Touch user interfaces have made significant advances in the consumer electronics market particularly for mobile phones and notebook computers, opening the door for adoption in other applications including white goods, computer peripherals, medical equipment, and instrumentation. Synaptics made its debut in the home appliance market earlier this year with the launch of the Samsung Hauzen ZERO air conditioner.
The standout products on day three of the SID 2010 conference is Universal Display's new PHOLED display architecture with a unique four-color, sub-pixel design, which promises to drive commercial development of all-phosphorescent active-matrix OLEDs and Sony's tiny rollable OLED display that can wrap around a pencil.
Smaller distributors were the only ones to post sales gains in 2009. Interestingly, two of the five distributors that posted growth last year -- Interstate Connecting Components and Sherburn Electronics -- derive 100 percent of their sales from interconnect products. Both of them also target the military/aerospace industry. Here are the top 10 sales leaders by ICs, passives/electromechanical devices, interconnects and computer products as well as sales growth.
IBM researchers demo fastest graphene transistor
Yorktown Heights, N.Y. — IBM researchers reported in a published paper in Science magazine that they have demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far for any graphene device — 100 billion cycles/second (100 gigahertz). The high frequency was achieved using wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using processing technology compatible with advanced silicon device fabrication, says IBM.
IBM says this is a key milestone for the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications (CERA) program funded by DARPA, in an effort to develop next-generation communication devices.
“A key advantage of graphene lies in the very high speeds in which electrons propagate, which is essential for achieving high-speed, high-performance next generation transistors,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research, in a statement. “The breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.”
IBM researchers say that uniform and high-quality graphene wafers were synthesized by thermal decomposition of a silicon-carbide (SiC) substrate. The graphene transistor itself used a metal-top-gate architecture and a novel gate insulator stack consisting of a polymer and a high dielectric constant oxide. The gate length was 240 nanometers, leaving plenty of space for further optimization of its performance by scaling down the gate length, say researchers.
IBM researchers note that the frequency performance of the graphene device already exceeds the cut-off frequency of state-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length (~ 40 gigahertz). Similar performance was obtained from devices based on graphene obtained from natural graphite, which shows that high performance can be obtained from graphene of different origins, according to IBM.
Previously, the team had demonstrated graphene transistors with a cut-off frequency of 26 gigahertz using graphene flakes.
NXP offers a low-power IC aimed at MPPT applications using PV cells or fuel cells. 
C&K Components offers a series of low-cost, miniature slide switches. The OS Series of RoHS-compliant switches feature a new high-temperature option for lead-free soldering.