Worldwide semiconductor revenue was $333.7 billion in 2015, a 1.9 percent decrease from 2014 revenue of $340.3 billion in 2014, according to Gartner Inc.

As recently as July 2015 Gartner was saying the 2015 market would grow by 2.2 percent compared with 2014 (see Gartner reduces chip market forecast, again) but the forecast was wrong Gartner now states.

Weak demand for key electronic equipment, such as PCs and smartphones, and the strength of the dollar in some regions are the reason it got it wrong, the market research organization said.

“2015 saw mixed performance with optoelectronics, non-optical sensors, analog and ASIC all reporting revenue growth while the rest of the market saw declines,”

Source: https://ac-dc.power.com/products/innoswitch-family/innoswitch-ep/?Adsource=NLen_EEWebDedNwsltr_InnoEP

It was not a happy Christmas for Micron, as the numbers confirm it is suffering in the solid state memory and storage business with a fourth consecutive decline in revenues and fifth in profits.

It made $3.35bn in revenues for its first fiscal 2016 quarter, compared to $4.57bn a year ago and $3.6bn in the preceding quarter, down 27 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.

Net income was $206m, 79 per cent less than the $1bn recorded a year ago and 56 per cent lower than the $471m reported for the prior quarter. At this rate it will make a loss in its next quarter. What’s going on, and will 3D XPoint memory signal a change in its fortunes?

The company said revenues for the quarter, which ended December 3, 2015, were “primarily due to a 13 per cent decline in DRAM average selling prices.”

Stifel MD Aaron Rakers notes Micron’s “DRAM revenue declined 10 per cent sequentially and ~38 per rent y-on-y; ”

There was price competition in client SSDs, particularly in lower-cost MLC (2 bits/cell) and TLC (3 bits/cell) product, according to Stifel MD Aaron Rakers.

There is no immediate revenue rescue coming from XPoint memory, the stuff that’s a 1,000 times faster than NAND but not as fast as DRAM, but cheaper. Micron thinks it will see revenue contribution during 2017.

This Design Idea presents a simple, proven, reliable, and robust method for charging large capacitor banks, using a series connection of power MOSFETs to raise the breakdown voltage over that of an individual MOSFET.

Using MOSFETs as voltage controlled current elements is very suitable to capacitor-charging circuit design.

a design with three P-MOSFETs connected in series

Measuring the body’s electrical signals is a neat trick… if you can get your equipment dialed in enough to establish dependable measurements. The technique is called Surface ElectroMyography (SEMG) though you’ll hear many call this ECG. They’re essentially the same technology; the Electro CardioGraph instruments monitor the activity of the heart while SEMG Instruments monitor electrical signals used to control other muscles. Both types of hardware amount to an instrumentation type amplifier and some form of I/O or display.

Since the human body is a great collector of 60 Hz noise (you can touch the tip of a scope probe for an example of how much) the rejection of the 60 Hz common mode is essential. The circuit shown has a feedback path that attempts to offset the effects of low frequency noise by inverting some of the signal, low passing it and feeding it back to the body.

As it turns out the circuit was able to produce a signal of roughly 5Volts by squeezing my hand. Just to help visualize that it really is working and not just displaying noise I connected up an LM3914 bar graph driver and was able to get a full scale display by flexing my arm muscles.

Safety

The biggest change I would make to the circuit would be to add 100k resistors in series with the leads as sticking anything to the skin that isn’t current limited can be dangerous, especially if there is AC operated equipment that has an issue such as a floating ground. In this case I used a 9V battery to power the circuit to eliminate the need for the extra components while shooting the video.

With just a handful of chips and we can see a little bit about what is going on under the skin.

A pulse oximeter monitors the oxygen saturation (SpO2) of a human’s blood based on the red light (600- 750 nm wavelength) and infrared light (850-1000 nm wavelength) absorption characteristics of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO2) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (Hb). The pulse oximeter flashes the red and infrared lights alternately through a finger to a photodiode. HbO2 absorbs more infrared light and allows more red light to pass through. On the other hand, Hb absorbs more red light and allows more infrared light to pass through.

RISC-V is on the march as an open source alternative to ARM and Mips. Fifteen sponsors, including a handful of high tech giants, are queuing up to be the first members of its new trade group which will host next week its third workshop for the processor core.

RISC V is the latest evolution of the original RISC core developed more than 25 years ago by Berkeley’s David Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessey. In August 2014, Patterson and colleagues launched an open source effort around the core as an enabler for a new class of processors and SoCs with small teams and volumes that can’t afford licensed cores or get the attention of their vendors.

Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lattice, Microsemi and Oracle – which is hosting next week’s workshop — will be among the first members of RISC-V. Tool vendor Bluespec also is joining the group.

Users will need to contribute as open source any changes they make to the core.

Currently RISC-V runs Linux and NetBSD, but not Android, Windows or any major embedded RTOSes. Support for other operating systems is expected in 2016.

So far, a camera SoC is the only shipping chip said to use the open source core commercially.

Three papers will describe FPGA-based accelerators using embedded RISC-V cores, a hot area given work by Web giants such as Microsoft and Baidu on FPGA accelerators.

The RISC-V instruction set supports 32- and 64-bit designs as well as vector and out-of-order extensions.

Even if it gains significant traction, RISC-V is not likely to have any major impact on ARM and Mips, given those vendors are well established with broad sets of customers and partners. However, the architecture could enable a new class of designs from small teams that would otherwise lack the heft to design their own chips.

“Open source has worked well in the software community, so there’s a place for this type of effort in CPUs but there’s a lot of practical issues they have to overcome, and I wouldn’t see this competing with ARM anytime soon,”

PsiKick Inc. (Charlottesville, Virginia), a semiconductor startup formed to work on sub-threshold voltage operation wireless circuits, has raised $16.5 million in Series B financing led by Osage University Partners and joined by existing investors.

The startup has designed a proof-of-concept wireless sensor node system-chip using conventional EDA tools and a 130nm mixed-signal CMOS that operates with sub-threshold voltages and opening up the prospect of self-powering Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The company has claimed that its proof-of-concept chip design would consume between 100 and 1000 times less than any comparable chip.

As part of its proof of concept progress PsiKick is working on systems that can scavenge energy from multiple sources including indoor light, RF rectification, thermal gradient and piezoelectric vibration. One such system is a battery-less electrocardiogram (EKG) sensor that supports a 1Mbit per second data rate over 10 meters distance.

Other companies working on sub- and near-threshold operation of ICs include fabless startup Ambiq Micro Inc. (Austin, Texas) and ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England). Ambiq has launched the Apollo line of Cortex-M4F based microcontrollers claiming they offer a 10x reduction compared with other microcontrollers and ARM has been working in R&D on a processor core optimized for operation close to the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors and at clock frequencies of the order of tens of kilohertz.

Leading foundry TSMC has developed a series of processes characterized down to near threshold voltages, such as 0.6V. The ULP family for ultra low power are processes, introduced at the 55, 45, 28nm planar CMOS and the 16nm FinFET nodes.

Intel Completes Acquisition of Altera
$16.7 billion deal underscores Intel CEO’s plan to expand chip maker’s business
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/intel-completes-acquisition-of-altera-1451338307-lMyQjAxMTE1NDI3ODAyMTgyWj

Intel Corp. on Monday completed its biggest-ever acquisition, part of Chief Executive Brian Krzanich’s plan to use new tactics to expand the chip maker’s business.

The $16.7 billion purchase of Altera Corp. makes Intel, known for microprocessors used in computers, the second-largest maker of chips that can be programmed after they leave the factory. Altera’s chips are used in an array of devices that include networking equipment, a field that Intel recently has targeted.

But Intel’s more pressing priority is continuing to serve the computing needs of giant Web services such as Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that rely on the company’s Xeon processors. That is becoming more difficult to do through Intel’s traditional practice of squeezing more transistors on each piece of silicon.

Microsoft and others, seeking faster performance for tasks like Web searches, have experimented with augmenting Intel’s processors with the kind of chips sold by Altera, known as FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays. Intel’s first product priority after closing the Altera deal is to extend that concept.

The Santa Clara, Calif., chip giant, which announced the Altera deal at the end of May, has said it plans in 2016 to begin selling products with a Xeon chip and an Altera FPGA in a single package.

Power supply users occasionally ask, “Why do I need to get my power supplies calibrated?” The typical justification given for calibrating power supplies is output accuracy. In other words, how well does a power supply’s output setting and displayed output values (feedback) compare to its actual voltage and current?

Users frequently challenge this justification, especially those who actively monitor the outputs of their supplies using a voltmeter and current shunts. Actively monitoring a power supply’s output with a meter would seem to render the need for calibration mute, but this isn’t the case when you consider the integrity of the power supply’s output.

Power supply signal integrity is basically concerned with the correctness of generated outputs without significant alteration by noise, harmonic distortion, transients, and so on.

It’s easy to ascertain from the figures how excessive PARD for DC power supplies and excessive THD for AC power supplies can compromise power supply signal integrity, which may adversely affect the operation of the circuits/devices they power.

Incorporating other test equipment such as an oscilloscope to actively monitor power supply signal integrity against performance specifications adds a resource burden to your work.