Communications

A perovskite photo diode that becomes a viable LED when its bias is reversed has been created at Linköping University in Sweden, allowing bidirectional communication between two identical devices. “We have managed to integrate optical signal transmission and reception into one circuit, something that makes it possible to transmit optical signals in both directions between two identical circuits,” said LiU ...

STMicroelectronics, Renesas, NXP, Microchip and Qualcomm have signed up to offer 32bit MCU development kits featuring Microsoft’s Azure RTOS ThreadX, one of the components of the its Azure RTOS embedded application development suite. “Their MCUs are embedded into billions of devices. This allows embedded developers to access reliable, real-time performance for resource-constrained devices, and seamless integration with the power of Azure IoT to connect, ...

STMicroelectronics is aiming at automotive gateways that link car electronics to the cloud with an evaluation kit built around secured chips. Called SGP-TC-EVK ‘smart gateway platform’, potential use-cases include over-the-air (OTA) management, firewall, Ethernet packet inspection, secure CAN-to-CAN data routing, secure CAN-to-Ethernet data routing, body control management, intrusion detection and predictive maintenance. On-board M.2 and Mini PCIe expansion connectors are provided to ...

Renesas has introduced a mmWave synthesiser for 5G and broadband wireless applications. “We developed our 8V97003 for mmWave radios, ensuring it meets demanding frequency range, phase noise, and output power requirements,” said Renesas v-p of timing products Bobby Matinpour. “8V97003 is particularly well-suited for emerging applications above the 6GHz carrier frequency, including broadband wireless, microwave back-haul, and 5G radios.” The ...

With the design of secured IoT products in mind, Microchip has announced range of cloud agnostic embedded development products that connect through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or narrow-band 5G. “From the smallest PIC and AVR MCUs for sensors and actuators, to 32bit MCU and MPU gateways for edge computing, the company is making it possible for developers to connect to any major ...

Nexperia has managed to achieve 100fF load capacitance in devices designed to protect USB4 signal lines. “Of special interest to engineers designing USB4 and Thunderbolt interfaces, the new device uses Nexperia’s TrEOS ESD protection technology with active silicon-controlled rectification,” according to the firm. “It delivers a combination capacitance down to 0.1pF), dynamic resistance down to 0.1Ω and 20A 8/20µs surge robustness.” ...

Anritsu and DSpace (stylised dSPACE) will jointly demonstrate a 5G network emulator integrated in a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system for the development of applications for automotive connectivity. The Anritsu booth at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2020 will showcase virtual test drives, testing vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) applications for traffic optimization and sensor sharing. The test drives will simulate the vehicle and environment ...

Microchip has announced what it claims is industry first space-qualified Ethernet transceiver – a radiation-tolerant device based on a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) chip. Called VSC8541RT, according to Microchip it is a single-port Gigabit Ethernet copper PHY with GMII, RGMII, MII and RMII interfaces. Radiation performances is: latch-up-immune to 78Mev and TID tested up to 100Krad. A second version,VSC8540RT, it bit-rate limited ...

The Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) has unveiled its next-generation of audio encoding at CES in Las Vegas, with new encoding to squeeze sound signals into Bluetooth LE bandwidth. It is called Bluetooth LE Audio. “Not only will LE Audio enhance Bluetooth audio performance, it will add support for hearing aids and enable ‘audio sharing’, an entirely new use case,” ...

It will be well below the radar, but Flutter is a technology I expect to make a noticeable impact in 2020. Spawned by Google at the very end of 2018, Flutter is a mobile user interface (UI) toolkit for creating embedded graphic components for both iOS and Android from a single codebase. It is an open source project with a ...