IoT

Microcontroller increases equipment uptimes, says Maxim

Tue, Jun 23, 2020

Industrial, healthcare and IoT applications can benefit from low power consumption and small form factors, using the MAX32670 microcontroller, says Maxim Integrated.

The Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller reduces the power consumption and size while increasing the reliability of industrial, healthcare and IoT applications and protects all embedded memory for both flash and SRAM with error-code correction (ECC).

In many industrial and IoT applications, high energy particles and other environmental challenges can threaten to bombard memory and create bit flips during the normal course of operations – especially as process nodes drop to 40nm and below, warns Maxim. This can disrupt microcontroller operation and produce incorrect results. The MAX32670 protects its entire 384kbyte flash memory and 128kbyte SRAM with ECC. With this protection, single-bit errors are detected and corrected by hardware.

Active power consumption is just 40 microW/MHz and the MAX32670 executes commands from flash at 40 per cent lower power than the closest competitive industrial microcontroller, claims Maxim. It is also claimed to be the lowest power device available for battery-operated sensor applications. It is supplied in a 1.8 x 2.6mm WLP and 5.0 x 5.0mm TQFN and claimed to be 50 per cent smaller than the closest competitor, offering reductions in overall size as well as material costs.

The MAX32670 is available now and there is also an evaluation kit, the MAX32670EVKIT#.

Maxim Integrated develops analogue and mixed-signal products and technologies to make systems smaller and smarter, with enhanced security and increased energy efficiency. Maxim’s customers operate in the automotive, industrial, healthcare, mobile consumer and cloud data centre sectors.

http://www.maximintegrated.com

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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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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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