Wireless

Silicon Labs has moved to 22nm for its latest series of wireless MCUs for IoT nodes. Announced today, there are parts for Zigbee, Bluetooth and Matter-over-Thread, and for mains or battery power. SixG301 is the mains-powered (line-powered) family, where ‘x’ becomes ‘B’ for the Bluetooth LE (and Bluetooth mesh) focussed variant, or ‘M’ for multi-protocol types. Concurrent multi-protocol operation will ...

SIMCom announced a ‘RedCap’ (reduced capability) 5G wireless comms module at Electronica in Munich this morning. “RedCap is very attractive for customers seeking the rapid deployment of IoT applications that meet 5G requirements, but which must also consider cost,” said SIMCom sales director Mads Fischer. “Our new RedCap modules enable systems designers to get up and running quickly and easily.” ...

Fluke once again has solar power engineers in mind with a pair of instruments, both true-RMS, CAT III and rated to 1,500V: the 283 FC digital multimeter and the a283 FC wireless ac and dc current clamp. These follow on from April’s PVA-1500HE2 and 1,500V 30A solar installation analyser and I-V curve tracer, and its less capable PVA-1500T2 cousin. “With ...

Mouser Electronics is stocking modules that combine Bluetooth and Zigbee radios with a secured microcontroller. Called WBZ350, they are made by Microchip and based on its PIC32CX-BZ family of 32bit wireless MCUs, in this case a PIC32CX5109BZ31032 with a 64MHz Arm Cortex M4F processor. There are two versions: WBZ350PE has an on-board antenna WBZ350UE has a U.FL connector for an ...

Vishay Intertechnology is aiming at industrial, medical and consumer wireless charging up to 30W with a range of transmit and receive powdered iron wireless charging coils, optimised for relative humidity up to 90%. Operation is at up to +105°C, and the company is claiming smaller footprints than its previous-generation devices. “The high moisture resistance of the devices results from their ...

I was out in the countryside with a partially-obedient dog over the weekend. It spontaneously bolts off, the owner told me, for up to a couple of hours. Why not use a dog tracker? I asked naively. It has one, said the owner, but the tracker does not work without mobile phone coverage – when you get home, you know ...

Silicon Labs is aiming at battery-free harvested energy applications with xG22E, a family of wireless microcontrollers covering Bluetooth Low Energy, 802.15.4 or proprietary 2.4 GHz links. “As Silicon Labs’ most energy-efficient SoCs to date, all three will enable IoT device makers to build wireless devices for battery-optimised and battery-free devices that can harvest energy from external sources in their environments ...

Silicon Labs has announced an Arm Cortex-M33 based family of secured wireless microcontrollers covering Matter, OpenThread, Zigbee and Bluetooth LE. Called xG26, it consists of MG26 devices for Matter, OpenThread and Zigbee, BG26 devices for Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth Mesh, and PG26 devices for the same processing power without wireless transceivers. “As users from consumer to industrial sectors extract more ...

Digi International and SparkFun Electronics have designed a development board that adds peripherals around a socket for Digi’s XBee wireless modules. Called ‘SparkFun Digi XBee development board’, it is designed for prototyping cellular IoT applications using one of several Digi’s XBee wireless modules – the socket footprint is Digi’s 13 x 19mm XBee 3 micro form factor – in particular ...

ST has announced a wireless microcontroller with the Bluetooth 5.3 LE software, initially in a 5 x 5mm QFN, and scheduled to be available in a ~2.8 x 3mm chip-scale package. STM32WB09 (right) is built around a single Arm Cortex-M0+ core and will support 2Mbit/s data, long range (coded PHY), advertising extensions, angle-of-arrival, angle-of-departure, LE data packet length extension and ...