (one size smaller than popular FR series components) and high endurance of 5.000h up to 10.000h at 105°C.

LioniX International together with the Dutch University of Twente has announced the development of a tunable diode laser on a chip which has a bandwidth (maximum frequency-uncertainty) of just 290 Hz. The bandwidth is thus extremely narrow at around 1.5 ppt (parts per trillion). It is an integrated InP-Si3N4 hybrid laser with particularly high spectral purity...

Panasonic Corporation announced that it has commercialized its "High Thermal Conductivity, Low Transmission Loss Halogen-free Multi-layer Circuit Board Material (Part No. R-5575)" intended for wireless base stations, and will launch mass production in August 2017. The industry's first(*1) halogen-free multi-layer board material for RF power amplifiers is designed to contribute to compact-sizing and stable operation of wireless base stations.

One of the things in life of which you can’t have enough is memory for your smart devices. For this reason semiconductor manufacturers keep on trying to cram as much bits in a volume as small as possible. In a volume, yes, not on a surface, because it has been a while that memory chips grow like sky scrapers in three dimensions instead of just two. A new 96-layer BiCS 3D flash memory device developed by Toshiba with a storage capacity of 32 gigabytes (GB) nicely illustrates this trend. Last time we looked, not so long ago, they were only at 64 layers.

Imagine you have two pieces of a magnetic latch and switch sensor in a three-pin package. What do you get when you combine the two devices into one? Indeed, a dual magnetic latch and switch sensor in a four-pin package. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but what if we tell you that the device we are talking about actually combines two separate silicon dies into one package? Still not impressed? Well, according to the manufacturer of these new devices, you should.

Researchers at SUNY-Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York claim to have made a reconfigurable device that can be a p-n diode, a MOSFET or a BJT. Researcher Ji Ung Lee said “we can form a single device that can perform the functions of all three devices”. The device is made of 2-D tungsten diselenide (WSe2), a new transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductor. This class of materials is promising for electronics applications because the bandgap is tunable by controlling the thickness, and it is a direct bandgap in single layer form. The bandgap is one of the advantages of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides over graphene, which has zero bandgap.

A new voltage regulator has been added to the ever growing pile of similar devices. This time it is a multimode switched capacitor buck-boost charge pump capable of regulating an input voltage in the range of 2.7V to 38V to a fixed 3.3V or 5V or adjustable from 2.5V to 5V. To operate it only needs three small ceramic capacitors, no inductors are needed, keeping EMI switching noise to a minimum.

13.7 nW/Mbit is claimed by Renesas as a record low stand-by power for embedded SRAM. Speed has been retained at 1.8 ns for an active read-out. The firm said it used its in-house 65-nm silicon-on-thin buried oxide (SOTB) process for the prototype, and used substrate biasing to adjust the leakage/speed compromise. The technology is claimed overcome challenges with conventional CMOS, such as the increased leakage with low-threshold transistors and high variability in gate threshold voltage.