Smart Sensors’ smart approach to custom ICs and SiPs

Swindon Silicon Systems, a Sensata Technologies company, provides custom integrated circuits, including tyre pressure monitoring system ICs. Its custom IC sensor solutions measure pressure, temperature, position, acceleration and proximity, all of which will be highlighted at this year’s Embedded World Digital as part of the company’s focus on the industrial sector, smart sensors and the IIoT.

Its background in sensor interface application specific integrated circuits for the connected world means Swindon can help engineers design intelligent and efficient factory automation and control systems that can boost productivity, extend system life and save energy.

“Standout features of Embedded World have always been the quality of the visitors and the wide range of projects they wish to discuss with exhibitors,” said Richard Mount, Swindon’s sales and marketing director. “We look forward to engaging with visitors to learn about their needs and to demonstrate how, as an end-to-end custom IC solutions company, our close partnership and collaboration with customers throughout the entire design and production process sets us apart from other suppliers.”

Smart sensors function by sensing, measuring, processing and interpreting and Swindon specialises in incorporating these functions into a mixed signal application specific integrated circuit or a system in package solution which the company states provides “many advantages and performance enhancements for the smart sensor over traditional discrete component-level solutions”. The company will use the show’s digital platform to explain how enhancing a product with a customer specific IC can provide a number of advantages including greater functionality, smaller size and lower overall cost.

A custom IC solution can also reduce a user’s inventory and bill of materials, protecting the originator’s intellectual property and provide longevity of their product life through non-obsolescence assurances. This is in sharp contrast to a solution manufactured using mainly standard components that are often made obsolete once the part is no longer sold in high enough volume by the supplier, says Swindon.

Embedded World Digital 2021, a virtual event, runs from March 1 to 5 2021

http://www.sensata.com

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Renesas RF microcontrollers are supported by Segger

Development tools, embedded software and production tools for the entire Renesas RE microcontroller family are available from Segger Microcontroller.

According to the company, the support makes firmware development for the Arm-based Renesas RE microcontrollers fast and easy.

Segger’s Embedded Studio integrated development environment (IDE) includes an optimised run-time library and the company’s own compiler and linker to generate small and efficient application code.

The J-Link debug probe offers the fastest flash download, including an unlimited number of breakpoints in flash memory, claims the company.

Application software includes an RTOS and communication, security, GUI and IoT software designed in-house, specifically for embedded systems. Segger’s system verification tool, SystemView, reveals the true runtime behaviour of the application. On completion of development, Segger’s Flasher series of production programmers can be used for mass production.

Trial versions of the software are available. Segger’s technical team and ecosystem offer support throughout the development process.

The power efficient Renesas RE family microcontrollers, combined with the low resource usage of Segger software, minimises – and sometimes even removes  – the need to recharge or replace batteries. This efficiency is particularly useful for home and building automation, smart farming and factory applications as well as for a range of medical devices and wearable applications.

Segger Microcontroller has over 25 years’ experience in embedded computer systems, and produces software libraries, and offers software tools and hardware tools for development and production.

Its software libraries include communication, security, data compression and storage and user interface software.

The company’s range of software libraries and tools for embedded system development are optimised for the requirements imposed by resource-constrained embedded systems.

The company was founded by Rolf Segger in 1992. It is privately held and has a US office in the Boston area, branch operations in Silicon Valley and the UK, and distributors on most continents.

Segger software is not covered by an open-source or required-attribution license and can be integrated in any commercial or proprietary product, without the obligation to disclose the combined source.

http://www.segger.com

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DRAM modules for FPGAs are first industrial grade versions

Innodisk claims that its industrial-grade DRAM modules are the first available in the industry. The rugged modules are for FPGAs and provide wide temperature support for artificial intelligence and IoT applications.

FPGAs can be used for inference in embedded, edge computing, AI, and IoT applications. Customisable FPGAs offer greater performance with lower power consumption than general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) and are more flexible for adjustment in the field than ASICs, explains Innodisk.

“We expect this to be a game-changer that can roll with the tide of AI,” said Samson Chang, global DRAM vice president of Innodisk. “Industrial-grade DRAM is key to the integration of FPGAs in applications like AI and [industrial IoT] IIoT,” he added.

The $5.9 billion FPGA market is expected to see a 7.6 per cent average annual growth rate over the next five years, fuelled primarily by increased AI and IoT adoption, Innodisk reports.

Chang said the Innodisk‘s DRAM modules provide “large capacity, low-latency memory access for FPGAs”. The industrial-grade DRAM modules for FPGAs include single or dual rank formats for high capacity applications. The DRAM modules has a -40 to +85 degrees C temperature tolerance, to surpass JEDEC standards. They also feature anti-sulphuration to guard silver alloys against sulphur corrosion and HumiSeal conformal coating to protect from dust, dirt, and corrosion. They also have side fill technology to bolster chip-to-PCB solder joints.

Innodisk provides flash memory, DRAM modules, and embedded peripheral products for industrial and enterprise applications.

https://www.innodisk.com

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AI from iBase is based on Nvidia Jetson TX2

Based on Nvidia’s Jetson TX2, the BoxPC EC-3200 is the latest compact embedded PC for use in industry, medical technology and smart cities. The industrial embedded PC is by iBase and available from TFT flat screen specialist, Distec.

The industrial embedded BoxPC EC-3200 is for applications with artificial intelligence (AI). It is based on the energy saving and powerful Nvidia Jetson TX2 processor. This fast and energy efficient processor has a dual core Denver 2 and a quad core Arm Cortex-A57 processor. “Compared to the Jetson TX1, the energy efficiency and performance has more than doubled,” explained Thomas Schrefel, product manager for Embedded at Distec. This is due to the Nvidia Pascal architecture with 256 processing units and up to 1.33T floating operations per second (TFLOPS). The EC-3200 is able to offer real AI computing power for edge applications with 8Gbyte memory and 59.7Gbyet per second memory bandwidth, he continued.

The robust design of the EC-3200 makes it suitable for use in industrial robots, medical devices, and smart cities and for devices that support collaboration in companies, said Distec.

For edge- and cloud-based AI products which require computing performance and video analysis to perform real time data processing and to overcome latency problems, the EC-3200 uses the Jetson TX2’s GPU-accelerated parallel processing to handle data-intensive and mission-critical workloads, such as deep learning applications.

The fanless EC-3200 is designed for uninterrupted operation and an extended temperature range from -20 to +60 degrees C. The Jetson TX2 has low power consumption, and is claimed to be 25 times more energy efficient than comparable desktop graphics processors.

The compact EC-3200 has 8Gbyte LPDDR4 memory and 32Gbyte eMMC. HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports are available as I/O interfaces.

The housing has a DB9 connection for RS232 or CAN bus, a micro USB slot and an external 10-pin GPIO connection. Two M.2 expansion sockets are available for expansion with optional SSD storage (2280 Key-M) and WAN modules (3042 Key-E). The operating system is based on a specially made Ubuntu 16.04 with Jetpack 3.2.1 and L4T 28.2.

https://www.distec.de/en

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