ICs & Semiconductors

Sondrel has launched the second in its family of reference designs for ASICs that provide a framework to support a customer’s own IP. The SFA250A is aimed at functional safety (FuSa) applications such as advanced driver assistance systems and contains an independent FuSa monitor compliant to ISO 26262 ASIL D – ASIC safety subsystem. Individual subsystems are responsible for the detection and, where applicable, the correction of errors. The SFA 250A has been designed to be easy to adapt to suit the support needs of the customer’s IP as it is scalable, both in terms of function and performance, as well as modular as multiple versions can be combined to form larger solutions.

“So often a customer has created innovative IP but has no idea how to implement this in a chip which is a high-risk scenario,” explained Graham Curren, Sondrel’s CEO. “We are a very safe pair of hands as we have done this hundreds of times over the years for customers. We have drawn on this experience to create the Architecting the future family of IP platforms that are each targeted at specific application areas. Each platform has been designed so that the customer’s IP can easily be integrated into it giving up to 30 per cent reduction in costs, risk and time to market.”

Ben Fletcher, Sondrel’s director of engineering, added: “Reducing risk is massively important for any complex chip design. Sondrel is constantly refining and improving processes to keep increasing the reliability and predictability of the work that we do, and avoid costly delays to customer schedules. Our detailed design practices help us to more easily deliver demanding projects that require the added dimension of functional safety.”

Sondrel emphasises that for those that work in a functional safety environment, safety has to be a top priority. This philosophy has enabled the company to work on FuSa designs for many companies including automotive designs to the ISO 26262 standard.

To further reduce risk and time to market, Sondrel offers a full turnkey service that turns designs into fully tested, shipping silicon.

http://www.sondrel.com

Developers of cellular IoT devices that connect to the internet through LTE-Cat M and NB-IoT networks can now call on STMIcroelectronics B-L462E-CELL1 Discovery kit which includes GSMA-certified embedded SIM (eSIM).

The kit features an ultra-small size all-in-one cellular module from Murata which, as well as the ST4SIM-200M GSMA-certified embedded eSIM, embeds ST’s ultra-low-power STM32L462 microcontroller and an LTE-M/NB-IOT chipset. The eSIM is pre-programmed with a bootstrap connectivity profile from Truphone, one of ST’s authorised partners. The kit leverages out-of-the-box data connectivity and enables remote SIM provisioning and SIM over-the-air updates. The user can immediately start the board by connecting to a power supply using a USB cable or inserting three AAA batteries in the connector provided before activating the eSIM to let the board connect to a cellular network to begin developing the application.

The B-L462E-CELL1 kit is designed to resist cellular connectivity attacks owing to the ST4SIM-200M eSIM solution based on the ST33 Arm SecurCore SC300 secure element, which is CC EAL5+ and GSMA SGP.02 v3.2 certified. The ST4SIM is ready to host a Root-of-Trust applet for enhanced protection against cyber-attacks.

A set of on-board sensors helps simplify development of motion- and environmental-monitoring solutions. They comprise ST’s LSM303AGR accelerometer-magnetometer, HTS221 relative humidity and temperature sensor, and LPS22HH pressure sensor. There is also a 0.96-inch OLED display, indicator LEDs and a USB connection.

The STM32Cube software expansion package, X-Cube-Cellular drives the Discovery kit and supports the Berkeley (BSD) sockets application programming interface. BSD’s standardised function-calls for Internet communication let users connect their prototypes to the internet without needing to develop an AT-command driver to control the modem. X-Cube-Cellular includes a demonstration application and cellular framework in source code, which ST says is easily imported and configured using the powerful, free STM32Cube software toolset.

With ST’s ultra-low-power technologies in the STM32L4, which draws about 2-microA in Stop 2 mode, and a cellular chipset drawing less than 1.4-microA in power saving mode, the B-L462E-CELL1 Discovery kit provides a platform to develop equipment with battery life of up to 10 years for smart-city, smart-industry, smart-agriculture, smart-metering, and wearable applications.

http://www.st.com/b-l462e-cell1

To help speed time to market Intel offers its 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor (code-named “Ice Lake”), including new network-optimised N-SKUs along with verified solution blueprints.

Intel says its N-SKUs deliver an average 62 per cent more performance on a range of broadly deployed 5G and network workloads over the previous generation. The company has also started sampling next-generation Intel Xeon D processors designed for space and power-constrained environments at the edge.

The new network-optimised SKUs suit wireless core, wireless access, network edge workloads and security appliances. They are available in a range of cores, frequency, features and power to deliver lower latency, higher throughput and deterministic performance for service provider network transformation requirements.

Intel software guard extensions integrated into the 3rd Gen Xeon processors enable secure channel setup and communication between the 5G control functions. Built-in crypto acceleration can reduce the performance impact of full data encryption and increase the performance of encryption-intensive workloads.

The new processors can be paired with Intel’s suite of platform components and software, including Intel FPGAs, Ethernet 800 series adapters, Optane persistent memory, FlexRAN, OpenNESS, Open Visual Cloud and Intel Smart Edge.

Agilex 10 nanometer FPGAs are being used in wireless core and access segments to provide infrastructure acceleration capabilities to complement core and access workloads running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

With 3rd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel says that communications service providers can increase 5G UPF performance by up to 42 per cent. Combined with Intel Ethernet 800 series adapters, they can deliver the performance, efficiency and trust for use cases that require low latency, including augmented reality, cloud-based gaming, discrete automation and robotic-aided surgery.

Intel has also announced updates to its network workload-optimised solutions for vRAN, Visual Cloud Deliver Network and NFVI Forwarding Platform, which offer pre-tested and verified configurations. These solutions were developed with various software partners, including Red Hat, VMware and Wind River. Intel is also working with a number of Intel network builders ecosystem partners to verify their offerings for these solutions, including: ASUS, Advantech, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intequus, Inventec, Lanner Electronics, Lenovo, Nexcom, QCT, Supermicro and ZT Systems.

http://www.Intel.com

From Renesas Electronics comes the RX23W module with full Bluetooth 5.0 low energy support for system control and wireless communication on Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint devices.

Featuring the RX23W 32-bit RX MCU supporting fully integrated Bluetooth low energy communication, the new RX23W module is equipped with an antenna, oscillator and custom-matched circuit.

The module is certified under Radio Law for multiple countries, including Japan and the USA, and is Bluetooth SIG certified which is said to eliminate the need for additional RF design work, tuning, or specialised RF knowledge. This in turn means customers can use the module as it is, shortening new product development time.

The small 6.1 mm x 9.5 mm, 83-pin LGA package makes it possible to design more compact devices with fewer external components, reducing the bill of materials cost, says Renesas which also states that this improves the development efficiency of IoT endpoint devices such as home appliance, healthcare and sports and fitness equipment.

The RX23W MCU incorporated in the module also supports long-range and 2 Mbps data throughput. Its communication characteristics offer reception sensitivity level of −105 dBm at 125 kbps. Built around Renesas’ RXv2 CPU core, the RX23W MCU operates at a maximum clock frequency of 54 MHz suiting it to system control. The RX23W also incorporates Renesas’ exclusive security function, the Trusted Secure IP (TSIP), that the company states provides robust protection against threats to IoT devices such as eavesdropping, tampering, and viruses.

A set of peripheral functions includes touch key, USB, and CAN functions.

The RX23W module uses the same software development environment used for RX MCUs, which means developers can work on both system and communication control at the same time. Smart Configurator enables developers to employ a GUI to generate driver code for peripheral functions and Bluetooth, as well as configuring pin settings. QE for BLE enables developers to generate programs for custom Bluetooth profiles.

http://www.renesas.com