RF & Microwave

NXP is sampling its family of 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Dual Band + Bluetooth/BLE chips for advanced gaming, audio, industrial and IoT markets. NXP’s IW62X family will provide increased capacity, efficiency and performance for smart consumer IoT hubs, wireless speakers, video-enabled smart devices, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices and IoT applications. The devices are suitable for advanced gaming consoles ...

STMicroelectronics has introduced a third generation of Bluetooth chip, describing it as “the world’s first Bluetooth LE 5.2-certified SoC to support concurrent connections up to 128 nodes”. Called BlueNRG-LP, according o the company it can consume as little as 3.4mA in receive mode, 4.3mA when transmitting, and under 500nA when quietly waiting for wake-up events. RF output power is programmable ...

The Zigbee Alliance – which oversees Zigbee, the IoT-friendly wireless standard – has launched a Europe Interest Group, made up of volunteer members with a shared focus on Zigbee in the European market. Areas of interest include the Connected Home over IP project (CHIP). This has the aim of establishing a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home ...

GNSS antenna modules by Reyax are claimed to have smallest dimensions available today. The company’s GPS, Glonass, Galileo and BeiDo modules are now available from Manhattan Skyline. The RYS8830 is a small form factor, low power 1.8V UART/I2C interface GNSS antenna module, built on the high performance Sony CXD5605GF CXD5605AGF GNSS engine. It uses concurrent reception of GNSS systems for ...

U-blox has announced a module combining Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 and dual Arm Cortex-M33 cores – M33 is Arm’s security-enabled small embedded core. Called Nora-B1, at 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.8mm the modules are tiny, and they operate at up to 105°C for industrial and outdoor lighting use. Bluetooth and MCU cores are supplied by a Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 chip, around which ...

Alps Alpine has created a cellular vehicle-to-anything (V2X) communication module specifically for the Chinese market. “The most prominent use for next-generation communications systems, and a potential killer application is connected vehicles. Cellular V2X, or C-V2X, will be a key platform here.” according to the company. “In China, cellular V2X is already deployed using 4G LTE in anticipation of 5G-based services. ...

The Z-Wave Alliance has announced the Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) specification, increasing the low-power protocol’s range and scalability. The standards organisation for developing the wireless smart home protocol, says it increases the wireless range fourfold, with 10x node scalability for larger network support and 10-year coin cell battery life. It also maintains Z-Wave backward compatibility. Basically, Z-Wave connectivity is ...

Artila Electronics, specialists in Arm-based embedded computers, has launched its IoT Gateway Matrix-752. It’s addressing the growing demand for edge analytics, networking and securing data flows between devices. Particularly, says the company, the needs of smaller networks required for low-power, remote applications. Built on a 800MHz Cortex-A7, with 512MB SDRAM and 16GB eMMC, it supports the Linux kernel 4.19.x and ...

DigitalAlerts, an Eindhoven-based company, is using Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF51822 SoC to help maintain social distancing in workplaces. The Bluetooth LE SoC provides the wireless connectivity for a ‘Buffr’ wearable tag – the system will detect when wearers are within 1.5m of one another to trigger an alert. Nordic writes: Using the Nordic nRF51822 SoC-enabled Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity, Buffr detects ...

Dr Esen Bayer, CTO at ETL Systems, shares his vision to tackle the ground segment demands of a new generation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites head-on. He and his team are creating a collaborative platform of completely new smart universal chassis’ designs, where the modules and habitat communicate with one another, interacting intelligently and almost all elements are hot-swappable. This, ...