Renesas has mobility mission with latest reference design

Helping customers to accelerate the development of e-scooters, e-bikes, uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and energy storage systems, Renesas Electronics has unveiled its 48V Mobility Winning Combination. The reference design uses a modular approach in hardware and software to showcase core and optional functional blocks that can be adopted for many 24 to 48V applications. These can range from e-scooters and e-bikes to lawn mowers, electric carts, robot cleaners, power tools and power banks. The reference design uses 15 Renesas ICs, including the ISL94216 16-cell battery front end (BFE), the HIP2211 100V MOSFET drivers, and RX23T 32-bit microcontroller for motor control. The 48V combination design is powered from a 25AHr li-ion battery that drives a 1600W inverter to attain speeds up to 5000 rpm.

Two boards that address the higher battery cell count and power levels mobility applications require. The BFE and charger board focuses on larger, higher voltage battery packs. The motor control and inverter board features synchronised current/voltage measurements and drivers that are pulse width modulated (PWM) to actuate the motor and monitor motor status. The algorithm with the hardware is suitable for driving brushless DC (BLDC) motors. There are also two optional boards – the wireless charging receiver board, and the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 5.0) control board.

For system control, there is a cost optimised, energy-efficient RX23T microcontroller with built-in floating point unit (FPU) and six high-performance timers specifically tooled for complex inverter control algorithms. The modular design is intended to help engineers reduce the time spent in software and hardware development and debug. The ISL94216 offers several features that balance and monitor system conditions to improve battery life and safety, in contrast to large cell count single-chip battery managers, the integrated ISL94216 performs independently of the microcontroller.

The collective also includes the ISL81601 60V bi-directional four-switch synchronous buck-boost controller for ultra-fast charging. The controller’s CC/CV charger profile is implemented through the system microcontroller.

http://www.renesas.com

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Power amplifier delivers native linearity sufficient for extreme temperatures

The first of several 0.25W linear power amplifiers scheduled for release by Guerilla RF is the GRF5507 which provides 24dBm output power.

The InGaP HBT power amplifier targets 5G/4G wireless infrastructure applications which require “exceptional” native linearity over temperature extremes of -40 to +85°C.

Operating over the 700 to 800MHz frequency range, the GRF5507 is tuned to operate within the n12, n14, n28 and n29 5G new radio (NR) bands. It can deliver over 24dBm of linear power over the entire – temperature range while maintaining ACLR levels of better than -45dBc, IMD3 levels less than -20dBm, EVM levels less than one per cent and PAE efficiencies above 15 per cent. These are achieved without the aid of supplemental linearisation schemes like digital pre-distortion (DPD).

The ability to beat the -45dBc ACLR performance metric without DPD is critical for cellular applications like home and commercial repeaters/boosters, femto cells, pico cells and cable loss compensators associated with automotive ‘shark fin’ antennae. In each of these use cases, the sensitivity to cost, power and size constraints prohibits the use of elaborate linearisation techniques like DPD, explains Guerrilla RF. Designers therefore have to rely on the power amplifier’s native linearity to meet the stringent emissions mask requirements demanded by the latest 5G and 4G standards.

Guerrilla RF designed the power amplifiers to be footprint compatible, enabling customers to rapidly customise their designs for a range of cellular frequencies.

  The GRF55xx family comes in pin-compatible 3.0 x 3.0mm, 16-pin QFN packages. The common footprint enables a single design to address multiple bands via simple component swaps, says the company.

Samples and evaluation boards are available now.

Based in Greenboro, North Carolina, USA, Guerrilla RF provides high performance monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) to wireless OEMs in multiple market segments, including 5G/4G macro and small cell base stations, cellular repeaters/DAS, automotive SDARS/V2X/DAB, mission-critical military communications, navigation and high-fidelity wireless audio.

https://guerrilla-rf.com

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Connected Buildings suite modernises infrastructure for smart cities

Solutions integrator, Black Box, has created Connected Buildings, a suite of solutions and services that enable digital experiences in smart, IoT buildings. The company designs, deploys, manages and maintains the foundational technology that connects the internal ecosystem of interoperable devices and sensors to enable human-to-human, human-to-device and device-to-device interaction.

Connected Buildings services modernise the IT infrastructure, solve in-building connectivity challenges and link clients’ devices at locations around the world.

“Now more than ever, our customers need spaces that are interactive, adaptive, automated and secure,” said Doug Oathout, senior vice president, Portfolio and Partnerships, Black Box. “At Black Box, we apply our broad portfolio . . . . to take the complexity out of connected buildings and make it simple for our customers by giving them one trusted partner to handle their IT services. Whether updating hundreds of existing locations or outfitting one location from the ground up, our team of project managers, engineers and technicians works with our clients to craft a solution that creates consistent customer experiences and reliable communications,” he said.

The Black Box Connected Building is enabled by fast, robust technologies, for example 5G/CBRS and Wi-Fi to augment existing wireless systems and create fully connected buildings. It also uses edge networking and data centres to collect data where it is created and combine it with artificial intelligence (AI) to make smarter devices. Addressing cybersecurity there is incident and event monitoring, endpoint detection and response, and VPN and firewall services.

The Connected Building services include assessment, consulting and project management, coupled with on-site services for configuration, staging, installation and logistics.

The services fall into four categories. There are those for multi-site deployments, where the Black Box team is able to handle large-scale national/global installations and provide uniform IT at hundreds or thousands of sites.

There are also IoT deployments, where the team supplies and installs cameras, digital signage, point of sale (POS), sensors and other in-building IoT technologies.

Another category is structured cabling and networking, to ensure the infrastructure necessary to support future bandwidth requirements.

Finally, digital transformation covers the management of implementations and deployments of the IoT.

http://www.bboxservices.com

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Smart factory ATX motherboard is based on Intel Xeon E processor

For the smart factory, Axiomtek offers the IMB525R ATX industrial motherboard which is versatile and offers superior graphics performance, says the company.

The IMB525R server-grade ATX motherboard is powered by the Intel Xeon® E, 9th/8th generation Intel Core, Intel Pentium or Intel Celeron processors with the Intel C246 chipset. According to Axiomtek it is flexible with I/O expandability and supports error correcting code (ECC) memory which provides improved data integrity and system reliability through automatic data correction.

The IMB525R is specifically suited for industrial workstations, embedded networks, factory automation, robotic motion control, machine vision, and testing and measurement. It has five SATA-600 ports with software RAID 0/1/5/10 for reliable data storage and protection and four 288-pin DDR4-2666/2400 ECC DIMM slots with a maximum memory capacity of 128Gbyte. In addition, it can be expanded with one PCIe x16 slot, two PCIe x4 slots, four PCI slots and one PCI Express Mini Card slot, according to customer requirements.

It also supports Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) to enhance network security whether as a cloud server, data centre or for industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. The Intel Coffee Lake Refresh-based ATX motherboard is designed to reduce overall development cost and speed up time-to-market, adds Axiomtek. There is also a watchdog timer and hardware monitoring functions.

The IMB525R is integrated with the Intel UHD Graphics 630 for visual performance, enabling triple simultaneous displays via DisplayPort++, HDMI, DVI-D, and VGA for multi-display applications. There are two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and seven 180D type A USB 2.0 ports and four RS-232, two RS-232/422/485, two Gigabit LANs with Intel Ethernet controller I211-AT and Intel Ethernet connection I219-LM, eight-channel digital I/O, one HD Codec audio, one SMBus, and one PS/2 keyboard and mouse.

Operating temperature ranges from 0 to +60 degrees C for use in harsh environments.

http://www.axiomtek.com

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