As March 11 Japan Earth Quake aftermath, Japanese had leant to go for greener energy and to be more conscious for Power saving Lighting devices such as LED lighting solution. Panasonic is Japan’s No. 1 LED lighting manufacturing Company, Though the market of Japan is big, but still not enough to feed this LED giant. The Road map for the market development is aiming to ship their LED lighting product to China,
Company target is to have 40% of their revenue coming from LED by 2015. and Overseas market will make up close to 40% of their products.
They would pursue for revenue of RMB 5b by year 2015, which is 5 times as comparing with 2009. They will set up their own 4800 selling points in various cities in China including this 2nd and third tier populated cities. Reversed engineering show that a 6.9 W 570 lm LED light bulb used 96 LEDs on a matrix layout on a ceramic substrates.
That is a standard way for Japanese LED light bulb using a lot of LEDs from 36 to 126 pieces. We will foresee that Panasonic will use up a lot of LED in the coming 4 years. They will use likely good Quality Japan LED for their packaging. Will not know if they will switch to other country supplier of LED by time when the price keeps on dropping for the finished LED light bulb. A 6.9W LED light bulb was selling at Yen 2,000 only latelty. We can see that the price is undergone a serious erosion, that is good for a massive penetration for the replacement of CFLs lighting in Japan and China.
HK Snob
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Semiconductor Development from the First Transistor to 3D-Chip
The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. It replaced Vacuum tubes in the years after gradually, and Radio was marked on the case as Solid State to interpret the durability of Transistor. Shock in a much high order than vacuum tubes, on the other hand it operates in less power and energy than the vacuum tube, and It is pretty SMALL.
In 1959 both TI and Fairchild parties applied for patents of IC. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.
In 1961 the first commercially available IC came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie. They used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators later.
The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "small-scale integration" (SSI), Early linear ICs such as Plessey SL201 or Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. The term Large Scale Integration was first used by IBM scientist Rolf Landauer when describing the theoretical concept, from there came the terms for SSI, MSI, VLSI, and ULSI.
SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. The Minuteman missile program and various other Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government space and defense spending still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow firms to penetrate the industrial and eventually the consumer markets. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968. Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.
In the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "medium-scale integration" (MSI).
They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices.
Later, driven by the same economic factors, led to "large-scale integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.
Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4,000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10,000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.
Remember your Texas Instrument Programmable Calculator when you was in the University in the 70’s.
VLSI Very-large-scale integration IC
Upper interconnect layers on an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor. The final step in the development process, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the present, was "very large-scale integration" (VLSI). The development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and continues beyond several billion transistors as of 2009.
Multiple developments were required to achieve this increased density. Manufacturers moved to smaller rules and cleaner fabrication, through the use of advance semiconductor equipment. They could make chips with more transistors and maintain adequate yield. The path of process improvements was summarized by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Design tools improved enough to make it practical to finish these designs in a reasonable time. The more energy efficient CMOS replaced NMOS and PMOS, avoiding a prohibitive increase in power consumption.
In 1986 the first one megabit RAM chips were introduced, which contained more than one million transistors. Microprocessor chips passed the million transistor mark in 1989 and the billion transistor mark in 2005. The trend continues largely unabated, with chips introduced in 2007 containing tens of billions of memory transistors.
ULSI, WSI, SOC and 3D-IC
To reflect further growth of the complexity, the term ULSI that stands for "ultra-large-scale integration" was proposed for chips of complexity of more than 1 million transistors.
Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a system of building very-large integrated circuits that uses an entire silicon wafer to produce few single "super-chip". Through a combination of large size and reduced packaging, WSI could lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers. The name is taken from the term Very-Large-Scale Integration, the current state of the art when WSI was being developed.
A system-on-a-chip (SoC or SOC) is an integrated circuit in which all the components needed for a computer or other systems are included on a single chip. The design of such a device can be complex and costly, and building disparate components on a single piece of silicon may compromise the efficiency of some elements. However, these drawbacks are offset by lower manufacturing and assembly costs and by a greatly reduced power budget: because signals among the components are kept on-die, much less power is required.
POP is package on package that is to stack the package on top of another package. The target is to increase the function and minimize the chip size both x and y.
On Packaging side, memory Chip is the competitive technology that is to stack up many as 10 chips on top the other on both side of the substrates, whereby, tiny gold wire of diameter 0.008 inch are used to interconnect the chips to the lead of the outer package by using the speed of 20 wires per second provided by the world fastest Gold ball bonder supplied by the major equipment supplier ASM and K & S. and the total package is only 1mm thick. This results that we can have an USB memory stick that can have 32G memory.
While more chips are built on a single chip and is operation in Giga operations in a second, technology is how to do Chip cooling down, the material, the thermal management, and the selection of the substrate matching the chip as not to crack the chip due to temperature rising and mechanical expansion. H how to apply the state of the Art o Cooling system by Air, Fins and Fans, water embedded porous copper material for efficient cooling such as Metaform. When we do Google , the Google server and network will operate and generate certain Kilo of CO2 in the world. As the microprocessor operate and that generate heat, so some one has proposed to install the server in the Polar area.
3D chips are expected to solve a number of problems for chipmakers who are aiming for performance increases in ever-smaller chips. As transistor density rises, the wires connecting them have become both thinner and closer together, resulting in increased resistance and overheating. And that leads to the demand of super accurate Gold ball bonder that connect thousand wires inside the chip here to there. These problems cause signal delays, packaging concern for the chip, limiting the clock speed of central processing units.
A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) has two or more layers of active electronic components that are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. Communication between layers uses on-die signaling, so power consumption is much lower than in equivalent separate circuits. Judicious use of short vertical wires can substantially reduce overall wire length for faster operation.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is vying with Intel to become the first company to sell three-dimensional chips that boost the density of transistors in a single semiconductor by up to 1,000 times.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker in the world, could make its first 3D chips commercially available before the end of 2011, according to a person close to the situation who requested anonymity.
The timeframe for TSMC matches the end-2011 schedule that Intel has set for the launch of its 3D Tri-Gate chips, which the company expects to be the world's first commercial 3D chip and the most significant advance in chip technology since the development of the chip transistor in the 1948.
With several layers of silicon stacked together, a 3D chip can achieve performance gains of about a third while consuming 50 percent less power. For this reason, 3D chips are particularly well suited to power new generations of mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones, and to offer more operative hours from the battery cell. Businesses where Intel has so far failed to establish a significant presence.
3D chips look more attractive because of their greater density, it is more difficult to make them because of the testing issues. If you have five stacked dies and one of the dies is bad, you have to scrap the whole thing. The Yield is a challenge!
TSMC is developing so-called 2D chips that replace an organic polymer substrate with silicon to boost transistor density. Communications chipmaker Xilinx has contracted TSMC to make its Virtex-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) using TSMC's 2D chip technology that puts three chip dies on one silicon substrate. Xilinx said on March 8 that it expects the first samples of the Virtex-7 485T FPGA to be available by August.
TSMC has been working closely with chip packagers and providers of design automation software to help commercialize 3D chip technology.
In April 2007, IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) researchers announced the first versions of 3D chips with support from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The 3D chips combined several layers of silicon using a technique called wafer bonding.
IBM's technique used a silicon base with active wafers layered on top. This technology allowed a processor to be placed on the bottom of the stack with memory or other components layered across the top, resulting in a thousand-fold reduction in connector length. The greater transistor density reduced the distance data has to travel, reducing processing time.
IBM used through-silicon vias (TSVs) to connect stacks of multiple chip components. TSVs allow for more efficient heat dissipation through the stack to cooling systems that improve power efficiency.
HK Snob
In 1959 both TI and Fairchild parties applied for patents of IC. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.
In 1961 the first commercially available IC came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie. They used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators later.
The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "small-scale integration" (SSI), Early linear ICs such as Plessey SL201 or Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. The term Large Scale Integration was first used by IBM scientist Rolf Landauer when describing the theoretical concept, from there came the terms for SSI, MSI, VLSI, and ULSI.
SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. The Minuteman missile program and various other Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government space and defense spending still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow firms to penetrate the industrial and eventually the consumer markets. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968. Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.
In the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "medium-scale integration" (MSI).
They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices.
Later, driven by the same economic factors, led to "large-scale integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.
Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4,000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10,000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.
Remember your Texas Instrument Programmable Calculator when you was in the University in the 70’s.
VLSI Very-large-scale integration IC
Upper interconnect layers on an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor. The final step in the development process, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the present, was "very large-scale integration" (VLSI). The development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and continues beyond several billion transistors as of 2009.
Multiple developments were required to achieve this increased density. Manufacturers moved to smaller rules and cleaner fabrication, through the use of advance semiconductor equipment. They could make chips with more transistors and maintain adequate yield. The path of process improvements was summarized by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Design tools improved enough to make it practical to finish these designs in a reasonable time. The more energy efficient CMOS replaced NMOS and PMOS, avoiding a prohibitive increase in power consumption.
In 1986 the first one megabit RAM chips were introduced, which contained more than one million transistors. Microprocessor chips passed the million transistor mark in 1989 and the billion transistor mark in 2005. The trend continues largely unabated, with chips introduced in 2007 containing tens of billions of memory transistors.
ULSI, WSI, SOC and 3D-IC
To reflect further growth of the complexity, the term ULSI that stands for "ultra-large-scale integration" was proposed for chips of complexity of more than 1 million transistors.
Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a system of building very-large integrated circuits that uses an entire silicon wafer to produce few single "super-chip". Through a combination of large size and reduced packaging, WSI could lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers. The name is taken from the term Very-Large-Scale Integration, the current state of the art when WSI was being developed.
A system-on-a-chip (SoC or SOC) is an integrated circuit in which all the components needed for a computer or other systems are included on a single chip. The design of such a device can be complex and costly, and building disparate components on a single piece of silicon may compromise the efficiency of some elements. However, these drawbacks are offset by lower manufacturing and assembly costs and by a greatly reduced power budget: because signals among the components are kept on-die, much less power is required.
POP is package on package that is to stack the package on top of another package. The target is to increase the function and minimize the chip size both x and y.
On Packaging side, memory Chip is the competitive technology that is to stack up many as 10 chips on top the other on both side of the substrates, whereby, tiny gold wire of diameter 0.008 inch are used to interconnect the chips to the lead of the outer package by using the speed of 20 wires per second provided by the world fastest Gold ball bonder supplied by the major equipment supplier ASM and K & S. and the total package is only 1mm thick. This results that we can have an USB memory stick that can have 32G memory.
While more chips are built on a single chip and is operation in Giga operations in a second, technology is how to do Chip cooling down, the material, the thermal management, and the selection of the substrate matching the chip as not to crack the chip due to temperature rising and mechanical expansion. H how to apply the state of the Art o Cooling system by Air, Fins and Fans, water embedded porous copper material for efficient cooling such as Metaform. When we do Google , the Google server and network will operate and generate certain Kilo of CO2 in the world. As the microprocessor operate and that generate heat, so some one has proposed to install the server in the Polar area.
3D chips are expected to solve a number of problems for chipmakers who are aiming for performance increases in ever-smaller chips. As transistor density rises, the wires connecting them have become both thinner and closer together, resulting in increased resistance and overheating. And that leads to the demand of super accurate Gold ball bonder that connect thousand wires inside the chip here to there. These problems cause signal delays, packaging concern for the chip, limiting the clock speed of central processing units.
A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) has two or more layers of active electronic components that are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. Communication between layers uses on-die signaling, so power consumption is much lower than in equivalent separate circuits. Judicious use of short vertical wires can substantially reduce overall wire length for faster operation.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is vying with Intel to become the first company to sell three-dimensional chips that boost the density of transistors in a single semiconductor by up to 1,000 times.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker in the world, could make its first 3D chips commercially available before the end of 2011, according to a person close to the situation who requested anonymity.
The timeframe for TSMC matches the end-2011 schedule that Intel has set for the launch of its 3D Tri-Gate chips, which the company expects to be the world's first commercial 3D chip and the most significant advance in chip technology since the development of the chip transistor in the 1948.
With several layers of silicon stacked together, a 3D chip can achieve performance gains of about a third while consuming 50 percent less power. For this reason, 3D chips are particularly well suited to power new generations of mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones, and to offer more operative hours from the battery cell. Businesses where Intel has so far failed to establish a significant presence.
3D chips look more attractive because of their greater density, it is more difficult to make them because of the testing issues. If you have five stacked dies and one of the dies is bad, you have to scrap the whole thing. The Yield is a challenge!
TSMC is developing so-called 2D chips that replace an organic polymer substrate with silicon to boost transistor density. Communications chipmaker Xilinx has contracted TSMC to make its Virtex-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) using TSMC's 2D chip technology that puts three chip dies on one silicon substrate. Xilinx said on March 8 that it expects the first samples of the Virtex-7 485T FPGA to be available by August.
TSMC has been working closely with chip packagers and providers of design automation software to help commercialize 3D chip technology.
In April 2007, IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) researchers announced the first versions of 3D chips with support from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The 3D chips combined several layers of silicon using a technique called wafer bonding.
IBM's technique used a silicon base with active wafers layered on top. This technology allowed a processor to be placed on the bottom of the stack with memory or other components layered across the top, resulting in a thousand-fold reduction in connector length. The greater transistor density reduced the distance data has to travel, reducing processing time.
IBM used through-silicon vias (TSVs) to connect stacks of multiple chip components. TSVs allow for more efficient heat dissipation through the stack to cooling systems that improve power efficiency.
HK Snob
Thursday, June 9, 2011
A Simple Low Cost Solution to Improve Life time of your HP LED (High Power Light Emitting Diode)
The Temperature of the LED junction is related to the life and reliability performance of a LED, especially Hi Power LED which runs at Hi current at High Power.A reduction of LED junction temperature for 1 degree C would increase the life time for more than 1,000 hours. If we can reduce the Junction temperature of the LED from 135 deg C down to 120 Degrees, it could possible increase the life time of 19000 hours.
Refer to Lumileds LUXEON Rebel Automotive Specification Datasheet DS58 (09/12/18) 8
Automotive White Short-Term Maximum Rating Estimated Lifetime
350 mA, Tc ~120°C, Tj ~135°C 50,000 hours
350 mA, Tc ~135°C, Tj ~150°C 31,000 hours
There are a few points that we should design for a long reliable LED life time.
The life time is inversely proportional to the operative temperature. The Die bonding process should not create any hot spot, such as undesired void between the die and the substrates.
The using of highly conductive Hi Silver Content Silver epoxy would help to conduct as much as it could heat from the Chip on to the substrates. The Selection of Substrates, ceramic Substrates or copper base leadframe material could be possible the best conduction for heat transfer from the chip passing through onto the substrate then through the heat sink into the external world. But the CTE must be matched… for best matching CTE with the LED, ceramic Substrates may be a good way for silver epoxy process or Directly Eutectic process for better reliability.
How to conduct the heat from the substrates into the other bigger heat sink!? OR how to conduct the heat energy form the HP LED to an external heat sink.
Yes, we have such solution ,,, Metafoam, a new solution to conduct heat energy form a LED to a heat sink. The solution developed by Metafoam significantly improves the heat management performance of heat pipes by providing a substitute to the currently used wick structures, especially the sintered copper powder.
By providing an open-cell copper foam wick structure instead of a simple copper powder wick, Metafoam allows for much improved material characteristics as much as 76% more , especially higher permeability which results with faster working fluid pumping speed in the heat pipe which result in faster thermal cycle within the heat pipe, thus enhanced heat load capacity.
How does it work!?
There is a micron porous whole material which was made from Copper, a very good heat conductor that fill up the copper pipe, a few drop of water that run and carries the heat from one end into other efficiently.
This can be used as the heat sink for the high beam head lamp for the Audi A8, that is a way to conduct the heat energy from the substrate of the HP LED into the main chassis of the Lamp cover. Cooling the LED bar of Back Light Unit of LCD TV. The heat Sink for those HP LEDs in the Street Lamp.
This kind of heat sink is being intensively tested with heat pipe manufacturers and major computer brands. Proven to be a reliable solution for cooling the CPU.
And that ensures the operation of the CPU would be trouble free! Price is reasonably low.
Visit at Metaform website www.metafoam.com for more.
By providing an open-cell copper foam wick structure instead of a simple copper powder wick, Metafoam allows for much improved material characteristics as much as 76% more , especially higher permeability which results with faster working fluid pumping speed in the heat pipe which result in faster thermal cycle within the heat pipe, thus enhanced heat load capacity.
How does it work!?
There is a micron porous whole material which was made from Copper, a very good heat conductor that fill up the copper pipe, a few drop of water that run and carries the heat from one end into other efficiently.
This can be used as the heat sink for the high beam head lamp for the Audi A8, that is a way to conduct the heat energy from the substrate of the HP LED into the main chassis of the Lamp cover. Cooling the LED bar of Back Light Unit of LCD TV. The heat Sink for those HP LEDs in the Street Lamp.
This kind of heat sink is being intensively tested with heat pipe manufacturers and major computer brands. Proven to be a reliable solution for cooling the CPU.
And that ensures the operation of the CPU would be trouble free! Price is reasonably low.
Visit at Metaform website www.metafoam.com for more.
HK Snob
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
OPTILED Galaxy 500 LED Bulbs
Good news to see OPTILED LED replacement Light Bulb is available in as many shops as 73 shops of Fotomax.OPTILED has been promoting the LED light bulbs for over three years and was only available in a few shops at that time. Retail price of Galaxy 500, A 9.5w LED power which is an equivalent of 60W incandescent light, selling at HKD$129 dollars. The Smaller 7W LED power Galaxy 350, equivalent to 40W incandescent light is selling at HKD$89.00. Price is good as they are using Cree LED chips, one of the best LED chip in the world.
Well, the LED bulb has been gaining a lot of popularity. Restaurants, public illumination of the Residential estate on top of MTR station, MTR Train, Bus, CitiStore, Cinema...etc.
Shopping centre is using enormous numbers of LED light bulbs in the commercial market.
A pity that the retarded Government is doing almost noting on LED adoption. Most likely those senior officials are too busy in removing their unauthorized renovation on their house before the next media attack. Next time when you incandescent lamp of CFL lamp is gone, buy LED light bulbs, as it save energy of 80% and at same time money for you.
The OPTILED Galaxy LED light bulb could last 35,000 hours, you may have to replace 35 incandescent light bulbs in 15 years of Galaxy LED operation life.
HK Snob
Monday, June 6, 2011
Samsug Tablet Tab
We have been hearing Apple Iphone and Ipad are migrating into 4g for quite some time. That lento would cause the Korea Competitor to come into the market.Samsung Electronics is going to launch the Android version Tablet PC with high speed 4G networking technology in July.
This is Samsung Galaxy Tab advance version, one is having 22,6mm screen and one is for 25.6mm. Equipped with 2MP camera, Android Honeycomb OS, dual core Processor, USD$499 to USD$599. Samsung is now the world second largest handphone manufacturer. The Samsung Speaker said: this Galaxy Tab has a bigger memory size, faster download speed... This is a trend for moving into 4G, likely other electronics giants will follow. Koean Snob