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Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy module has a long-range reach

Thu, Jan 16, 2020

The long range Bluetooth 5.0 module, the PAN1780, is for IIoT and smart home applications, says Panasonic Industry Europe. The module is based on the Nordic nRF52840 SoC controller. It has an output power of up to +8dBm and the high sensitivity of the nRF52840 which is combined with the low energy-coded PHY.

It also enables a higher symbol rate of 2Mbits per second, using the high-speed Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) 2M PHY. The new LE advertising extensions allow for much larger amounts of data to be broadcasted in connectionless scenarios, says Panasonic Industry Europe.

The module’s qualified Bluetooth mesh profile stack supports Bluetooth LE 5.0 with 802.15.4 and NFC-A. The Cortex M4F processor, 256kB RAM and the built-in 1Mbyte flash memory enable it to be used in standalone mode, eliminating the need for an external processor. This saves complexity, space and cost, says Panasonic Industry. A variant with an AT command set, the PAN1780AT, is available.

The compact module measures just 15.6 x 8.7 x 2.0mm and features an Arm TrustZone Cryptocell 310 security core that supports a secure boot process. A temperature sensor is integrated in the PAN1780 module. The operating temperature range is -40 to +85 degrees C and the supply voltage ranges from 1.7V to 5.5V.

The PAN1780 module is suitable for industrial IoT applications, such as devices for smart city infrastructure, industrial mesh networks or robotics within Industry 4.0 environments. It is also suitable for smart health and secure medical peripherals or building automation applications like smart locks or intelligent lighting. The Cryptocell also makes it suitable for edge computing.

Panasonic Corporation develops electronics technologies and solutions for customers in the consumer electronics, housing, automotive, and B2B businesses. The company celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2018 and operates 582 subsidiaries and 87 associated companies worldwide.

Panasonic Industry Europe is part of the global Panasonic Group and provides automotive and industrial products and services in Europe.

http://industry.panasonic.eu

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Demonstration board drives eGaN FETs for ToF and lidar systems

Mon, Jan 13, 2020

Using fast transition eGaN FETs from Efficient Power Conversion (EPC), the EPC9144 is a 15V, 28A high current pulsed laser diode driver demonstration board.

It is designed to illustrate the use of eGaN FET technology in developing systems that enhance the accuracy, precision, and processing speed of time of flight (ToF) and flash lidar systems.

Reliable ToF systems rely on the speed and accuracy of object detection. EPC says that the EPC9144 board demonstrates the rapid transition capability of the company’s AEC Q101-qualified EPC2216 eGaN FETs to provide power pulses to drive laser diodes, vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSELs) or LEDs up to 10 times faster than an equivalent MOSFET, in a small fraction of the area, energy, and cost.

eGaN FETs and ICs provide the high current pulses, extremely narrow pulse widths, and small size that make affordable, high performance lidar possible, EPC maintains. The short pulse width leads to higher resolution while the small size and low cost make eGaN FETs particularly well suited to ToF applications in a range of applications from automotive to industrial, healthcare to smart advertising, gaming, and security.

The EPC9144 ships with an interposer board. This is a collection of break-away 5.0 x 5.0mm square interposer PCBs with footprints to accommodate different lasers, RF connectors and other footprints designed to allow engineers to experiment with different loads in development projects. The use of the interposers allows many different lasers or other loads to be mounted, allowing users to test the performance with the load requirements that are appropriate to their application, adds EPC.

GaN can be used in autonomous vehicles and other ToF applications, advises the company, such as facial recognition, warehouse automation, drones and topological mapping. The EPC9144 can also be used for applications requiring a ground-referenced eGaN FET, for example, in class E or similar circuits.

http://www.epc-co.com

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Snapdragon Ridge hails autonomous vehicles with customisable SoC

Mon, Jan 13, 2020

Scalable and open autonomous driving solutions from Qualcomm Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm, consist of the family of Snapdragon Ride Safety system on chips (SoCs), Snapdragon Ride Safety Accelerator and Snapdragon Ride autonomous stack.

Snapdragon Ride aims to address the complexity of autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) by leveraging power-efficient hardware, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and what Qualcomm describes as a pioneering autonomous driving stack. The combination of Snapdragon Ride SoCs, accelerator and autonomous stack offers vehicle manufacturers a scalable solution designed to support three industry segments, namely: L1/L2 active safety ADAS for vehicles that include automatic emergency braking, traffic sign recognition and lane keeping assist functions, L2+ convenience ADAS for vehicles featuring automated highway driving, self-parking and urban driving in stop-and-go traffic and L4/L5 fully autonomous driving for urban driving, robo-taxis and robo-logistics.

The Snapdragon Ride platform is based on the Snapdragon family of automotive SoCs and accelerator. It is built on scalable and modular heterogenous high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, and a graphics processing unit (GPU). It offers 30 Tera operations per second (TOPS) for L1/L2 applications to over 700 TOPS at 130W for L4/L5 driving. This enables it to be used in designs that can be passively or air-cooled to reduce cost and increase reliability by avoiding the use of expensive liquid cooled systems. It also allows for simpler vehicle designs and extends the driving range for electric vehicles (EVs), says Qualcomm. The Snapdragon Ride SoCs and accelerator are designed for functional safety ASIL-D systems.

The Snapdragon Ride autonomous stack is modular and scalable for automotive manufacturers to use optimised software and applications for complex use cases, such as self-navigating human-like highway driving as well as modular options like perception, localisation, sensor fusion and behaviour planning. This software infrastructure for Snapdragon Ride supports customer-specific stack components to be co-hosted with the Snapdragon Ride autonomous stack components.

The Snapdragon Ride integrated safety board support package has safe OS and hypervisors and operates within safety frameworks from automotive industry leaders, including Adaptive AutoSAR. It has optimised foundational function libraries for computer vision, sensor signal processing, and standard arithmetic libraries

AI tools for improving model efficiencies, as well as optimising runtime on heterogeneous compute units

Snapdragon Ride is expected to be available for pre-development to automakers and tier-1 suppliers in the first half of 2020 and the company anticipates Snapdragon Ride-enabled vehicles to be in production in 2023.

http://www.qualcomm.com

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Siemens and Arm partner to develop and validate automotive safety systems

Fri, Jan 10, 2020

To help automotive designers develop and validate electronic systems, Siemens has paired its PAVE360 software with Arm’s automotive IP in a partnership that will bring IP, methodologies, processes and tools together to help automakers, integrators and suppliers collaborate, design and bring to market their next-generation platforms much faster, says Siemens.

Bringing together IC methodologies, processes and tools will help the automotive supply chain solve design and verification challenges, by validating differentiated safety enabled systems, ICs and software solutions in the context of the entire vehicle the company added.

Siemens’ PAVE360 is part of Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Xcelerator portfolio. This partnership was formed to address the increasingly complexity in developing platforms to realise active-safety, advanced driver assistance, in-vehicle infotainment, digital cockpits, vehicle-to-vehicle/vehicle-to-infrastructure and self-driving vehicles. Advances in computing and sensor technology are enabling companies to redefine mobility beginning with the ICs and software within automotive electronics systems.

Siemens’ PAVE360 digital twin environment, featuring Arm IP, applies high-fidelity modelling techniques from sensors and ICs to vehicle dynamics and the environment within which a vehicle operates. Using Arm IP, including Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) products with functional safety support, digital twin models can run entire software stacks providing early metrics of power and performance while operating in the context of a high-fidelity model of the vehicle and its environment.

Using PAVE360 with Arm automotive IP allows automakers and suppliers to simulate and verify sub-system and system on chip (SoC) designs and understand how they perform within a vehicle design from the silicon level up, before the vehicle is built. By rethinking IC design, manufacturers can consolidate electronic control units (ECUs), saving thousands of dollars per vehicle through reduced the number of circuit boards and lengths of wire within the vehicle design, says Siemens. These savings also reduce vehicle weight which can promote longer range electric vehicles (EVs).

Siemens‘ PAVE360 platform will be demonstrated in the Siemens Mobility booth at CES in Las Vegas (7 to 10 January 2020).

http://www.siemens.com

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Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy module has a long-range reach

Demonstration board drives eGaN FETs for ToF and lidar systems

Snapdragon Ridge hails autonomous vehicles with customisable SoC

Siemens and Arm partner to develop and validate automotive safety systems

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