SemiSerious

Any discussion of Major League Baseball that includes the word “green” usually means one thing – money. In the SF Giants case, though, it means using solar energy. A solar farm incorporating 590 Sharp Corp. panels was installed before San Francisco’s AT&T park hosted the All-Star game. The installation was reported to cost about $1.5 million to be funded by 15 million PG&E customers since the panels are on their grid. The total power available is about 120kW.

Obviously, Mark LaPedus was onto this story a long time ago. But I am adopting the excuse that Barry Bonds will be breaking Hank Aaron’s home run record imminently. Therefore, this news is still very topical.

 So even if Barry Bonds isn’t clean, a portion of the power for the Giants’ ballpark is.

The most respected entity in reverse engineering was sold yesterday to CMP Technology, our long-time media partner. With Semiconductor Insights now part of the CMP family, I may have to drop “Semi” from the title. Things are about to get “serious” around here but in a good way. We are starting down the road to new opportunities and concepts in the technical information space. I guarantee that you will begin to see new and exciting things from us in the near future.

Since I’m not at Semicon West this week to talk to any of the industry movers and shakers, I will take certain liberties to comment on a recent EDN interview with Applied Materials CEO, Mike Splinter.

Ed Sperling looked to extract some information about AMAT’s success in the tool business. Splinter pointed to recognizing and concentrating on what Applied was best at:

• thin films
• complex system engineering
• global infrastructure

Certainly, there are many organizations that need to take the approach Applied did  as they got out of the implant business to focus on thin film technology. Hoping for some clarification on that favorite buzz word – nanotech – Sperling asked Splinter for his thoughts. Unfortunately, Splinter described thin films as nanotech because of their thickness (or lack thereof, I suppose). In that case, nanotechnology isn’t really new since thin films have been around for optics and other purposes since before the microelectronics industry learned to walk.

But let’s not dispute their prowess in this area. Applied has moved aggressively into the solar cell technology space. “Anyplace where there is competition, we’ve won—at least so far,” as Splinter described their success in this new market. And solar panel technology – outside of the single crystal wafer variety – relies heavily on thin film technology. Splinter cited the 8.5 layers created in their process as a big lead over the competition.

Solar panel fabrication is also tailor-made for Applied’s second corporate strength – engineering big, complex tools. As you can well imagine, converting sunlight into useful quantities of energy for the power grid requires a lot of silicon real estate. To get the cost per watt to a level competitive with the industrial revolution era technology we currently depend upon, you also need each panel to be huge. Therefore, the reactors and handling tools need to be commensurately large.

Applied is also perfectly positioned to deal with one more aspect of the gigantic nature of panels for solar energy farms. They have a truly global presence. Splinter offered this simple explanation, “You can’t fit many panels into the belly of a 747.” Panel production will be highly localized, and this is evident in the many ongoing announcements and speculation on new solar panel production facilities all over the world.

A recent article in Technology Review caught my eye today. A group of engineers at the University of Southampton in England have built a prototype accelerometer powered by ambient vibrations. I’m happy to see the vibrations that I could never escape and drove me up the wall during my grad student days doing noise measurements are being put to good use. Before going any further, let me first point out that my one of my colleagues here at the firm independently produced a plan to harvest the energy of ground vibrations created by cars and trucks to power our traffic lights. With his concept now proven at the milliwatt scale, we need to check whether this technology scales.

Speaking of scaling, that was obviously a problem for reducing the size of a microgenerator while maintaining useful output power levels. This could be a true breakthrough in terms of making wireless sensor networks widespread (big brother is watching you). The Technology Review article identified another cool source for this type of technology, but at the more modest scale of about 10cm. That company is aptly named, Perpetuum. They have these larger microgenerators installed today at industrial plants such as the Yorkshire waste water treatment plant. But Perpetuum also appears to have an even smaller generator than Soton U.  This device is based on MEMS, and simulations suggest peak power levels of 36mW.

For now, the folks at Southampton have by far the smallest working prototype microgenerator, but it sounds like Perpetuum might be the ones to squeeze the well-worn “nano” into the name of their newest device.

If you just crawled out from under a rock or you were too busy filling orders for Saskatchewan sealskin bindings, you may not have heard about Apple’s iPhone launch last Friday. Fortunately, we did, and our crack marketing team stood in a Boston Apple Store line for 12 hours, raced back to HQ here in Ottawa, and promptly smashed the poor thing to bits. The result was the revelation of the secret inner hardware in a tasteful video.

As many reviews including our own have pointed out, there was nothing earth-shaking discovered on the high-level IC parts list. But exploring the nether regions of integrated circuits is our business, and we have discovered one interesting device so far. The EDGE radio module contains an innovative product from Peregrine Semiconductor. This device is an SP4T switch for use in the RF path of a radio (cell phone) to switch between transmit and receive circuit connections to the single antenna. It is based on what Peregrine has trademarked as UltraCMOS. This technology is silicon-based. It is a subset of silicon-on-insulator, but does not use the oxide of silicon for the insulator as we often see in typical SOI devices. For this high performance application, UltraCMOS uses a sapphire substrate as the platform for adding silicon transistors. What you get is silicon-on-saphhire or S-O-S.

Peregrine’s UltraCMOS device is very interesting. The iPhone is the first consumer product we have pulled one out of. Peregrine’s technology is the only silicon-based circuit for this application. Its competitors are complex III-V and derivative compounds patterned as p-HEMTs and other such beasts. (Check my last post for some background on III-V’s.)

Despite the undeniable cool factor of the iPhone and the Peregrine UltraCMOS, the real news here is that our world-leading SCM team has produced 2D carrier concentration profiles of this type of device for the first time. Acquiring two-dimensional carrier profiles by SCM is a daunting task for any type of SOI device. However, it proved to be no obstacle for my amazing colleague, Dr. Jochonia Nxumalo. You can see some CMOS devices at the left and the Peregrine die markings in the SCM image at the top of this post.