IoT interoperability – NXP refreshes up – Renesas loads up
15
Sep
2014
IoT seems to be catching all the buzz these days. One of the challenges to grow the market will be interoperability. A bit like Betamax vs. VHS or Blue Ray vs. HD DVD, a number of industry heavy weights have thrown their punches into the ring with competing interests and standards. The latest efforts come from Renesas with the R-In consortium focused on industrial equipment – manufacturing, cameras and robots. A month before, Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung and Wind River announced the Open Interconnect Consortium to “Drive Seamless Device-to-Device Connectivity”. On July 15th it was Google, Freescale ARM, Samsung and SiLabs to name a few who founded Thread to connect products around the home. In March it was AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel with the Industrial Internet Consortium . And it all started when the AllSeen Alliance sprung up with Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, Silicon Image, TP-LINK on board last year. Finally, we shouldn’t forget about the IPSO Alliance that has been advocating for “establishing the Internet Protocol as the basis for the connection of Smart Objects”.
We can be sure there will be epic battles to win a market that is planned to grow to $26B by 2020.
Back down to earth for us mortals, there are rumors of lots of new products including a low power Atmel ARM based MCU for November. More recently, NXP has woken up with a few refreshes. Were they consumed by the Apple M8 before the new iPhone launch?
Renesas in the meantime was busy spinning new versions of its 100MHz RX63, 90 in total.
Atmel has been quiet for the past month, but we should expect new ARM based silicon for Electronica in November. That silicon sampled early September. Likely low-end.
The K02 parts are now back on the site, but that was the only change. Only 4 came back up, in 64 and 128K Flash flavors, all 100MHz, but the VLF – LQFP48 packages are gone (2 parts).
NXP released the LPC810M021JN8 but we can now only find traces of it. Might have been a change in name since the LPC810M021FN8 has the same package (DIP8).
On the Cortex M3 front, NXP quietly released 6 products, 3 of which seem to be refreshes of existing products:
- LPC18S10FBD144
- LPC18S30FET256
- LPC18S50FET256
2 others are the LPC18UC and LPC18UK. UC suffixes are traditionally WLCSP packages. The last one is the more traditional LPC1817FDB44, for now in development.
Lastly, on the Cortex M4 front, 2 new products showed up, similar to the LPC18S, they seem to be refreshes of existing products:
- LPC43S20FBD144
- LPC43S57JET256
There were also documentation refreshes.
Renesas released not less than 90 products in the RX63 families.
- 630: 8 new parts: 100 MHz, USB, from 384 to 1024 kB Flash, 80 to 144 pins, adding to the 60 already present
- 631: 49 new parts: 100 MHz, from 256 kB to 2 MB, adding to the 152 already present
- 63N: 33 new parts: 100 MHz, from 768 kB to 2 MB, adding to the 177 already present
Renesas continues the ramp up of the RL78 G14 high performance family, adding 36 new produts.
Still no signs of movement at Silicon Labs last month.
There were 22 new parts at ST this month, but like last month most of them are either TR (tape and reel) or industrial temp (-40 +105C) of existing parts. The temperature code 3 had been elucidated, it is -40 to +125, for harsh environment industrial applications. A few parts drew our attention:
- Five F401xD parts give a 384kB Flash option to the portfolio
- The F072RBI6 is likely a UFBGA package, but why the redundance with the F072RBH6 at least in the datasheet, unless there is a typo?
Finally, the STM32F050 is now completely gone off the radar and replaced by a number of alternatives in the F03x, F04x and F051 families. A few of the F429/439 families were let go too.
Not much change on the Tiva side while, on the MSP430 front, we found lots of new parts
- MSP430A0 and A1: 45 new parts, seem related to the F1 family, but unclear from the web site
- MSP430F1: 5 new parts, adding to the 152 already present
- MSP430FR: 94 new parts, adding to the 152 already present
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