The All About Circuits and EETech team had an amazing time at last week’s Embedded World 2024 show! With a mix of scheduled meetings and impromptu drop-bys, we saw a huge variety of impressive embedded technologies and products. To give you a taste, in this newsletter, we’ve rounded up the highlights from a handful of the many companies that had news to share at the show.
Many thanks to every company and every person we interacted with, whether it was talking with us, letting us take cool pics, or just making a connection. We can’t wait until next year!
– Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief for All About Circuits
NXP Releases First of Its S32N Family of Vehicle Processors
NXP Semiconductors announced the S32N55 processor at the show. This is the first device in the new S32N family of vehicle super-integration processors. The device is the heart of the recently announced S32 CoreRide central compute solution. NXP says the processor offers scalable combinations of safe, real-time and applications processing to address automakers’ diverse central compute needs.
According to the company, the S32N55 processor excels at safe, centralized, real-time vehicle control that demands high-performance, deterministic compute supporting the highest level of functional safety. Through software-defined, hardware-enforced isolation, it can host dozens of vehicle functions with different levels of criticality, while providing freedom from interference between them.
The automotive-grade S32N55 processor integrates 16 split-lock Arm Cortex-R52 processor cores running at 1.2 GHz for real-time computation. The cores can operate in split or lockstep mode to support different functional safety levels up to ISO 26262 ASIL D. Two auxiliary pairs of lockstep Cortex-M7 cores support system and communication management. Tightly-coupled integrated memory and 48 MB of system SRAM enable fast execution with low-latency accesses. A firewalled Hardware Security Engine provides a root of trust for secure boot, security services, and key management.
Memory can be expanded with LPDDR4X/5/5X DRAM, LPDDR4X flash and NAND/NOR flash interfaces. Functional safety and security requirements are supported with memory error correction and in-line cryptography.
An integrated Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet switch, a CAN hub for efficient, internal routing of 24 CAN FD buses, four CAN XL interfaces and a PCI Express Gen 4 interface help reduce wiring and system cost.
Adlink Unveils IIoT Gateway for Energy, Smart Manufacturing Industries
At Embedded World, Adlink Technology launched its EMU-200, an application-ready IIoT gateway. It was designed to meet the data network requirements of various harsh application scenarios, including renewable energy, electric vehicle (EV) charging, building management, and factory equipment monitoring, says the company.
The EMU-200 series features a built-in smart software tool, the EGiFlow web console, which allows for seamless integration of multiple communication protocols. Paired with extensive connectivity options and highly adaptable hardware specifications, EGiFlow can cater to a wide range of on-site configurations while reducing the efforts required by engineers on development and deployment.
According to Adlink, integrating EGiFlow with the EMU-200 series simplifies the once complicated data transfer process between different systems and provides pre-configured data flow settings, alleviating the workload of solution developers and expediting the setup process for data collection, transferring and filtering from multiple sources, all achievable through a straightforward three-step setup.
For broad connection coverage, the EMU-200 series integrates a variety of mainstream industrial communication protocols, such as Modbus TCP/RTU, MQTT, and OPC UA. Additionally, open charging point protocols (OCPP) for electric vehicle charging will soon be integrated. The unit supports abundant I/O interfaces, along with Wi-Fi, 4G/LTE connectivity. This enables connection to data acquisition devices such as remote IO and Ethernet DAQ systems, facilitating seamless connectivity from the edge to cloud platforms.
Arm Reveals New NPU and IoT Reference Design
At Embedded World, Arm announced two new IoT-targeted solutions to provide more AI computing power at the edge. As AI continues to gain momentum across industries, designers can use Arm’s new Ethos-U NPU and IoT reference design platform to deploy power-efficient AI models to revolutionize edge computing.
Arm says the Ethos-U85 neural processing unit (NPU) allows designers to add hardware-based AI acceleration to embedded devices. The Ethos-U85 expands Arm’s previous Ethos NPU portfolio, offering higher performance and support for transformer-based AI models.
“This support is a key feature that allows faster customization and accelerates optimization for unique edge AI deployment,” said Paul Williamson, senior VP and GM of Arm’s IoT business line (in photo above). “Ethos U85 offers not only weight by matrix for convolutional neural networks but also matrix by matrix multiplication, which is essential as a component for transformer networks. Because transformer-based models can be adapted to different tasks more easily than convolution traditional networks, transformer networks will drive new applications.”
To showcase the Ethos-U85’s performance and jump-start development, Arm has also announced its Corstone-320 IoT reference design. This dedicated platform includes supporting hardware, software, and development tools to help designers rapidly adopt the new Arm hardware and accelerate time to market.
Renesas Adds Real-Time Code Customization and More to Cloud-Based Tool
At the show, Renesas announced new features for its Quick Connect Studio toolset, a cloud-based embedded system design platform. Quick Connect Studio enables users to graphically co-optimize hardware and software to quickly validate prototypes and accelerate product development. Quick Connect Studio now offers support for all the Renesas RA MCU boards, as well as several Renesas wireless modules and sensors. Meanwhile, support for devices from partners such as ams OSRAM, TDK, and Arducam has been added.
The newly announced features start with real-time code customization and remote debugging for Quick Connect Studio users. The automatically generated code can be customized real-time in the browser application. Employing remote board farms, the code can be tested on target hardware dynamically to verify the operation before buying or building the physical board and setting up the test system. According to the company, this capability dramatically speeds up the process of building proof of concepts and prototyping system solutions by concurrently working on both software and hardware components of system design.
The company says that it now offers multi-region secure infrastructure deployments around the world for uniform user experience, fastest response, and reduced latency. This enables auto-scaling to accommodate multiple concurrent users to access the platform anywhere, anytime.
Green Hills Collabs With STMicro, Cetitec on Software-Defined Vehicle Solution
Green Hills Software announced an effort with STMicroelectronics (ST), and Cetitec, a Porsche company, to provide an integrated and configurable communications platform for use in zonal controllers for the centralized EE vehicle architecture of the SDV. At the Embedded World show last week, Green Hills demonstrated this zonal controller solution platform.
The solution marries Green Hills’ µ-velOSity RTOS, ST’s Stellar Integration MCU platform, and Cetitec’s advanced networking stacks, gateways, and routing frameworks.
Running on ST’s latest Stellar MCUs, Green Hills’ µ-velOSity RTOS benefits from access to the latest hardware updates of the Stellar P and G microcontrollers. The Green Hills MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) fully integrates with the Stellar Studio development environment, making the development of applications faster and easier to debug.
Based on this platform, Cetitec provides a demonstrator consisting of the Cetitec Gateway and the Cetitec Distributed Communications Framework (CDCF). These communications solutions bridge the gap between automotive-specific protocols such as CAN, LIN, and Ethernet and a service-oriented software architecture, where Ethernet is often used as the vehicle networking technology.
The Cetitec Gateway can update the routing configuration post-build without recompiling the firmware, and supports all standard automotive networking protocols. The ST Stellar Data Move Engine (DME) runs on one of the Arm Cortex-M4 cores present in the Stellar MCUs performing the communication routing functionality which offloads the main Stellar MCU core (Cortex-R52) running the Green Hills µ-velOSity RTOS.
Synaptics Launches Processors and Dev Kit for AI-Native IoT
For its part, Synaptics’ main Embedded Word news was the launch of its Synaptics Astra platform. The platform includes its new SL-Series of embedded AI-native Internet of Things (IoT) processors and the Astra Machina Foundation Series development kit. The SL-Series allows designers to bring AI directly to their products independent of the data center, solving for data privacy and latency.
The family of embedded processors provides industry-leading compute capability at power-consumption levels that enable a wide range of consumer, enterprise, and industrial edge IoT applications.
The SL-Series of multi-core Linux or Android systems on chip (SoCs) are based on Arm Cortex A-series CPUs and feature hardware accelerators for edge inferencing and multimedia processing on audio, video, vision, image, voice, and speech.
- The SL1680 is based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 64-bit CPU, a 7.9 TOPS NPU, a high-efficiency, feature-rich GPU, and a multimedia accelerator pipeline.
- The SL1640 is optimized for cost and power and is based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor, a 1.6+ TOPS NPU, and a GE9920 GPU.
- The SL1620 is also based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU subsystem, a feature-rich GPU for advanced graphics and AI acceleration, superior audio algorithms, and dual displays.
The Astra Machina Foundation Series development kit supports the SL-Series. The kit helps AI beginners and experts quickly unlock the processors’ superior AI capabilities, powerful processing and graphics performance, and matching wireless connectivity, starting with Synaptics’ SYN43711 and SYN43752 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combo SoCs.
EW24 Quick Briefs
- Microchip launched the AVR DU family of 8-bit MCUs, which integrate USB connectivity. The DU family is designed to provide enhanced security features and higher power delivery than previous iterations.
- Ceva unveiled Ceva-Waves Links, a new family of multi-protocol wireless platform IPs. These IPs include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), and IEEE 802.15.4 (for Thread / Zigbee / Matter). The solution targets IoT and smart edge AI applications.
- NeoCortec had a new demo at the event using modules placed across two of the exhibition halls. The demo showed how easy it is to create full sensor-to-cloud solutions using NeoMesh Click boards from MikroE and the IoTConnect cloud solution from Avnet.
- Embeetle IDE showed off its namesake IDE at its partner Geehy Semiconductor’s booth. The IDE is designed with simplicity to “decrease mental overload and reduce overall operational costs.” It parses C/C++ files, along with linkerscript, makefile, and assembly files.
