With classes offered for all levels of experience, the event offers engineers with a forum for sharing and exchanging technical information on the company’s large portfolio of products while working as a design resource for applying these products in applications. This year’s conference will offer more than 110 classes, including more than 50 new courses, on the company’s 8, 16 and 32-bit PIC, AVR and Arm-based SAM MCUs, as well as high-performance analog and interface solutions, dsPIC digital signal controllers, wireless and mTouch sensing solutions, memory products and the MPLAB development ecosystem. The event will also highlight new classes from the company’s Microsemi subsidiary, including three FPGA courses and one on PoE. As well as the classes provided, more than 50 hands-on workshops will be offered for attendees.

“Attendees at MASTERs will leave knowing how to use smart, connected and secure semiconductors and services to develop new, differentiated products that will enable innovation across different markets,” said Ken Pye, Microchip’s vice president of worldwide applications. “Engineers will work with conference attendees to provide the best possible learning experience, resulting in reduced design cycle times so products can get to market faster.”

The 16mm x 10mm x 4mm, 41-pin, QFN package is simple to solder onto a printed circuit board and provides for a compact, low-profile point-of-load design. The devices’ feature sets comprise power good, adjustable soft start, tracking, synchronisation, programmable UVLO, prebias start-up, selectable auto or FPWM modes, as well as overcurrent and overtemperature protection. The modules can be configured as negative output voltage for inverting applications.

Typical environments include industrial, Medical and Test Equipment, General Purpose Wide V_IN Regulation, and Inverted Output Applications.

The device provides 720W of continuous output, with an efficiency of >85%, MTBF 50000h with an output current 60A. The device measure 225mm L x 176mm W x 70mm D with a weight of 1.9kg. The operating range is between minimum -20C and maximum +50C. The device has a maximum Input Current at 30A and output Frequency Range <10Hz. The device offers chassis Mounting.

The tool presents a Risk Evaluator feature based on a unique relevancy engine that examines partial part numbers and descriptions to recommend the best options for customers. The tool is free to anyone with a My Mouser account and evaluates the millions of daily interactions of buying professionals and engineers. The tool then promptly validates product availability, part numbers, and price, then recommends alternative products to lessen design and product lifecycle risks.

The tool provides expanded customisation, additional intelligence, and enhanced part match confidence that makes the BOM-building process quicker, simpler to use, and easier to share. The highly intelligent tool remembers users’ preferences, naming conventions, spreadsheet layouts, and previous product orders. The tool also provides legacy features like translations for all of the company’s supported languages, support for the most common file formats, real-time product pricing and availability, and simple purchasing directly from the BOM.

Based on the Cypress CYW43012 combo chipset, the ultra-small dual-band Wi-Fi 11a/b/g/n/ (11ac Friendly) +Bluetooth 5.0 module offers data transference rates up to 78Mbps on Wi-Fi and 3Mbps on Bluetooth. The solution supports a wide range of popular processors including PSoC6, i.MX RT, STM32, i.MX, and IP Camera platforms, as well as Linux and RTOS based applications.

The module size is 10mm (L) x 7.2mm (W) x 1.4mm (H). It will have a reference antennae design for FCC/IC certifications and CE conducted test to give a lower development cost and quicker time to market.

“Teaming up with Cypress allows us to leverage our combined expertise in delivering breakthrough solutions that are game changers for the market,” said Koichi Sorada, product manager, Connectivity Solutions for Murata Europe. “Using our proprietary packaging and miniaturization technologies, Murata leads in developing turnkey, transformational tools that ease integration and enable connectivity to help bring IoT to fruition. With this lowest Wi-Fi power module, we now enable a new class of products that were previously designated for Bluetooth.”

“The Cypress CYW43012 combo solution continues its forward momentum in the market as OEMs demand key benefits including best-in-class throughput and power efficiency,” said Brian Bedrosian, vice president of marketing for the IoT Compute and Wireless Business Unit at Cypress. “Our collaboration with Murata in integrating the CYW43012 delivers a compact, pre-tested solution that has helped position Cypress as the supplier of choice for OEMs delivering high performance, long battery-life IoT solutions in applications including cameras, music, healthcare, and security.”

“TE’s Sliver card edge connectors for SFF-TA-1002 deliver the highest performance in the industry by enabling 28G NRZ / 56G PAM-4 with a roadmap to 56G NRZ / 112G PAM-4,” said Lucas Benson, product manager at TE Connectivity. “We are proud that our new card edge connectors have been selected as the basis for the standard for SFF-TA-1002.”

The devices offer unique features such as low offset 40µV (maximum), low offset drift (2µV/C maximum) high slew rate (18V/µs), and high capacitive load drive at up to 500pF. These characteristics make the device excellent for high-voltage industrial applications. The device allows operation in single-supply applications via the common-mode range of the internal op-amp that reaches to the negative supply. The device has the option to operate on single (4.5V to 36V) or dual supplies (±2.25V to ±18V).

The device offers a difference amplifier for the base of many common circuits, and without employing an expensive precision resistor network. The device is specified for operation over the extended industrial temperature range of –40C to +125C, and is offered in an 8-pin VSSOP surface-mount package.

Phosphor is plentiful and found more widely than lithium and combined in its two-dimensional form, known as phosphorene, with sodium, it could replace lithium and graphene at the anode of batteries. Lithium ion batteries use graphene and lithium at the anode, but with phosphorene and sodium instead, researchers are expecting a 50% battery capacity boost and far faster charging times. The phosphorene nanoribbons are also expected to enable faster electronics, more efficient solar cells, improved thermoelectric devices, and have applications in nanoelectronics and quantum computing.

“There are a lot of people working on sodium ion batteries, it is fast charging, the capacity is predicted to be 50% more than lithium,” says University College London department of physics and astronomy associate professor, Chris Howard. “We’re trying to electrify vehicles and you know what the charging problems are with these cars, so if you can make it charge quicker, anything quicker is very important to investigate.”

Researchers isolated the 2D phosphorene, which is considered to be the phosphorus equivalent of graphene, in 2014. Howard pointed out that the many papers had been written predicting the wide range of potential uses for phosphorene nanoribbons. “In energy materials, for example, they are predicted to absorb infra-red light and support the excited electronic states, that are required for solar cells,” Howard added. This higher level of IR light absorption would make the solar cell more efficient.

Mass production

The nanoribbons were created by dissolving lithium in liquid ammonia which is at a temperature of -50 degrees Celsius and mixed with black phosphorus. The lithium would be replaced by sodium for the phosphorene, sodium anodes. After 24 hours, the ammonia is replaced with an organic solvent and it is this solvent that creates a solution of nanoribbons of mixed sizes. “We made this [phosphorene nanoribbon] material kind of by chance,” Howard explained. The nanoribbons look like they are corregated, like corregated iron.

The key to its commercial use is scaling up production to meet the quantities needed by battery and electronics manufacturers. Howard is confident that that is possible. Because a phosphorene battery can use sodium there is a potential cost saving because sodium is 100 times cheaper than lithium and far more widely available, according to Howard. The reason why a phosphorene, sodium battery can charge much faster is that the sodium ions can travel 1000 times faster within the corregations of the phosphorene than lithium ions can in the corresponding graphene material.

The team wants to investigate phosphorene’s use in applications in energy storage and work with new partners to study its possible roles in thermoelectric devices and other applications. The research involved University College London, University of Bristol, Virginia Commonwealth University and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. The work was funded by the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Included in the kit is a 16Mbyte flash for bitmaps and other design asset storage, backlight control and a connector for an audio speaker. The module interfaces directly with any MCU with an SPI host port.

The microcontrollers are based on the Armv8-M architecture and a low-power 40nm embedded flash process. The devices highlight advanced security features, including SRAM-based PUF root of trust and provisioning, plus asset protection with Arm TrustZone-M. The microcontrollers also give real-time execution from encrypted images.

The microcontrollers offer an integrated power management unit to lower power consumption and produce up to 32µA/MHz efficiency at the 96MHz core clock frequency. The devices possess a dedicated DSP hardware accelerator leveraging the co-processor extensions offered in the Armv8-M architecture and increasing the processing ability of the CPU while preserving full ecosystem and toolchain compatibility. The microcontrollers provide enhanced real-time parallelism, utilising an autonomous PLU for offloading and execution of user-defined tasks.

The company also provides the LPCXpresso55S69 development board, which comprises a high-performance onboard debug probe, audio subsystem, and accelerometer for evaluating the dual-core LPC5569 microcontroller. The board is completely supported by the MCUXpresso suite of tools, which offers device drivers, middleware, and examples to enable rapid development, plus configuration tools and an optional free IDE.