Components & Connectors

Embedded chip antennas are small and durable for the IoT

Tue, Aug 08, 2023

Surface mounted embedded antennas have been added to the antenna portfolio by Amphenol RF. The surface mounted chip antennas offer electrical performance up to 8.5GHz and support cellular 4G/5G-FR1 frequencies as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRa, UWB and GNSS. 

The embedded RF antennas are compact and have a durable construction, making them suitable for IoT and smart devices.

By surface mounting the chip antenna directly on the PCB, with antenna ensure there is no need for external antennas. They are manufactured from ceramic or FR-4 materials and are omnidirectional. In addition, said Amphenol RF, they are easy to tune and available in tape and reel packaging. 

 The small size of ceramic chip antennas enables efficient integration into compact devices where space is at a premium. These antennas are well suited for smart utility meters, robotics, intelligent transport systems, set-top boxes and gateways, and mobile electronic wallets. 

Amphenol RF provides local technical support and matching of antennas. 

Amphenol RF manufactures coaxial connectors for use in radio frequency, microwave, and data transmission system applications. Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut, USA, Amphenol RF has sales, marketing and manufacturing locations in North America, Asia and Europe.  Standard products include RF connectors, coaxial adapters and RF cable assemblies. Custom engineered products include multi-port ganged interconnect, blind mate and hybrid mixed-signal solutions. 

https://www.amphenolrf.com

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Accelerators extend Hailo-8 AI portfolio for edge AI

Fri, Aug 04, 2023

The Hailo-8 Century and Hailo-8L AI accelerators have been added to the Hailo-8 portfolio to enable high performance AI in edge devices ranging from entry level to high-capacity deployments, said Hailo.

The Hailo-8 AI accelerator offers hundreds of successful deployments in customer programs and products. The new high-performance Hailo-8 Century PCIe card line offers up to 208T operations per second (TOPS) for most demanding applications. Hailo adds that the Hailo-8L makes advanced AI processing available for entry-level applications. 

“The expansion of our Hailo-8 AI accelerator portfolio is unlocking new opportunities for our customers to harness real-time, power-efficient intelligence in a diverse range of applications and industries,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo. “With the rise of generative AI driven applications, our . . . solutions bring unmatched AI performance and power efficiency, enabling state-of-the-art transformer-based models such as ViT, CLIP and SAM, at the edge,” he said.

The Hailo-8L has up to 13TOPS and is designed to support entry level products requiring limited AI capacity or lower performance. The Hailo-8 Century line comprises PCIe cards delivering 52 to 208TOPS for demanding applications such as video management systems handling a large number of video streams. The Hailo-8 Century PCIe cards deliver best-in-class power efficiency at 400FPS per Watt on the ResNet50 benchmark model. They are also cost-efficient said Hailo, representing up to 70 per cent reduction in edge AI deployment costs. The robust design supports industrial temperature ranges and ensures compatibility with virtually any environment or application, said the company. 

The Hailo-8 Century products can be used where AI compute power is large camera deployments is required, such as security, retail and smart cities for video analytics.

Hailo-8 Century and Hailo-8L deliver low latency, high efficiency processing and are capable of handling complex pipelines with multiple real-time streams and concurrent processing of multiple models and AI tasks. The expanded portfolio of Hailo-8 products features seamless scalability for future upgrades. All products are compatible with the same field-proven and comprehensive Hailo-8 software suite.

The Hailo-8L can run the benchmark classification model ResNet50 at 500 FPS, and the Century high performance PCIe cards can run this model at up to 10K FPS, outperforming Nvidia’s comparable products in performance, cost efficiency and power efficiency parameters. 

Hailo is an AI-focused chipmaker, developing specialised AI processors that enable data centre-class performance on edge devices. The processors are designed to fit into smart machines and devices, impacting a variety of sectors including automotive, security, industry 4.0 and retail.

http://www.hailo.ai 

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NFC antennas expand Amphenol RF portfolio for keyless access

Thu, Aug 03, 2023

The near field communication (NFC) antennas that Amphenol RF has added to its portfolio of internal RF antennas support keyless access and smart tag applications. The antennas are easy to use, said the company and are designed to support NFC Forum standards.

NFC antennas offer high performance capabilities which support NFC Forum wireless standards. They are available in standard configurations with adhesive mount options. They are short range internal antennas which operate at 13.56MHz and are therefore suitable for compact IoT devices such as smartphones, tablets and portable gaming systems as well as in payment readers and ticketing systems. They are also commonly used in devices that require pairing with a Bluetooth device.

NFC antennas are extremely small in size and are manufactured from either PI or FR-4 materials, with or without ferrite and adhesive.

Testing, tuning and measurement capabilities of NFC antennas is available. The antennas are for use in quick, short range data transfer within smart IoT devices, advised Amphenol RF.

The NFC antennas are the latest additions to Amphenol RF’s range of internal and external options. They are designed to meet any design requirement, said the company but custom designs are also available if additional assembly is needed such as cable and connector or combo-design with a wireless charging coil.

Amphenol RF is a manufacturer of coaxial connectors for use in radio frequency (RF), microwave and data transmission system applications. The company is headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut, USA and has sales, marketing and manufacturing locations in North America, Asia and Europe. Standard products include RF connectors, coaxial adapters and RF cable assemblies. Custom engineered products include multi-port ganged interconnect, blind mate and hybrid mixed-signal solutions.

https://www.amphenolrf.com

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IMU is equipped with six DoF sensor to measure slow and fast motion

Tue, Jul 25, 2023

IMUs (inertial measurement units) from Epson now include the M-G370G, which has been added to the company’s portfolio. 

It allows users to select an accelerometer output range of either ±8G or ±16G and offers 0.05 per cent non-linearity of the full scale range of the gyroscopic sensor. In this way, the M-G370G IMU measure all types of motion, from slow to fast, said Epson.

The IMU is compact, with dimensions of 24 x 24 x 10mm3 and is backwards compatible with the M-G330 and M-G366, M-G370 and M-G370S IMUs which will sharply reduce development costs and evaluation time, noted Epson. 

It has a low current consumption of 16mA, making it suitable for vibration damping for cameras and antennas, unmanned vehicles (industrial drones, terrestrial vehicles, sea probes), vibration, angle, trajectory measurement of industrial equipment and for navigation systems (GNSS, INS4, high-precision locators).

Epson will exhibit the M-G370G at Maintenance and Resilience Tokyo 2023 26 to 28 July, at Tokyo Big Sight.

First launched in 2011, Epson’s IMUs have been used in an array of customer applications, from precision agriculture (GNSS2) and industrial drones to camera and antenna platform vibration control and stabilization, earning an excellent reputation for outstanding performance and quality. Epson has a full range of IMUs, from basic models to high-spec models. All are based on a platform that measures about one inch along the sides, the standard form factor for IMUs.

The M-G370G will enter volume production this month.

Epson Europe Electronics is the European headquarters for electronic devices of Seiko Epson, Japan. It is located in Munich, Germany and has several European sales representatives and a European-wide network of distributors. 

Epson Europe Electronics provides value added services for timing devices, semiconductors, sensors and sensing systems targeted to various markets like industrial, automotive, medical and communication. 

Epson’s goal is to become carbon negative and eliminate use of exhaustible underground resources such as oil and metal by 2050.

http://www.global.epson.com

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