Electronics Letters: volume 47 issue 18

Featured article

A new spin on the MOSFET

New pseudo-spin-transistors could create an alternative development path for low-power and high-performance CMOS logic systems.

Also in this issue

• Interview with Clint Schow and Alexander Rylyakov, IBM

  Dr Clint Schow (right) and Dr Alexander Rylyakov (left) from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in the US talk about their Letter 30-Gbit/s, 850-nm, VCSEL-based optical link.

  
  

• A VECSEL worth its salt

  Continuously tunable lead-salt VECSELs look set to fill the gap of reliable and compact light sources for 3-4 μm absorption spectroscopy.

  
  

• Top division

  A current re-used divide-by-3 injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) operating above 110GHz is presented in work from Taiwan. Previous designs have been limited to below 100 GHz but this ILFD, fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process, achieves an input locking range between 117.45 and 118.38 GHz, consuming only 12 mW on a 1.3 V supply.

  
  

• A problem shared

  Researchers in Taiwan and Canada have demonstrated a ‘mutual-protection’ ESD protection scheme, which allows the capacitance of the protection device to be in the femto-farad range. The scheme involves sharing the ESD current between a diode string and the output transistor, and allows the discharge of ESD currents greater than the summation current of the two individual devices.

  
  

• Height of power

  Researchers in Germany have developed DFB ridge waveguide lasers for the generation of nanosecond optical pulses with very high peak power. With a high frequency GaN transistor for amplification, the 4 ns-long pulses with a peak power of 2.6 W and a spectral width of 40 pm represent record values.

  
  

• Ultra-adaptable

  An ultrasound beamformer using parallel-operated sample-and-hold delay lines with digitally-assisted delay control and charge-mode summation has been proposed by researchers in The Netherlands. Their circuit is programmable and flexible, and can be easily adapted to ultrasound receivers with various delay requirements.

  
  

• Independently different

  A background subtraction video segmentation algorithm that works by modelling the different appearances of a pixel in a set of independent layers has been developed by researchers in Spain. Their methods may help in video semantics and advance such fields as interactive video navigation and video security.