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Former Electronic Engineering editor Ron Neale has tracked the progress of phase-change memory (PCM) for many years. His work on the technology dates back to when it was first proposed as a rad-hard memory for the military. Since then, PCM has promised to become a universal, low-power memory but, some 40 years, on has still failed to achieve it.

The development of a carbon-nanotube form of PCM could signal a way for the technology to deliver on its promise -…

When Panasonic said it would ship its first parts based on a 32nm high-k, metal-gate process by last October, technical analyst firm Dick James of Chipworks was confident the company would hit its deadline and beat many of the other companies planning HKMG.

It took a while but James says Chipworks has now found a Panasonic…

A little over ten years, David Miller of Stanford University argued that optical interconnects for electronic chips would ultimately become necessary:

“Optics is arguably a very interesting and different physical approach to interconnection that can in principle address most, if not all, of the problems encountered in electrical interconnections.”

Miller found problems…

The advantage of system on-chip (SoC) design is that the architects have a lot of control over the power consumption of the equipment because so much of the logic is tied up in one chip. Potentially, the savings can be big because system software can determine which of the functional units are running at any one time. That is as long as they make use of that control.

Writing for EETimes Designline, Satish Sathe of Applied Micro Circuits…