Microprocessors

STMicroelectronics has announced a series of AI-enabled and security-enabled industrial and IoT microcontrollers: STM32MP235. The parts have dual Arm Cortex-A35 cores (1.3 or 1.5GHz depending on version), a 400MHz Cortex-M33 and an 0.6Top/s neural network accelerator. On board is a 400MHz VeriSilicon GC8000UL 3D GPU capable of up to 66.5Mtriangle/s or 400Mpixel/s, Open GL ES 3.2.8 or Vulkan 1.2. This ...

DeepX is to start production of its DX-M1 neural processor unit IC in the second quarter of this year, according to the company, which claims for it “the highest power-efficiency and performance efficiency in the world”. The company has published ResNet-50 figures in support of these claims: >10Top/s/W and 60frame/s/Top/s. Total capability per IC is 25Top/s. It is due to ...

Mouser is stocking Silicon Labs’ latest series of Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth Low Energy 5.4 and Matter wireless modules, which measure 16 x 21.1 x 2.3mm. Called SiWG917Y, “the series are shielded modules with a dedicated wireless processing subsystem, an MCU and a security engine,” according to Mouser, which is stocking the parts. “The modules come with radio approvals for the ...

Espressif has announced PSA Level 2 certification for its ESP32-C6 RISC-V MCU. “PSA certification aligns with upcoming regulations including the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act, the US Cybersecurity Improvement Act, the EU Radio Equipment Directive, and the UK Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure [regime],” according to Espressif. “Achieving PSA Level 2 certification signifies that the ESP32-C6’s PSA root-of-trust has undergone ...

Texas Instruments is claiming “the world’s smallest” for its latest MCU, which measures 1.6 x 0.86mm (1.38mm2) in its 8pad DSBGA package. Despite this, it has a 24MHz 32bit Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, three 12bit ADC channels (with DMA), four timers and one each: UART, I2C and SPI interfaces. There are actually two devices at this size, the MSPM0C1104S8YCJR with 16kbyte ...

Renesas is aiming at the high-volume vision AI market with a 15Top/s 10Top/s/W microcontroller. Called RZ/V2N, it comes with the company’s own AI accelerator, DRP-AI3. The 15Top/s (INT8) claim comes from sparse networks through the accelerator’s “advanced pruning technology”, said the company. On dense networks it can only hit 4Top/s, and its Resnet50 score is 769 inference/s. The main CPU ...

Microchip has added high-performance analogue blocks to its PIC32 MCUs: 12bit 40Msample/s ADCs, 5ns comparators and 100MHz GBW (gain.bandwidth) op-amps. There are implemented in in the new 32bit 200MHz PIC32A family. On top of the analogue blocks are hardware safety and security features such as ECC (error code correction) on flash and ram, built-in memory self-test, IO integrity monitoring, clock ...

Synaptics announced an AI MCU at Embedded World today, based around Arm’s Ethos-U55 NPU (neural processing unit) and Cortex-M55 CPU, plus a low-power Cortex-M4 CPU and Synaptic’s in-house mini-NPU. “SR110 dynamically adjusts its compute power based on real-time system demands,” according to the company. “This context-aware computing enables ultra-low-power operation while maintaining high-performance AI capabilities when needed.” There are three ...

ST is aiming at secured Bluetooth, Zigbee and other 2.4GHz comms with a wireless MCU family. Called STM32WBA6x, the controllers have a 100MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core with floating-point and DSP extensions, backed by up to 2Mbyte of flash and 512kbyte of ram. The flash memory is dual-bank. “Thread, Zigbee, Matter and Bluetooth are naturally low-bandwidth protocols, [which] means that downloading the ...

ST has used near-threshold logic to create an MCU series that will run at 117Coremark/mW and has a <2µA stop mode. “The STM32U3 series offers greater power efficiency in run mode compared to previous product generations. It is the first STM32 near-threshold design, which drastically reduces dynamic consumption,” said the company, which is aiming them at IoT devices which operate ...