Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced that its power solutions, as well as timing solutions from IDT, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Renesas, support the Xilinx Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) devices featured on the Xilinx VCK190 evaluation kit and the Renesas VERSALDEMO1Z power reference board. Built on 7nm process technology, Versal is the industry’s first ACAP platform that addresses the needs of a wide range of applications in data center, automotive, 5G wireless, and wired and defense markets.

Polymers are used to develop various materials, such as plastics, nylons, and rubbers. In their most basic form, they are made up of many of identical molecules joined together over and over, like a chain. If you engineer molecules to join together in specific ways, you can control the characteristics of the resulting polymer. Using this method, Sheng Shen, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and his research team created a polymer thermal regulator that can quickly transform from a conductor to an insulator, and back again. When it’s a conductor, heat transfers quickly. When it’s an insulator, heat transfer much more slowly. By switching between the two states, the thermal regulator can control its own temperature, as well as the temperature of its surroundings, such as a refrigerator or computer.

A University of Illinois-based team of engineers has found that the model currently used to predict heat loss in a common semiconductor material does not apply in all situations. By testing the thermal properties of gallium nitride semiconductors fabricated using four popular methods, the team discovered that some techniques produce materials that perform better than others. This new understanding can help chip manufacturers find ways to better diffuse the heat that leads to device damage and decreased device lifespans.