Inside Electronics

The PCI-SIG PCI Express Gen 7 standard is now available but work has not stopped there. PCIe Gen 8 is on the horizon and with a planned doubling of the bandwidth to 256 GT/s. This will be challenging from a number of perspectives from support copper connections at this speed to advancements in the protocol.  

In this episode, Electronic Design talks to Karl Wachswender, Senior Principal System Architect at Lattice Semiconductor. Lattice is well known for its power efficient FPGAs that support artificial intelligence (AI) applications. They also address post-quantum cryptography, and are found in demanding applications like automotive. 

Nanusens creates nanoscale sensor structures inside the CMOS layers using standard CMOS processes within the same production flow as making the control electronics on the same chip. This approach reduces the size and cost as it benefits from the vast economies of scale of using giant CMOS fabs. The resulting single chip solution has a packaged size of 0.5 mm³. This episode delves into the technology, its future, and some limitations.

Christian Bornschein, Manager of Marketing & Sales at Port Industrial Automation, talks about how Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is employed in industrial automation. We also discuss some real-world examples and how TSN enables simpler, more effective industrial control product development. 

RAID, redundant array of independent disks, uses redundancy to provide a more robust disk drive array capable of operation even with the loss of a drive. RAID 1 replicates data with a 50% overhead. RAID 5 and 6 are more common in larger arrays with less overhead as more drives are added to the mix but with a tradeoff in performance.  
Mark Anthony, Product Line Manager at Microchip Technology, talks about the company's SmartRAID 4300 Series, which is designed to accelerate the operation of RAID arrays implemented build on NVMe drives.

AI workloads and other advanced computing applications continue to expand, pressuring the development community with the dual challenges of performance and manufacturability. Traditional SoCs are approaching their limits in terms of size, yield, and cost, and one solution lies in chiplet-based architectures. In this episode, we talk to Larry Zu, CEO at Sarcina Technology, and how the company is deploying interconnect to minimize signal crosstalk and enhance signal integrity.

Synaptics is well known for their touch technology, but they do a lot more including their new Astra SL2610 family of system-on-chip (SoC) that incorporates Google’s open source, Coral artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator. Synaptics’ Vikram Gupta talks about the Synaptics' continuing push for edge AI and how that is tied into their other offerings that touch on everything from wireless connectivity to biometrics.  

Wide-bandgap semiconductors like silicon carbide (SiC) have changed the landscape of electronics and have fomented a revolution in power conversion. In this podcast, we talk to Adam Barkley, VP, Power Technology Development at Wolfspeed, about the state of the industry in silicon carbide and where the industry is going.

We can simulate everything very exactly, but when it comes to that analog interface between the system and reality, you must be very careful because sometimes things don't behave in the analog realm the way they're predicted to. In this episode, we talk to Dermot O'Shea, CEO of Taoglas, about the state of the cloud and IoT and the challenges in developing products to operate well within it. 

The world of test and measurement is getting more complex and challenging in many ways. There are multiple factors impacting the T&M industry, from materials to new topologies to smaller form factors with even higher levels of integration and power density. In this episode, we talk to the CEO of Liquid Instruments, Daniel Shaddock, about the current situation in the test and measurement industry and the company’s software-defined test solutions.