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.

The company’s engineers worked together with the team at Dutch systems integrator SODAQ on developing and implementing energy efficient livestock monitoring hardware for Brisbane-based client mOOvement.

Through use of mOOvement’s smart tracker, valuable data on cattle herds can be obtained concerning their position and grazing patterns, with the capability to set alarms if individual animals are not moving or fenced boundaries have been breached. Fastened to one of the cattle’s ears, each tracker includes an accelerometer, a LoRa communication module (with a built-in microcontroller) and a GPS transceiver, as well as a passive NFC tag.

“For this project, there were numerous technical challenges that had to be addressed,” states Ollie Smeenk, head of sales and marketing at SODAQ. “The evident power efficiency of the e-peas PMICs, alongside the strong lines of communication their staff built with us and the exceptional technical support they provided, all proved to be contributing factors that helped us to succeed.”

“In the past, the cattle trackers available to farmers needed to be periodically recharged. This was obviously inconvenient, requiring a considerable investment of time and human resources. By being able to efficiently utilize the energy from sunlight such issues can be completely avoided,” adds Pieter Vogels, chief commercial officer at mOOvement. “Together, SODAQ and e-peas, through their respective expertise in IoT and energy harvesting, have supplied us with a system that is not only reliable and operationally effective, but also compact and light enough to be animal friendly.”

The device provides protection features to manage overload, short-circuit and overvoltage conditions. The totem-pole output stage, able for 600mA source and 800mA sink current, is fitting for big MOSFET drives. This totem-pole stage coupled with the other features makes the device an attractive low-cost solution for EN61000-3-2 compliant SMPS up to 100W.

The PFC Controllers are perfect for both indoor and outdoor solid-state lighting applications and offer an extended temperature range operation down to -40C with guaranteed electrical specification.

The device combines a flexible, very low-power RF transceiver with a powerful 48MHz Arm Cortex-M4F CPU in a platform supporting multiple physical layers and RF standards. A dedicated radio controller (Arm Cortex-M0) handles low-level RF protocol commands that are stored in ROM or RAM, thus ensuring ultra-low power and great flexibility. The low power consumption of the device does not come at the expense of RF performance; the device provides excellent sensitivity and robustness (selectivity and blocking) performance.

The applications processors are optimised for ultra-low-power (down to sub-Watt in specific applications), combining up to four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, plus a 400MHz Cortex-M4 for low-power, real-time processing. The processors support 2D and 3D graphics to give a rich visual HMI experience, feature hardware 1080p video acceleration to facilitate two-way video applications, and provide advanced audio capabilities to allow audio-rich applications.

Supporting a broad range of general embedded consumer and industrial applications, the pin-compatible processors incorporate a large selection of high-speed interfaces to facilitate broader system connectivity and promote industrial level qualification. The DRAM controller supports 32-bit/16-bit LPDDR4, DDR4, and DDR3L memory, providing excellent system design flexibility.

The applications processors are supported by the 8MMINILPD4-EVK evaluation kit, which consists of a compact compute module and larger base board.

The company also provides the Si522xx PCIe clock generators and Si532xx PCIe buffer families, which can provide two, four, eight, or twelve PCIe Gen 1/2/3/4/5-compliant outputs, making them an excellent fit for clocking a broad mixture of PCIe endpoints in data centre applications.

The company’s new clock devices are fully compliant with PCIe Gen 5 Common Clock, SRNS and SRISarchitectures. Despite PCIe Gen 5 having more stringent jitter demands, The company’s new products do not need discrete power supply filtering components, simplifying PCB layout while assuring board-level noise does not degrade clock jitter performance. Board designers can seamlessly migrate existing PCIe Gen 1/2/3/4 designs with drop-in compatible Si5332, Si522xx and Si532xx clocks to easily upgrade current designs to take advantage of faster PCIe serial interfaces.

“Silicon Labs is committed to providing best-in-class timing solutions to ease the migration to higher-speed PCI Express,” said James Wilson, general manager of timing products at Silicon Labs. “Data centre designers want to take advantage of PCIe Gen 5 to increase interconnect speeds between the CPU and workload accelerators, including GPUs, FPGAs and dedicated accelerator solutions. Increasing the bandwidth among networking, storage and AI resources will help enable the industry transition to 400G Ethernet.”

These new devices provide next-generation improvements over the popular Allegro ACS711 predecessor.

The family also features an extremely fast, dedicated over current fault output that has a typical response time of 1.5 µs, improving system safety. This fault output offers an easy means of detecting short circuit events that will stop damage to MOSFETs or IGBTs in inverter, motor and other switching power electronics applications.

“Allegro was the first company to introduce the Hall-based, flip-chip integrated current sensors that make it possible to have simple surface mount assembly, great SNR and low power losses, while using a small PCB area,” explains Shaun Milano, director of Allegro’s Current Sensor Product Line. “This new family represents the evolution of these innovative products and offers our customers improved safety, reliability and efficiency.”

The device is offered in two very small form factor package options, each offers different levels of galvanic isolation. The tiny 3mm x 3mm, wettable flank QFN package can be used on voltage rails up to 120VDC and allows solder joint inspection needed in zero PPM automotive applications. The standard footprint SOIC8 package is UL certified to 2400VRMS of isolation and offers a working voltage of 420VDC or 297VRMS.

The device is a secure I²C coprocessor with built-in 1-Wire master that blends FIPS202-compliant secure hash algorithm (SHA-3) challenge and response authentication with the company’s patented ChipDNA feature to offer a cost-effective solution with excellent protection against security attacks.

The device uses the ChipDNA output as key content to cryptographically secure all device-stored data. Efforts to probe or observe ChipDNA operation modifies the underlying circuit characteristics, which stops discovery of the unique value used by the chip cryptographic functions. The ChipDNA circuit, a physically unclonable technology, employs a random variation of semiconductor device characteristics that naturally occur through wafer fabrication. The circuit produces a unique output value that is repeatable over time, temperature, and operating voltage, providing a core set of cryptographic tools derived from integrated blocks.

The company insists on using industrial-grade chips from original manufacturers in its DDR4-2666 high-performance wide-temperature memory. This can ultimately avoid the high malfunction rates of commercial IC products working in extreme temperature environments.

The company is dedicated to using industrial-grade ICs to produce wide-temperature SSD and memory. The development of 5G will accelerate AI from the cloud to the edge. The company’s high-performance wide-temperature memory product line includes UDIMM, SODIMM, RDIMM, ECC UDIMM and ECC SODIMM specifications. All of these are able to support the highest level of anti-sulfuration technology to stop accelerated resistor sulfuration due to high temperature, and they come in 4GB to 16GB capacity options.

The integrated VCO of the device provides a fundamental output frequency ranging from 4000MHz to 8000MHz. Also, the VCO frequency is connected to divide by 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 circuits that enable the user to generate RF output frequencies as low as 62.5MHz at RF8x. A frequency multiplier at RF16x generates from 8GHz to 16GHz. A frequency quadrupler generates frequencies from 16GHz to 32GHz at RF32x. RFAUX8x duplicates the frequency range of RF8x or allows direct access to the VCO output. To suppress the undesired products of frequency multiplication, a harmonic filter exists between the multipliers and the output stages of RF16x and RF32x.

Control of all on-chip registers is through a three-wire interface. The device works with analog and digital power supplies ranging from 3.15V to 3.45V, and 5V for the VCO power supply. The device also comprises hardware and software power-down modes.

The device is provided in a compact 7mm x 7mm 48-terminal LGA package, and is RoHS compliant.