ICs & Semiconductors Archives - Page 72 of 227

STMicroelectronics reveals single-chip antenna-matching ICs for easier, faster design with Bluetooth LE SoCs and microcontrollers

Tue, Feb 07, 2023

STMicroelectronics has extended its range of single-chip antenna-matching ICs that simplify RF-circuit design with two new devices optimised for BlueNRG-LPS system-on-chip ICs (SoCs) and STM32WB1x and STM32WB5x wireless microcontrollers.

The MLPF-NRG-01D3 for BlueNRG-LPS and MLPF-WB-02D3 for STM32WB integrate the complete filtering and impedance-matching network needed for best RF output power and receiver sensitivity with an external antenna. Each has 50Ohm nominal impedance on the antenna side. The chip-scale package has a minuscule footprint, 0.4mm bump pitch and a profile of only 630micro after reflow soldering. Also featuring a 2.4GHz low-pass filter, ST’s antenna-matching ICs ease compliance with worldwide radio regulations, including FCC, ETSI, and ARIB specifications.

The circuit elements are fabricated on a glass substrate leveraging ST’s integrated passive device (IPD) technology, which, the company claimed, minimises insertion losses and outperforms circuits built with discrete components. Integration on the same die is said to ensure consistent component parameters for end-product quality. In addition, ST’s IPDs help accelerate time to market, reduce bill-of-materials costs and miniaturise circuit dimensions.

The BlueNRG-LP and Blue NRG-LPS SoCs and STM32WB1x and STM32WB5x contain ST’s energy-efficient 2.4GHz radio IP and come with royalty-free protocol stacks and dedicated software tools. They help developers quickly design state-of-the-art wireless products, even without having extensive RF-design skills. Both provide on-chip features such as memory, peripherals, communication interfaces, power regulation and advanced hardware security including encryption, memory protection and public key acceleration (PKA).

BlueNRG-LPx SoCs can be used in standalone or network processor applications and support Bluetooth Low Energy 5.3 features including point-to-point and mesh communications, advertising extensions and direction finding.

The MLPF-NRG-01D3 IPD is compatible with all variants, comprising the BLUENRG-3x5Vx, BLUENRG-3x5Ax and BLUENRG-332xx in UFQFPN and WLCSP packages.

The STM32WB5x and STM32WB1x MCUs are Bluetooth 5.3, Zigbee 3.0 and OpenThread certified and feature an Arm Cortex-M4 core for application processing with a Cortex-M0+ dedicated to managing the radio. They are available in WLCSP and UFBGA packages that connect directly to the MLPF-WB-02D3 IPD. A different IPD is available for other MCU variants in UQFN and VQFN packages.

The MLPF-NRG-01D3 and MLPF-WB-02D3 single-chip antenna-matching ICs are available from $0.14 for orders of 1,000 pieces.

https://www.st.com/

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Multi-channel LED driver addresses RGB and single colour solid state lighting

Fri, Feb 03, 2023

A linear current LED driver, the AL5887, offers a simple way of driving numerous LEDs to enable complex colour mixing and different lighting patterns, said Diodes. It integrates two interface options (I2C and SPI) for system design flexibility. It delivers a wide colour range and an extensive dynamic range of brightness levels, making it suitable for use in smart home appliances, electric vehicle charging stations, infotainment displays, IoT information indicators, and computing hardware.

The AL5887 has 36 independent programmable channels and can drive up to 12 RGB LED modules or 36 single-colour emitters. It features an internal 12-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM) for colour and 6-bit analogue brightness control, which can be accessed through either the SPI or I2C interface.

There are three programmable banks for software control of each colour for ease of programming and setting lighting module patterns. An independent colour-mixing and brightness register per channel enables better colour-mixing schemes, said Diodes. The dimming function relies on a PWM duty cycle from three to 100 per cent. Once the duty cycle goes below three per cent, internal circuitry converts the output to analogue dimming, maintaining linearity. By combining PWM and analogue dimming functions, a dimming ratio greater than 100K to 1 can be achieved.

The AL5887’s diagnostics with fault-reporting functions are combined with built-in protection capabilities, which include short-circuit and open-LED protection, as well as over-temperature shutdown. The pre-event over-temperature shutdown warning also results in earlier system protection.

Using the two external hardware address pins, up to four of these devices can be connected together in I2C mode. An internal 16MHz oscillator avoids the need for an external high-precision clock and therefore reduces the bill of materials (BoM) cost.

The AL5887 LED driver is supplied in a 52-pin wettable QFN package, with exposed pad for better heat dissipation.

http://www.diodes.com

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nRF7002 companion IC and development kit create low power Wi-Fi 6 IoT

Thu, Feb 02, 2023

The first IC in Nordic Semiconductor’s Wi-Fi product family is the nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 companion IC. The low power Wi-Fi 6 companion IC provides seamless dual band (2.4 and 5.0GHz) connectivity. The nRF7002 IC can be used with Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 and nRF53 series multi-protocol SoCs and the nRF9160 cellular IoT (LTE-M / NB-IoT) system in package (SiP), but can be used in conjunction with non-Nordic host devices.

In IoT applications, Wi-Fi 6 has power efficiency gains for battery power Wi-Fi operation and management in smart home products, industrial sensors, asset trackers, and wearables. They also contribute to the management of large IoT networks comprising hundreds of devices, said Nordic Semiconductor.

According to Svein-Egil Nielsen, CTO and executive vice president of R&D and Strategy at Nordic: “This highly integrated and flexible solution will empower developers to create new, innovative Wi-Fi 6-enabled products. Supported with the nRF7002 DK and the award-winning nRF Connect [software development kit], combined with Nordic’s . . . technical support, I believe it has never been easier to develop great Wi-Fi products.”

“The nRF7002 is designed to work alongside Nordic’s nRF52 and nRF53 Series making it a perfect fit for Matter, a smart-home standard backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Nordic, Samsung, and hundreds of other companies,” explained Finn Boetius, product marketing engineer with Nordic. “The introduction of the IC and the nRF7002 DK now makes it easy for developers to get started on Matter and any other Wi-Fi based applications.” Matter uses Thread and Wi-Fi for data transport, and Bluetooth LE for commissioning.

The nRF7002 brings low power and secure Wi-Fi to the IoT. The dual-band IC complies with Station (STA), Soft Access Point (AP), and Wi-Fi Direct operation, and meets the IEEE 802.11b, a, g, n (Wi-Fi 4), ac (Wi-Fi 5), and ax (Wi-Fi 6) standards. The product also offers co-existence with Bluetooth LE, Thread and Zigbee.

The nRF7002 supports target wake time (TWT) a key Wi-Fi 6 power saving feature. Interfacing with a host processor is done via serial peripheral interface (SPI) or quad SPI (QSPI). The IC offers a single spatial stream, 20MHz channel bandwidth, 64 QAM (MCS7), OFDMA, up to 86Mbits per second PHY throughput, and BSS (base service set) colouring.

In addition to general IoT applications and Matter, the nRF7002 implements low power SSID-based Wi-Fi location when used with Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP and the company’s nRF Cloud Location Services. SSID-based Wi-Fi location supplements GNSS- or cell-based location by providing accurate positioning indoors and in places with a high density of Wi-Fi access points.

The introduction of the nRF7002 is accompanied by the launch of the nRF7002 DK, a development kit for the Wi-Fi 6 companion IC. The DK includes an nRF7002 IC and features an nRF5340 multi-protocol SoC as a host processor for the nRF7002. The nRF5340 embeds a 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor and a 64MHz high efficiency network processor. The DK supports the development of low-power Wi-Fi applications and enables Wi-Fi 6 features like OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing), beamforming, and TWT (target wake time). The DK includes Arduino connectors; two programmable buttons; a Wi-Fi dual-band antenna and a Bluetooth LE antenna, and current measurement pins.

The nRF7002 companion IC and nRF7002 DK are available now from Nordic’s distribution partners.

http://www.nordicsemic.com

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16Gbyte SoM with edge AI can be used in handheld devices, says Nvidia

Wed, Feb 01, 2023

The Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte module is now available for purchase from Nvidia. The system on module (SoM) has a small form factor, making it suitable for low power robots, embedded applications and autonomous machines. It can be used in products like drones and handheld devices, advised Nvidia.

Target applications are in manufacturing, logistics, retail, agriculture, healthcare, and life sciences.

The Jetson Orin NX is the smallest Jetson form factor, delivering up to 100 TOPS of AI performance with power configurable between 10 and 25W. It gives developers three times the performance of the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier and five times the performance of the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX.

The SoM supports multiple AI application pipelines with Nvidia Ampere architecture GPU, next-generation deep learning and vision accelerators, high-speed I/O and fast memory bandwidth. It can be used for developing systems with large and complex AI models in natural language understanding, 3D perception and multi-sensor fusion.

To showcase the leap in performance achievable by the SoM, Nvidia ran some computer vision benchmarks using the Nvidia JetPack 5.1. Testing included some dense INT8 and FP16 pre-trained models from NGC, Nvidia’s portal of enterprise services, software, management tools, and support for end-to-end AI and digital twin workflows. The same models were also run for comparison on Jetson Xavier NX.

The benchmarks for people detection, licence plate recognition, object detection and labelling and multi-person human pose estimation showed that the Jetson Orin NX delivered a 2.1 times performance increase compared to Jetson Xavier NX. With future software optimisations, this is expected to approach 3.1 times for dense benchmarks. Other Jetson devices have increased performance by 1.5 times since the first supporting software release. Similar results are anticipated for the Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte.

Jetson Orin NX also brings support for sparsity, which will enable even greater

performance. With sparsity, developers can take advantage of the fine-grained structured sparsity in deep learning networks to increase the throughput for Tensor Core operations.

All Jetson Orin modules run the world-standard Nvidia AI software stack.

Nvidia JetPack 5.1 supports the Orin NX 16Gbyte and the latest CUDA-X stack on Jetson Orin.

The Jetson partner ecosystem supports a broad range of carrier boards and peripherals for the Jetson Orin NX 16Gbyte module, such as sensors, cameras,

connectivity modules (5G, 4G, Wi-Fi).

http://www.nvidia.com

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STMicroelectronics reveals single-chip antenna-matching ICs for easier, faster design with Bluetooth LE SoCs and microcontrollers

Multi-channel LED driver addresses RGB and single colour solid state lighting

nRF7002 companion IC and development kit create low power Wi-Fi 6 IoT

16Gbyte SoM with edge AI can be used in handheld devices, says Nvidia

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