Imec, Holst Centre and Rohm have described an all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) for IoT radio transceivers at ISSCC 2017 in San Francisco.According to the partners, a PLL is not only one of the major power consumers in a radio, but can also take up to 30% of the radio area. In contrast, the ADPLL occupies just 0.18mm2 in a 40nm CMOS process...

imec, Holst Centre and Cartamundi claim to have demonstrated the first thin film tag on plastic, compatible with the near field communication (NFC) barcode protocol – a subset of ISO14443-A – which is available as a standard in many commercial smartphones.“Making a plastic electronics device compatible to the ISO standard orig...

Self-reinforcing solitary wave packets called solitons could achieve a more stable transmission of information, according to scientists at the Centre for Artificial Low Dimensional Electronic Systems (CALDES), within Korea's Institute for Basic Science (IBS). Their experiments and models are said to pave the way to a new field of electronics: s...

In a move which it claims sets the standard for precision amplifiers, Texas Instruments has launched the OPA388, which it describes as the first operational amplifier to offer zero-drift and zero-crossover technology.This, it continues, allows the device to maintain high precision across the entire input range in such applications as test and m...

One of the key ideas behind the IoT is the use of sensor networks to gather data. But when there may be thousands of sensors in a network, each sensor needs to be as low cost as possible.However, low cost sensors often have limited energy and computing capacities, so making the most of these limited resources is important and Austrian researche...

A new principle, in which electromagnetic waves, including light, can propagate on the edge of a 2D photonic crystal without being scattered, has been developed by researchers from Japan’s International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS).It was known that scattering of li...

A new class of metals, revealed by researchers at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Zurich, possesses electronic properties that could help scientists find other, similarly-endowed materials.The study described the class of metals based on their symmetry and a mathematical classification known as a topological number, which is predictive o...

Researchers from TU Delft and Graphenea in Spain have found a way to create what they call 'mechanical pixels'. While the pixels, created using balloon like structures, do not emit light, they could be used in energy-efficient colour displays for a range of applications.The 'pixels' are 13µm wide circular indents in silico...

Researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology believe it will be possible to predict accurately the level of noise caused by the amplification of photonic and plasmonic signals in nanoscale optoelectronic circuits. The scientists say their approach could be used not only to evaluate the ultimate data transfer rates in emerging optoe...

A wireless sensor module developed by Samtec and STMicroelectronics is said to be a production-ready solution that allows engineers to sense and measure inertial, environmental and acoustical parameters remotely.Measuring 13.5mm x 13.5mm, the module contains an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor and microphone – parts...