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Technological tidbits Techno Talk Since I offer freelance technical consulting and writing services (“I write for food”), I end up chatting with a lot of companies about the latest and greatest technological offerings that are coming soon. A s I may have mentioned before on occasion, I am incredibly lucky. I’m not referring to my awesome looks, ready wit, or internationallycommented-on sense of fashion (“you aren’t going out dressed like that, are you?”, says my mother back in the UK). I mean that I get to chat with a cornucopia of companies on the cutting edge of technology, spanning myriad applications and industries. Let me share a few examples. Feel the power Just a couple of minutes ago, I was chatting with the folks at AmberSemi (https://ambersi.com). This small, fabless (and fabulous!) semiconductor company is poised to upend the power supply market. I’m talking about the AC-to-DC power supplies that plug in the wall and power our electronic doodads, gizmos, thingamabobs and what have you. A common architecture for low-power AC-to-DC converters employs 1950s-era electromagnetic components like bridge rectifiers, transformers and high-voltage bulk capacitors. The folks at AmberSemi have replaced all of this with a solidstate semiconductor implementation that is much smaller and lighter, more efficient, more reliable, and cheaper. Be the power Speaking of power, a few days ago I had a call with the guys and gals at Circuit Mind (https://circuitmind.io). When they first came to my attention a year or so ago, they told me about their deterministic AI that helps electronic teams go “from architecture to schematic in 60 seconds”. You can use their interface to capture a high-level block diagram (microcontroller, temperature sensor, LCD display etc), annotate each block with any lowerlevel requirements (8-bit, 1°C accuracy, 640×480 resolution etc), while leaving anything you aren’t sure about or don’t care about unsaid. You use sliders to specify trade-offs like cost, area, power and component availability. When you click the “Go” button, their system selects components, generates the circuit diagram(s) and provides a bill-ofmaterials (BOM), amongst other things. In our most recent conversation, they informed me that they’ve just added a Practical Electronics | May | 2025 new power supply design module. This performs all the tasks discussed above for the power supply portion of the design. People who can design power supplies (well, good power supplies) are few and far between, so this capability will be worth its weight in gold for many teams developing embedded systems and the “things” part of the IoT. Losing count Reticles, also known as photomasks, are critical components in the production of silicon chips. The high-end (size-wise) for today’s biggest and baddest silicon chips is typically around 625mm2 (25 × 25mm). The absolute limit is around 800mm2 (28 × 28mm). Recently, I was chatting with the lads and lasses at Synopsys (https://synopsys. com), a company that makes, among other things, widely used IC design software. They were excited to give me their predictions for chiplets and multi-die systems in 2025. As part of this, we touched on the new Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU) from Nvidia. There are two main flavours: the B100 and the B200. The latter consists of two 800mm2 silicon dies joined by a 10 terabytes-per-second (TBps) chipto-chip interconnect, forming a unified single GPU. In the same package, the B200 also contains 12 high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks, each of which contains multiple DRAM dies. Excluding the HBMs, the B200 boasts 208 billion transistors (104 billion for each main die). How much power does this bodacious beauty consume? I’m scared to think, but… Strike while the die is hot A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with the chaps and chapesses at Saras Micro Devices (https://sarasmicro.com). We started by looking at an image of an H100-based accelerator card that plugs into a server motherboard in a data centre, where the H100 (Hopper) GPU is the 2022/2023 predecessor to the Blackwell. The H100 is a big package that occupies about ¼ of the accelerator card’s real estate. The remaining ¾ of the card is taken up with power conversion and delivery components. 48V DC coming in is converted to 12V, which is Max the Magnificent subsequently stepped down to the pointof-load voltages. I’m told we are looking at 1000W <at> 1V, which equates to 1000A. In the not-so-distant future, when core voltages drop it 0.7V, we’ll be looking at 1500A! Think about this; 1500A on a single, relatively small accelerator card, with 2000A heading our way. This is known as ‘horizontal power delivery’, because the power travels horizontally across the board from the power conversion components to the main processor. This is where the folks at Saras leap onto the stage with a fanfare of flugelhorns (once heard, never forgotten). Their goal is to remove the inductors and capacitors that consume so much valuable real estate, and to embed these components in the board or package substrates. This will pave the way for ‘vertical power delivery’, with much shorter tracks that will dramatically reduce IR voltage drops and associated I2R thermal losses. Memories are made of this There are lots of different semiconductor memory technologies, the main contenders being flash, which is relatively slow but non-volatile (it remembers its contents when power is removed from the system); dynamic RAM (DRAM), which is cheap, has high capacity, and consumes little power; and static RAM (SRAM), which is expensive, has a low capacity, and is fast, but consumes lots of power. When designing custom silicon chips like system-on-chip (SoC) devices, onchip memory like caches and blocks of memory are usually made of SRAM to provide the highest possible performance. Other memory technologies, such as magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), have attractive qualities, like non-volatility and low power consumption, but they are significantly slower than SRAM. I was recently conversing with the folks at Numem (https://numem.com). They have created an MRAM-based memory technology called NuRAM with a ‘SmartMem’ subsystem that results in MRAM with SRAM-like performance. The scary thing is that I talked with all the companies mentioned here in just the past couple of weeks. Who knows what we’ll learn in the days and weeks to come? PE 3