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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.

MCUs optimized for CAN FD bus data

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Microchip Technology Inc. announced its PIC18 Q84 family — the first PIC18 microcontroller (MCU) family that can be used to transmit and receive data through a Controller Area Network Flexible Data-Rate (CAN FD) bus. Accompanied by an extensive array of Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs) that handle a variety of tasks without requiring CPU intervention, Microchip’s PIC18 Q84 family cuts both time and cost when connecting systems to a CAN FD network.

The family provides a simple solution for transporting sensor data to a CAN FD bus, without the need for gateways or sophisticated network switching techniques. In addition, its configurable CIPs make it easy to create custom hardware-based functions for automotive and industrial designs with near-zero latency. Additional code is not required. Available peripherals include a 32-bit Cyclic Redundancy Check with Scan (CRC/SCAN) and a Windowed Watchdog Timer (WWDT) for functional safety capabilities, and a Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface to implement industry-standard testing and debugging.

The PIC18 Q84 family offers both hardware and software support. Hardware includes a Curiosity Nano Development Board and a Curiosity High Pin Count (HPC) Development Board. A plug-in module (PIM) is also available for the Automotive Networking Development Board and for use with Microchip development boards. The software includes Microchip’s MPLAB Code Configurator (MCC).

Microchip also provides a broad family of CAN FD transceivers and CAN FD controllers. To learn more about Microchip’s complete CAN and CAN FD offering, visit Microchip’s CAN technology design center.

The PIC18 Q84 family is available in volume production starting at $0.78 in 10,000-unit quantities.

ROS now supports 64-bit processor cores

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SEGGER has announced that its embOS real-time operating system now supports 64-bit processor cores.

Today, most IoT implementations and other sophisticated embedded applications rely on 32-bit CPUs. In the very near future, however, they will start migrating to higher performance 64-bit CPUs. This is because the latest generation of SoCs and FPGAs with advanced peripherals (like SuperSpeed USB and Gigabit Ethernet) tend to also come with powerful 64-bit CPU cores incorporated. Such peripherals are usually not available to the 32-bit core devices currently deployed.

With embOS, users can now easily upgrade to 64-bit systems while continuing to run the same application software as deployed to their current 32-bit platforms. This will ensure that the same deterministic real-time behavior is maintained while enabling even higher speeds to be delivered.

In many cases, the small footprint of embOS enables the use of 64-bit cores with just the on-chip RAM and cache memory. This eliminates the need for the inclusion of external RAM. The number of components is consequently lowered, thereby reducing both the complexity and cost of the end product.

embOS is a commercial RTOS that makes every bite count. It is available for use across all-silicon manufacturers’ platforms and directly supported by the experts who wrote the code.

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.

Secure prototyping/production platform handles Renesas RX MCUs

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Secure Thingz announced support for Renesas E2 Lite in Secure Desktop Provisioner, a component of the company’s secure prototyping and production platform Secure Deploy. Together with the recently announced Security Development Environment Embedded Trust version 1.50, the platform enables rapid development, implementation, prototyping, and volume production of secure embedded applications based on Renesas RX MCUs.

Secure development, programming, and provisioning are crucial in meeting the demands of secure industrial IoT applications and achieving the IEC 62443 standard specifications. IEC 62443 demands unique personalization of devices to achieve sufficient security for many applications and to protect from a range of attacks such as ransomware and attacks from sophisticated hackers. Secure provisioning provides unique characteristics to every device being produced. This enables every programmed device to be identified and acted upon, whether this is to provide authentication or to enable updates to be targeted to a single device, or a group. Secure Desktop Provisioner makes provisioning straight forward.

IAR Systems provides the complete C/C++ compiler and debugger toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench with exceptional design flexibility for embedded developers working with the extensive Renesas product portfolio. The offering was recently extended with build tools supporting implementation in Linux-based frameworks for automated application build and test processes. More information is available at www.iar.com/renesas.

Secure Desktop Provisioner with Renesas E2 Lite support is available for Renesas RX MCU Family as part of the Security from Inception Suite, a complete set of tools and services for implementing and customizing security in embedded applications. More information about the complete security offering from IAR Systems and Secure Thingz is available at www.iar.com/security.

First 112G 5-nm SerDes IP targets cloud data center apps

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Marvell unveiled the industry’s first 112G 5nm SerDes solution that has been validated in hardware. The DSP-based SerDes boasts industry-leading performance, power, and area, helping to propel 112G as the interconnect of choice for next-generation 5G, enterprise, and cloud data center infrastructure. Marvell has recently secured a new custom ASIC design win customer that will embed this new IP to build next-generation top-of-rack (ToR) and spine switches for leading hyperscale data centers around the world. The Marvell 5nm SerDes solution doubles the bandwidth of current systems based on 56G while enabling the deployment of 112G I/Os in many exciting new applications, including network and data center switching, network traffic management, machine learning training and inference, and application-specific accelerators.

The 112G 5nm SerDes solution is part of Marvell’s industry-leading IP portfolio that addresses the full spectrum of infrastructure requirements and includes processor subsystems, encryption engines, system-on-chip fabrics, chip-to-chip interconnects, and a variety of physical layer interfaces.

Marvell’s 112G 5nm SerDes offers breakthrough performance with the ability to operate at 112G PAM4 across channels with >40dB insertion loss, providing a margin that is critical for high-reliability infrastructure applications. The solution also delivers power reduction of more than 25% compared to 7nm, enabling systems with tight thermal/power constraints and helping to drive down the total cost of ownership. The power reduction of Marvell’s high-speed SerDes enables scale-up of bandwidth within acutely constrained 5G applications.

Marvell will offer a complete product suite of PHYs, switches, data processor units (DPUs), custom server processors, controllers, accelerators, and custom ASICs in 5nm, delivering end-to-end interoperable infrastructure solutions. This interoperability between Marvell components will allow customers to significantly reduce their product development and validation cycle time, and time-to-market.

For Marvell’s ASIC customers, this IP further enhances the industry’s most comprehensive offering for leading-edge custom solutions. The Marvell ASIC business unit is engaged with customers across multiple markets looking to take advantage of this first-to-market proven silicon with differentiated power, performance, and area. These designs will lead the industry in bandwidth density.

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