i2552.pdf
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9975 KB
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Pobierz
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19-25 June 2013
|
No. 2552
|
Electronic
V:HHNO\
.com
Testing times
USE THE RIGHT HIGH FREQUENCY PROBES TO
INCREASE ACCURACY OF HIGH SPEED DATA
MEASUREMENTS
PAGE 20-21
3D MODELS WILL CHANGE BOARD DESIGN
AND TESTING
PAGE 19
It’s all part of the plan
SILICON LABS’ CEO TALKS TO ELECTRONICS WEEKLY
ABOUT HOW THE ACQUISITION OF ENERGY MICRO
FITS HIS STRATEGY FOR THE FIRM
PAGE 3
Getting it all white on the light
TRUE COLOUR RENDERING MAKES WHITEST LED FOR LIGHTING
PAGE 13
IS THERE ROOM IN THE LIGHTING MARKET FOR BOTH OLEDS AND LEDS?
PAGE 12
Product focus: Development kits
PAGE 23
news
NEWS IN BRIEF
CBI calls on government to raise
high tech spend
The CBI has called for the government
to increase high tech funding for the
UK’s Technology Strategy Board. CBI
called for the Chancellor to seriously
consider where cuts are being made
as part of the £11.5bn in savings
needed, and proposed moves that
would aim to not harm the ‘fragile
growth’ of the UK.
MICROPROCESSORS
Energy Micro acquisition is
part of Silicon Labs’ big plan
S
ilicon Labs has agreed to acquire
Energy Micro, the Oslo-based
firm specialising in low power
32-bit ARM Cortex-M based mi-
crocontrollers and RF chip for $170m.
“We have been investing in
building a broad-based business, it is
a transformation of the company,”
Silison Labs CEO Tyson Tuttle told
Electronics Weekly. “We are a $600m
company and if we are to get to $1bn
we know we must have a broad-based
product business which addresses
larger markets.”
“32-bit microcontrollers are core to
this strategy to provide the mixed-
signal platform for these broader
markets,” said Tuttle. He described
the addition of Energy Micro’s range
of low power ARM Cortex-M based
microcontrollers as a “dramatic
acceleration of our 32-bit MCU
offering”.
Energy Micro will add nearly 250
ARM-based EFM32 Gecko microcon-
trollers to Silicon Labs existing MCU
offering, which is built around its
ARM Cortex-M3-based Precision32
devices. The company has a full range
of ARM Cortex-M devices, ranging
from the low-end Cortex-M0+ devices
up to higher performance Cortex-M4
core devices capable of DSP and
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But the acquisition is not only
about low power ARM microcon-
trollers. Energy Micro also has a
mixed-signal and low power RF design
capability, with its EFR Draco low
power radio and also low energy
Bluetooth Smart transceivers.
Tuttle said the company’s strategy
AMD adds 5GHz eight-core x86
processor
AMD has unveiled the most powerful
member of its FX processor family, the
eight-core FX-9590 which can run at
5GHz when set to turbo-mode.
Featuring the Piledriver architecture,
they are unlocked for overclocking.
From left: Torleif Ahlsand, chairman, Energy Micro; Tyson Tuttle, CEO, Silicon Labs;
Geir Førre, CEO, Energy Micro; Steinar Fossen, director, investinor VC
RS brings open-source shop to
DesignSpark
RS Components has introduced an
open-source software area as part of its
DesignSpark website aimed at design
engineers. It will explain how design
projects can be developed with
resources such as PCB schematics and
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example, along with mechanical
blueprints, software code and/or
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is to create a series of mixed-signal
vertical products combining technolo-
gies such as low power radio, sensors
and power with the 32-bit MCU.
“Energy Micro brings a strong brand
and product differentiation. It will be a
cornerstone of future work,” he said.
“The business needs to be scalable,
have strong product support, design
support and strong sales channels.
Energy Micro brings many of these
things,” said Tuttle. “We have a strong
presence in low power 2.4GHz radio
and ZigBee, and Energy Micro will
add Bluetooth Smart to this.”
For Energy Micro, being part of the
larger company will bring resources
and new mixed-signal technology to
new product development. “The
combination of our broad portfolios of
energy-friendly MCU, radio, wireless
connectivity and sensing solutions
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embedded industry,” said Geir Førre,
president and CEO of Energy Micro,
who, after the closing, is expected to
become general manager of Silicon
Lab’s microcontroller and radio
business, which will be based in Oslo.
“It will give customers a large
choice of 32-bit microcontroller and
sub-GHz, ZigBee and Bluetooth LE
connectivity options, based on the
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in the industry,” added Førre.
Silicon Labs will now have wireless
transceivers supporting frequency
bands ranging from sub-GHz to
2.4GHz and multiple standard and
proprietary protocols including
Bluetooth Low Energy (LE),
6LoWPAN, ZigBee, RF4CE, 802.15.4(g),
KNX, ANT+ and others.
The proposed acquisition includes
an up-front payment of $115m in cash,
plus approximately $55m in deferred
and earn-out consideration.
Digi-Key signs microwave
passives specialist
Digi-Key has signed a global distribu-
tion deal with American Technical
Ceramics (ATC). The 40-year-old AVX
subsidiary manufactures multilayer
and single layer capacitors, resistors,
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products for RF, microwave, and
millimeter-wave applications.
200W brushless motor driver
reference design has PFC
Fairchild has developed a 200W
brushless DC motor controller
reference design with power factor
correction: RD-401 has an input range
of 90Vac-264Vac, or up to 400Vdc.
www.silabs.com
www.energymicro.com
POWER
Irish windfarms expanding
A £3.6m expansion of the Athea wind
farm in County Limerick is being
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Powerteam. The wind farm will add a
further 34MW of capacity, bringing
total operational wind farm capacity
in Ireland to over 500MW.
NXP advocates RF heating at 2.4GHz
N
XP has introduced a series of RF
LDMOS power transistors intend-
ed for RF heating in the 2.45GHz
ISM band.
At the IEEE International
Microwave Symposium last week it
demonstrated an RF spark plug, an RF
plasma lamp delivering 140 lm/W, and
a solid-state cooker.
Called the BLF2425M and BLF25M
series, the transistors are claimed to
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to power levels from 12W to 350W.
“Over the past 10 years engineers
exploring the ways to harness RF
energy have had to be content using
brute force magnetrons with extreme-
ly limited or next-to no control,” said
NXP marketing director Mark Murphy
0DGHLQYROXPHRQWKHğUPłV9
LDMOS process, BLF2425M6L(S)180P
is a 180W dual fet, BLF2425M7L(S)140
is a 40W single fet, and
BLF2425M7L(S)250P is a 250W dual
fet. ‘S’ variants are solder-only, non-S
variants include screw mounting
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Sampling to selected customers on
the same process, BLF25M612 is a
12W single FET.
Manufacturer completes PCB deal
Manufacturer Exception Group has
completed the sale of its PCB
Solutions division to FastPrint
HongKong Co. The division has
facilities in Tewkesbury and Calne, as
well as Penang, Malaysia.
NXP
www.nxp.com
19-25 JUNE 2013
EW
|
3
ElectronicsWeekly
.com
news
FPGAS
Altera tunes performance and power
with a measured approach to finfets
A
ltera has revealed more of its
next-generation Stratix FPGAs,
made on Intel’s 14nm finfet (‘tri-
gate’) process, and 20nm
TSMC-fabricated Arria FPGAs. The fami-
lies will be called Stratix 10 and Arria 10.
For the same power, Stratix 10 will
deliver 1.4-1.6x performance com-
pared with existing Stratix V parts,
and double the performance is
available for 1.3x power.
“You can port an existing design. To
get the full 2x performance, you will
have to do some re-designing for the
new architecture,” said Altera
vice-president of corporate strategy
Danny Biran, who is not yet revealing
details of the architecture’s changes.
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Stratix can offer the same perfor-
mance for 0.3x of the power compared
with Stratix V, but, said Biran: “If you
just want to maintain performance as
today, the mid-range Arria 10 will
probably give you a better solution.”
According to Biran, the planar
TSMC process costs less than the
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faster than previous generation
Stratix V.
“Anything you can do today with
Stratix V today you can do with Arria
10 with lower power consumption,”
said Biran.
Stratix 10 will also come with
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million logic elements, and up to 10x
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Altera’s current FPGA with processor
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demonstrated on a test chip”),
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They get a “second-generation
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$50&RUWH[$ZLWKNE\WH/
cache, and up to one million look-up
tables. “First-generation”, inside
Cyclone V and Arria V, was an 800MHz
dual-core A9. Tools are already
available for Arria 10.
“Early access customers are
currently using the Quartus II
software for Generation 10 product
development,” said Altera.
“Generation 10 devices are supported
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WKDWLQFOXGHDQ2SHQ&/VRIWZDUH
development kit [SDK], SoC embedded
design suite, and DSP Builder.”
An 8x improvement in compilation
times versus the previous generation
is claimed, through algorithms that
split across multiple cores.
Initial Arria 10 samples are planned
for early 2014, and Stratix 10 test chips
this year (Quartus II is supporting
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Figure 1: Altera 14nm Stratix and 20nm Arria FPGA
precision – through improved MAC
(multiply-accumulate) resources.
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hard processors, of which Altera
would say nothing more explicit than
that it will be a “third-generation
processor system”.
The die will be ’3D capable’,
meaning that the die pin-out and
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Interposers are expected to be used to
combine the FPGAs with SRAM or
DRAM where a lot of memory
bandwidth is required, or to combine
FPGAs with special purpose Asics.
With Arria 10, Biran is predicting
up to a 1.9x performance boost over
Altera
www.altera.com
EMBEDDED
Power management board
cuts embedded energy use
M
icrochip has announced a devel-
opment board that links code to
power consumption to help cut
embedded system energy. Real ICE
Power Monitor Module is designed to
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emulator and MPLAB X integrated de-
velopment environment (IDE).
It “allows users to measure,
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power consumption for all of
Microchip’s 8, 16 and 32-bit PIC
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provides programmable power to the
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XVHUVFDQUXQDWVSHFLğFYROWDJHOHYHOV
and set sampling intervals (10bit
resolution at 1MHz acquisition, or
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current threshold level that causes a
code break when exceeded.
Microchip
www.microchip.com
|
EW
19-25 JUNE 2013
4
ElectronicsWeekly
.com
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