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Traveling extensively around Europe the last couple of weeks I encountered an all too familiar problem: I was constantly running out of battery life be it for my shaver, cell phone, or laptop computer - there simply never was a power outlet available when needed. When it comes to electronic devices, one can either design a system that consumers less power or one can opt for a battery that can store more charge. The first one is being extensively done already, and in the shrinking world of electronic devices a larger battery is often times not an option. Further, with System on a Chip (SOC) designs integrating ever more functionality and components, any potential battery life gains due to low voltage operation are quickly cancelled out. To compound this problem, the current batch of rechargeable batteries looses significant capacity after only a few hundred recharge cycles. For the weary traveler what is needed are batteries with a higher density that loose less capacity over time. Luckily, there seems to be at least some hope on the horizon.

Earlier this year, we wrote about batteries that are to be composed entirely of liquids and for which the commercialization is expected within the next five years or so. On the exactly opposite side of the spectrum one can find a company called Seeo, a battery startup out of Berkeley, CA which is developing rechargeable lithium batteries utilizing a solid-state polymer electrolyte. Just a few days ago the company raised an additional $8.6 million in funding to bring the total funding to a little over $10 million. Seeo is being pretty stealthy regarding its technology and you won’t find anything but a simple messages on the company’s website informing you that the company is developing advanced materials that will revolutionize electricity storage and delivery. However, digging around the web yielded at little bit of information.

The technology Seeo is using was licensed by the company from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and is based on a nano-structured polymer electrolyte (NPE). Unlike current lithium-ion batteries the NPE based batteries being developed by Seeo have several advantages: They can be designed to resists dendrite growth which under certain circumstances can lead to shorts and potential explosions. They lack the highly flammable liquid electrolytes and are thus inherently safer than traditional lithium-ion batteries. NPE based batteries should also exhibit a significantly higher energy density over existing batteries. Finally, the batteries are expected to only loose about five percent of their capacity after a thousand cycles. On the downside, NPE batteries are expected to require a longer charge time than lithium-ion batteries. Even with this short coming there are likely to be plenty of products that will be able to take advantage of this new technology. And if nothing else, it is good to see that there is plenty of innovation happening on the battery front as well.

Now and then a company comes along that is developing a technology so unique that it has the potential of completely changing the way we think about how things get done. Case in point, Kovio Inc., a semiconductor startup based out of Milpitas, California. Several years after spinning out from the MIT Media Laboratory, the company has been pursuing printed silicon electronics and slowly but surely the hard work seems to be bearing fruit. Back in October, Kovio announced the world’s first printed silicon RFID platform for item-level intelligence, which utilized printed ICs operating at 13.56 MHz, that containied 128 bits of read-only memory as well as an integrated capacitor. In July of this year, the company was able to raise an additional $20 million in Series E venture capital funding from a myriad of Venture Capitalists (VCs), to begin volume shipments of their RF Barcodes which can be integrated into various consumer products such as nutrition information on food items, tickets, and so on. In addition, Kovio has been collecting awards left and right, including the 2009 Red Herring 100 North America and IDTechEx Printed Electronics Awards.

The advantages of printed silicon are numerous, including lower fabrication costs as opposed to traditional silicon technology, high customization potential, and a rapid time to market. Obviously, performance levels are not comparable to high-end silicon processes, but the innovation here is Kovio’s proprietary silicon based ink, depicted below,  and process technology that makes low-cost printed silicon based products a reality, such as the RF barcodes that the company is currently pursuing. Software developers are probably licking their chops, thinking about all the applications they will be able to build on top of the printed silicon once it penetrates the market.

But what if this was only the beginning? What if a few years from now anyone could design a basic system and print it as easily as one can print a piece of paper today? If a substantial amount of copies were needed, one could take the design to a place similar to a printing/copying center, such as FedEx Office, and make a few thousand copies. Only for millions of copies one would need to consider foundries. Let’s be honest, most designs do not need to operate in the GHz realm. If the common person could sit down, design a system, and bring it into the real world by simply printing it, similar to how graphics artist and designers work today, the creativity of individuals would be unleashed. Just maybe this would lead to a semiconductor renaissance where the actual design and function would matter more than the latest process node on which it was fabricated.

Last week was definitely not a good one for semiconductor startups. Every other day an announcement appeared proclaiming the end for one startup or another. There was Evident Technologies, a company that specialized in Quantum Dot Products and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), which filed for Chapter 11.Then there was CSwitch, a startup specializing in configurable switch array chips for next generation networks, which seized operations according to sources. And finally, there was MetaRAM, a company that worked on quadrupling the DRAM capacity of existing systems using existing DIMMs.

We profiled MetaRAM in March of last year, shortly after the company emerged from stealth mode. It was backed by several prominent venture capital firms including: Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital. This just shows you that having prominent VC backing is not a guaranteed indicator of success. Already back then we had a couple of concerns regarding the MetaRAM technology: First, with increasing DRAM frequency, how long would MetaRAM be able to hide the latency of their chipset via clever buffering of reads and writes? Second, it was inevitable that memory controllers would enable support for ever larger amounts of memory, possibly making MetaRAM technology irrelevant? Whether any of these was the actually reason for the company ceasing operations we might never know. The company’s website seems to be down, and as far as I’m aware nobody has been able to reach any of the company representatives for an official comment.

The issues that lead to troubles for the other two semiconductor startups are somewhat clearer. CSwitch was simply unable to raise another $10 million in funding in order to bring its chips into mass production. The company is currently negotiating to sell its assets, and with some luck we might see the technology hit the market yet in the same way Ambric’s technology did earlier this year. Evident’s issue was a bit different, in that the company announced this it was filing for bankruptcy protection due to exorbitant costs associated with a patent infringement case that was brought against the company by a large California-based life science company. The good news here is that while in Chapter 11, Evident intends to continue their research and development, as well as commercialization of their technology.

We first covered Powervation and the company’s Auto-Control DC/DC technology at the beginning of this year, while mentioning several other startups that were developing digital solutions for typically analog problems. A few months have passed and Powervation recently notified us that the company’s inaugural product, namely the PV3002 has become available. The PV3002 is an Auto-Control Dual Phase Digital Power IC and is targeted at the Computing, NetComms, and Storage markets, although many additional applications will surely take advantage of it. The PV3002 consists of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP), a RISC processor, and several analog blocks to make it a complete mixed-signal System-On-a-Chip (SOC). It can provide 1 or 2 phase operation and several of these ICs can be utilized in parallel to enable load sharing. As mentioned in our previous post, the key feature of this IC is its ability to monitor the output voltage in order to compensate for variations in line, load, capacitance, and inductance.

Performance and stability are provided through the use of a feedback loop for which the compensation level is controlled dynamically through a single parameter referred to as “MOJO.” The exact implementation of MOJO is obviously a trade secret, but one can obtain somewhat of an idea about what it entails from several publications. The company’s own website has a nice little primer titled DC-DC conversion with Auto-Control, which examines the typical digital DC-DC converter design, the inherent limitations brought on by the digital feedback loop, and how adaptive control can relax some of the performance constrains while still keeping the system stable. If you want to delve a little deeper and have IEEE access, you can find the following two recently published papers: Current Share in Multiphase SMPCs by Digital Filtering and Current Share in Multiphase DC-DC Converters Using Digital Filtering Techniques. Anthony Kelly, Powervation’s VP of Digital Control, must be one busy guy for all of these publications are authored by him.

The PV3002 comes in a 5x5 mm package and can deliver up to 80A to the load. The key parameters for the IC are specified in the table above. Tests at beta sites have show a 10% efficiency improvement at light load over existing solutions and a gain of up to 30% in system energy savings. Since the power-converter is completely self-contained, it can be plugged into any board and operate directly without any user intervention – this is referred to by Powervation as Plug-and-Power technology. Should some configuration be necessary, a Digital Power Center Interface GUI is also provided to make the configuration a breeze. In quantities of 1000, the PV3002 is currently available at $2.75 a pop.