Power Tips #151: Improving efficiency in 48V-input multiphase buck converters with GaN

Step-down buck converters used in 48V-to-5V power supply designs are becoming increasingly common in automotive and industrial applications, especially in advanced driver assistance systems, in-vehicle infotainment, and robotics. While synchronous…

What does Arm’s own chip stand for?

Arm is now a chip vendor—what does it mean for the semiconductor industry? EE Times’ Nitin Dahad was at the event in San Francisco, California, where the British IP giant unveiled its first chip, an AGI CPU for data centers. He reports on…

Overcoming interconnect obstacles with co-packaged optics (CPO)

Over the last few years, there has been growing interest across the global semiconductor packaging industry with a new approach. Co-packaged optics (CPO) involves integrating optical fibers, used for data transmission, directly onto the same…

The Tapo Hub: TP-Link joins the low-bandwidth, long-range RF club

Leveraging low-power wireless connectivity isn’t proprietary to a single smart-home technology and product supplier, no matter that each company’s implementation of the concept may be. Back in 2019, when I first conceptually explored, then…

The 6G clock ticking: Why silicon architecture for 2030 must start in 2026

The 6G transition is no longer a distant theoretical exercise; it’s a commercial inevitability driven by fundamental requirements for cellular standards to keep moving forward. 5G penetration has already surpassed 75% and is on a trajectory…

1MHz 555 VFC

For decades, I’ve had a fascination with voltage-to-frequency converters and the 555 analog timer chip, and therefore a double obsession with VFCs based on the 555. In fact, my first Design Ideas (DI) submission (in 1974) was for a 555 VFC.…

Chiplets: 8 best practices for engineering multi-die designs

Semiconductor design is in the midst of a structural shift. For decades, performance gains were achieved by packing more transistors into single, monolithic dies. But the physical limitations of these dies—and the process technologies used…

Is your PLC/DCS reading the field contacts reliably?

In process industries, field contacts from pressure, temperature, flow switches, limit switches, push buttons, etc., are read by programmable logic controllers and/or distributed control systems (PLC/DCS) through digital input modules. They…

Demystifying 3D ICs: A practical framework for heterogeneous integration

For decades, the semiconductor industry has relied on the relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law—the doubling of transistors on an IC every two years—to deliver ever-increasing performance and functionality. This traditional approach, primarily…

A scale that tells inconsistent-weight tales

When a bathroom scale gives you multiple different weight-measurement results from consecutive usage attempts, is it cheating if you pick the lowest outcome of the lot? Two years ago (with publication following a few months later), I took apart…

GPS-free systems to spur highly advanced sensors, fusion

We’ve come to expect the U.S.-based global positioning system (GPS) to be available and ubiquitous for the countless military, commercial, and consumer applications dependent on it. Its diverse uses represent a huge leap from its original…

Vcc delay

It was with humble spirit and a good dose of Mea Culpa that a semiconductor company, from whom some very large-scale digital large-scale integration (LSI) chips were purchased, had a problem (later corrected, thank goodness) in that their chips…