RF & Microwave

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, ...

STMicroelectronics has added a QFN48 package to its STM32WLE5 wireless SoCs. Called STM32WLE5Cx “the new 7mm x 7mm package option makes it suited to a simplified two-layer board design that eases manufacturing”, according to the company – ‘x’ decides how much flash is available. These chips combine an ARM Cortex-M4 STM32L4 microcontroller with Semtech’s SX126x sub-GHz radio IP. They support ...

Raltron has developed a parabolic antenna series that provides continuous coverage from 600MHz to 6.5GHz. There are two antennas in the ‘RGP’ series: RGP-MBF4-825-17F-TA-001 820mm round, 215mm deep Heavy duty version – one-piece dish RGP-MBF4-6099-17F-TA-001 ~0.6 x 1m rounded rectangle, o.4m deep Two-piece dish Both cover the whole frequency range, but can be optimised for gain in certain bands by ...

Per Vices has introduced a wide-band software defined radio (SDR) offering up to sixteen independent Rx and Tx chains, with 1GHz rf bandwidth on each chain, up to 18GHz. Called Cyan, it is a direct conversion quadrature transceiver built around an Altera Stratix 10 FPGA with an on-chip quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 MPCore processor, “providing the highest instantaneous stare bandwidth of any ...

Smiths Interconnect has released a series of high frequency surface mount chip PCB line terminations. Called CTX SMT, and based on thin-film construction, the devices work across dc-67GHz and handle up to 1W of power. VSWR is typically 1.25:1, and 1.50:1 max in a 50Ω system, and 10x pulses can be handled (1µs at 1% duty cycle). Operation is up ...