Science Daily March 20, 2023 To ensure the absence of Trojans in commissioned chips, one straightforward solution is to compare the received semiconductor devices to the design files that were initially submitted to the foundry. The fundamental techniques to detect Trojans which require evident changes to the silicon layout are well-understood. According to an international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium) there is a glaring lack of public case studies describing the process in its entirety while making the underlying datasets publicly available. To improve upon this state of the art they presented a public and open hardware Trojan detection case […]
Category Archives: Microchips
Physicists work to shrink microchips with first one-dimensional helium model system
Phys.org July 6, 2022 As the spatial dimension is lowered, locally stabilizing interactions are reduced, leading to the emergence of strongly fluctuating phases of matter without classical analogues. A team of researchers in the US (University of Tennessee, Argonne National Laboratory, Caltech, University of Indiana) describes the experimental observation of a one-dimensional quantum liquid of 4He using nanoengineering by confining it within a porous material preplated with a noble gas to enhance dimensional reduction. The resulting excitations of the confined 4He are qualitatively different than bulk superfluid helium and can be analyzed in terms of a mobile impurity allowing for […]
Researchers integrate optical devices made of multiple materials onto single chip
Science Daily September 29, 2021 An international team of researchers (UK, Italy, Australia) has developed transfer printing process and demonstrated its ability to place devices made of multiple materials on a single chip, all integrated within a footprint similar in size to the devices themselves. The method is based on reversible adhesion in which a device is picked up and released from its growth substrate and placed onto a new surface. The process uses a soft polymer stamp mounted on a robotic motion control stage to pick up an optical device from the substrate on which it was made. When […]
First steps towards revolutionary ULTRARAM™ memory chips
Science Daily March 29, 2021 Researchers in the UK have implemented ULTRARAM which is a III-V compound semiconductor memory concept that exploits quantum resonant tunneling to achieve nonvolatility at extremely low switching energy per unit area. They exploited resonant tunneling that allows a barrier to switch from opaque to transparent by applying a small voltage. ULTRARAM™, is a working implementation of the so-called ‘universal memory’, with all the advantages of DRAM and flash, with none of the drawbacks. They integrated ULTRARAM™ devices into small (4-bit) arrays which allowed them to experimentally verify the memory architecture that would form the basis […]
Microchips of the future: Suitable insulators are still missing
Nanowerk March 9, 2021 The demands placed by CMOS logic circuits at their ultimate scaling limits could be satisfied by a number of layered 2D materials. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is widely considered to be the most promising gate insulator for meeting challenging requirements for gate insulators. An international team of researchers (Austria, Russia, Switzerland, Japan, Saudi Arabia) assess the material parameters and performance limits of hBN. They compared experimental and theoretical tunnel currents through ultrathin layers of hBN and other 2D gate insulators, including the ideal case of defect-free hBN. Though its properties make hBN a candidate for many […]