A new family of microcontrollers have been added to Infineon Technologies’ PSoC portfolio of Arm Cortex-based, high performance, low power, secured devices.
PSoC Edge is designed for next generation, responsive compute and control applications, featuring hardware-assisted machine learning (ML) acceleration. The microcontrollers enable end products to be more intelligent and intuitively usable, by lowering the barrier in human-machine interaction and adding contextual awareness to end applications, explained Infineon. At the same time, they provide robust privacy and safety protection through embedded Infineon Edge Protect technologies.
Microcontrollers in the new PSoC Edge portfolio offer a mix of scalable power and performance to support emerging AI/ML requirements, extensive HMI capabilities and security features required for next-generation applications. All supported with a deep ecosystem of software and tools, fit for task, said Steve Tateosian, senior vice president of microcontrollers for Infineon.
The PSoC Edge devices are based on Arm Cortex-M55, including Helium DSP support paired with Arm Ethos-U55 and Cortex-M33 paired with Infineon’s low power NNLite which is a proprietary hardware accelerator intended to accelerate the neural networks used in ML and AI applications. There is also support for always-on sensing and response which makes them suitable for advanced IoT and industrial segments such as smart home, security, wearables and robotics, said the company. The family of devices comes with non-volatile, on-chip RRAM as well as high speed, secured external memory support. The PSoC Edge family provides scalability for next-generation intelligent systems while enabling software reuse and portability, Infineon added.
The enhanced intelligence of the PSoC Edge family extends support for advanced graphics, voice, audio and vision-based applications to the existing PSoC portfolio. The new family enables easy migration of applications within the family, as well as an upgrade path from existing designs.
Developers can leverage the power of PSoC Edge for current and future design needs. There is also a strong ecosystem partners, comprehensive documentation and the ModusToolbox software, including integration with Imagimob Studio AI to accelerate time to market.
Infineon’s ModusToolbox software platform provides a collection of development tools, libraries, and embedded runtime assets for a flexible and comprehensive development experience for consumer IoT, industrial, smart home and wearable applications.
Imagimob Studio is an Edge AI development platform, integrated into ModusToolbox, and delivers end to end ML development, from data in to model deployed. There are starter projects and Imagimob’s Ready Models available all designed to support developer deploying ML models for the edge.
The PSoC Edge family is available for early access customers now.
Wearable
Embeddable database streamlines and analyses MCU data in milliseconds
Real-time secure embedded data management software provider, ITTIA, has launched its latest database, ITTIA DB IoT 8.8 for microcontrollers, microprocessors and electronic control units. The databased streams, analyses and gains insight in real time to microcontroller data in milliseconds to advance edge computing for IoT devices, said the company.
As part of the ITTIA DB embeddable database family, ITTIA DB IoT brings advanced database and stream processing capabilities to microcontroller devices.
With this new release, microcontroller applications embedded with ITTIA DB are capable of ingesting and aggregating data, detecting anomalies, storing information, and making choices in milliseconds. OEMs building gateway devices, industrial systems, software-defined vehicle applications, medical devices, wearables, and other embedded products can seamlessly embed ITTIA DB to locally monitor, store, and manage data in real time.
ITTIA DB IoT can be embedded into Arm Cortex-A, Cortex-M, and Cortex-R architecture devices, different RTOS platform variants, and can be easily ported to support custom environments.
ITTIA DB IoT’s architecture offers mix-and-match customisation so embedded developers may select to stream real time data, manage time series, and/or store table data.
Real time data capture and edge analytics are becoming common requirements for edge devices. As microcontroller technology advances, some OEMs seek to first process real-time data, interpret it and then store it while others prefer to store the entire data while footprint and performance play an important role in their design. ITTIA DB IoT 8.8 serves both schools of design. By incorporating ITTIA DB, a microcontroller can transform into a real time data processing platform that responds to event-driven data, as well as support applications that prefer to store the entire data into tables.
Embedded, edge IoT and AI systems demand devices to process data at a massive scale to achieve measurable metrics. ITTIA DB IoT 8.8 streaming and time series functionalities address this kind of demand. OEMs can build applications that respond immediately to events, craft materialised views over streams, and receive real time data from the current state on demand. Time series data ingestion, transformation, analytics, and distribution make microcontrollers compatible with today’s computing world, added ITTIA.
ITTIA software development lifecycle (SDL) conforms to the principles of IEC/ISO 62443.
Infineon goes beyond standard Wi-Fi with lates AIROC device
The latest addition to Infineon Technologies’ AIROC portfolio is the Airoc CYW5551x. This single device combines Wi-Fi 6 / 6E performance and advanced Bluetooth connectivity, making it suitable for a host of IoT applications.
The AIROC CYW5551x Wi-Fi 6/6E and Bluetooth 5.4 family delivers secured, reliable 1×1 Wi-Fi 6 / 6E (802.11ax) connectivity that goes beyond the standard, said Infineon. This is combined with advanced low power Bluetooth connectivity. The optimised CYW55512 is a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 solution and the CYW55513 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 / 6E device. Both feature power-efficient designs that are suitable for use in smart homes, industrial applications, wearable devices and equipment and other small factor IoT applications, said the company.
“Infineon’s new CYW5551x family brings the range, reliability, and network robustness from our 2×2 Wi-Fi 6/6E CYW5557x family of devices to an IoT optimised family,” said Sivaram Trikutam, vice president of Wi-Fi Products of Infineon. “As part of the company’s digitalisation and decarbonisation strategy, this family is optimised for very low power consumption, making it ideal for battery-operated devices like wearables and IP cameras,” he said. They are also tuned for best performance across a wide temperature range, enabling them to serve industrial and infrastructure applications such as electric vehicle charging and solar panel controls, logistics.
The AIROC CYW551x family offers support for the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi 6E, delivering lower latency and reduced interference. Bluetooth 5.4 low energy (LE) with Audio is range and power optimised with up to 20dBm transmit power.
Other features include improved multi-layer security (PSA Level 1-certifiable) and design versatility supported by a wide ecosystem of module and platform partners.
The devices feature Linux, RTOS and Android support, and have a fully validated Bluetooth stack and sample code to accelerate development time.
Infineon’s AIROC CYW55512 and CYW55513 are sampling now. The CYW5512 will be commercially available in March 2024, and the CYW55513 will be commercially available in June 2024.
Prophesee claims event-based vision sensor is world’s smallest
Claimed to be the world’s smallest and most power efficient event-based vison sensor, the GenX320 brings intelligence, privacy and safety to consumer edge AI devices, claimed Prophesee.
The company’s latest event-based Metavision sensor has low power, low latency, high flexibility for efficient integration in AR/VR headsets, security and monitoring/detection systems, touchless displays, eye tracking features and always-on smart IoT devices, said the company.
It is, said Prophesee, the industry’s first event-based vision sensor developed specifically for integration into low power edge AI vision devices. The fifth generation Metavision sensor is available in a tiny 3.0 x 4.0mm die size.
The 320 x 320 6.3 micron pixel BSI stacked event-based vision sensor offers a tiny 1/5 inch optical format. It has been developed with a specific focus on the requirements of efficient integration of event sensing in energy-, compute- and size-constrained embedded at-the-edge vision systems. It enables robust, high-speed vision at ultra-low power and in challenging operating and lighting conditions, added the company.
Features of the GenX320 include low latency microsecond resolution timestamping of events with flexible data formatting. There are also on-chip intelligent power management modes reduce power consumption to as low as 36 microW and enable smart wake-on-events. Deep sleep and standby modes are also featured.
Ease of integration/interfacing with standard SoCs with multiple integrated event data pre-processing, filtering, and formatting functions minimises external processing overhead. In addition, MIPI or CPI data output interfaces offer low-latency connectivity to embedded processing platforms, including low power microcontrollers and modern neuromorphic processor architectures.
The GenX320 is AI-ready, with on-chip histogram output that is compatible with multiple AI accelerators. For security, sensor-level privacy is enabled via the event sensor’s inherent sparse frameless event data with inherent static scene removal.
There is also native compatibility with Prophesee Metavision Intelligence event-based vision software suite, which is available free of charge and is used by community of 10,000+ users.
The high speed eye-tracking allows for foveated rendering for seamless interaction in AR/VR/XR headsets. The low latency touch-free human machine interface is suitable for consumer devices (TVs, laptops, game consoles, smart home appliances and devices and smart displays. The event-based sensor is also suitable for smart presence detection and people counting in IoT cameras and other devices as well as for always-on area monitoring systems and fall detection cameras in homes and health facilities.
The GenX320 is available for purchase from Prophesee and its sales partners. It is supported by a complete range of development tools, including a comprehensive evaluation kit housing a chip on board (COB) GenX320 module, or a compact optical flex module. In addition, Prophesee is offering a range of adapter kits that enable seamless connectivity to a large range of embedded platforms, such as a STM32 MCU, enabling faster time-to-market.
Prophesee creates neuromorphic vision systems. It developed an event-based vision approach to machine vision which allows for significant reductions of power, latency and data processing requirements to reveal what was invisible to traditional frame-based sensors until now. Prophesee’s patented Metavision sensors and algorithms mimic how the human eye and brain work to dramatically improve efficiency in areas such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, IoT, mobile and AR/VR. Prophesee is based in Paris, with local offices in Grenoble, Shanghai, Tokyo and Silicon Valley.
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