This is an oldie, but oh, man is this ever good. It’s a Nixie clock made without a microcontroller. In fact, there aren’t any logic chips in this circuit, either. As far as we can tell, the logic in ...

We are somewhat spoiled because electronics today are very reliable compared to even a few decades ago. Most modern electronics obey the bathtub curve. If they don’t fail right away, they won’t fail ...

When designing a chip, a designer needs to consider many tradeoffs before developing the logic. For example, if a chip is being developed for mobile applications, power becomes a very important factor ...

CMOS is, and will continue to be, the work-horse process technology of the semi-conductor industry. But designers of large devices, of complex SoCs and of devices using multiple IP elements are ...

Wire delay is beginning to dominate gate delay in current CMOS technologies. According to Moore’s Law by 2016 CMOS feature size should be on the order of 22 nm with clock frequencies reaching around ...

Fig 1. A typical CMOS input circuit comprises a “P” and “N” transistor. One is fully “on” for logic high, and the other is “on” for a logic low. Fig 2. When a CMOS input pin is at logic high or low ...

RF instruments and wireless transceivers often feature an input for an external reference clock, such as the ubiquitous 10MHz reference input port found on RF instruments. Many of these same systems ...

Two test strategies are used to test virtually all IC logic: automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) with test pattern compression and logic built-in self-test (BIST). This article will describe how ...