Microprocessors

ST  has joined Quintauris, the RISC-V facilitator, as its sixth shareholder alongside Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Qualcomm. Quintauris was founded in December 2023 to advance the adoption of products based on RISC-V principles. This will include access to reference architectures, and assistance in the creation of versatile, cross-industry solutions. The initial core industry applications will be for the ...

SiFive has announced RISC-V core intellectual property for data centre processors. Called P870-D, it is an update of the non-data centre P870, with support added for AMBA CHI protocol. “By harnessing a standard CHI bus,” said SiFive, “the P870-D enables SiFive’s customers to scale up to 256 cores while harnessing industry-standard protocols including CXL [Compute Express Link] and CHI C2C [chip ...

Raspberry Pi’s RP2350, its second-generation microcontroller, will be available by the end of the year in flash-less and flash-inclusive forms, in two packages: RP2350A QFN60 no flash $0.80 RP2350B QFN80 no flash $0.90 RP2354A QFN60 2Mbyte flash $1.00 RP2354B QFN80 2Mbyte flash $1.10 QFN60 types are 7 x 7mm and have 30 GPIOs, QFN80 types are 10 x 10mm and ...

Raspberry Pi has announced its second microcontroller, the RP2350, adding two RISC-V cores alongside improved Arm cores, more ram, and security. Not initially available on its own (ETA pre-year-end), it will first ship as part of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single-board microcontroller (right) – which is the same 21 x 51mm size as the original Pico, and priced from ...

Intel has announced a discrete graphics processing unit, aimed at vehicles being shipped in 2025. ‘Arc Graphics for Automotive’, or A760A, has 28 of the company’s Xe GPU cores, 28 ray tracing units, 448 matrix engines (XMX) for AI and 448 vector engines. It will be software-compatible with the GPUs integrated into its software-defined-vehicle processors, and used as an add-on ...

Microchip Technology has announced a 32bit 200MHz version of its dsPIC33 series of DSP-heavy MCUs. dsPIC33A, as the family will be called, is aimed at fast closed-loop control of PSUs and motors. As with earlier dsPIC processors, the parts remain a combination of CPU and maths accelerator (‘DSP engine’), rather than a pure DSP architecture. In this fifth generation, the ...

Distributor Avnet has introduced the Tria brand for its embedded computing products (computer on modules, boards and systems). It has also announced the Tria Technologies business group which will also include its compute design and manufacturing capabilities. Tria Technologies will support OEMs with design either from scratch or using off-the-shelf products and will also make custom designs. Tria will be ...

Nature provides the model for integrating sensors for a distributed edge AI system, say Bartosz Boryna and Zuzana Jirankova. The horseshoe crab (limulus polyphemus) is recognised by scientists as an interesting model for vision research because the animal’s body is large enough to study and its retina neurons are quite easily accessible. The crab has several compound eyes distributed over ...

The third generation of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) by Quadric introduces pre-integrated clusters of two, four or eight cores to deliver up to 108 TOPS. This latest iteration has increased performance and optimisations for generative AI. the company has also introduced a safety enhanced version for automotive applications. The company described the Chimera QC series as NPUs with a ...

Rohm has released a line of 16bit microcontrollers for power supplies with hybrid analogue-digital control loops, plus an evaluation board with software as a design stepping stone. “In recent years medium power power supplies are required to provide a level of reliability and precise control that is difficult to meet with analogue-only configurations,” said Rohm. “On the other hand, while ...