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Novel Devices ♦ news digest


Qualcomm & Sharp To Invigorate LCD Displays


The displays will incorporate Sharp’s IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) technology and be built utilising existing LCD manufacturing infrastructure, and Qualcomm’s equity investment in Sharp.


Qualcomm is expanding its display technology agreement between its subsidiary Pixtronix, Inc. and Sharp Corporation to develop and commercialise high-quality colour, low-power MEMS displays.


As a result of the equity investment, Qualcomm will become a minority shareholder in Sharp.


Qualcomm’s equity investment in Sharp and the expanded joint development agreement build upon the existing work between Sharp and Pixtronix; the two companies have been engaged in development activities for the last year and a half.


The goal of this joint effort is to accelerate commercialisation of Pixtronix’s low power MEMS displays utilising Sharp’s IGZO technology.


The equity investment by Qualcomm will take place in stages and the consummation of the transaction is subject to certain contingencies.


“As one of the leading electronics companies in the world, Sharp has an established industry brand and is a recognised leader in the development and commercialisation of new innovative display technologies,” says Derek Aberle, executive vice president and group president of Qualcomm.


“Expanding our existing relationship with Sharp to jointly commercialize new MEMS display technologies will help both companies realise their shared goal of driving high performance, lower power displays for a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets.”


“Sharp has brought many innovations to the display industry, including the world’s first commercialisation of IGZO technology in LCD displays this year,” adds Yoshisuke Hasegawa, executive managing officer of Sharp Corporation. “Sharp is targeting to accelerate the commercialisation of MEMS displays by combining Sharp’s cutting-edge IGZO technology and Pixtronix’s MEMS display technology.”


InGaAs MOSFETs could beat Moore’s Law


Indium gallium arsenide transistors could snatch silicon’s crown


Silicon’s crown could be under threat. The semiconductor’s days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from III-V semiconductor InGaAs.


Last week, researchers at Purdue University announced a new type of transistor shaped like a Christmas tree, where each transistor contains three tiny nanowires made of InGaAs.


So III-Vs replacing silicon seems to be a hot research topic, with InGaAs being one of the main contenders.


Now scientists at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, have also created a compound transistor, which performs well despite being just 22nm length. This makes it a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, says co-developer Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.


To keep pace with our demand for ever-faster and smarter computing devices, the size of transistors is continually shrinking, allowing increasing numbers of them to be squeezed onto microchips. “The more transistors you can pack on a chip, the more powerful the chip is going to be, and the more functions the chip is going to perform,” del Alamo says.


But as silicon transistors are reduced to the nanometre scale, the amount of current that can be produced by the devices is also shrinking, limiting their speed of operation. This has led to fears that Moore’s Law - the prediction by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on microchips will double every two years - could be about to come to an end, del Alamo says.


January/February 2013 www.compoundsemiconductor.net 229


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