Embedded Computing Design

If the growing number of new RISC-V announcements aren’t enough proof of the license-free protocol’s momentum, there is a mountain of analyst predictions, trend research, and market analysis that seems to be getting ever more optimistic about the space.

Motor control is critical to thousands of device types, from simple home appliances to advanced medical equipment. Moreover, the continuing drive toward automation has made it a must-have in industrial and edge devices.

Sometimes a new brand is created for purely marketing reasons, but in the best cases a company can offer real strategic and engineering benefits from reorganizing and creating a new imprint, subsidiary, or product family. A recent important example is now public, and it comes from Avnet.

In a recent release, Senseeker, a company specializing in fabless semiconductor and cryogenic test solutions for digital imaging, announced that its new Neon RD0131 is now available.

Embedded Computing is revolutionizing the power of Edge Intelligence and pushing AI and autonomy to new heights, opening the door to new applications in every vertical. One rapidly growing arena is as far toward the edge as it’s possible to be: computing in space.

The Edge is nothing new. Edge networking, Edge processing, and most recently Edge intelligence have been where many companies have been innovating and expanding capabilities and product lines for years.

According to a recent release, QuickLogic Corporation, a developer of embedded FPGA (eFPGA) Hard IP, ruggedized FPGAs and endpoint AI solutions, has joined Intel Foundry’s Accelerator IP and USMAG (US Military/Aerospace/Government) Alliances.

Microchip Technology recently announced an On-Board Charger (OBC) solution that is designed to use a selection of the company’s automotive-qualified digital, analog, connectivity and power devices, including the dsPIC33C Digital Signal Controller (DSC), the MCP14C1 isolated SiC gate driver and mSiC MOSFETs in an industry-standard D2PAK-7L XL package.

This week on DevKit Weekly, we take a look at the Infineon PSoC 4000T CAPSENSE Prototyping Kit.

Is the 5th Industrial Revolution upon us? Well, every facet of the connected enterprise space, from materials creation and mining, through supply chain and manufacturing, to retail and end uses; and in every layer from the Edge to the Cloud, and IoT through Embedded, has been deep in the Fourth Industrial Revolution for many years now.

Raspberry Pi is now making AI accessible on its platform, tailored specifically for low-power edge applications. The new Raspberry Pi AI Kit is available now for $70 and is ready to help developers experiment and implement with neural networks, artificial intelligence and machine learning on Raspberry Pi 5.

In the world of computer sensing and IoT, vision is the current hot number. Although vibration, weight, scent, and other sensing are extremely useful in their niches, vision is more widely applicable to lots of solutions and uses.

According to a recent release, NXP Semiconductors has partnered with eleQtron and ParityQC, with the QSea consortium of the DLR Quantum Computing Initiative (DLR QCI), to create what is reportedly the first full-stack, ion-trap based quantum computer demonstrator made entirely in Germany. The new quantum computer demonstrator is in Hamburg.

The Matter 1.3 Specification was published this week, and according to the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the new spec enables energy reporting for Matter devices, new entertainment features, support for water management devices, electric vehicle chargers, and new major appliances.

IoT security has been a perennial discussion, and well it should be, since the endpoints that make up the IoT are often the first point of vulnerability in any system, especially at the edge. And with all the need for intelligence, ML, and compute at the edge, the need for a Root of Trust is even more critical now than ever.

Ever since Gordon Moore made his eponymous prediction in 1965, it’s been inevitable that we would reach an end to the ability to keep doubling the processing in individual chips, if only because of the laws of physics (at the macro scale anyway – we’ll cover quantum computing another time!).

In a recent release, Silicon Labs announced its new xG26 family of Wireless SoC and MCU designed for the IoT and, according to the company, its highest performance device family to date.

Synopsys and Samsung have teamed up to announce that they have successfully accomplished the production tapeout for a Samsung high-performance mobile SoC design, according to an announcement this morning.

It’s been coming and growing for quite a while now, but the most obvious trend coming out of this year’s embedded world in Germany was that IoT, AI, and Embedded systems are becoming an ever more entwined horizontal technology layer.

One of the key messages to come out of embedded world in Nuremburg, Germany this year was that Embedded computing is becoming increasingly more entwined with IoT systems and AI applications and that customers are looking for these all-in-one solutions at every opportunity. And it's no surprise that the first fertile furrows to plant are the sensor integration and energy efficiency rows.