Smart Cities

NFC chip is first IC certified for CCC applications

Wed, Oct 05, 2022

Believed to be the first NFC Forum-certified IC for CCC applications, the ST25R3920B eases certification of digital car key systems, said STMicroelectronics.

The automotive-qualified NFC reader ICs for Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) digital-key applications is used in car door and centre console locations for keyless entry and starting. It can also be used as Qi wireless-charging control and smartphone pairing. 

The chip has ST’s Heartbeat algorithm for NFC card protection on Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) applications, which can differentiate between an NFC card and a smartphone in card-emulation mode. This ensures phones can charge while cards stay protected.

New features include enhanced active wave shaping (AWS), this eases certification to the latest NFC Forum Certification Release 13 (CR13), said ST. It also promotes interoperability between CCC digital keys and smartphones. AWS helps remove undershoot and overshoot from the received signal by adjusting parameters. In doing so it avoids repeatedly rematching the antenna during development. The ST25R3920B also supports automatic antenna tuning and automatic low power wake up.

The ST25R3920B has output power up to 1.6W combined with what is claimed to be best in class sensitivity to maximise interaction distance when installed in, for example, in a car door handle, where space constraints require a small antenna. The output power is dynamically adjustable to comply with upper and lower limits expressed in NFC Forum and EMVCo specifications.

ST has combined a highly noise-resistant input structure and integrate noise suppression receivers (NSR). It claimed that the ST25R3920B has the market’s best immunity against external interference. It can also pass car manufacturers’ most stringent proprietary injected noise tests to ensure safe operation in worst-case conditions, said the company.

Samples of the ST25R3920B are available now. 

http://www.st.com

> Read More

Low profile 5G and 4G LTE antennas are slim for limited spaces

Tue, Oct 04, 2022

Two low profile antennas have a low height of just 1.6mm. This makes the Alcor and Atria suitable for a variety of applications, said Synzen Precision Technology.

The Alcor is a 5G low profile surface mount antenna that is compact but still covers bands from 617 to 6000MHz. It has a small footprint of 40 x 10 x 1.6mm, a minimal clearance of 40.0 x 13.5mm and a fallback to 4G / 3G / 2G.

Atria is even more compact at 30.0 x 7.0 x 1.6mm but still covers bands from 698 to 2690MHz. Minimal clearance is 30.0 x 12.0mm. It also falls back to 3G / 2G. It requires a small clearance area, added the company.  (don’t be fooled by claims of small antennas which often need a much bigger clearance area).

“Many antennas calling themselves low-profile are double the height – around 3.0mm. We’ve been able to halve that without losing any performance. Our elegant design solution is also cost-effective for customers because it doesn’t require any external RF switch circuits,” said Synzen’s technical director, Chris Tomlin. 

Alcor and Atria are suitable for MIMO applications and are designed to work in compact devices with limited space. These antennas are suitable for wearables, health monitoring, smart meters and other slim IoT devices, confirmed Synzen Precision Technology. Left and right corner mount versions are offered.

These latest antennas form part of Synzen’s Galaxy class, which all feature low-profile design.

Synzen Precision Technology is an antenna and module product design company based in Taipei, Taiwan. The company offers advice and support for customers for antenna choices. The company will advise on optimal placement and tuning and offers free testing to characterise the performance. The company can even test and prove a design within a day without charge.

For custom design or additional support for an ongoing project, the company offers free technical support for the lifecycle of a product.

http://www.synzen.com.tw

> Read More

Industrial ATX motherboard is scalable for AIoT

Mon, Oct 03, 2022

Equipped with an LGA1700 socket for the 12th generation Intel Core i9 / i7 / i5 / i3 processors (code named Alder Lake-S), the IBM540 is the latest industrial ATX motherboard from Axiomtek.

It has quad displays and dual GPU expansion for AIoT applications. The IMB540 is built with the Intel R680E chipset and the Alder Lake-S CPU options. It also has four DDR4-3200 ECC/non-ECC un-buffered long-DIMM slots with a total capacity of 128Gbyte. There are five PCIe slots, two 4.0 x16 slots and three x4 slots for GPU, AI acceleration, frame grabber, NIC and motion control card configurations. 

The networking interfaces consist of a 2.5GbE LAN port with time-sensitive networking (TSN), a GbE LAN port, as well as a PCIe mini card slot with SIM slot for Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / LTE connectivity. The Intel Iris Xe Graphics allows for support of up to four independent displays via HDMI, DVI-D, VGA, and DisplayPort++.

For storage, there are four SATA 3.0 ports with integrated RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 and additional storage is available via an M.2 Key M 2280 slot with PCIe x4 signal for NVMe SSD. The USB interface support includes four USB 3.2 Gen2, four USB 3.2 Gen1 and five USB 2.0 ports. The board is further equipped with four RS-232, two RS-232 / -422 /- 485, eight-channel programmable digital I/O, one HD codec audio, one SMBus, and one PS/2 keyboard and mouse. 

The industrial ATX motherboard can withstand a wide operating temperature range from 0 to 60 degrees C. It also supports onboard Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM) to provide hardware-based data protection. Operating systems are Windows 10 and Linux.

The IMB540 drives AI computing performance and includes sufficient I/O, high-speed interfaces, multi-display connection capability and flexible expansion slots for medical imaging, video surveillance, computer vision and data analysis, said Kasper Tsai, the product manager of the AIoT team at Axiomtek. “Moreover, we have the capability to assist with any customer’s industrial integration requirements and achieve fast time to market,” he added.

http://www.axiomtek.com 

> Read More

Display Technology adds Aaeon’s Boxer-8221AI to linecard

Mon, Oct 03, 2022

The latest box PC designed by Aaeon which is powered by Nvidia’s Jetson Nano for AI applications.

The Boxer-8221AI Box PC is intended for mid-level deployment of AI and edge computing applications, confirmed the company. The Jetson Nano SoC combines the quad-core Arm Cortex-A57 MPCore processor with Nvidia Maxwell GPU architecture featuring 128 Nvidia Cuda cores.

The fanless embedded Box PC allows processing speeds up to 472GFLOPs (floating operations per second) and is capable of operating multiple neural networks or processing several high resolution images at the same time. The Nvidia Jetson Nano also provides the Boxer-8221AI with 4Gbyte RAM and 16Gbyte eMMC storage.

The Boxer-8221AI is certified to CE and FCC class A. It has one LAN and two RS-232 ports as well as one M.2 E-Key 2230 port for Wi-Fi.

The power input is 12V DC.

Established in 1996 as Display Solutions and acquired by Display Technology in September 2018, the UK subsidiary of Fortec Elektronik. Display Technology delivers the latest technical innovations in displays, touch screens and embedded computing backed by services from initial consultation through to sample design, volume manufacturing and immediate-response after-sales support. 

In the UK, the company specialises in embedded computing market sectors, including industrial instrumentation and control, transportation, retail/point of sale, outdoor signage, medical, marine, audio and lighting control and energy management.

http://www.displaytechnology.co.uk

> Read More

About Smart Cities

This news story is brought to you by smartcitieselectronics.com, the specialist site dedicated to delivering information about what’s new in the Smart City Electronics industry, with daily news updates, new products and industry news. To stay up-to-date, register to receive our weekly newsletters and keep yourself informed on the latest technology news and new products from around the globe. Simply click this link to register here: Smart Cities Registration