Sector News

Renesas is first to support public building air quality standards in environmental sensors

Tue, Apr 04, 2023

Renesas Electronics today announced new firmware for its industry-leading ZMOD digital air quality sensors. The latest firmware lets engineers configure the sensors to support various green air quality standards for Commercial & Public buildings, making them the first sensors in the industry to conform to the requirements of multiple global air quality standards. As commercial HVAC systems move towards autonomous monitoring of our air quality, these systems can now monitor and detect harmful gasses in indoor spaces. Support for environmental standards increases the value of end products and reduces the effort needed to qualify manufacturers for government incentives.

Renesas offers support for the Commercial & Public standards, as well as other environmental standards, through its ZMOD digital gas sensors. Both the ZMOD4410 indoor air quality sensor and the ZMOD4510 outdoor air quality sensor offer compliance with the standards. The ZMOD sensors offer customers the ability to configure the sensors through firmware with cloud-based connections. This enables both new and existing ZMOD customers to implement support for the building standards around the globe. A wide range of products can take advantage of this support, including HVAC systems, thermostats, smart appliances and smoke detectors.

“We are excited to see Renesas designing and producing sensors that align with green and healthy building standards,” said Stanton Wong, President, RESET International Standard, an organisation promoting data collection and continuous monitoring for buildings via standardisation. “As awareness of the health impact of environmental factors continues to grow, monitoring the performance of a building via sensors is the best way to understand and optimise for health in indoor spaces. We look forward to the technological innovations Renesas will bring to the industry.”

“Environmental sensors are a vital tool for ensuring the health and safety of occupants in public and commercial buildings,” said DK Singh, Sr. Director of the Sensor Solutions Business at Renesas. “By using our AI-enabled hardware and firmware platform, customers can easily implement advanced sensors that comply with various building air quality standards to provide a safer and healthier environment for people around the world.”

 Key Features of the ZMOD Digital Gas Sensors

  • Support for multiple standards for both indoor and outdoor air quality
  • Firmware configurable for unique flexibility with cloud connectivity
  • Artificial intelligence enables training of sensors
  • JEDEC JESD47 qualification ensures 10-year product life
  • Compensation engines support low-level part per billion (PPB) standard requirements
  • Senses TVOC (Total Volatile Organic Compounds), Ozone and Nitrogen Dioxide

Winning Combinations

Renesas has combined the sensors with other compatible devices from its portfolio, including MCUs, power devices, and wireless connectivity solutions to create multiple Winning Combinations, including the Gas Sensor with Cloud Connection for Industrial Applications. Winning Combinations are technically vetted system architectures from mutually compatible devices that work together seamlessly to bring an optimised, low-risk design for faster time to market. Renesas offers more than 300 Winning Combinations with a wide range of products from the Renesas portfolio to enable customers to speed up the design process and bring their products to market more quickly. All Renesas sensors are part of Renesas’ Quick-Connect development environments to ensure rapid prototyping with minimal coding.

Availability

Both the ZMOD4410 and ZMOD4510 sensors are available today, along with Commercial & Public firmware. The ZMOD4410-EVK and ZMOD4510-EVK evaluation kits are also available.

About Renesas Electronics Corporation

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) empowers a safer, smarter and more sustainable future where technology helps make our lives easier. A leading global provider of microcontrollers, Renesas combines our expertise in embedded processing, analog, power and connectivity to deliver complete semiconductor solutions. These Winning Combinations accelerate time to market for automotive, industrial, infrastructure and IoT applications, enabling billions of connected, intelligent devices that enhance the way people work and live. Learn more at renesas.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

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Smart waste sensor module is world’s smallest, says adhoc networks

Tue, Apr 04, 2023

Measuring 71 x 43 x 28mm, the Oscar smart waste sensor module is the world’s smallest, said Adhoc Networks.

The sensor has a long battery life which combined with its size opens up a range of applications needing remote fill-level detection. 

The optics can measure up to four metres within a container with a cone angle of 27 degrees to determine the fill level. They can be used as part of a local authority or private companies’ automated, fill-level detection and collection to reduce unnecessary collection trips to containers that are only partly filled.

The optical sensor in the device monitors the fill level in a waste container and sends that data for centralised processing to enable a schedule of waste collection to be created. Waste is only collected when the containers are full, reducing a collection fleet’s CO2 emissions by up to 40 per cent, reported adhoc networks.

“Knowing the exact level in every container ensures that there are no wasted collections of part filled containers and, even more importantly, no overflowing containers,” explained Ole Ostermann, adhoc networks’ CEO. The smart sensor module monitors new waste containers which are larger than previous models and which are located below ground level. “These are not currently easy to check the fill level apart from lifting a lid so they are usually emptied more often than necessary just to be sure, but that is a waste of resources,” explained Ostermann.

Oscar uses a Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP to collate data and send it to the cloud over the mobile network LTE-M and Narrowband-IoT. It is a low power device, using a 3.6V Li-thionyl chloride battery which has an operational life of up to five years based on, typically, twelve fill measurements a day and three uplinks of the data to the cloud.

Oscar replaces the company’s first-generation sensor, called Phil, launched in 2021 and currently in use by local authorities around the world. 

The miniaturised version’s footprint is equivalent to a stack of around 10 credit cards, said Ostermann, which enables it to be used in small bins in parks, airports, as well as donated clothes, agricultural produce in storage hoppers or industrial materials such as plastic pellets used for injection moulding. 

http://www.ad-hoc.com

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COTS card with direct RF sampling features Electra-MA chip

Tue, Apr 04, 2023

COTS board and systems supplier, Annapolis Micro Systems, is now shipping what it claims is the industry’s first COTS card to feature Jariet Technologies’ Electra-MA chip with 64Gsample per second, 10-bit ADC and DAC capability. The SOSA-aligned WILD FMC+ DME1 card targets demanding applications which require direct sampling frequency coverage from 0.1 to 36GHz (VHF through Ka-band) and/or wide instantaneous bandwidths.

According to Annapolis Micro Systems, the direct sampling Jariet transceiver performs frequency conversion and filtering in the digital domain, eliminating the need for costly analogue frequency conversion. 

The DME1 card can be integrated into RF and microwave systems. It has usable analogue bandwidth of 36GHz and a maximum instantaneous bandwidth of 6.4GHz on both channels simultaneously. All transceiver channels feature onboard digital downconverters (DDCs) and digital upconverters (DUCs), including sub-band channelisers for dynamic frequency selection.

The DME1 is available for use with Annapolis’ WILDSTAR 3U OpenVPX baseboards (one WFMC+ mezzanine site) or 6U OpenVPX baseboards (two WFMC+ mezzanine sites). 

The company also offers the WILDSTAR 3AE1, 3U OpenVPX baseboard and the WILDSTAR SAF1 standalone small form factor module.

The DME1 comprises Annapolis’ WILD100 EcoSystem that aligns with SOSA 1.0. The EcoSystem is an interoperable portfolio of rugged high-performance OpenVPX COTS boards and systems that are used for challenging data acquisition, digital signal processing, and data storage applications.

http://www.annapmicro.com 

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Vibration-tolerant MEMS gyroscope positions aircraft

Tue, Apr 04, 2023

A high stability and vibration-tolerant digital MEMS gyroscope from TDK, the GYPRO 4300 features a ±300 degrees per second input measurement range, together with 200Hz bandwidth and one millisecond latency with a closed-loop architecture.

It is the first product in the company’s Tronics GYPRO4000 digital MEMS gyro family which complements the recently announced AXO300 closed loop digital accelerometers range. 

It offers precise navigation and positioning, with bias instability of 0.5 degrees per hour as typical value (two degrees per hour maximum) and an ARW (angular random walk) of 0.1 degrees per square hour. The GYPRO4300 is a miniature, digital and low-SWaP (size, weight and power) high performance MEMS gyro, said TDK, for precise positioning, navigation and stabilisation functions in dynamic applications such as railway, land vehicles, VTOL (vertical take off and landing) aircraft and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), marine and sub-sea systems, bore hole drilling and surveying instruments. 

The closed loop architecture offers a strong vibration rejection of 0.5 degrees per hour per g² under harsh conditions. The GYPRO4300 gyros are housed in a miniature, hermetic, ceramic J-lead package that ensures long operational and storage life and guarantees a high compliance with the stringent thermal cycling requirements of critical applications. 

There is also a 24-bit digital serial peripheral interface (SPI) for a swift integration into inertial navigation systems (INS), inertial measurement units (IMUs) as well as attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS). To minimise mechanical cross-coupling in multi-axis applications, the GYPRO4300 is available in three frequency ranges. 

Suitable applications for the miniature, low power consumption, the Tronics GYPRO4300 gyro is an cost-effective and low-SWaP alternative to bulky, expensive, and power-consuming solutions like dynamically tuned gyroscopes (DTGs) and fibre optical gyroscopes (FOGs). The solid-state architecture also reduces the number of internal components and system complexity required. As a result, the GYPRO4300 demonstrates a MTBF (mean time between failure) higher than 1,000,000 hours, more than 10 times better than incumbent DTGs and FOGs with similar performances, said TDK. The built-in self-test ensures both an initial verification of the sensor’s integrity and a continuous in-operation functionality test, advised TDK. 

http://www.tdk-electronics.tdk.com

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