Microprocessors

Distributor Farnell is now shipping Nexperia’s power GaN FETs. The FETs can be used in hard switching for AC-DC totem pole power factor correction (PFC) applications, LLC phase shift full-bridge (resonant or fixed frequency) for soft-switching applications, as well as all DC-AC inverter topologies and AC-AC matrix converters using bidirectional switches. GaN FETs provide low RDS(on) and fast switching, together ...

Wireless Gecko SoC families from Silicon Labs available from Mouser Electronics now include the EFR32BG22 (BG22), EFR32MG22 (MG22) and EFR32FG22 (FG22) SoCs. The new SoCs are highly energy efficient, delivering exceptional battery life for a range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The Silicon Labs EFR32BG22 single-chips SoCs support Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, including Bluetooth Mesh, Bluetooth Low Energy and direction-finding with ...

Stealthy, three year-old, processor start-up Groq says it has developed a single chip architecture which can deliver 1PetaOps/sec performance. Groq calls its architecture Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP). Two years back it said it had recruited eight of the ten people who developed Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). The company has raised $62.3 million in funding. Groq’s architecture is equivalent to ...

Microchip detailed an FPGA family with a quad core 64bit RISC-V processor alongside the programmable array. Called ‘PolarFire SoC’, the “architecture brings real-time deterministic asymmetric multiprocessing capability to Linux platforms in a multi-core coherent CPU cluster”, according to the firm, which worked with Risc-V specialist SiFive to create the devices. Real-time operation is included for safety-critical, system control and trusted ...

Ask any senior executive in a semiconductor company to pick their “most important” product family is rather like pinning down a proud mother or father and asking them to choose between their children, writes Farnell.

Fully-depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SoI) technology i.MX7ULP applications processors from NXP Semiconductors are now available from Mouser Electronics. They support low power graphics operation and include 2D and 3D graphics processing units (GPUs) for graphics applications in portable medical devices, wearable products, smart home controls, gaming accessories and portable printers and scanners. The processors are based on Arm Cortex-A7 and ...

Alibaba has produced its first semiconductor IP – a RISC-V processor core. The core was developed by Alibaba’s IC unit called Pingtouge and called Xuantie 910. Pingtouge says Xuantie 910 is available for licensing and related code will be released on GitHub. Pingtouge says that Xuantie 910 is the most powerful RISC-V core ever developed and can be used for ...

With increasingly tight global pollution standards for even small engines, STMicroelectronics and Arrow Electronics have produced am electronic control unit (ECU) reference design for single and twin-cylinder fuel-injected petrol engines. Called SPC5-L9177A-K02, the ECU reference design is aimed at motorcycles, scooters, and three wheelers – particularly those which must satisfy Euro 5, Bharat Stage VI (BSVI), and China IV standards. ST also foresees ...

ST microelectronics has introduced a secure microcontroller that includes a 13.56MHz RF interface for contactless operation and a serial interface for contact operation. Called ST31P450, it is built on a 40nm flash process and is aimed at contactless and contact applications in banking, identity, transportation and pay-television. The RF interface includes an RF UART for contactless comms up to 848kbit/s compatible with ...

A marketing initiative to promote STM32 MCUs has been launched by ST. Called MadeForSTM32  it labels qualified, reviewed, and approved products from ST Partners. Engineers designing with MCUs  rely on the design ecosystem that provides configuration and development tools, ready-to-use software examples and libraries, and circuit boards to prototype their applications and bring them into production. For many designers, the quality ...