www.eenewseurope.com January 2019 electronics europe News News e-skin beats human touch Swedish startup beats e-Ink on low-power Special Focus: Power Sources european business press November 2011 Electronic Engineering Times Europe1 181231_8-3_Mill_EENE_EU_Snipe.indd 1 12/14/18 3:59 PM 181231_QualR_EENE_EU.indd 1 12/14/18 3:53 PM CONTENTS JANUARY 2019 Dear readers, www.eenewseurope.com January 2019 The Consumer Electronics Show has just closed its doors in Las Vegas, yet the show has opened the mind of many designers, some returning home with new electronics europe News News ideas and possibly new companies to be founded. All the electronic devices unveiled at CES share in common the need for a cheap power source and a lot of research goes into making power sources more sus- tainable. While lithium-ion batteries are commercially mature, their long-term viability is often questioned and new battery chemistries are being investigated for their simpler material sourcing, lower cost and sometime increased energy density. Energy harvesting is another feature that is more and more often inte- e-skin beats human touch grated into wearables but also at grid-level. Our Power Sources feature will give you a market insight and reviews some of the latest findings. Other topics covered in our January edition are Sensors and Data Encryption, two aspects of electronics that used to be two worlds apart and that are now often tightly integrated, one relying on the other. Swedish startup beats e-Ink on low-power With this first edition of 2019, let me wish you all an excellent year and plenty Special Focus: Power Sources of new business opportunities, whether you are designing the future for a european business press startup or working for a well-established company. November 2011 Electronic Engineering Times Europe 1 Julien Happich 181231_8-3_Mill_EENE_EU_Snipe.indd 1 Editor in Chief 12/14/18 3:59 PM 4 - 50: OPINION 32 - 39: POWER SOURCES At the tipping point of a new energy era Uncommon Market: In 2035, the world will be on an accelerated path to RRAM-based TCAMs reduce greenhouse gas viable for neuromorphic emissions and eventually processors become carbon neutral by 2050. Bart Onsia, expert Last word: The Era of Connected Cars and business develop- ment manager at imec and 6 - 21: NEWS & TECHNOLOGY EnergyVille, talks about the outlook for solar energy generation and storage. Taiwanese startup to fuel 5G era with 2228ppi AMOLED displays 40 - 43: BIOMETRICS & DATA ENCRYPTION Frictionless banking: the future – or fool’s gold? AimBrain promises to capture any user data – voice, face, Founded in 2016 with a vision to enable the oncom- behavioural or otherwise – in ing high-bandwidth 5G era and the delivery of ultra- a bank’s secure environ- high resolution content, Taiwanese startup INT Tech ment, and convert it to a has developed a proprietary glass-based deposition non-reversible mathematical construct for passive process to deliver red/green/blue AMOLED displays behavioural authentication and real-time security risk at pixel densities of 2228ppi. assessment. 22 - 31: SENSORS 46: READER OFFER & SIGNAL CONDITIONING This month, Microchip Technology is giving away Lab-on-skin chip analyses five MGC3140 Emerald sweat even at rest Development Kits, worth Researchers from EPFL’s Nanolab $199 each, for eeNews have devised a lab-on-chip that Europe’s readers to win. integrates differently functionalized ion-sensitive FETs (ISFET) with 49: DISTRIBUTION CORNER specially designed microfluidics able to passively pump minute amounts of sweat to be analysed out of the wearer’s skin, even when the subject is at rest. eeNews Europe www.eenewseurope.com January 2019 News 3 UNCOMMON MARKET Control of Anything, From CEA-Leti proves RRAM-based TCAMs Anywhere with Peace of Mind viable for neuromorphic processors Build Smart, Connected and Secure Designs By Julien Happich n a joint paper titled “In-depth Characterization of Resistive applications requiring many read/write cycles, trading speed for Memory-Based Ternary Content Addressable Memories”, better search/read endurance and better search margin could researchers from French research institute CEA-Leti and from be sufficient to retain network configuration data in a multi-core Ithe Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and neuromorphic chip where long match times (from few tens to ETH Zurich have proven the viability of resistive-RAM (RRAM) hundreds of μs) are required to be compatible with spike length. for network packet routing in multicore neuromorphic circuits. In the paper presented at IEDM 2018, the re- searchers detail a compact RRAM layout that can be directly integrated in the Back End Of Line of a 130nm CMOS process, on top of the fourth metal layer, slashing silicon area by a factor of 8 compared to the implementation of conventional 16-transistor Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAM). TCAM circuits provide a way to search large data sets using masks that indicate ranges, making these circuits useful for complex routing and big data ap- plications, where an exact match is rarely necessary. With TCAMs, stored information can be searched by its content, as opposed to classic memory systems in which a memory cell’s stored information is retrieved by its physical address. This shortens search times dramatically, but due to their relatively cumbersome architecture (16 CMOS transistors), TCAMs’ storage capacity is often limited to tens of Mbs in standard memory structures in order SEM cross section of the integrated TiN/HfO2 /Ti/TiN RRAM. Both HfO2 and Ti to save up valuable silicon real estate. layers are only 10nm thick. By replacing the SRAM cells with resistive-RAM (RRAM) in So to improve the search margin and search/read endurance, TCAM circuits, the researchers reduced the number of required the researchers adopted strong RRAM programming conditions, transistors to two (2T), and to two RRAMs (2R). In addition, low search voltage and a limited word length. This came at the they were able to fabricate the RRAMs on top of the transistors, expense of lower performance in terms of longer search laten- which further reduced the required silicon real estate (hence the cies and lower write endurance, but as the authors emphasized 8x shrink). in their conclusion, multi-core neuromorphic computing archi- But coming up with an innovative architecture was not tectures would not be affected by these problems and could enough, as reliability issues were looming and such RRAMs greatly benefit from the RRAM’s high density. may not be suitable for every application. What the authors In such an application, search operations are frequent, but explain is that circuit reliability is strongly dependent on the write operations are few and idle times are long, taking full ad- ratio between the ON and OFF states of the memory cells, and vantage from the zero standby power consumption of RRAMs RRAM-based TCAMs have a relatively low ON/OFF ratio (from while not being affected by the longer search latencies and 10 to 100) with respect to the 16-transistor structure with an lower write endurance. ON/OFF ratio about 105, and RRAMs also suffer from a limited One example cited in the paper is the NeuRAM3 DYNAP-SEL endurance with respect to CMOS transistors. neuromorphic chip (EU H2020 Project running until 2019) whose processing cores comprise multiple TCAM cells per neuron to To identify the right trade-offs and overcome these challeng- implement memory-optimized source-address routing schemes. es, the researchers clarified the link between RRAM electrical These TCAM cells are typically small and are only programmed properties and TCAM performance with extensive characteriza- at network configuration time. www.microchip.com/SmartConnectedSecure tions of a fabricated RRAM-based circuit. The limited endur- ance can be overcome by either decreasing the voltage applied “Assuming many future neuromorphic computing architec- during each search, or increasing the power used to program tures will have thousands of cores, the non-volatility feature of the TCAM cells beforehand. The research showed a trade-off the proposed TCAM circuits will provide an additional crucial exists between TCAM performance (search speed) and TCAM benefit, since users will have to upload all the configuration bits reliability (match/mismatch detection and search/read endur- only the first time the network is configured,” explains Denys ance). R.B. Ly, a Ph.D. student at Leti and lead author of the paper. While a performance reduction in order to increase endur- “Users will also be able to skip this potentially time-consum- ance could be a critical limiting factor in standard TCAM-based ing process every time the chip is reset or power-cycled.” The Microchip name and logo and the Microchip logo are registered trademarks of Microchip Technology Incorporated in the U.S.A. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their registered owners. © 2018 Microchip Technology Inc. All rights reserved. DS00002758A. 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