Semiconductor Engineering

Speeding Up NMOS

For years—decades, in fact—the NMOS transistor world has been on cruise control. NMOS is naturally faster and its performance has scaled better than PMOS. PMOS has had a cost advantage. But lately, it ...
Hackaday

The Q2, A PDP8-Like Discrete Transistor Computer

[Joe Wingbermuehle] has an interest in computers-of-old, and some past experience of building computers on perfboard from discrete transistors, so this next project, Q2, is a complete implementation ...
Semiconductor Engineering

The History Of CMOS

Since CMOS has been around for about 50 years, a comprehensive history would be a book. This blog focuses on what I consider the major transitions. Before CMOS, there was NMOS (also PMOS, but I have ...
NextBigFuture

Breakthrough Pseudo CMOS Transistors for 1000 Times More Efficient Computing

As transistors are scaled to smaller dimensions, their static power increases. Combining two-dimensional (2D) channel materials with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) logic architectures ...
Electronic Design

Use Hybrid PMOS-NMOS Active Loads To Cut Substrate Noise In Differential Amplifiers

PMOS transistors are less vulnerable to substrate noise since they’re placed in separate wells; designers implement guard rings to attenuate the substrate noise propagation. However, substrate noise ...
CRN

IBM-AMD, Intel Describe 65-nm Transistors

Intel is in production with several 65-nm processors now, creating an inventory of commercial microprocessor products that will begin shipping early next year. At the IEDM conference, Intel showed die ...
EDN

Low Power LDO Design Techniques for Really Small Profile Applications, Part 1

A key challenge to the ultra-miniaturization of electronic systems is power management. As any EE knows, when overall system sizes shrink the amount of area available for energy storage and energy ...