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Wi-Fi 8 Click board brings Wi-Fi to the masses

Fri, Aug 27, 2021

Based on Microchip’s integrated, low power ATWINC3400-MR210CA Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0-certified module, WiFi 8 Click is the latest compact add-on peripheral board from MikroElektronika (Mikroe).

The Microchip module is optimised for low power and high-performance mobile applications and this Click board can add wireless connectivity to designs in development. While wireless communication is widely used, different environments and applications require different Wi-Fi chips and modules, explained Nebojsa Matic, CEO at Mikroe. “If you have a Wi-Fi router connected to a fixed broadband line, Liechtenstein has the fastest Wi-Fi speeds in the world at 229.98Mbits per second . . . Even on Everest there is Wi-Fi, at least at base camp. Whatever the need, bringing mobility and internet to your design is just a Click away,” he said.

The Wi-Fi 8 Click board, is priced at $34.00, making it suitable for use in highly integrated and cost-effective applications, industrial wireless control, Bluetooth gateway, smart home applications and other cost-sensitive projects. The module comes with integrated power and low noise amplifiers, transmit/receive switch (for WiFi and Bluetooth), a power management unit, an integrated 2.4GHz chip antenna, and an additional 32.768 kHz clock for sleep operation.

It uses optimised IEEE 802.11 Bluetooth co-existence protocols and provides a serial peripheral interface (SPI) to interface with the host controller.

WiFi 8 Click joins 15 other Wi-Fi Clicks available from Mikroe. The total number of Click peripheral development boards offered by the company is now over 1,000.

Mikroe’s Click boards are supported by a mikroSDK compliant library, which includes functions that simplify software development. Click boards feature the company’s standard 16-pin mikroBUS socket. This standardised approach enables design engineers to change peripherals easily, cutting months off development time, said Mikroe.

MikroElektronika invented the mikroBUS development socket standard which is included on the development boards of leading microcontroller companies such as Microchip, Renesas and Toshiba.

SiBRAIN is Mikroe’s latest standard for MCU development add-on boards and sockets. MikroElektronika claims to also make the world’s widest range of compilers and additionally provides development environments, development boards, smart displays and program debuggers.

https://www.mikroe.com

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Advantech bases edge AI PCs on NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus

Wed, Aug 25, 2021

Four edge artificial intelligence (AI) products based on NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus have been launched by Advantech.

The early access partner of NXP has released the RSB-3720 2.5-inch PICO-ITX single board computer (SBC), the EPC-R3720 compact edge AI box PC system, and the ROM-5722 SMARC 2.1 computer on module (COM).

The RSB-3720 and EPC-R3720 have UIO40-Express, modular application-oriented I/O expansion boards, and AIM-Linux to Vision AI applications.

All three are powered with up to four core 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 processors supported by a Cortex-M7 co-processor for handling real-time tasks. There are two image signal processors (ISPs) and a dedicated neural network processor operating at up to 2.3T operations per second. This is sufficient for image and AI inferencing capabilities and all three consume less power than when doing the calculations by the core CPUs alone. This allows for AI applications like object detection, recognition, classification and pose estimation.

Advantech AIM-Linux modular Linux software services integrate many types of application add-ons and Edge AI inference engines/libraries mainly based on the NXP eIQ toolkit. Python-based demo programs empower AI inference using mainstream inference engines, including Arm NN, TensorFlow Lite and ONNX.

To meet the demands of edge AI applications such as facial recognition and product assembly optimisation, all of which require premium camera inputs, the ROM-5722, RSB-3720, and EPC-R3720 provide 2 x MIPI-CSI camera inputs for connection with 2 x built-in ISPs — enabling intelligent vision-based systems. They accommodate multiple displays via 4Kp30 HDMI, one dual channel LVDS (configurable as two single channel LVDS) and one four-lane MIPI-DSI. They also provide I/O for advanced network and peripheral connection connectivity like two GbE LANs. Expansion for WLAN and WWAN are available.

The RSB-3720 features an UIO40-Express mechanical design for connection with application-oriented I/O expansion boards. Developers can select I/O extension boards for more serial ports (RS-232, RS-485), isolated DI/DOs, USB 2.0, and four port GbE Ethernet hub. AIM-Linux includes embedded Linux board support package (BSP) based on the long-term-support version and peripheral drivers for diverse software requirements.

All three modules and the EPC-R3720 support a wide operating temperature range of -40 to +85 degrees C and have high vibration resistance (3.5Grms for board and 3.5Grms for box).

Advantech’s WISE-DeviceOn provides fast and simple set up for projects using multiple IoT devices. It provides real-time device management, firmware over the air (OTA) maintenance, failure analysis, and operation efficiency optimisation on the same dashboard.

http://www.advantech.eu 

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Farnell supports designers of light-energy harvesting with Epishine signing

Wed, Aug 25, 2021

Swedish company, Epishine, which manufactures printed organic solar cells and development kits, has signed a franchise agreement with Farnell, an Avnet company. Farnell says it is the first high service distributor to stock products from the company.

The printed organic solar cells are optimised for harvesting energy from indoor, low energy lighting enabling organic solar power to be used everywhere. Design engineers can use this technology with Epishine’s light energy harvesting evaluation kit.

Epishine’s organic solar cells are small, thin, flexible, and printed on recyclable plastic. The cells can be integrated into any low power electronic equipment where they convert ambient indoor light into electricity. The organic solar cells can replace batteries in new-build wireless sensors and similar devices, reducing the environmental impact of battery waste and saving battery replacement costs, said Farnell.

The EK01LEH3_6 light energy harvesting evaluation kit demonstrates how Epishine’s light energy harvesting (LEH) modules can power indoor wireless low-power devices that are usually powered by batteries. It combines a six-cell 50 x 50mm LEH module with a supercapacitor which acts as an energy buffer and intelligent charging management system to support various output voltages and energy storage solutions. An external primary battery can be used as a back up. The evaluation kit can deliver sufficient output current to power most low-power wireless devices such as Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee and LoRa. The programmable evaluation kit are optimised for indoor use (-20 to +40 degrees C / 0 to 85 per cent RH) with illumination intensities of 20 to 1,000 lux

It also includes a supercapacitor for energy storage which can be reconfigured to charge rechargeable battery.

Epishine’s organic solar cells will be added to Farnell’s line card later this year.

Founded in 2016, Epishine is a Swedish technology company which manufactures flexible organic light modules and a development kit to help engineers design new products that are normally powered by batteries. The light modules can be used to partly or completely power wireless sensors and similar devices required in our increasingly connected world.

Epishine’s manufacturing process is claimed to provide industry-leading efficiency in low light conditions. The company was founded in 2016 and has 25 employees with its headquarters, lab and manufacturing located in Linköping, Sweden.

Farnell offers a range of products in its comprehensive semiconductor portfolio to support design engineers. Customers also have free access to online resources, datasheets, application notes, videos, webinars and 24/5 technical support.

http://www.element14.com/news

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Intel addresses data centres with Sapphire Rapids processor

Tue, Aug 24, 2021

Another launch at this year’s Intel’s Architecture Day was the next generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor (code-named Sapphire Rapids). The processor delivers substantial compute performance across dynamic and increasingly demanding data centre uses and is workload-optimised to deliver high performance on elastic compute models like cloud, microservices and artificial intelligence (AI).

The processor is based on a tiled, modular SoC architecture that leverages Intel’s embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) packaging technology making it scalable while maintaining the benefits of a monolithic CPU interface. Sapphire Rapids provides a single balanced unified memory access architecture, with every thread having full access to all resources on all tiles, including caches, memory and I/O. According to Intel, the processor offers consistent low latency and high cross-section bandwidth across the entire SoC.

Sapphire Rapids is built on Intel 7 process technology and features Intel’s new Performance-core microarchitecture (see softei news 23 August), which is designed for speed and pushes the limits of low latency and single-threaded application performance. Sapphire Rapids delivers the industry’s broadest range of data centre-relevant accelerators, including new instruction set architecture and integrated IP to increase performance across a broad range of customer workloads and usages.

The processor integrates acceleration engines including the Intel Accelerator Interfacing Architecture (AIA). This supports efficient dispatch, synchronisation and signalling to accelerators and devices. There is also the Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) which is a workload acceleration engine which delivers massive acceleration to the tensor processing at the heart of deep learning algorithms. It can provide an increase in computing capabilities with 2K INT8 and 1K BFP16 operations per cycle, said Intel.

Tests using early Sapphire Rapids silicon and optimised internal matrix-multiply micro benchmarks run over seven times faster using Intel AMX instruction set extensions compared to a version of the same micro benchmark using Intel AVX-512 VNNI instructions. This is significant for performance gains across AI workloads for both training and inference.

The Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) is designed to offload the most common data movement tasks to alleviate overhead and improve processing these overhead tasks to deliver increased overall workload performance. It can move data among CPU, memory and caches, as well as all attached memory, storage and network devices

The processor is built to drive industry technology transitions with advanced memory and next generation I/O, including PCIe 5.0, CXL 1.1, DDR5 and HBM technologies. An Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) is a programmable networking device designed to enable cloud and communication service providers to reduce overhead and free up performance for CPUs. Intel’s IPU-based architecture separates infrastructure functions and tenant workload which allows tenants to take full control of the CPU. The cloud operator can offload infrastructure tasks to the IPU to maximise the CPU. IPUs can manage storage traffic, which reduces latency while efficiently using storage capacity via a diskless server architecture. IPU allows users to use resources with a secure, programmable and stable solution that enables them to balance processing and storage.

Mount Evans is Intel’s first ASIC IPU. It integrates learnings from multiple generations of FPGA SmartNICs. It offers high performance network and storage virtualisation offload while maintaining a high degree of control. It provides a programmable packet processing engine for firewalls and virtual routing. There is also a hardware accelerated NVMe storage interface scaled up from Intel Optane technology to emulate NVMe devices. Intel Quick Assist technology deploys advanced crypto and compression acceleration.

http://www.intel.com

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Wi-Fi 8 Click board brings Wi-Fi to the masses

Advantech bases edge AI PCs on NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus

Farnell supports designers of light-energy harvesting with Epishine signing

Intel addresses data centres with Sapphire Rapids processor

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