Skorpios Semiconductor Acquires Texas Fab

Skorpios Technologies, a US System on Chip (SoC) company, has acquired Novati Technologies, a semiconductor integration company and fab located in Austin, Texas. 

The Novatis facility is known for its innovative work in 2.5D/3D integration, photonics, MEMS sensors, and micro fluidics for medical applications. Skorpios has a proprietary wafer scale process that allows it to monolithically integrate silicon with III-V gain materials used as the active medium, to create silicon photonic ICs.

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Cardiff Uni's £300m innovation campus 'can be a beacon'

A new £300m campus can be a beacon to attract worldwide talent to Cardiff, a university professor has said. Cardiff University's innovation campus aims to develop closer links between academic research and industry. Major projects include developing a system to remove impurities from water and the technology behind facial recognition software for smartphones. Prof Graham Hutchings said: "We want to take this fantastic research and make it so that it goes into application." The new buildings will give researchers more room to work, develop products and demonstrate them to industries interested in using them.

Prof Hutchings specialises in catalysis - the acceleration of chemical reactions using catalysts - and one of the existing projects being developed in the new building is water purification.

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Could UV Light Improve Semiconductor Integration?

Integrating different semiconductor materials into an epitaxial device structure offers additional degrees of freedom to select for optimal material properties in each layer. However, interfaces between materials with different valences (i.e. III-V, II-VI and IV semiconductors) can be difficult to form with high quality. 

Now, a discovery by Kwangwook Park and Kirstin Alberi, at the US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), suggests that careful application of UV illumination may be used to improve the optical properties of these material layers.

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Electronics Weekly – Intersil Transceivers, RS Components AC Inverters & More

Intersil has announced two high-speed, isolated RS-485 differential bus transceivers that provide 40Mbps bidirectional data communication for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. The higher working voltage and reinforced isolation is required for today's medical and motor control applications.

The ISL3274xE transceivers provide low radiated emission and EMI susceptibility, support for up to 160 devices on the bus and a 125°C temperature range. These devices utilize giant magnetoresistance (GMR) technology that provides galvanic isolation to keep the communication bus free from common-mode noise generated in electrically noisy factory and building automation environments.

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A New Generation Takes Aim at IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is sparking huge interest and, naturally, all vendors want to get in on the act. One interesting result of this interest in IoT, and a welcome result from my point of view, is all the effort taking place at different levels—from home automation up to the major IT companies that, quite clearly, are leading the way.

In some of the less advanced IoT areas, however, confusion reigns. For example, home automation solutions are riddled with interoperability and security issues. Not many devices can talk to each other. And many devices, such as coffee pots, refrigerators and even cars, are susceptible to being hacked.

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Intelligent Indoor Air Quality Detector for Homes and Automobiles

There is a growing interest in the quality of air that we breathe, whether in the home, at school, at work or outside. A major contributor to poor air quality is a group of low boiling-point gases called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These gases that occur naturally are produced by the human metabolism or result from a combustion or industrial process.

There is increasing evidence that VOCs contribute to the incidence of respiratory disease and related healthcare costs. In the workplace, it is assumed that they adversely impact absenteeism and can also cause major loss in productivity as a result of what is known as sick building syndrome. Even if harmless to humans, many VOCs are highly odorous and contribute to unpleasant smells.

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EV Battery Management Impacts Vehicle Design and the Grid

All EVs employ rechargeable batteries, so proper care of these batteries is critical to operation of the vehicle. To see how they impact vehicle design and the electrical grid, we have to look at the characteristics of these batteries, which are usually li-ion.

 EV battery packs are made up of multiple cell modules arranged in series and in parallel. The battery pack has a battery management system (BMS) that monitors components close to the battery cells themselves. During the charging and discharging of an EV battery, each cell within the battery pack must be closely and accurately monitored, because unbalanced cell voltage conditions can impact battery performance.circuits, due to their high volumetric efficiency and excellent price performance ratio.[1] Unfortunately, their characteristics change with operating frequency, whereas an ideal capacitor’s impedance decreases with frequency. But, in the real world this is not seen in the laboratory. Increasing frequency up to a certain point leads to the expected impedance reduction but increasing frequency causes the impedance to increase, i.e., it acts like a resonance circuit. To model the behavior of an actual capacitor requires the addition of extra elements to the capacitor model. ESR is actually the resistance that a capacitor shows in the border between capacitor-like behavior and inductor-like behavior, i.e., resistance at the resonance frequency.

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