Archive : 10 November 2015 год

Imagination Technologies has added the embedded 32bit M-class M6200 and M6250 CPUs and high end P-class P6600 64bit CPU to its portfolio. The additions all build on the MIPS Release 6 architecture.

The P6600 is said to build on the 32bit P5600 and to pave the way to higher performance 64bit MIPS processors. Meanwhile, the M6200 and M6250 broaden the M-class roadmap, addressing deeply embedded designs which require higher performance and larger address space.

Tony King-Smith, pictured, executive vp of marketing, said: “Customers keep telling us they want different price/performance CPU cores to what is currently on offer in the market. Responding to their needs, we’re delivering a more comprehensive roadmap that addresses their real system needs and provides them with the choice of CPU IP cores they tell us they really want.”

The 64bit P6600 is based on a 16 stage multi issue out of order (OoO) pipeline implementation. It features 128bit MIPS SIMD architecture (MSA) support for parallel processing of vector operations and what the company calls sophisticated branch prediction, with a fully associative Level 1 branch target buffer and an improved Level 2 cache sub-system.

The low-power M6200 and 6250 are 32bit CPUs based on a six stage pipeline implementation. According to Imagination, the cores support 30% higher frequencies than the MIPS microAptiv CPU. Also featured is integrated DSP and SIMD functionality, as well as support for the microMIPS r6 Instruction Set Architecture.

The M6200 MCU features a memory controller for tightly coupled 64bit Instruction/Data SRAM and a memory protection unit. The M6250 has a memory controller for Instruction/Data L1 cache and, optionally, tightly coupled ScratchPad RAMs (SPRAMs). With 40bit physical addressing, the core also boasta a memory management unit.

King-Smith noted: “Our partners have announced multiple devices based on the latest MIPS Warrior CPUs and we are delighted to see MIPS based products reach the market as we continue to deliver new cores designed to deliver the power, performance and area our customers need in their products.”

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Edinburgh based battery management company Dukosi has received a £1.2million investment following a recent funding round. The cash will be used to accelerate the commercialisation of its technology, which is applicable in automotive and energy storage applications.

CEO Dr Gordon Povey said: “We are seeing significant growth in the lithium-ion battery markets, driven largely by increasing sales of electric and hybrid cars. Even large Li-ion battery systems require battery management technology and, over the last two years, we have been developing technology that has now been demonstrated in a road going vehicle.

“We will use this investment to enhance our technology, orient the company for volume production and build our commercial pipeline.”

The technology – called Evoic – is said to be chemistry agnostic and capable of running advanced cell models without creating data or processing bottlenecks. According to the company, the technology supports any battery pack size and the implementation of differing charging and power delivery requirements and passive and active balancing.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

A spin off from Finnish research centre VTT is commercialising a display that will allow information to be presented at high definition within the user’s field of vision. According to Dispelix, this will not only enable smartglasses to replace smartphones and tablets, but also allow users to see the world around them.

The technology is based on lightguide optics, which enables the manufacture of displays of any shape on glass or plastic elements just 1mm thick. In addition, the technology is said have excellent transparency and to create an image equivalent to viewing a 60in TV from a distance of 3m.

“Compared to existing solutions, which are bulky or difficult to manufacture, the Dispelix solution has advantages such as the display’s thinness, lightness, aesthetic appearance and volume production compatibility,” says managing director Antti Sunnari, pictured.

Dispelix claims the first applications for its technology will be found in the exercise, work and motor sport sectors; for example, allowing athletes to see their performance data displayed directly on sport glasses.

“As electronics and optics evolve, displays will even be seamlessly integrated into ordinary glasses,” said Sunnari, who noted the product should be on the market by the end of 2016.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Four engineering students from the University of Waterloo, Canada, have won an international James Dyson award. Their invention, the Voltera V-One, is a laptop-sized PCB printer that can turn design files into prototype circuit boards in minutes, cutting both the time and cost involved in designing and prototyping PCBs.

Voltera V-One uses the same rapid prototyping principles that underpin 3D printing. It lays down conductive and insulating inks to create a functional, two-layer circuit board. But it is also a solder paste dispenser, allowing components to be added to the board and reflowed by a 550W heater.

Alroy Almeida, co-founder said: “When we first started the company, we spoke to many experts who told us we were too ambitious and that it was impossible to create a tool that could effectively prototype circuits. We took that as a challenge.”

Additive manufacturing has transformed how things are made and who can make them. Voltera V-One promises to do the same for electronics. As international winners of the James Dyson Award, the team will be awarded £30,000 to further develop their idea.

According to a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the growth of personal 3D printers is said to have averaged 345% every year between 2008 and 2011, and CCS Insight claim that consumer 3D printing is set to grow tenfold by 2018. But while 3D printers have opened the door to the maker and hobbyist movement, three quarters of the revenue generated is expected to come from business.

Jesús Zozaya, co-founder, added: “We’re at a critical point with Voltera. Our parts are now being manufactured and we are about to begin a new wave of testing in our lab. The £30,000 we’ve been awarded will allow us to ramp up production and enhance testing.”

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Altera has unveiled the industry’s first heterogeneous System-in-Package (SiP) devices that integrate stacked High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) from SK Hynix with Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs. Stratix 10 DRAM SiP represents a class of devices that is specifically architected to meet the most demanding memory bandwidth requirements in high-performance systems.

Stratix 10 DRAM SiP is claimed to offer over 10X higher memory bandwidth relative to discrete DRAM solutions that are currently available. This level of bandwidth is required in data centre, broadcast, wireline networking and high-performance computing systems, which are processing an ever-increasing amount of data.

Danny Biran, senior vice president of corporate strategy and marketing at Altera, said: “Supporting higher memory bandwidth requirements is one of the biggest challenges many of our customers face as they implement more computationally intensive tasks in their systems. Altera is in a unique position to serve these system requirements by combining the industry’s highest performance FPGA with High-Bandwidth Memory in a single package.”

Altera claims to be the first company to integrate this 3D stacked memory technology alongside an FPGA. Stratix 10 DRAM SiP is said to enable users to customise their workloads and achieve the highest memory bandwidth in a power-efficient manner.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Sherry Coutu, chair of the Scale-Up Institute, announced the results of this year’s Scale-Up survey at the Innovate 2015 conference. She released data that illustrates over 90% of scale-ups in Britain want their details more readily shared across public and private sectors to attract essential support to continue their expansion.

At the conference, Innovate UK promoted its Five Point Plan, which has been developed in order to focus its efforts on targeting more scale-ups and creating an ecosystem of support for growing businesses.

Coutu commented: “It is essential that we take steps to allow the sharing of information about our scale-up companies, so that we can shine a spotlight on them and help them overcome the challenges to support their continuing growth.”

A scale-up company is categorised as growing more than 20% p.a. and having more than 10 full time employees. The Scale-Up Survey comes a year on from the release of the government-initiated Scale-Up report and will be used by the Scale-Up Institute to inform its work to close the scale-up gap.

Ruth McKernan, CEO of Innovate UK, said: “Small businesses are the engine room of the UK economy. Economic growth and enhanced productivity can be achieved by scaling up those small businesses to create the new jobs and industries of tomorrow.’

The Scale-Up Institute’s survey has also revealed the top three barriers to growth for British scale-ups: Building leadership capacity when growing fast; easy access to talent and the right skill sets from schools and graduate leavers as well as overseas; and attracting large corporate companies as customers both at home and abroad.

Coutu added: “If the details of our growing companies are shared by the government, both internally and externally, we will start to see these concerns addressed. The Five Point Plan we have seen from Innovate UK acknowledges that support for scale-ups is essential for economic growth in Britain and we anticipate that this plan will help close the Scale-Up gap.”

According to the survey, the benefits of closing the UK’s scale-up gap would include, in the short term, an additional 238,000 jobs and £38billion additional turnover within three years of reversing the scale-up gap; and in the long term, a potential of £225bn additional GVA and 150,000 net jobs by 2034.

Speaking at the conference, Business Secretary Sajid Javid said: “The UK is embracing new technologies and leading the world in innovation, but we must not be complacent and must look to the long term future of Research & Development to support our jobs and industries.”

He also revealed how a national panel of expertise to help direct funding and improve the outcome of public investment would secure the UK’s leading position, and invited applications from organisations up and down the country to conduct Science and Innovation Audits for their region.

“By taking stock of our assets and supporting best practice and expertise, we will propel the UK to the forefront of the global innovation race.”

Pic: Ruth McKernan, CEO of Innovate UK

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Wind River and Lauterbach have announced that they are working together to ensure interoperability between the Wind River operating systems and Lauterbach debugging tools.

Barry Lock, UK manager at Lauterbach, said: “The cooperation between Wind River and Lauterbach has enabled our engineers to provide a complete ‘OS Awareness’ functionality, which targets all of the architectures supported by Wind River.

“We can now offer the debugging solutions to Wind River customers and assist them in setting up complex debugging scenarios and to also customise the debug tools to their specific needs,” he added.

Lauterbach tools are said to support all the major families of microprocessor cores, covering products from 75 silicon companies. The quality and capability of Lauterbach tools enable engineering teams to develop robust code whilst minimising development time lost to debugging.

Pic: Barry Lock, UK manager, Lauterbach

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

ARM has released the ARM mbed IoT Device Platform, a suite of products to accelerate secure IoT technology deployments at scale by businesses. The platform includes mbed Device Connector, a free service that businesses can use to connect and securely manage IoT devices. It also includes the enhanced mbed OS and mbed Reference Designs. It is claimed that the products will shorten hardware design time, giving innovators greater ability to focus on product differentiation.

Krisztian Flautner, general manager, IoT business, ARM said: “ARM mbed partners now have access to the fundamental building blocks to develop and securely deploy IoT devices at any scale. Since the launch of the mbed IoT Device Platform last year, we have focused our efforts on providing the mbed Partnership with the tools to scale deployments from a single cloud-connected sensor to a host of more intricate devices that enterprise-grade IoT solutions demand.”

Businesses deploying IoT applications need to address all aspects of connectivity, security and productivity. To accelerate this, ARM has also created two reference platforms as part of a roadmap of mbed Reference Designs that is says will help developers cut the time from prototype to final device design with the use of open-source resources.

The two reference platforms include the mbed Wearable Reference Design, a wrist-based connected device capable of delivering an interactive user-experience while achieving a battery life of around eight weeks; and the mbed Smart City Reference Design aimed at infrastructure monitoring and smart industrial applications using Sub-GHz 6LoWPAN & CoAP mesh network protocols for large numbers of devices.

The mbed Smart City Reference Design is said to support quick deployment, configuration and management of routers and end devices compatible with a variety of backhaul technologies in industrial applications that will reduce the bill of materials for end devices.

More than 55 partners have joined the mbed Partnership Programme in the past year. All of whom are investing resources to support the mbed IoT Device Platform, with around 250 dedicated engineers now involved.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Imec and Kaneka have signed an agreement that is said to strengthen and extend their R&D collaboration. As well as working on next generation solar cells, under this frame agreement imec and Kaneka will explore new applications in life science and thin-film electronics.

Luc Van den hove, president and CEO at imec, said: “Collaboration plays a crucial role in pushing forward the development of innovative solutions, and we are extremely pleased that Kaneka has made imec a key partner for its advanced research.”

This frame agreement validates the successful photovoltaics collaboration, but also underscores the mutual benefits both companies see in other fields. Imec has built-up a track record of innovative developments in life sciences and wearable biomedical applications. Using its thin-film electronics technology developed in cooperation with Holst Centre, imec plans to further optimise such applications in flexible, stretchable and low cost solutions.

Kimikazu Sugawara, Kaneka’s Chairman, said: “Such a roadmap is fully in-line with Kaneka’s ambitions and strategy for future products. It is crucially important to collaborate with advanced research institutes to cope with today’s competitive world where speed is key to innovation.”

Pic: Luc Van den hove, president and CEO, imec

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

EnSilica has appointed Anglia Components as its business development partner in the UK and Ireland for its eSi-Modules family of FPGA-based system-on-modules. Anglia will target the eSi-Modules at key vertical industry sectors including utilities, smart cities, oil and gas, access control, medical devices, IoT, industrial internet and telematics.

Ian Lankshear, CEO of EnSilica, said: “With its strong application knowledge, extensive team of field application engineers, good outreach into key vertical markets, excellent geographical coverage and complementary product lines, Anglia is the perfect choice.”

John Bowman, Marketing Director of Anglia added: “EnSilica helps us to offer a solution for both existing FPGA users and for customers who have a design which requires an FPGA but perhaps don’t have the budget or design resource to develop their own solution.”

EnSilica’s eSi-Modules family comprises the eSi-ZM1 small form factor system-on-module built around the Xilinx Zynq extensible programming platform with Xilinx Series-7 FPGA fabric and powered by an ARM dual-core Cortex A9 processor running embedded Linux. This is supported by the eSi-ZB1-DK full development kit comprising carrier board, ZM1 module and a power supply, and eSi-ZB1-BB carrier board without the ZM1 module.

The eSi-ZM1 is claimed to facilitate low risk and fast-time-to-market development with minimal integration effort across a range of applications and hardware designs without sacrificing differentiation or flexibility. It also provides a range of advanced I/O including gigabit Ethernet, USB, I2C and SD card.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk