Communications

Marvell has launched a couple of mobile ICs for LTE – a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53-based IC running at 1.2GHz  and an octo-core Cortex-A53-based SoC running at 1.5GHz.

TDK unveiled five products at Electronica, including a duplexer for LTE Band 1, an active filter to minimise leakage currents and a PLZT-based capacitor.

FTDI Chip is on something of a roll. At Electronica, FTDI founder and CEO Fred Dart said he expects revenue increase of 20%-25% this year.

FT600Q and FT601Q are FTDI Chip’s first generation USB 3.0 products that function as SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to FIFO bridges, providing data bursting rates of up to 3.2Gbps.

Scientists from the Fraunhofer IIS (institute for integrated circuits) will present a 10Gbit/s data link for cars that works over a simple twisted pair at Electronica in Munich next week.

Multi-kilometre machine-to-machine communications special interest group (SIG) Weightless has decided to pursue ultra-narrow-band (UNB) comms in free-to-use ISM bands, rather than ‘white space’ radio for its physical layer. Around the world, agreements, legislation and infrastructure required to use white space radio (comms in spare TV channels) are not coming along quickly enough, Weightless SIG CEO Professor William Webb told Electronics ...

Machine-to-machine communication industry body Weightless is switching its focus from whitespace radio to ultra-narrow-band radio. “Weightless not pursuing white space as availability is not coming along anything like as quickly as we thought it would. We won’t return to whitespace for two or three years, or maybe longer,” Weightless Special Interest Group CEO Professor William Webb told Electronics Weekly. Instead ...

Ton Middelman, technical business development manager (communications) at Acal BFi, takes a look at Bluetooth Low Energy The engineering world has fallen in love with the concept of the internet of things (IoT) without being clear about how billions of devices are going to connect to the internet. The introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) technology appears to move the world one ...

IP-addressable wireless mesh networks for use in the home are the focus of a design initiative by Silicon Labs. The chip supplier has created a networking protocol, called Thread, to help customers with product development for ZigBee-based mesh networking. It is not yet a Zigbee standardised protocol, but described as a “ZigBee-like” protocol. It seems that Google is also included in the Thread IP-addressable mesh networking initiative. ...

NXP Semiconductors says it has moved into production of chipsets to support secure vehicle to vehicle communications, which will alert drivers of traffic information. The technology is expected to be on the roads within two years, said NXP. NXP said it will supply Delphi Automotive with its RoadLINK chipset for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. The system allows alerts ...