RF, software and Rock’n roll
25
Mar
2016
With South by Southwest behind us, beyond the Rock’n roll, the interactive part left us with the feeling that less and less of our lives will be left unmonitored. SoftBank emotion-sensing robot now connects to IBM Watson ecosystem to better understand you, while Neuroon – the first intelligent sleep mask (sic) – wants you to sleep better. A common theme: a host of crazy ideas competiting for our attention where connetivity is a must. The next Google or Amazon is in the making, the semiconductor world is a the heart of it with interesting trends.
We are adding a new announcement bit to our newsletter to keep our readers abreast of new development at Keremi. Next month, we will add a few manufacturers and product lines to our portfolio.
This move answers customer demands in a few areas of the market.
First, with the rise of the industrial internet, there is a constant need for connectivity, wireless in particular to bridge the gap between the field (think sensors and actuators on the production floor or embedded in equipment) and the intelligence (think server farms and AI). You probably haven’t escaped the plethora of alliances and consortia vying to address the connectivity problem – aka how does sensor/actuator from manufacturer X talks to intelligence back end from company Y). As standards progress, and you can already see a few, we will experience more integration on the silicon. Remember GSM in 1995, when our cell phones counted 10s if not 100s of components? Years later, radio, power management and application are integrated into a few components. This trend is already happening with MCU and RF. So starting in April, we will cover integrated MCU+RF components from Dialog Semiconductor, Nordic Semiconductor, Qualcomm, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. Our data will show protocols and RF bands supported as well as some element of power consumption for the RF function.
Second, the industrial internet will happen thank to security. More MCUs are integrating crypto accelerators: a lot of value… at a cost. We will provide more details to the algorithms whether they are AES or SHA.
Finally, field equipment needs to communicate with humans, if only to provide status information. One effective way is LCD displays. Whether these are graphical or segment has impact on the value provided. We will track more precisely starting in April.
That’s all for this month.
There were 17 new products in the D20, SAM4E families, all of themm revision B of existing silicon.
Atmel also launched the ATTiny102 and 104: 1kB Flash, 32 Bytes SRAM, 5-chan 10b ADC. The 104 offers a larger package.
The ATUC03 family is shrinking with 10 products lost, while the ATMEGA16H and ATMEGA8H have been pulled out. They were a monitoring and protection circuit for 1-cell and 2-cell Li-ion applications with focus on high security/authentication, accurate monitoring, low cost and high utilization of the cell energy with secure authentication features. Maybe a lost opportunity?
Infineon had no changes this month.
Microchip added close to 200 products:
The DSPI33EV gained new packages, so did the PIC(L)F171x
Most of the activity however happened with the PIC32MZ who got many new package and temperature options, in all 168 on top of the 252 existing.
Beyond a few datasheet updates, Nuvoton had no product change this month.
This month, the MKL got 2 new part numbers with WLCSP package while the MKV3x, the motor control family, started to add software to its offering in the form of a bundle. Dubbed KMS (Kinetis Motor Suite), the software enables the rapid configuration of BLDC and PMSM motor drive systems. The markup is $0.41@10k for the MKV31F256VLH12 that is initially $2.06: the KMS seems like a critical piece of the puzzle.
This follows an interesting trends that Renesas is part of with its Synergy platform. The customers are proposed silicon and software IP in exchange for a higher recurring price. That saves them the hassle of shopping for software and doing the risky and lenghly integration themselves. Shorter time to market but a slightly higher cost $4,100 for 10k, not a bad deal at this volume.
The LPC18xx and LPC43xx got P suffixes unfortunately, they do not come with documentation we could find.
Finally, the LPC54 family welcomed the new LPC541xx Cortex-M4-based 100MHz series:
– LPC54101-LPC54113: Cortex-M4
– LPC54102-LPC54114: Cortex-M4+Cortex-M0+
5 devices were announced.
Both RX and RL78 portfolio were stable.
Silicon Labs EFM8 and EFM32 were quiet this month.
Spansion was quiet this month.
ST released 12 products, mostly TR versions of existing parts.
TI launched the “world’s first microcontroller with a configurable low-leakage transimpedance amplifier” aka the MSP430FR231x. The new MCU is deemed to offer “20 times lower leakage than alternative voltage and current sensing solutions” according to TI. The MSP430FR231x comes in 12 flavors with 16MHz, 2 or 3.75kB of Flash in TSSOP or VQFN packages.
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