Microprocessors

Resasas has put its in-house developed 32bit RISC-V core into a few-pin general-purpose MCU series, following earlier RISC-V projects with Anders and SiFive. Announced last November, the core implementation can accommodate various standard RISC-V options, to which Renesas has added its own options including: a stack monitor register to protect against rogue software, a dynamic branch prediction unit improve the ...

Renesas has added a 24bit ΣΔ (sigma-delta) ADC to a 48 MHz Arm Cortex-M23 microprocessor, as well as dual-bank code flash for over-the-air firmware updates. “RA2A2 devices offer multiple power structures and voltage detection hardware to realise energy-efficient operation as low as 100µA/MHz in active mode, and 0.40µA in software stand-by mode,” according to the company. “An independent power supply ...

STMicroelectronics is emphasising power consumption and security for a range of 56MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontrollers. Called STM32U0, the “MCUs can reduce energy consumption by up to 50% compared to previous product generations”, said the company. It “allows more designs to go battery-free, running solely from an energy-harvesting system such as a small photovoltaic cell”. On the same day, ST announced ...

As accelerated computing reaches its tipping point, Nvidia’s CEO explained the company’s plan is not to drive down costs but to scale up performance. He was speaking at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, introducing the Blackwell AI superchip. It will democratise trillion parameter AI, promises Huang, to meet the 1.8 trillion parameters computing performance of accelerated computing. In the home ...

Renesas is aiming at industrial robots with a microcontroller that combines AI vision and real-time control processing. Called RZ/V2H, the ICs include the company’s DRP-AI3 ‘dynamically reconfigurable processor’ AI accelerator – recently revealed at ISSCC in San Francisco – in 10Top/s/W form. “Pruning technology employed in the DRP-AI3 accelerator improves AI computing efficiency, boosting inference performance to 80Top/s,” according to ...

Nvidia has added to the Ada Lovelace architecture-based family of laptop GPUs, with the RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation laptop GPUs for portable mobile workstations. As with the recently released RTX 2000 (Electronics Weekly RTX 2000 Ada GPU meets AI visualisation demands (electronicsweekly.com),the GPUs have both an NPU (neural processing unit) and the company’s RTX GPU, with Tensor cores ...

Microchip is aiming at motor control by combining a triple half-bridge mosfet gate driver, a 100MHz processor and CAN FD transceivers in the same IC. Other members of the family offer LIN transceivers instead of CAN, or a CAN interface without transceivers, or no CAN or LIN, and a base model has a 70MHz processor. Some have SENT interfaces for ...

NXP has fleshed out the MCX A microcontroller series it announced in 2022. The ‘A’ series is the lower-cost branch of the MCX family, and like other MCX MCUs, the devices are built around an Arm Cortex-M33 core – this is the security-enabled M3. The first parts are MCX A14x (48MHz core) and MCX A15x (96MHz core), which come in ...

Demonstrations of automotive technology at CES paved the way for autonomous driving and emphasised the role of sensors and AI in vehicle systems, reports Caroline Hayes. Automotive radar has been described as one of the most significant additions to vehicles in the past two decades. In a 3D form, measuring azimuth (horizontal angle) distance and velocity, radar is used in ...

U-blox is sampling a module that combine LTE-M cellular communication (23dBm output) and GNSS for precise location finding. SARA-R520M10 is the super-set device, combining on-board an LTE-M and NB-IoT IC (v2 of UBX-R5) with the company’s M10 GNSS receiver IC, allowing concurrent communication and location-finding in a 16 x 26 x 2.2mm package. Cellular coverage is global, and the module ...