In a move intended to increase the competitiveness of its industrial partners, CEA-Leti has launched the Silicon Impulse IC design competence centre. According to the French research organisation, Silicon Impulse will offer IC design services, advanced IP, emulation and test services, as well as multiproject wafer shuttles. In a move inten...

The merger between Cypress and Spansion has been completed ahead of schedule, creating a company that will be the third largest supplier of memories and MCUs to the automotive industry.Cypress' president and CEO TJ Rodgers, pictured, said: "The new Cypress will capitalise on its expanded product portfolio and leadership positions in em...

Scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich have developed a prototype solid state lithium ion battery which is said to have an improved interface between solid electrolyte and electrodes. The cell, said to be the forerunner of a new generation of such devices, has been charged and discharged in the laboratory more than 350 times. Lithiu...

Silicon Labs and ARM are working together deliver power management application programming interfaces (APIs) for ARM mbed platforms. According to the companies, the APIs will enable the mbed community to optimise their designs for energy efficiency and longer battery life.Zach Shelby, ARM's vice president of IoT business marketing, said: &q...

A new communications technology developed by IBM Research and Semtech is said to offer 'significant advantages' over cellular networks and Wi-Fi when it comes to M2M communications.The technology, called LoRaWAN – Long Range wide-area networks – taps the unlicensed wireless spectrum, allowing sensors to communicate over long...

Infineon has introduced the OptiMOS 5 product family of 25V and 30V devices, including power MOSFETs in standard discrete packages, a new class of power stages named Power Block and in an integrated power stage called DrMOS 5x5.According to the company, efficiency improvements of around 1% have been made across the whole load range compared to...

As part of a major project which aims to build on the legacy of the BBC Micro, the BBC plans give a personal coding device to every child across the country starting secondary school in September 2015.The device, which is still in development, is currently called Micro Bit. The BBC says it will be a small, wearable device with an LED display th...

Although multicore processors have been available for some years, methods that allow software to take advantage of multicore processing have been slow to evolve. Looking to address the issue, computer scientists from Saarland University say they have developed a tool that parallelises code sections automatically, whilst giving developers programmin...

SoCs for critical applications could use 28% less energy and 48% less chip area while offering hardware failure rate nine times lower, if they were designed using the Desyre architecture, according to the European project. The result, the project adds, would reduce hospital costs and replacement rate of medical devices drastically.The DeSyRe (o...

Scientists in Japan believe perovskites have the potential to improve the fabrication of electrodes and wiring in devices such as multilayer ceramic capacitors, as well as spark plugs.Such devices are composed of oxides and metals – the oxides provide the product's electric, optical or magnetic properties, while the metals are used in...