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Eval kit accelerates BLE SoC development for industrial and smart buildings markets

Tue, Jun 23, 2020

The STMicroelectronics STEVAL-IDB008V1M Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 (BLE) evaluation platform is intended to accelerate application development with modules featuring the BlueNRG-2 SoC.

BlueNRG-2 supports the Bluetooth 5.0 certification, which allows enhanced security with LE secure connections, power-efficient privacy with Link Layer Privacy 1.2 and up to 2.6 times higher throughput with LE data length extension. The SoC contains an Arm Cortex-M0 core operating at up to 32MHz to handle the Bluetooth stack and application processing. Other features are a 32kHz ring oscillator, 24kbyte RAM and 256kbyte flash program memory. Standby power is low, just 0.9 microA in sleep mode with active Bluetooth stack and there is full RAM retention.

The BlueNRG-M2SA module combines a ceramic antenna, RF balun circuit, and 32kHz crystal oscillator and switch mode power supply (SMPS) inductor to reduce power consumption. The compact module measures 13.5 x 11.5mm.

According to STMicroelectonics, the module greatly reduces engineering costs and enables designers to create wireless devices with minimal RF engineering expertise. BlueNRG-M2SA is qualified as a Bluetooth end product, so additional testing by the customer to complete product qualification is unnecessary, says the company. The modules are pre-certified according to US FCC, Canadian IC, European RED, Japan TYPE radio-equipment regulations and will also meet China SRCC requirements when those are finalised.

The STEVAL-IDB008V1M kit’s board combines the BlueNRG-M2 module with sensors including a MEMS pressure and temperature sensor and motion sensors suitable for nine-axis sensor-fusion library. There is also a low-latency, low-power ADPCM codec, ready to use with BlueVoice middleware for voice over BLE streaming. Arduino R3 connectors are provided, and allow access to all the module’s peripherals and enable users to further extend functionality by adding expansion shields.

The associated development-software package, STSW-BLUENRG1-DK, contains an intuitive BlueNRG-Navigator graphical user interface (GUI) which negates the need for an external programmer or hardware.

The kit also simplifies integration of the BlueNRG-M2SA module with ST’s STSW-BNRG-MESH software. STSW-BNRG-MESH implements the Bluetooth SIG Mesh Profile v1.0 to allow true two-way communication and range-extending mesh networks, for industrial and smart building applications.

Operating temperature range is -40 to +85 degrees C. The module has 5dBm RF output power, enabling it to be powered directly with a pair of AAA batteries or any power source from 1.7 to 3.6V.

The STEVAL-IDB008V1M evaluation kit is available now.

http://www.st.com

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Stratix 10 NX FPGA are AI-optimised, says Intel

Fri, Jun 19, 2020

The Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGA include capabilities, such as AI Tensor blocks and hardware programmable AI, to implement customised hardware with integrated, high-performance AI.

The Stratix 10 NX FPGAs high performance AI Tensor blocks are up to 15 times more INT8 throughput than Intel Stratix 10 FPGA DSP block for AI workloads and are hardware programmable for AI with customised workloads. Near compute memory and embedded memory hierarchy for model persistence are also included, together with integrated high bandwidth memory (HBM) and high bandwidth networking with up to 57.8G PAM4 transceivers and hard Ethernet blocks.

The flexible and customisable interconnect can scale across multiple nodes, adds Intel.

The Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGA fabric includes new types of AI-optimised Tensor arithmetic blocks (AI Tensor blocks). These blocks contain dense arrays of lower-precision multipliers typically used in AI applications. The AI Tensor Block’s architecture is tuned for common matrix-matrix or vector-matrix multiplications used in a wide range of AI computations for both small and large matrix sizes. The AI Tensor Block multipliers have base precisions of INT8 and INT4 and support FP16 and FP12 numerical formats through shared-exponent support hardware. All additions or accumulations can be performed with INT32 or IEEE754 single precision floating point (FP32) precision and multiple AI Tensor Block can be cascaded together to support larger matrices.

Other features are speech recognition, speech synthesis, deep packet inspection, congestion control identification, fraud detection, content recognition and video pre and post processing.

The Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGA also incorporate hard intellectual property (IP) such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 x16 and 10/25/100G Ethernet media access control (MAC) / physical coding sub-layer (PCS) / forward error correction (FEC). These transceivers provide a scalable and flexible connectivity solution to adapt to market requirements.

http://www.intel.com

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SoC is optimised for cost-conscious, two-layer PCB wireless products

Fri, Jun 19, 2020

Available in a wafer level chip scale package (WLCSP), optimised for compact, two-layer PCB wireless products, the nRF52805 SoC adds Bluetooth 5.2 to Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 series.

The nRF52805 SoC offers Bluetooth low energy (LE), high-throughput device can be used for cost-constrained applications such as disposable medical products, styluses, sensors, and beacons

The nRF52805 Bluetooth 5.2 SoC in a WLCSP measures just 2.48 x 2.46mm. The WLCSP SoC is optimised for two-layer PCB designs, avoiding the need for more expensive four-layer PCBs in compact, budget-constrained designs, says Nordic. The SoC is capable of Bluetooth LE high-throughput 2Mbits per second and enhanced Channel Selection Algorithm #2 (CSA #2) for improved co-existence.

Based on a 64MHz, 32bit Arm Cortex-M4 processor (144 CoreMark) with 65 CoreMark/mA efficiency, the SoC also includes 192kbyte flash memory and 24kbyte RAM. The multiprotocol (Bluetooth LE/2.4GHz) radio offers up to +4dBm power output and -97dBm sensitivity (1Mbits per second Bluetooth LE) for a link budget of 101dBm. The radio’s peak power draw is only 4.6mA (TX 0dBM, RX 1Mbits per second) and the SoC’s current draw is as low as 0.3 microA in system off and 1.1 microA in system on with 24kbyte RAM retained and real time clock (RTC) running. The SoC features a range of analogue and digital interfaces such as SPI, UART and two wire interface (TWI), a two-channel 12-bit ADC, and ten general purpose I/Os.

Nordic offers a 9.5 x 8.8mm reference layout with all ten general purpose I/Os available, which requires only 10 external passive components (including two crystal load capacitors).

The SoC can be powered from a 1.7 to 3.6V supply and integrates LDO and DC/DC voltage regulators.

The nRF52805 is currently supported by the S112 SoftDevice and Nordic confirms that support for the S113 SoftDevice follows soon. The S112 and S113 SoftDevices (Bluetooth 5.1-qualified protocol software) are memory-optimised peripheral stacks which support high-throughput 2Mbits per second and CSA #2 features. The stacks support up to four connections as a peripheral concurrently with a broadcaster.

The number of connections and bandwidth per connection is configurable, enabling memory and performance optimisation.

Both the S112 and S113 also support LE Secure Connections, improving security compared to LE Legacy Pairing. S113 also supports LE Data Packet Length Extension, resulting in higher throughput and less overhead per packet.

There is a guide explaining how to use the nRF52805 with Nordic’s nRF5 software development kit (SDK). Nordic recommends the nRF52 development kit can be used to emulate the nRF52805 and is a good hardware basis to start designs before moving over to a custom development board.

The nRF52805 is now in volume production.

http://www.nordicsemi.com/nRF52805

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Lynx software bundles strength mission-critical edge computing

Tue, Jun 16, 2020

Software bundles, based on Lynx MOSA.ic have been introduced by Lynx Software Technologies. Initial introductions are for industrial, unmanned aerial vehicles/satellites and avionics.

Lynx MOSA.ic for Industrial, Lynx MOSA.ic for UAVs/Satellites, and Lynx MOSA.ic for Avionics bundles bypass the restrictions imposed by typical embedded approaches to mission-critical systems, allowing developers to create edge computing with robust system-safety mechanisms, security and real-time determinism with sub-microsecond latency, says the company.

Lynx’ secure hypervisor technology, which has been proven in mission-critical environments including commercial aviation, healthcare, and military aircraft and helicopters, is at the heart of the bundles.

Pavan Singh, vice president, product management at Lynx, observed: “Each is designed to let developers of security and safety critical systems, including certifiable systems, take advantage of powerful workflows and techniques such as containers and sensor fusion, easily connect to cloud services, and to scale and adapt intelligently to changing market requirements.”

The bundles are tailored to handle emerging use cases, such as industrial robotics, drone aviation, and complex satellite constellations carrying payloads owned and accessed by multiple users. The Lynx MOSA.ic bundles provide the tools needed to deploy systems efficiently and manage assets securely and safely, while letting developers create, certify, and deploy robust platforms cost-effectively, said Lynx.

The three initial domain-optimised offerings contain common features of the MOSA.ic software framework, including real-time operating systems (RTOS), bare metal and third party operating systems. Lynx MOSA.ic for Avionics and Lynx MOSA.ic for UAVs/Satellites support Arm and x86 processor architectures. Both include LynxOS-178, Lynx’s DO-178 certified operating system, the LynxSecure separation kernel hypervisor, Linux, a set of tools and support for the SR-IOV extension to the PCIe specification.

The initial alpha release of MOSA.ic for Industrial removes Lynx’s RTOS and adds Azure IoT Edge and Windows 10 support for x86 platforms. It also provides Virtual PLC functionality to let manufacturers quickly scale, reconfigure and update software-driven capacity, says Lynx.

Future iterations will extend capabilities including guest operating systems, IoT connectivity, and processor architectures, confirmed Lynx.

http://www.lynx.com

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Eval kit accelerates BLE SoC development for industrial and smart buildings markets

Stratix 10 NX FPGA are AI-optimised, says Intel

SoC is optimised for cost-conscious, two-layer PCB wireless products

Lynx software bundles strength mission-critical edge computing

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