Here you can read the feature articles and author interviews that appear in every issue of the new-look Electronics Letters To view issue tables of contents and all of the technical papers, please visit Electronics Letters on the IET Digital Library [new window].
New pseudo-spin-transistors could create an alternative development path for low-power and high-performance CMOS logic systems.
Dr Clint Schow and Dr Alexander Rylyakov from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center talk about their Letter 30-Gbit/s, 850-nm, VCSEL-based optical link.
Continuously tunable lead-salt VECSELs look set to fill the gap of reliable and compact light sources for 3-4 μm absorption spectroscopy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This unique supplement to Electronics Letters contains a mix of contemporary articles, Insight Letters, Landmark Letters and recent technical Letters which explore the past, present and future of silicon photonics.
The cover image is based on the silicon evanescent laser developed by researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara and Intel.
