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PowerLines by Linnea Brush
January 24, 2011
Everything-on-a-Chip
Power Channels: Communications Power, Power Components, Switch-Mode Power
Buzzwords have power. And power benefits from buzzwords. Actually, power supplies are not the beneficiaries of buzzwords as much as system applications. Do power supplies have an equivalent of “cloud computing,” for instance? Instead, they have to cling to the coat-tails of consumer or computer devices. The semiconductor industry has some clout in this area, however, and it might have introduced a term that power supplies co-opted before the system makers got hold of it.
This is the “on-a-chip” phenomenon. By definition, this is a semiconductor buzzword. It’s been around for a while, but it was confined more to R&D presentations than marketing presentations. As a technology, it’s challenging to do, so it was unlikely to catch on with the general public. But somehow it has – maybe because small, portable devices are proliferating and shrinking even more. The system world is now catching up with the power supply world, at least in terms of marketing language.
Recently, I have run across the terms, “lab-on-a-chip,” “basestation-on-a-chip,” and my personal favorite, “femtocell-on-a-chip.” Since I had been writing about “power-supply-on-chip” (PwrSoC) in Darnell’s new DC-DC Converter Module and ICs report, all these new on-chip technologies intrigued me. System demands have reached a point where they need components that are increasingly integrated, and it made me wonder if eventually we’d have “on-chip-power-supplies-on-a-chip.”
The furthest out is “lab-on-a-chip,” which will use the processing power of smartphones (another buzzword) in conjunction with small peripheral devices – for example, blood-analysis devices to determine whether a blood sample indicates a patient has cardiovascular disease. This technology is not expected to be available for a year or so. Right now, “the current functional models are more like a ‘lab-in-a-shoebox,’ consisting of cartridges just slightly smaller than credit cards.” Buzzwords are spawning further buzzwords!
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We would like to hear your comments on the topics discussed in this column. We welcome the opportunity to publish opposing opinions. Please email Jeff Shepard at jshepard@darnell.com.
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