Chip Set Research Articles

Guest Editorial: Ushering in a New Era of Oilfield Innovation With the Internet of Things

Guest editorial The Internet of Things (IoT)—the connected network of Internet-enabled physical devices that collect and exchange information with each other—is rapidly growing in both acceptance and applicability across a number of industries. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. Studies predict that by 2020, the IoT will include nearly 50 billion devices worldwide with 212 billion sensors producing 44 zetabytes of data. These devices, the “things” in the IoT, include everything from smartphones and automobiles to valves and pumps in industrial plants. The growing momentum of IoT adoption is mainly driven by the reduction in cost of connectivity and computation. According to market studies, over the past 10 years, the cost of sensors has been cut in half, the cost of bandwidth has dropped by a factor of 40, and the cost of processing has decreased by a factor of 60. Although further efforts are required to lower the cost of sensors, the number of new IoT use cases has grown and a greater number of technology companies are developing IoT-specific services and technologies ranging from sensors and chip sets to platforms and software systems. The main barriers to IoT adoption by industries—network security and scalability—have also been addressed, with reliable and highly secure communication systems and analytics. What do these advances mean for the oil field? The oil and gas industry finds itself at the precipice of a new era of innovation, spurred by a normalization of oil prices over the past 2 years. Now, as E&P companies slowly ramp up drilling and production activities while adjusting to a new period of “lower for longer” prices, the time is right for widespread adoption of the IoT. Advancing the Digital Transformation While several operators and service companies have begun implementing the IoT in some parts of their daily operations, the industry as a whole still seems uncertain about how to integrate it for optimal business impact. Fortunately, the industry does not have to start from first principles to implement IoT technologies, thanks to an infrastructure built in support of the first iteration of the digital oil field more than a decade ago. The digital oil field has made strides in certain areas, such as affording project collaboration with colleagues located across the globe via real-time operating centers. However, the concept has not fulfilled its ultimate promise of enabling information-based business decisions that deliver end-to-end optimized operations, increased uptime, and new value creation.

Cutting the Cord at 60 GHz

The 60 GHz EHF wireless band, long dormant, is finally coming alive as more companies announce chip sets and products for high-bandwidth wireless display and video connectivity. Signals in this band can link up at distances to 100 ft, using multiple antenna arrays and beam-steering on TX/RX chips. With four channels allocated worldwide from 57 to 64 GHz, it is now practical to consider high-bandwidth wireless display connections to “cut the cord” from mobile devices, set-top boxes, and laptops at ultrahigh-definition resolutions. High-speed data connections emulating the Universal Serial Bus can also be made at these frequencies.

Increased wavelength VCSELs reach out

Work from Sweden and the US is extending the reach of low-cost laser and fibre technology to meet the growing needs of optical interconnects in the massive data centres that underpin our Internet-enabled world. Team member Ewa Simpanen holding up a set of VCSEL chips in the cleanroom at Chalmers University of Technology. VCSELs (Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers) are power efficient semiconductor lasers that can be produced in high volumes at low cost. They can also be directly modulated at high speed when biased at low currents. All of this makes them the preferred light source for the short-reach optical interconnects used in data centres and high-performance computing systems. In these applications, VCSELs are used with high modal bandwidth multimode fibre (MMF) to relax the laser-to-fibre alignment tolerance, which also reduces costs associated with assembly and packaging. With the development of cloud-based applications and Internet-delivered services, data centres operated by service providers like Facebook and Google are developing into very large facilities. These ‘mega’ data centres need optical interconnects that can reach beyond 1 km. This cannot be supported by current VCSEL-MMF technology owing to the large chromatic dispersion and attenuation in MMF at the standard wavelength – 850 nm. At longer wavelengths, dispersion and attenuation are much lower, allowing greater reach. This is the need that the team, from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in the US, are working to meet. Team member Ewa Simpanen told us, “The purpose of this work is to develop high-speed, longer wavelength those while still using the GaAs-based material systems as it enables the fabrication of VCSELs which are superior to those based on other material systems in terms of speed, efficiency, manufacturability, and cost.” Currently, large-scale data centres use single-mode fibres and long-wavelength silicon photonic transceivers to cover the needed distances. With longer wavelength GaAs-based VCSELs, it would be possible to build transmitters for long-range interconnects that are as power and cost efficient as those used for shorter reach interconnects. In this issue of Electronics Letters, the Chalmers and HPE team present a VCSEL design operating at 1060 nm. This high-speed, single-mode, low-resistance VCSEL can support bit-rates up to 50 Gbit/s while dissipating no more than 100 fJ of energy per bit; making it very energy efficient – on par with the state-of-the-art at 850 nm. “We have limited the wavelength extension to 1060 nm since the long-term reliability of GaAs-based VCSELs may be compromised if extending the wavelength beyond ∼1100 nm,” explained Simpanen. At 1060 nm, the fibre chromatic dispersion is reduced by 70% and attenuation by 50% compared to 850 nm. Using a single-mode VCSEL the narrow spectral width of the laser further reduces the impact of chromatic dispersion. With the single-mode VCSEL properly aligned to the MMF, only the fundamental mode of the fibre, or the lowest order mode group, is excited, which also reduces the impact of modal dispersion. “In these conditions, the fibre ideally acts as a pure attenuator without degrading the signal quality. All this together should enable data transmission distances compatible with what is required in mega data centres,” said Simpanen. The results reported in this issue deal with the modulation capacity of the VCSEL itself. Since then, the team have started investigating the data transmission capacity of optical interconnects using the VCSEL together with MMF designed for high modal bandwidth at 1060 nm and so far the results are very promising, according to Simpanen. “This prototype fibre is fabricated at and provided by Corning. In a first preliminary experiment, we have transmitted data at 25 Gbit/s over 1 km with some margin. We believe that higher data rates and/or longer transmission distances are possible with further optimisations. We will also investigate the alignment tolerances under mode selective launch as they are of utmost importance for practical implementations.” A microscope image of an array of VCSEL devices on chip; newly fabricated and ready for characterisation. Looking further ahead, the team think that continued engineering of conventional VCSEL designs and the implementation of more exotic VCSEL concepts for further significant speed improvements will play a big part in developing much higher capacity interconnects. Combined with electronic compensation techniques, such as equalisation and digital signal processing, higher order modulation formats, and more advanced forms of spatial and wavelength division multiplexing, they believe such lasers could eventually achieve aggregate interconnect capacities approaching 100 Tbit/s.

Dynamic Load Balancing of Dispatch Scheduling for Solid State Disks

Providing low-latency and high-throughput is an important design feature of an I/O scheduler. Especially, when multiple applications share and compete for a storage resource, the operating system is required to schedule the IO requests for the maximum throughput. Recently, the flash-based storage, solid-state drive (SSD) has been popularly used in various computing systems and traditional scheduling algorithms have been researched and tuned for the emerging flash-based storages. However, the SSDs suffer from the contention problem caused by multiple I/O requests and experience significant performance degradation. This is mainly due to the concurrently accesses to a finite set of flash memory chips. In this paper we propose Dynamic Load Balanced Queuing (DLBQ) that reorders the I/O requests and evenly distributes the accesses on flash memory chips to avoid contention. For that purpose, we have introduced a virtual time method which chases the run-time status of the SSD. We have evaluated the throughput and latency of DLBQ versus the four I/O schedulers with micro benchmarks and server benchmarks. The experimental results show that the throughput of DLBQ is improved by 11 percent on a 128 GB SSD and 15 percent on a 256 GB SSD while ensuring a bounded latency.

Antipiracy-Aware IP Chipset Design for CE Devices: A Robust Watermarking Approach [Hardware Matters

Intellectual property (IP) chip sets are indispensable components of consumer electronics (CE) products, such as set-top boxes, digital televisions, digital video discs (DVDs), tablets, digital cameras, and audio-video receivers. They represent several years of investment, research, and development through expensive infrastructure. Watermarking in IP chip sets for the protection of CE devices against false claims of ownership, piracy, and counterfeiting has proven to be a promising solution. However, the design process of a watermarked (antipiracy-aware) IP chip set is complex, and no published work exists in the literature to introduce a formal design methodology. This column presents a formal design approach for antipiracy-aware IP chip sets for CE devices. Using robust multivariable signature-encoding methodology, decoded watermarking constraints are embedded into the formal architectural synthesis design steps of an IP chip set. Each step of the IP chip set design is lucidly introduced with the aid of a real-life benchmark from the domain of multimedia and digital signal processing.

A System for Distinguishing Octoploid Strawberry Cultivars Using High-Throughput SNP Genotyping

Cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is an important commercial berry crop grown throughout the world. Improved strawberry cultivars are developed to meet the needs of consumers and breeders. Strawberries are usually propagated through runners, which sometimes lead to mislabeling or misinterpretation of cultivars. However, perfect identification of strawberry cultivars is essential for germplasm maintenance and for breeding programs. Molecular marker technology has been widely used to distinguish cultivars of other crops, but marker development in octoploid strawberries is complicated. Therefore, SNP marker with high-density and even distribution in the genome has been used currently as efficient DNA markers. In this report, previously published high-quality poly high resolution (PHR) SNPs from the 90 K Axiom® SNP array were utilized to develop a Fluidigm 24 SNPs genotyping system. Hundred nine (109) octoploid strawberry cultivars were screened using this 24 SNPs chip set. In addition, 24 SNPs were mapped to six chromosomes of diploid strawberry (Fragaria vesca). Our developed SNPs fluidigm genotyping is automatable, easy and reliable for processing and interpretation of data. Thus, this high-throughput SNP genotyping system will be a useful tool for distinguishing strawberry cultivars and find out parent-offspring relationship.

Ultrasound-Induced Magnetic Imaging of Tumors Targeted by Biofunctional Magnetic Nanoparticles.

Biofunctional magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have been widely applied in biomedical engineering. MNPs are used as a contrast medium in magnetic imaging. Current methods of magnetic imaging, such as magnetic particle imaging and magnetic relaxometry, use small amounts of MNPs at target points far from the surface of the patient's body; these methods always consume considerable power to produce magnetic fields of high uniformity or gradient excitations. Some drawbacks, such as a limited imaging region, imaging system shielding, and complex algorithms based on assumptions of MNP properties or environmental factors, also limit the application of MNP methods in clinics. Therefore, this work proposes an interdisciplinary methodology of ultrasound-induced magnetic imaging that lacks these drawbacks. In the proposed imaging method, magnet sets were designed with uniform magnetic fields to magnetize MNPs. Besides, magnetized MNPs are subjected to ultrasound vibrations; the motion of the MNPs induces weak induction voltages at the imaging pickup coils. The highly sensitive scanning superconducting quantum interference device biosusceptometry with three sets of ultrasound focus chips was developed to construct magnetic tomography at three depths. A phantom test showed favorable consistency between the visual photos and the magnetic images of alpha-fetoprotein antibody (anti-AFP) MNP distribution on gauzes. In animal tests, rats with liver tumors were imaged at the pre-injection and post-injection of anti-AFP MNPs. The consistent results of magnetic images and ultrasound images implied that the proposed method has high clinical potential.

RF Front-End Technologies--30 Years of Applied Research and Development [Book\/Software Reviews

The author, Mike Harris was a principal research engineer, division chief, and associate director in the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at Georgia Technical Research Institute. He has 40 years experience in semiconductor materials and device technology. He developed semiconductor processes for gallium nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) pseudomorphic HEMTs (pHEMTs). The second author, Rick Sturdivant, has industry experience designing products for microwave and millimeter-wave systems. He developed the world’s first array module for phased-array radar. He is currently president of Microwave Packaging Technology, Inc. This book focuses on RF application-specific integrated circuit chip set design for active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) for radar and communication applications in both transmit and receive modules. It condenses 30 years of applied research and development of RF front-end technologies. T/R modules technology topics covered in the text include an introduction to phased arrays in radar and communication systems, T/R modules, and module components; monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs); T/R module packaging; RF interconnect materials; thermal management for T/R modules, and MMICs; T/R module manufacturing and testing; module costs; and next-generation T/R modules.

Constitutional variants are not associated with HER2-positive breast cancer: results from the SIGNAL/PHARE clinical cohort

Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer is a subtype of interest regarding its outcome and the impressive impact of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 targeted therapy. Constitutional variants may be involved in the aetiology of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer, and we propose a case–case study to test the hypothesis that single nucleotide polymorphisms may be associated with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status. A Genome-Wide Association Study was used in a cohort of 9836 patients from the SIGNAL/PHARE study (NCT00381901-RECF1098). The main goal was to identify variants specifically related to human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer. A two-staged genotyping strategy was carried out to cover as large a proportion of the genome as possible. All subjects were genotyped using the Illumina HumanCore Exome chip set. Principal Components Analysis and k-means were then used to characterize the ancestry of the participants. A random sample of subjects from the main “European” cluster was genotyped with the Omni5 chip set. These data were then used to impute missing genotypes from the remaining subjects genotyped only using the HumanCore Exome array. From the 9836 patients, a total of 8703 cases including 3230 patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer were analyzed. Despite having 80% power to detect an odds ratio of 1.23 in this population, no variant achieved genome-wide significance for association with the occurrence of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–positive breast cancer vs. any other subtype of breast tumour. Our study was unable to identify constitutional polymorphisms that are strongly associated with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive status among breast cancer patients.

Tag, You're It Radar Cross Section of Chipless RFID Tags

Mass deployment of RF identification (RFID) is hindered by its cost per tag. The main cost comes from the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip set in a tag. A chipless tag costs less than a cent, and these have the potential for mass deployment for low-cost, item-level tagging as the replacement technology for optical barcodes. Chipless RFID tags can be directly printed on paper or plastic packets just like barcodes. They are highly useful for automatic identification and authentication, supply-chain automation, and medical applications. Among their potential industrial applications are authenticating of polymer bank notes; scanning of credit cards, library cards, and the like; tracking of inventory in retail settings; and identification of pathology and other medical test samples.

Dual liquid porosimetry: A porosity measurement technique for oil- and gas-bearing shales

Measuring and differentiating effective and ineffective porosity in oil- and gas-shale remains a challenging step in the calculation of hydrocarbon reserves. Shale composition, typically dominated by clay minerals and organic matter (OM), forms a complex pore system, making the proportion between effective and ineffective porosity variable and difficult to determine in the course of porosity measurement.In this study, total porosity was measured from a set of rock chips using both light kerosene (kerosene immersion porosimetry-KIP) and deionized (DI) water (water immersion porosimetry-WIP) as saturation-immersion fluids. Both KIP and WIP measurements were performed on samples equilibrated at 40% and 80% relative humidity (RH) and combined with water adsorption isotherms to estimate the range of clay-bound water (CBW). A combination of these procedures, and the use of kerosene and water as the saturation-immersion fluids, is hereafter called dual-liquid porosimetry (DLP). To test the method, two different burial diagenetic sequences of mudstone with different mineralogy and OM content were used.The results demonstrate that all the porosity values show a consistent declining trend with depth regardless of sample origin and type of saturation-immersion fluid used in the measurement process. Samples saturated with DI water were susceptible to swelling and the swelling decreased with sample depth, maturation and cementation, and increased with illite-smectite mineral content and degree of expandability. A consistently lower calculated grain density for KIP samples compared with WIP samples reflected incomplete pore saturation by kerosene. Kerosene saturation can be restricted by the presence of residual water that blocks kerosene pathways to small pores. This limitation, however, reflects geologic formation conditions making KIP measurement a good approximation for maximum liquid hydrocarbon-available porosity. Equilibrating the rock chips at 40% and 80% RH provides a rapid evaluation of the range of CBW that may represent ineffective porosity under various formation conditions. CBWmin (40% RH) constitutes roughly 1W–2W smectite equivalent layers and gives an estimation of bound water close to high hydrocarbon saturation. CBWmax (80% RH) represents the maximum possible bound water content in formations with higher water saturation. For samples, with low porosity and a significant content of expandable clay minerals and cation exchange capacity, CBW can constitute up to 100% of rock porosity.In order to avoid the limitations and assumptions of WIP (swelling) and KIP (incomplete saturation of nanopores), a combination of grain density and bulk density measured by WIP and KIP, respectively, was proposed. The paper further tests and discusses the pitfalls of saturation-immersion techniques.

The use of near infrared hyperspectral imaging for the prediction of processing parameters associated with the pelleting of biomass feedstocks

Near infrared hyperspectral imaging combined with chemometrics was used to assess the potential for the prediction of the moisture content, specific energy and the feed rate of the feedstock into the pellet die. Samples were produced from a diverse set of agricultural products and wood chips, with a range of moisture contents. Image analysis was also utilised to assess the efficient mixing of biomass feedstocks prior to pelleting in a multi biomass stream. The moisture content (%), specific energy (kWhkg−1) and feed rate (kgmin−1) were predicted with root mean square errors of prediction of cross validation of 1.11% (R2=0.94), 0.12kWhkg−1 (R2=0.64) and 0.20kgmin−1 (R2=0.70), respectively. The results of this study indicate that near infrared hyperspectral imaging has the potential to be incorporated into a biomass pelleting facility to improve the efficiency of the system.

Towards reliable optical label-free point-of-care (PoC) biosensing devices

In this work, we report a method to read-out optical biosensors that significantly enhance the Limit of Detection (LoD). In a previous work we introduced the concept of “Increased Relative Optical Power” (IROP), related to the interferometric optical signals of two interferometers as a biosensing method to measure biological species [1] (Holgado et al., 2014). We predicted that this theory might have important implications for developing compact Point of Care (PoC) devices with a significant improvement in the LoD. Moreover, this method can be used for reading-out most of the optical transducers reported in the literature. While in that first study we demonstrated theoretically and experimentally this novel concept by using a conventional high-resolution spectrometer, in this article we report the performance of a novel compact PoC device specifically developed on IROP principle to demonstrate these expected predictions. This improvement in the performance is shown: Firstly by measuring a set of chips simulating thin biofilm thicknesses and fabricated by atomic layer deposition (ALD), and secondly by carrying out a direct immunoassay based on the complex anti-IgG/IgG. Finally, both results are compared with standard high-resolution spectrometry. The main conclusion is that this novel compact PoC based on IROP concept considerably enhance the LoD and performance in a cost-effective manner.

Review of Millimeter-Wave Integrated Circuits With Low Power Consumption for High Speed Wireless Communications

Abstract In this paper we review high-speed radio-frequency integrated circuits operating up to 210 GHz and present selected state-of-the-art circuits with leading-edge performance, which we have designed at our chair. The following components are discussed employing bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductors (BiCMOS) technologies: a 200 GHz amplifier with 17 dB gain and around 9 dB noise figure consuming only 18 mW, a 200 GHz down mixer with 5.5 dB conversion gain and 40 mW power consumption, a 190 GHz receiver with 47 dB conversion gain and 11 dB noise figure and a 60 GHz power amplifier with 24.5 dBm output power and 12.9 % power added efficiency (PAE). Moreover, we report on a single-core flash CMOS analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) with 3 bit resolution and a speed of 24 GS/s. Finally, we discuss a 60 GHz on-off keying (OOK) BiCMOS transceiver chip set. The wireless transmission of data with 5 Gb/s at 42 cm distance between transmitter and receiver was verified by experiments. The complete transceiver consumes 396 mW.

A Wideband Bandpass Filter With Frequency Selectivity Controlled by SAW Resonators

A wideband bandpass filter (BPF) with two cascaded sections, each consisting of a surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonator and one or two transmission lines in parallel, is proposed. The lower and upper rolloffs of the passband are separately controlled by the narrowband characteristics of the SAW resonators to realize high frequency selectivity. The filter principle is analyzed for the two sections using the modified Butterworth-Van Dyke model for SAW resonators. The effects of cascading the two sections using a transmission line are also discussed. To demonstrate the proposed filter topology, two types of resonators are chosen from a limited set of available SAW resonator chips. The filter is designed and simulated based on the data of on-wafer measurements of the chip resonators. It is shown that the wideband behavior of the SAW resonators has impact on the filter. A prototype BPF centered at 2.02 GHz is implemented on PCB combining the discrete chip SAW resonators and microstrip lines. The chips are assembled using 1-mil wire bond technique. The measured filter has a 3-dB fractional bandwidth of 28.8% with high frequency selectivity.

A High-Performance Pathway: a 0.95\/2.45-GHZ Switched-Frequency Bandpass Filter Using Commercially Available RF MEMS Tuning Elements

Software-defined radio chip sets are becoming increasingly available for a wide variety of RF bands including the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands. Efficient operation of systems like these typically requires high-performance, multifunctional RF filters to enable preselection of the signals of interest while suppressing undesired interferers and noise. To fulfill these requirements and ensure high-quality transmission of the desired signal within a range of ISM bands using a single compact signal path, miniaturized and highly selective bandpass filters (BPFs) with broadband switching/tuning capabilities need to be developed.

SeMIA: Self-Similarity-Based IC Integrity Analysis

Counterfeit chips in the supply chain as well as hardware Trojan (HT) attacks pose serious threats to the semiconductor industry. If undetected before deployment, they can lead to serious consequences including system performance/reliability issues during field operation and potential revenue/reputation loss for a trusted manufacturer. Currently, no unified detection method is available that can simultaneously address these integrity violations in integrated circuits (ICs). In addition, most existing detection approaches require a set of golden chips as a reference, which significantly increases the test cost and complexity. Furthermore, in some scenarios, it may be extremely difficult to obtain golden chips. In this paper, we present a novel unified IC integrity analysis approach that can effectively detect both recycled counterfeit ICs (the most dominant form of counterfeiting) as well as Trojan attacks in ICs without the need of golden chips. The proposed approach, referred to as self-similarity-based microchip integrity analysis (SeMIA), exploits intrinsic structural self-similarity in a design (e.g., multiple cores, multiple functional units of the same type, different parts of an adder) to isolate recycled chips and HT attacks under large inter- and intra-die process variations. It compares dynamic current ( ${I} _{\text {DDT}}$ ) signatures between two adjacent similar circuit structures using an appropriate isolation metric to detect such attacks with high degree of confidence. SeMIA does not rely on any embedded structure for authentication, thus it comes at virtually zero hardware overhead and can be applied to chips already produced. Through extensive simulations, we show that for 15% inter- and 10% intra-die variations in threshold voltage for a 45 nm CMOS process, over 98% of recycled chips can be reliably identified. Finally, experimental measurements on field programmable gate array chips demonstrate effectiveness of SeMIA for protection against both attacks.

Mouse Resistin (mRetn): cloning, expression and purification in Escherichia coli and the potential regulative effects on murine bone marrow hematopoiesis.

BackgroundResistin (Retn) is a cytokine which has a controversial physiological role regarding its involvement with obesity and type II diabetes mellitus. Recently, murine Retn was found to be a possibly potential regulator of hematopoiesis in mice shown in the screening results of a set of gene chips which mapped the expression level of murine genes during regeneration of impaired bone marrow (BM) by 5-fluorouracil.ResultsRecombinant mice Retn was expressed in Escherichia coli and purified using ion exchange chromatography. Totally 11.4 mg rmRetn was obtained from 500 ml culture with endotoxin level less than 1.0 EU/ug. The purity of recombinant murine Resistin reached to at least 97.6 % via SDS-PAGE analysis and HPLC. The protein possessed chemotaxis effects in the mouse aortic endothelial cells in vitro in transwell analysis. In vitro, rmRetn could up regulate the CFU number of mice BM and after rmRetn was administered, the cell number of murine bone marrow was significantly increased in vivo after chemotherapy. Finally, rmRetn was found able to protect mice from the chemotoxicity of 5-fluorouracil.ConclusionsThe discovery demonstrated a new function of murine Retn and suggested that it could potentially accelerate bone marrow regeneration post chemotherapy.

Thermal-stress analysis and calculation of single and dual chip set double-sided circuit board based on three-dimensional finite element algorithm

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze and figure out the temperature field and thermal stress field with the calculation model of thermal insulation material and composite material. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopted the three-dimensional finite element algorithm. Findings – The simulated results showed great shearing strength between the chipset and the printed circuit board. The position of chip exerts great influence on the distribution of temperature field and thermal stress field of circuit board. The reasonable distribution of chip will effectively reduce the temperature extremum and stress extremum of circuit board. Originality/value – The paper analyzes and presents a discussion of the problems relating to the density of electronic packaging. The analysis process and the method of the paper provide essential help in resolving electronic device heat problems.

Enabling Electronics With Physically Flexible ICs and Hybrid Manufacturing

Printed and flexible electronic components have been used and proposed in a wide range of markets, including biomedical, environmental, computers, energy, and communication. Fully printed and flexible electronic systems promise great advantages in ease of manufacture, weight, durability, and physical conformity, but such systems have failed to achieve widespread adoption. Printed technology still seeks solutions in the areas of complex logic, analog circuitry, power usage, and light emission. First, the benefits and challenges of taking hybrid manufacturing approaches that combine printed components with either traditional integrated circuits or recently fabricated complex flexible devices are discussed. Second, a recently realized set of physically flexible integrated circuits poised to accelerate the development of flexible sensor systems is presented, enabling the combination of low cost and large format printed systems with high performance and low-power silicon-based semiconductors. The chip set addresses the three requirements of flexible sensor systems, namely, sensor readout, signal processing, and communications with three chips—an analog-to-digital converter, a microcontroller, and an RF communicator. This technology may revolutionize such things as smart, wearable consumer devices, flexible and conformal industrial applications, and smart structures for military, automotive, and aerospace.