Electronics Letters: vol 46 issue 14

Featured article

Interview with Nicolas Gisin and Rob Thew

Nicolas Gisin and Rob Thew, world leading researchers in quantum communication at the University of Geneva and authors of the invited Insight Letter Quantum communication technologies, tell us why they enjoy their field.

Also in this issue

• Forming a bond

  Glass could become the wafer material of the future for many microelectronic and photonic devices thanks to a new anodic bonding technique.

  
  

• The coin’s edge

  The smallest ever series of true random number generators push efficiency right to the limit.

  
  

• Finding fault

  Networks-on-chip (NoC) have been convincingly demonstrated as suitable for organising on-chip communication. However, technology scaling increases the probability of faults, making reliability a major issue. A low-power NoC monitoring circuit based on thresholds has been presented by researchers from the UK, which is able to distinguish not only between transient and non-transient faults, but also faults in NoC links and routers.

  
  

• Plane uniform

  Cadmium telluride (CdTe) as an absorber in solar cells has many advantages for photovoltaic energy conversion.  However, thickness uniformity in the deposition process is limited.  Now, researchers from Korea have used a chemical mechanical planarisation process to investigate the optical properties and to enhance the thickness uniformity of CdTe thin films, improving their absorbance after deposition.

  
  

• Direct conversion

  A parallel DAC architecture suitable for direct digital-to-RF transmitters and simultaneous multiband operation has been developed by researchers from the USA. Such converters are known to suffer with problems of nonlinearity, but using time-shifted clocks and interleaved signals, their topology cancels nonlinearity spurs and enables near-to-Nyquist operation.

  
  

• A reliable guide?

  Evaluating the performance of approaches for extraction of image features independent of scale, orientation and photometrical changes is an important issue in vision research. The most widely employed metric is repeatability rate, however it has been seen that this does not necessarily match actual performance. Researchers in the UK present an improved repeatability formulation and find that this alters the choice of ‘best’ detector.

  
  

• The quiet sensitive type

  Miller theorem-based varactors can be used to increase the tuning range of voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs), but at the cost of introducing noise via an auxiliary amplifier, which degrades the VCO phase noise. Researchers in Taiwan have demonstrated an LC-VCO with an architecture that prevents this degradation and has high sensitivity, making it suitable for low-voltage applications.