Blogs

Introduction The world of LIDAR sensing is evolving. Rotating turret LiDARs are commonplace for applications such as autonomous driving (see our Automotive LIDAR teardown subscription), but they are being displaced by a new generation of solid-state laser scanning LiDAR technology. Of particular

Ray Fontaine August 12, 2020 Our teams have sourced the Samsung 640 x 480 indirect time-of-flight (ToF) with global shutter sensor demonstrated at VLSI 2019 [1]. The IC is reported to be a 65 nm back-illuminated generation sensor and our die photograph seems aligned with the die photograph in the

Contributed by: Arabinda Das Today the semiconductor industry is a behemoth whose annual sales revenue crosses US $400 Billion. Over its 60 years of existence, this mature industry has experimented with various models like integrated device manufacturer (IDM), fabless, and foundry concepts, each of

Posted: July 09, 2020 Contributed by: Sinjin Dixon-Warren, PhD Electric vehicles (EV) are potentially a disruptive technology in the automotive market. They offer the promise of increased energy efficiency and the potential for reduced emissions, depending on the primary energy source used to

Posted: June 05, 2020 Contributed by: Sinjin Dixon-Warren, PhD The power electronics industry is in a period of transition. For many years silicon-based devices have dominated the industry, with conventional Si MOSFET transistors being used for lower power and intermediate frequency, with super

Contributed Author: Sinjin Dixon-Warren The market for Silicon Carbide (SiC) power transistors is expected to grow considerably over the coming years. SiC power transistors have several advantages over traditional silicon-based devices, including improved performance in high-temperature, high

Is the Apple A12Z bionic SoC just the A12X renamed, with an enabled GPU core? When we first got the Apple iPad Pro 2020 A2068 in our labs, this was the first thing we wanted to know. What is the A12Z? When we saw the A12Z, there was visually no difference between it and the A12X, so we dug further

Contributing Author: Jeongdong Choe Originally Posted March 12, Revised April 7 2020 TechInsights finally found 3D Xtacking® NAND devices manufactured from Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC) in Wuhan, China. With this device, YMTC has become China's first mass-producer of 3D NAND flash

Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine Congratulations to the Samsung team for not only delivering a well spec’d camera system, but also for being first to market with 0.7 µm generation pixels! The GH1 stacked imager, announced in September 2019, is in use in the S20 Ultra 5Gs front-facing camera

Contributing Authors: Daniel Yang, Ray Fontaine It is an especially busy time in TechInsights’ labs. Just a few days after we started the teardown of various models of the Xiaomi Mi 10 flagship series - the world’s first Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 platform phone that also supports LPDDR5 - we now have

Here we were, waiting for the release of the Samsung Galaxy S20 so we could see the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform, and along came Xiaomi with their announcement on February 13 that the Mi 10 - also based on the Snapdragon 865 - would be available (very) soon. We waited days - not weeks -

Huawei Leads Imaging Chip Area Arms Race, Sony Wins Big with i-ToF, Emergence of Event-Driven Vision Sensors Posted: December 18, 2019 Contributing Authors: Ray Fontaine, Senior Technology Analyst Samsung, Huawei and Apple continue to push more imaging-related silicon into their flagship smartphone