ICs & Semiconductors

Single-chip GaN gate driver accelerates automation, says STMicroelectronics

Wed, Sep 01, 2021

STMicroelectronics’ STDRIVEG600 half-bridge gate driver has high current output and 45ns propagation delay, closely matched between high-side and low-side outputs, in order to handle high frequency switching of GaN enhancement-mode FETs.

The driver can also be used for driving N-channel silicon MOSFETs at up to 20V, and allows up to 6V gate source voltage (VGS) to be applied on GaN devices to ensure low Rds(on). The driver also has an integrated bootstrap circuit that helps minimise the bill of materials (BoM) and to simplify board layout, claims STMicro. The bootstrap circuit uses a synchronous MOSFET that lets the bootstrap voltage reach the logic supply voltage, VCC, allowing the driver to operate from a single supply without a low dropout regulator (LDO).

The STDRIVEG600 has dV/dt immunity of ±200V/ns for dependable gate control in challenging electrical environments. The logic inputs are CMOS / TTL -compatible down to 3.3V for easy interfacing with a host microcontroller or DSP. The high side section withstands up to 600V, allowing use in applications with a high voltage bus up to 500V.

In addition, the outputs have 5.5 / 6.0A sink / source capability and provide separated turn-on and turn-off pins. As a result, designers can choose the optimum way to control the gate. Both the high side and low side circuits support Kelvin connection to the power switch source for enhanced control. Dedicated ground and supply voltage connections for the low side driver ensure stable switching with the Kelvin connection and allow a shunt resistor to be used for current sensing without additional isolation or input filtering.

Built-in safety functions include under-voltage lockout (UVLO) on both the lower and upper driving sections to prevent the power switches from operating in low efficiency or dangerous conditions. There is also interlocking to avoid cross-conduction, as well as over-temperature protection. A dedicated pin for shutdown functionality is also available.

The STDRIVEG600 can be used in applications such as high voltage PFC, DC/DC, and DC/AC converters, switched mode power supplies, UPS systems, solar generators, and motor drivers for home appliances, factory automation and industrial drives.

The STDRIVEG600 is in full production and available as a 16-pin SO16 device.

Two development boards are available. The first is the EVSTDRIVEG600DG which contains a 150mOhm 650V GaN HEMT in 5.0 x 6.0mm PowerFLAT package with Kelvin source. The second is the EVSTDRIVEG600DM which comes with a STL33N60DM2 MDmesh 115mOhm 600V silicon power MOSFET with fast recovery diode in 8.0 x 8.0mm PowerFLAT with Kelvin source or alternative DPAK package.

http://www.st.com/gandrivers

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Wind River develops reference system based on Intel FlexRAN for 5G vRAN

Tue, Aug 31, 2021

Wind River and Intel are jointly developing a 5G virtual radio access network (vRAN) which integrates the Intel FlexRAN reference software for systems using third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI acceleration. Also included are Intel Ethernet 800 network adapters and the Intel vRAN dedicated accelerator ACC100 with Wind River Studio.

The collaboration will optimise new capabilities using the future next generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids).

Wind River Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes container-based architecture based on the StarlingX open source project for the deployment and management of distributed edge networks at scale. Studio is characterised by low latency and a small footprint infrastructure to allow the flexibility to grow new business and further improve total cost of ownership, explained Wind River. Intel FlexRAN is a vRAN reference implementation for virtualised cloud-enabled radio access networks.

Operators are pursuing vRAN for greater agility following the shift to cloud-native approaches, driven by 5G. There is the potential for vRAN to act as an anchor tenant for far-edge cloud but challenges include system integration, operational complexity for multi-vendor vRAN and edge cloud server performance.

Using the reference design, prospective customers and vRAN solution providers will be able to review evaluation packages consisting of Intel FlexRAN reference software pre-integrated with Wind River Studio to simplify and accelerate customer trials and deployments of 5G vRAN.

“As 5G opens up new opportunities across industries, there will be an increasing need to put greater intelligence and compute to the edges of the network, where new use cases evolve and thrive. As such, operators must adopt a low-latency far-edge cloud architecture to enable these new use cases in an intelligent, AI-first world,” said Kevin Dallas, president and CEO at Wind River.

“As operators realise the benefits and embrace a virtualised, software-defined architecture, our products, ecosystem, and years of experience help accelerate this shift to flexible, agile networks,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Network Platforms Group.

Wind River delivers software for intelligent systems. Its technology has been powering the safest, most secure devices in the world since 1981. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio, supported by world-class global professional services and support and a broad partner ecosystem. The company says its software and expertise are accelerating digital transformation of mission-critical intelligent systems that will increasingly demand greater compute and AI capabilities while delivering the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability.

http://www.windriver.com

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Wind River develops reference system based on Intel FlexRAN for 5G vRAN

Tue, Aug 31, 2021

Wind River and Intel are jointly developing a 5G virtual radio access network (vRAN) which integrates the Intel FlexRAN reference software for systems using third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI acceleration. Also included are Intel Ethernet 800 network adapters and the Intel vRAN dedicated accelerator ACC100 with Wind River Studio.

The collaboration will optimise new capabilities using the future next generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids).

Wind River Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes container-based architecture based on the StarlingX open source project for the deployment and management of distributed edge networks at scale. Studio is characterised by low latency and a small footprint infrastructure to allow the flexibility to grow new business and further improve total cost of ownership, explained Wind River. Intel FlexRAN is a vRAN reference implementation for virtualised cloud-enabled radio access networks.

Operators are pursuing vRAN for greater agility following the shift to cloud-native approaches, driven by 5G. There is the potential for vRAN to act as an anchor tenant for far-edge cloud but challenges include system integration, operational complexity for multi-vendor vRAN and edge cloud server performance.

Using the reference design, prospective customers and vRAN solution providers will be able to review evaluation packages consisting of Intel FlexRAN reference software pre-integrated with Wind River Studio to simplify and accelerate customer trials and deployments of 5G vRAN.

“As 5G opens up new opportunities across industries, there will be an increasing need to put greater intelligence and compute to the edges of the network, where new use cases evolve and thrive. As such, operators must adopt a low-latency far-edge cloud architecture to enable these new use cases in an intelligent, AI-first world,” said Kevin Dallas, president and CEO at Wind River.

“As operators realise the benefits and embrace a virtualised, software-defined architecture, our products, ecosystem, and years of experience help accelerate this shift to flexible, agile networks,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Network Platforms Group.

Wind River delivers software for intelligent systems. Its technology has been powering the safest, most secure devices in the world since 1981. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio, supported by world-class global professional services and support and a broad partner ecosystem. The company says its software and expertise are accelerating digital transformation of mission-critical intelligent systems that will increasingly demand greater compute and AI capabilities while delivering the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability.

http://www.windriver.com

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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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