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Connectivity

Reference platform speeds design of Wi-Fi HaLow devices based on IEEE 802.11ah spec

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Palma Ceia SemiDesign announced the availability of the company’s Wi-Fi HaLow Reference Platform, including all necessary hardware and software, for the design of Wi-Fi HaLow devices and systems based on the IEEE 802.11ah specification.

Wi-Fi HaLow is the Wi-Fi Alliance’s designation for products based on the IEEE 802.11ah standard for wireless network transmissions commonly referred to as Wi-Fi. It operates in spectra below one gigahertz (GHz) to offer a longer range and lower power connectivity. Wi-Fi HaLow, meeting unique needs for the Internet of Things (IoT), enables a range of use cases in agricultural, industrial, smart building, and smart city environments.

The Palma Ceia Wi-Fi HaLow Reference Platform consists of all necessary hardware and software to showcase the advanced connectivity capabilities of the IEEE 802.11ah standard.

mGig PHY chips boast low power consumption, exceed IEEE cable reach requirements

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Marvell introduced its second-generation Alaska Octal Scalable mGig PHY family, bringing industry-leading performance, cable reach, low power, and speed to enterprise networking infrastructure. The mGig PHYs are the newest additions to Marvell’s borderless enterprise portfolio, a comprehensive set of Prestera switches, and Alaska PHYs architected to address the specific requirements as emerging mobility and cloud applications extend the boundaries of the traditional campus environment. Designed to optimize borderless enterprise access and aggregation switching, the new PHY family offers a clear upgrade path to multi-Gigabit (mGig) technology.

Together with the previously released access, aggregation, and core Prestera Ethernet switches and Alaska PHYs, the new devices are part of Marvell’s Scalable mGig Solutions that incorporate 10G, 5G, and 2.5G capabilities and provide a seamless and flexible upgrade from 1Gb Ethernet. The Octal mGig-10G 88X3580, a 10G PHY transceiver, and the Octal mGig-5G  88E2580, a  2.5/5G PHY transceiver both exceed IEEE cable reach requirements, optimizing the number of access switch deployments and simplifying campus networking. The PHYs are the industry’s first Octal 10G and 2.5/5G devices manufactured in 12nm FinFET advanced process technology, providing lower power consumption by up to 10% compared to the previous product generation.

The new Octal mGig PHYs are Marvell’s first optimized, low power dissipation, low footprint Octal 10M/100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10GBASE-T Ethernet transceivers with IEEE 1588v2 PTP support. Key features include: Long cable reach performance: Exceeds IEEE standard requirements, 10-20% improvement compared with Marvell’s previous generation Octal solution; Low power consumption: The X3580 provides approximately 10% power reduction compared with Marvell’s previous generation Octal solution; Enhanced ESD/surge immunity; Enhanced EMI protection; Full Speed range (10M/100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G); Small footprint package (17mm x 17mm); Dual media support (Optical and BASE-T); USXGMII and legacy host interfaces (XFI, 5GBASE-R, 2500BASE-X, SGMII)

Marvell’s Octal mGig PHY family is part of the industry’s most complete networking portfolio optimized for the borderless enterprise. The portfolio includes Marvell’s unified Prestera Ethernet switch and Alaska PHY solution set and is architected from the ground up with insightful telemetry, flow-aware intelligence, scalable performance, and advanced integrated security technologies that set the bar in switching. With a complete line of GE, 2.5GE, 5GE, 10GE, 25GE, 100GE, and 400GE platforms, the portfolio is designed to fit a variety of network architectures at different speeds, densities, and scales at small, medium, and large enterprise IT organizations.  The 88X3580 and 88E2580 Octal PHY devices are available now for sampling.

LTE-M development kit speeds IoT connectivity projects

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Avnet makes the development of IoT devices more efficient with the new Monarch LTE-M Development Kit.

By providing developers with a complete set of components, software, and services from NXP Semiconductors, Sequans, Microsoft, Verizon, and Avnet, the kit speeds time to market for the development of IoT solutions using LTE-M connectivity. The kit is powered by the Sequans Monarch LTE-M modem, NXP’s LPC55S69 MCU microcontroller, Verizon’s SIM and ThingSpace IoT platform, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, and Avnet’s end-to-end engineering services.

LTE-M connectivity is a crucial feature for today’s IoT devices. Its wide availability, bandwidth, and speed are ideal for the always-on, reliable data connectivity that IoT applications demand, such as remote monitoring, asset tracking, and smart city/smart home applications. The Monarch LTE-M Development Kit has been designed to meet the needs of developers looking to incorporate LTE-M connectivity in their IoT devices, ensuring they can rely on Avnet’s end-to-end ecosystem to bring their projects from idea to design and design to production.

The connectivity in the kit is provided by the Sequans Monarch Go LTE-M modem. The modem is certified for end-use on the Verizon network, eliminating the need for certification testing and significantly improving time to market. Verizon’s ThingSpace IoT platform is also incorporated in the kit, simplifying device deployment on the Verizon LTE-M network and ensuring data integrity with reliable network connectivity.

The Monarch LTE-M Development Kit bundles the Monarch Go Arduino Shield with an NXP LPC55S69-EVK board and includes example code showing how it all works together to create a cellular-connected edge device-to-cloud connectivity. The kit’s evaluation board features an NXP LPC55S69 MCU, a secure microcontroller which balances high performance and power efficiency while incorporating TrustZone-M for enhanced security. Avnet is also offering the Monarch Go Arduino Shield as an accessory item for developers who may want to enable other Arduino-compatible MCU boards with LTE Cat-M1 connectivity.

Embedded developers can build upon the provided out-of-box cloud connectivity and dashboard examples using Microsoft’s Azure IoT Central and Avnet’s IoTConnect cloud platforms. From monitoring sensor data from the NXP MCU board to sending commands remotely via the Verizon network, these cloud-based examples will accelerate application development and time to market.

The Monarch LTE-M Development Kit is available for $99 and the Monarch Go Arduino Shield is available for $69.95.

Supercomputing platform delivers over 2 TB/sec of memory bandwidth

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NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU — the latest innovation powering the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform — with twice the memory of its predecessor, providing researchers and engineers unprecedented speed and performance to unlock the next wave of AI and scientific breakthroughs.

The new A100 with HBM2e technology doubles the A100 40GB GPU’s high-bandwidth memory to 80GB and delivers over 2 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth. This allows data to be fed quickly to A100, the world’s fastest data center GPU, enabling researchers to accelerate their applications even faster and take on even larger models and datasets.

The NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU is available in NVIDIA DGX A100 and NVIDIA DGX Station A100 systems and expected to ship this quarter.

Leading systems providers Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, GIGABYTE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur, Lenovo, Quanta, and Supermicro are expected to begin offering systems built using HGX A100 integrated baseboards in four- or eight-GPU configurations featuring A100 80GB in the first half of 2021.

Building on the diverse capabilities of the A100 40GB, the 80GB version is ideal for a wide range of applications with enormous data memory requirements.

For AI training, recommender system models like DLRM have massive tables representing billions of users and billions of products. A100 80GB delivers up to a 3x speedup, so businesses can quickly retrain these models to deliver highly accurate recommendations.

The A100 80GB also enables training of the largest models with more parameters fitting within a single HGX-powered server such as GPT-2, a natural language processing model with superhuman generative text capability. This eliminates the need for data or model parallel architectures that can be time-consuming to implement and slow to run across multiple nodes.

With its multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, A100 can be partitioned into up to seven GPU instances, each with 10GB of memory. This provides secure hardware isolation and maximizes GPU utilization for a variety of smaller workloads. For AI inferencing of automatic speech recognition models like RNN-T, a single A100 80GB MIG instance can service much larger batch sizes, delivering 1.25x higher inference throughput in production.

On a big data analytics benchmark for retail in the terabyte-size range, the A100 80GB boosts performance up to 2x, making it an ideal platform for delivering rapid insights on the largest of datasets. Businesses can make key decisions in real-time as data is updated dynamically.

For scientific applications, such as weather forecasting and quantum chemistry, the A100 80GB can deliver massive acceleration. Quantum Espresso, a materials simulation, achieved throughput gains of nearly 2x with a single node of A100 80GB.

Key Features of A100 80GB
The A100 80GB includes the many groundbreaking features of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture: Third-Generation Tensor Cores: Provide up to 20x AI throughput of the previous Volta generation with a new format TF32, as well as 2.5x FP64 for HPC, 20x INT8 for AI inference, and support for the BF16 data format; Larger, Faster HBM2e GPU Memory: Doubles the memory capacity and is the first in the industry to offer more than 2TB per second of memory bandwidth; MIG technology: Doubles the memory per isolated instance, providing up to seven MIGs with 10GB each; Structural Sparsity: Delivers up to a 2x speedup inferencing sparse models; Third-Generation NVLink and NVSwitch: Provide twice the GPU-to-GPU bandwidth of the previous generation interconnect technology, accelerating data transfers to the GPU for data-intensive workloads to 600 gigabytes per second

The A100 80GB GPU is a key element in NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform, which brings together the full power of NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA NVLink, NVIDIA InfiniBand networking, and a fully optimized NVIDIA AI and HPC software stack to provide the highest application performance. It enables researchers and scientists to combine HPC, data analytics, and deep learning computing methods to advance scientific progress.

Fiber-optic transceiver integrates 100 Mb/sec optical port in one component

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KDPOF presents the brand new integrated Fiber Optic Transceiver (FOT) KD7051. It is the first device for optical in-vehicle connectivity that incorporates the transceiver IC, optoelectronics, and optics. The integrated FOT is a 100 Mb/s optical port in one single component. KDPOF’s new KD7051 thus substantially reduces the overall expense compared to STP (shielded twisted pair of copper wires). Further advantages are no margin stacking between links in the supply chain and supply chain simplification. Consequently, it offers competitive pricing for EMC critical or galvanic isolated critical links. Applications include battery management systems, camera and sensor links, fast Ethernet links, and smart antenna links.

KDPOF’s new transceiver IC KD7051 offers a complete new FOT design. It reuses low-cost MEMs encapsulation and allows SMD reflow assembly with 8 by 7 mm LGA components. The FOT is fully shielded against electromagnetic radiation. Fiber connection is done with a very simple plastic connector placed on top. The temperature range, from -40 °C to +105 °C, conforms with harsh automotive environmental requirements. With a vibration class of V2, it withstands motor conditions. Additionally, the device endures water without sealing. EMC performance is excellent even with the ECU shield case removed, as shielding is integrated into the PCB component. The assembly of the FOT and the IC in the PCB is simplified. Optics implement Tx and Rx lenses. The first prototypes are available.

As a plastic optical fiber with a large diameter, POF is more cost-effective to manufacture and install: installation is just easy plug and play; winding and clamping are similar to copper cables. Moreover, during the car assembly, the optical harness can be installed in the same process as the copper harness. POF has been present in vehicles for more than 10 years and is installed in millions of cars.

Small LTE dipoles do the work of larger antennas

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Raltron has launched a multiband LTE dipole antenna that covers the entire LTE frequency band in a compact form factor. Primarily used as an LTE relay or booster, the RDP-MBD Series stub antenna supports frequencies as low as 600 MHz up to 5500 MHz.

The dipole antenna improves the quality of service (QoS) for established standards including GSM, 2G, 3G, and 4G/LTE (800 / 900 / 1800 / 2100 / 2600). Enhanced QoS is important for applications requiring high-speed data, high-capacity video streaming, or high-reliability e911 services.

The omnidirectional RDP-MBD Series antenna offers continuous 360° wireless connectivity and linear vertical polarization. The RDP-MBD Series offers high gain values, ranging from 0.93 dBi up to 4.37 dBi.The RDP-MBD Series enhances the quality of experience (QoE) by reducing interference/noise to improve signal integrity.

The RDP-MBD Series is 196.15 mm long and x 21.5 mm wide. With an operating temperature of -20°C to +65°C, the RDP-MBD is ideal for a wide range of LTE applications.

RDO-MDD Series datasheet: http://www.raltron.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/RDP-MBD7-12770215-22M-W-001.pdf

LoRa Alliance white paper details practical trials and proof-of-concept deployments

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Selecting an intelligent multi-radio strategy is becoming increasingly important to succeed in a connected world, as illustrated in a new whitepaper released by the LoRa Alliance and Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA). The paper, “Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Trials – An Overview of Use Cases Across Regions Combining Two Technologies,” provides details on practical trials and proof of concept deployments (POCs), representing a variety of use cases implemented across different geographies and verticals. It builds on the two organizations’ earlier whitepaper, “Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Deployment Synergies: Expanding Addressable Use Cases for the Internet of Things,” which compared the two technologies theoretically and sought to demonstrate how they could be utilized to effectively support a vast array of use cases.

The POCs explored in this new white paper conclude that hybrid Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN connectivity increases market opportunity, provide a strong ROI, and offer enhanced network solutions. Adding LoRaWAN to Wi-Fi using network mutualization is a cost-effective approach to deployment using the existing base of Wi-Fi access points. This offers a significant opportunity for Wi-Fi providers to expand their addressable businesses on complementary use cases that cover both broadband applications and massive IoT leveraging the license-exempt spectrum.

This work is the result of a collaboration between members of the WBA and the LoRa Alliance. Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN are two of the most widely adopted unlicensed technologies, and together they address a large proportion of current IoT use cases. Both technologies are disrupting private-public business models and enable participation in the 5G ecosystem and developing capabilities for IoT roaming, using OpenRoaming models. 11 companies representing both Alliances from all global regions contributed to this work, including Actility, Abeeway, Boingo Wireless, Charter Communications, Cisco, Kerlink, Lacuna Space, Nesten, Simplycity, Skyhook, and Semtech.

Covered use cases include: Smart Buildings: Multi-Family Dwellings (Boingo Wireless, United States); Smart City: Smart Light Pole (Charter Communications, United States); Smart City: Energy Management and People Attendance Monitoring (Simplycity, Australia); Smart City: Interoperability between Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN at the Network Level (Nesten, Skyhook, United States); Smart Interconnection: OpenRoaming & LoRaWAN (ORL) (Cisco, Switzerland); Smart Retail: Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN In-Store Retail Analytics (Kerlink, Smart Traffik, The Netherlands); Smart Tracking: Tracking with Semtech LoRa Edge and Lacuna Satellites to Resolve Human-Wildlife Conflict (Lacuna Space, IRNAS and Smart Parks, South Africa); Smart Transportation: Asset Tracking for the Automotive Industry (Actility, Abeeway, Volvo, France)

These featured use cases are expected to give existing market players who have deployed both technologies new ideas for how to leverage their networks to support innovative applications. Additionally, network operators, enterprises, or communities that have deployed either Wi-Fi or LoRaWAN networks are shown ways they might consider extending their offerings by deploying the other complementary technology.

Reference design speeds MCU-based Alexa-Built-in products

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STMicroelectronics has released an Amazon-qualified reference design package for smart connected devices leveraging Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Integration for AWS IoT Core, which can be used to create Alexa Built-in products using simple microcontrollers (MCUs).

AVS Integration for AWS IoT Core has the ability to transform the way users interact with smart “things,” bringing cloud-based Alexa experiences to items such as toasters, cookers, thermostats, blinds, hairdryers, and many others with no need for significant investment in electronic hardware. This could hasten the end for traditional buttons and dials, leading to new generations of products that offer easy and natural user interactions, adaptable smart features, and access to cloud services such as cooking advice or reordering of consumables.

ST’s Amazon-qualified solution jump-starts the design of Alexa-enabled appliance controllers, with Alexa voice-user-interface software already integrated on high-performing MCUs of the STM32 family. The energy-efficient STM32, being the world’s most successful 32-bit Arm Cortex-M MCU family, is ideal for low-cost, small, and simple connected devices that require state-of-the-art features such as far-field audio capture and natural-language understanding.

ST’s AVS Integration for AWS IoT Core reference design contains a compact 36mm x 65mm main board that combines a high-performance STM32H743 MCU and Wi-Fi module.

Unlike other devices commonly used for Alexa products, such as digital signal processors (DSPs) and flashless processors, STM32 MCUs integrate all necessary system features including powerful audio front-end processing, local wake-word detection, communication interfaces, and memory, including RAM and Flash, in a single chip. This integration enables the board to have small dimensions and a simple layout for cost-effective deployment in customers’ end products.

The audio front end delivers outstanding far-field voice detection, even in noisy environments and with closely spaced microphones. Created by ST Authorized Partner DSP Concepts, distributed by ST as part of the STM32 MCU, and supported by ST channels, the front end comes with a free Audio Weaver tool license to help users easily fine-tune their designs.

Leveraging the features of the high-performance STM32 microcontrollers, users can customize and scale their designs by adding enhancements such as a second wake word, extra local commands, and a graphical display to combine with the voice-command capability for an even more compelling user experience.

Further simplifying prototyping and development, the reference design hardware includes an audio daughterboard as a separate module. This contains an ST FDA903D audio codec, user LEDs and buttons, and two MP23DB01HP MEMS microphones spaced at 36mm for size-constrained products such as power switched plugs. The hardware’s modularity lets users implement a custom daughterboard if application-specific mic spacing, acoustics, and user-interface definitions are needed.

The reference design includes fully developed software that provides the features needed to support Alexa products, including Audio-capture software; Advanced Audio Front End (AFE) with noise reduction, echo cancellation and advanced beam-forming signal processing for far-field audio detection; Amazon “Alexa” Wake Word; Connectivity to AWS IoT; Audio output software

Working with this reference design enables product designers to certify new end products with AVS faster and more easily than bringing up the entire system independently. Both the hardware and software content can be easily adapted to support individual customers’ new-product concepts.

The bill of materials (BOM) for the reference design is engineered to be less than $10 when purchasing the components in high volumes. Please contact your ST sales office for pricing options and sample requests.

Enterprise-grade 16-channel PCIe 4.0 NVMe hardware + firmware combo speeds SSD development

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Silicon Motion Technology Corporation announced the SM8266, a complete enterprise-grade 16-channel PCIe 4.0 NVMe hardware plus firmware turnkey SSD controller solution. Customers can rapidly develop and bring to market enterprise SSDs for data centers by using our complete development platform that includes a turnkey NVMe firmware stack and hardware reference design kit.

The SM8266 controller solution features Silicon Motion’s state-of-the-art firmware and hardware technology to provide consistent, low latency QoS domains. Offering capacity up to 16TB with 16 NAND flash channels, the SM8266 is designed to support the latest 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash technologies. To ensure enterprise-level reliability, data integrity, and retention at PCIe Gen4 performance, the SM8266 is equipped with Silicon Motion’s proprietary technologies including:

  • 6th generation NANDXtend technology, which incorporates machine learning algorithms supporting Silicon Motion’s proprietary high-performance LDPC error correction code (ECC) engine with RAID, ensuring better data integrity even in extreme operating environments.
  • End-to-end data path protection, which applies ECC to the SSD’s SRAM and DRAM buffers as well as to the primary NAND flash memory array. This maintains data integrity as data is transmitted between the host and the SSD, and between buffer memories and NAND flash.
  • Power loss protection, which eliminates the risk of data loss in the event of an unexpected power outage.

Other features of SM8266 include: High-performance PCIe Gen4 x4 & NVMe 1.4 compliance; Turnkey stacks enable standard NVMe SSD as well as proprietary Open-Channel and Key-Value SSD implementations; Support for up to 16TB of physical NAND capacity; Low and consistent latency enabled by physical and logical isolation; Ultra-high sequential read performance of up to 6.5GB/s and 950K sustained random read IOPS; Data security with AES 256-bit hardware supporting SED, Secure Boot, and TCG Opal

Wi-Fi 6E MIMO antenna system optimized for IoT access points

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The Antenna Company announced a new Wi-Fi 6E MIMO antenna system designed to increase network capacity, extend the range, and reduce latency in enterprise and industrial IoT networks. The antenna system enables simultaneous operation in the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz frequency bands, resulting in an additional 1.2 GHz of the spectrum and a greater than 2x increase in available channels.

Optimized for seamless integration into access points, The Antenna Company’s design supports a total of 15 antennas, including dedicated 4×4 5 GHz + 4×4 6 GHz + 4×4 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi antennas. Cross-pair Wi-Fi antenna isolation of greater than 45 dB is achieved for concurrent operation in the 5 GHz band.

An additional 0.9/2.4 GHz IoT antenna is included to enable IoT use cases, along with tri-band 2.4/5/6 GHz antennas for radio spectrum management. The entire antenna system is mounted on a metal backplate to enable mechanical, thermal and RF integration with the access point.

The design also comes with an Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) option to enable Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) services such as access control, indoor navigation, asset tracking, and contact tracing. The UWB antennas support channels 5 and 9 for worldwide spectrum coverage. To avoid coupling and detuning between antennas, greater than 30 dB of isolation is achieved between the UWB and Wi-Fi antennas.

The Antenna Company’s Wi-Fi 6E + UWB antenna system also features a compact design that enables size reduction of enterprise access-points by 20% or more, without sacrificing antenna system performance; Low input impedance essential to achieve peak data rates for 80/160 MHz channels; Uniform radio coverage to avoid nulls and blind spots.