Latest News Archives - Page 150 of 581 - SmartCitiesElectronics.com

Portwell’s fanless embedded system automates industrial systems

Fri, Feb 03, 2023

The WEBS -85H1 is a rugged, fanless embedded computer for intelligent warehouse, real time traffic monitoring, automatic sorting / grading and factory automation applications by Portwell.

Portwell provides industrial PC (IPC) and embedded computing and is a Titanium Partner of the Intel Partner Alliance. The WEBS-85H1 is a high-performance fanless box PC. It is powered by the 10th Generation Intel Core processor with integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630. It supports high resolution, triple display output for graphics applications.

Portwell said it is cost-effective for edge applications in rugged environments. The WEBS-85H1 provides three GbE LAN, Wi-Fi / Bluetooth module and LTE via M.2 (optional Wi-Fi / LTE antenna) for connectivity. As a monitoring system, it supports three 4K displays (one HDMI 2.0, one HDMI 1.4, one DisplayPort). For storage capacity, it has dual 2.5 inch SSD and CFast slots. It also allows user to expand via M.2 and mPCIe to achieve additional dual SATA.

For operation in harsh environments, the WEBS-85H1 complies with heavy industry certification IEC 61000-6-2/4 and has passed reliability tests such as vibration test of 1Grms/ 10 to 500Hz and a shock test of 50G. In addition, its wide range of power inputs (9.0 to 36V) and extended operating temperatures (-20 to +60 degrees C) ensures stability in critical environments and rugged scenarios such as factory automation, intelligent warehouse, real time traffic monitoring system and automatic sorting and grading applications, said Portwell.

Portwell is an Associate member of the Intel Internet of Things Solutions Alliance. It designs and manufactures a range of IPC products (SBCs, backplanes, redundant power supplies, rack mount and node chassis), embedded architecture, DVR system and communications appliances. It provides R&D and project management services to decrease customers’ time to market and reduce project risk and cost.

Portwell is also an ISO 13485, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified company that deploys quality assurance through product design, verification and manufacturing cycles.

http://www.portwell.eu

> Read More

nRF7002 companion IC and development kit create low power Wi-Fi 6 IoT

Thu, Feb 02, 2023

The first IC in Nordic Semiconductor’s Wi-Fi product family is the nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 companion IC. The low power Wi-Fi 6 companion IC provides seamless dual band (2.4 and 5.0GHz) connectivity. The nRF7002 IC can be used with Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 and nRF53 series multi-protocol SoCs and the nRF9160 cellular IoT (LTE-M / NB-IoT) system in package (SiP), but can be used in conjunction with non-Nordic host devices.

In IoT applications, Wi-Fi 6 has power efficiency gains for battery power Wi-Fi operation and management in smart home products, industrial sensors, asset trackers, and wearables. They also contribute to the management of large IoT networks comprising hundreds of devices, said Nordic Semiconductor.

According to Svein-Egil Nielsen, CTO and executive vice president of R&D and Strategy at Nordic: “This highly integrated and flexible solution will empower developers to create new, innovative Wi-Fi 6-enabled products. Supported with the nRF7002 DK and the award-winning nRF Connect [software development kit], combined with Nordic’s . . . technical support, I believe it has never been easier to develop great Wi-Fi products.”

“The nRF7002 is designed to work alongside Nordic’s nRF52 and nRF53 Series making it a perfect fit for Matter, a smart-home standard backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Nordic, Samsung, and hundreds of other companies,” explained Finn Boetius, product marketing engineer with Nordic. “The introduction of the IC and the nRF7002 DK now makes it easy for developers to get started on Matter and any other Wi-Fi based applications.” Matter uses Thread and Wi-Fi for data transport, and Bluetooth LE for commissioning.

The nRF7002 brings low power and secure Wi-Fi to the IoT. The dual-band IC complies with Station (STA), Soft Access Point (AP), and Wi-Fi Direct operation, and meets the IEEE 802.11b, a, g, n (Wi-Fi 4), ac (Wi-Fi 5), and ax (Wi-Fi 6) standards. The product also offers co-existence with Bluetooth LE, Thread and Zigbee.

The nRF7002 supports target wake time (TWT) a key Wi-Fi 6 power saving feature. Interfacing with a host processor is done via serial peripheral interface (SPI) or quad SPI (QSPI). The IC offers a single spatial stream, 20MHz channel bandwidth, 64 QAM (MCS7), OFDMA, up to 86Mbits per second PHY throughput, and BSS (base service set) colouring.

In addition to general IoT applications and Matter, the nRF7002 implements low power SSID-based Wi-Fi location when used with Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP and the company’s nRF Cloud Location Services. SSID-based Wi-Fi location supplements GNSS- or cell-based location by providing accurate positioning indoors and in places with a high density of Wi-Fi access points.

The introduction of the nRF7002 is accompanied by the launch of the nRF7002 DK, a development kit for the Wi-Fi 6 companion IC. The DK includes an nRF7002 IC and features an nRF5340 multi-protocol SoC as a host processor for the nRF7002. The nRF5340 embeds a 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor and a 64MHz high efficiency network processor. The DK supports the development of low-power Wi-Fi applications and enables Wi-Fi 6 features like OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing), beamforming, and TWT (target wake time). The DK includes Arduino connectors; two programmable buttons; a Wi-Fi dual-band antenna and a Bluetooth LE antenna, and current measurement pins.

The nRF7002 companion IC and nRF7002 DK are available now from Nordic’s distribution partners.

http://www.nordicsemic.com

> Read More

EKF Elektronik pledges long term support for CompactPCI boards

Thu, Feb 02, 2023

Two 3U CompactPCI processor boards, based on 11th generation Intel Core and Xeon processors (codename Tiger Lake H45) will be launched at Embedded World 2023 (14 to 16 March) by EKF Elektronik.

The boards will be available as a CompactPCI Serial design and a version which supports both CompactPCI Classic and CompactPCI PlusI/O. The latter supports the classic parallel PCI bus, for which there are still numerous COTS and proprietary expansion cards available today. Developers of CompactPCI-based systems can implement any CompactPCI system design and secure investment in the PICMG standard, long into the future.

The new boards will be available until at least 2032, confirmed EKF Elektronik. The company supports existing CompactPCI CPU boards with 7th generation Intel Xeon E3 v6 processors (codename Kaby Lake), which the company also offers for all three CompactPCI sub-specifications.

“Support for the PCI bus is essential for older CompactPCI system designs, yet some vendors are withdrawing from this market,” said Manuel Murer, business development manager at EKF Elektronik. He added that developers “can safeguard their investment in this legacy technology for many more years, continue to upgrade their system designs with the latest processor technology, and reap all the benefits that come with it”.

Upgrades bring advantages, including higher energy efficiency, higher processor-integrated security and computing power, up-to-date software support, and above all, said EKF Elektronik, support for AI and the latest graphics features.

As 11th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors no longer support PCI natively, EKF Elektronik has installed a software-transparent PCIe-to-PCI bridge on the processor boards with CompactPCI Classic and CompactPCI PlusIO support. This allows developers to seamlessly port existing applications to the new boards, explained EKF Elektronik.

There is also a J2 connector on the CompactPCI PlusIO (PICMG 2.30) boards, which is footprint-compatible with the CompactPCI Classic (PICMG 2.0) specification. This change was necessary because the J2 connector specifically developed for PlusIO has been discontinued. There is no need to redesign the backplane, advised EKF Elektronik. The only restriction is that high-speed backplane transfer is limited to 2.5Gtransfers per second for PCIe Gen 1, and 1.5Gbit per second for SATA. Depending on the application and system, it is possible to use the full bandwidth. The CompactPCI‘s PCI bus can be used in the usual bandwidth up to 133Mbyte per second.

The CompactPCI processor boards with 11th Gen Intel Core processors in the CompactPCI Serial (SC9-TOCCATA) variant are expected to be available mid-2023. The PC9-TOCCATA variants for CompactPCI Classic and CompactPCI PlusIO will go into series production later. Until that time, 7th generation PC7-FESTIVAL variants, which can be ordered now, provide a reliable long-term solution to existing availability problems for cPCI and PlusIO applications.

Visit EKF Elektronik at Embedded World 2023, Hall 1 – 406

http://www.ekf.de

> Read More

16Gbyte SoM with edge AI can be used in handheld devices, says Nvidia

Wed, Feb 01, 2023

The Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte module is now available for purchase from Nvidia. The system on module (SoM) has a small form factor, making it suitable for low power robots, embedded applications and autonomous machines. It can be used in products like drones and handheld devices, advised Nvidia.

Target applications are in manufacturing, logistics, retail, agriculture, healthcare, and life sciences.

The Jetson Orin NX is the smallest Jetson form factor, delivering up to 100 TOPS of AI performance with power configurable between 10 and 25W. It gives developers three times the performance of the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier and five times the performance of the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX.

The SoM supports multiple AI application pipelines with Nvidia Ampere architecture GPU, next-generation deep learning and vision accelerators, high-speed I/O and fast memory bandwidth. It can be used for developing systems with large and complex AI models in natural language understanding, 3D perception and multi-sensor fusion.

To showcase the leap in performance achievable by the SoM, Nvidia ran some computer vision benchmarks using the Nvidia JetPack 5.1. Testing included some dense INT8 and FP16 pre-trained models from NGC, Nvidia’s portal of enterprise services, software, management tools, and support for end-to-end AI and digital twin workflows. The same models were also run for comparison on Jetson Xavier NX.

The benchmarks for people detection, licence plate recognition, object detection and labelling and multi-person human pose estimation showed that the Jetson Orin NX delivered a 2.1 times performance increase compared to Jetson Xavier NX. With future software optimisations, this is expected to approach 3.1 times for dense benchmarks. Other Jetson devices have increased performance by 1.5 times since the first supporting software release. Similar results are anticipated for the Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte.

Jetson Orin NX also brings support for sparsity, which will enable even greater

performance. With sparsity, developers can take advantage of the fine-grained structured sparsity in deep learning networks to increase the throughput for Tensor Core operations.

All Jetson Orin modules run the world-standard Nvidia AI software stack.

Nvidia JetPack 5.1 supports the Orin NX 16Gbyte and the latest CUDA-X stack on Jetson Orin.

The Jetson partner ecosystem supports a broad range of carrier boards and peripherals for the Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte module, such as sensors, cameras,

connectivity modules (5G, 4G, Wi-Fi).

http://www.nvidia.com

> Read More

Portwell’s fanless embedded system automates industrial systems

nRF7002 companion IC and development kit create low power Wi-Fi 6 IoT

EKF Elektronik pledges long term support for CompactPCI boards

16Gbyte SoM with edge AI can be used in handheld devices, says Nvidia

About Smart Cities