The Kynix Blog - News Room

With increasing OEM development of compact and low-cost Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices and accessories, Fujitsu Components America has introduced a new family of ultra-compact, BLE modules based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 System-on-Chip (SoC). The modules provide an economical means for developers to reduce their time-to-market.Fujitsu's new MBH7BLZ01-109003 and MBH7BLZ02-109004 Bluetooth low energy modules are among the smallest on the market. Bluetooth V4.0 single-mode compliant, the modules allow OEMs to quickly develop tiny, power-conscious and cost-efficient Bluetooth Smart consumer devices, such as medical monitors, proximity sensors, smart watches and fitness monitors, as well as emerging applications, such as 3D motion sensors and environmental sensors.Fujitsu offers two versions: A 10.5 x 9.2 x 1.6 mm surface-mount module without antenna, and a 15.7 x 9.8 x 2.0 mm surface-mount module with antenna. The modules feature a built-in MCU, which allows adding upper layer profiles including private profiles and application code. With development tools available from Nordic Semiconductor, it is possible to implement specific processing into the module and compose functions without using an additional MCU. These blank modules contain the complete verified and qualified Bluetooth® low energy protocol stack, offering flexibility and a high level of customization.Nordic Technical Support Center has a range of development tools and reference designs to quickly implement specific processing into the modules. The Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 SoC is built around a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 CPU with 256kB flash + 16kB RAM. The separation of protocol stack and application code allows engineers to focus on developing the application code for Bluetooth Smart accessories with assurance that the protocol stack is fully tested and can't be corrupted by application software development. Currently available reference designs include keyboard, mouse and advanced navigation remotes.According to Bob Thornton, Fujitsu Component America's President, combining Fujitsu's proven module packaging technology, distribution network, environmental responsibility and customer privacy with Nordic Semiconductor's ultra-low power SoC, application software development and technical support is a win-win. "Developers will have everything they need to create next-generation BLE products quickly and at a low cost," he said.J. Darren O'Donnell, Director of Marketing & Sales - Americas at Nordic Semiconductor, agreed. "We are pleased to work with Fujitsu to offer the design community an ultra-compact, ultra-low power, single-chip solution that allows engineers to develop a range of Bluetooth low energy and 2.4GHz proprietary designs for cost, power, and size-constrained applications," he said.Reference:KY45-DL16-7PCBA3KY45-DL100-7-PCBA3KY45-ZEPIR0BBS02MODG 

As circuits become smaller and more densely populated with circuit protections, electrical characteristics of the components become more prone to the influence of the heat generated. "The interaction between thermal and electrical phenomena is one of the most troublesome problems in analog and digital integrated circuits," explain Ryo Ishikawa, Junichi Kimura and Kazuhiko Honjo from the University of Electro-communications in Chofu-shi, Japan.     In this paper, the researchers report on the world's first method to compensate the disturbed electrical characteristics by using an electric circuit that cancels signal distortion caused by thermal behaviour of a heterojunction bipolar transistor. This research should help design devices that are better equipped to handle heat effects. A modulated high-frequency signal is distorted by the thermal behaviour through complex intermodulation phenomena, although the temperature response of the circuit is slow. The researchers modelled the thermal effects of a heterojunction bipolar transistor in an integrated circuit using thermal resistors and thermal capacitors. The circuit elements were arranged in a 'ladder circuit' comprising repeating units of thermal resistors and thermal capacitors. To compensate the signal distortion on the integrated circuit, an electric 'ladder circuit' was connected. Although the validity of the electric ladder circuit to compensate the signal distortion has already been confirmed by experiments and simulations, a theoretical derivation for the behaviour has so far been lacking. Honjo and his team derived nonlinear expressions describing the circuit parameters, and solved the expressions using series expansions. The model compared well with experiments and simulations. Experiments for an InGaP/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor power amplifier operating at 1.95GHz provide compelling validation for their analytical design, emphasising its potential for designing circuits that cope better with heat effects. Reference: KY438-PN-DESIGNKIT-38 KY438-PN-DESIGNKIT-37    

Bird’s new Wideband Power Sensor series of USB Thruline power meters feature five models each suited to a particular application. All capable of measuring True Average Power, Peak Power and Duty Cycle, as well as VSWR/Return Loss, Average Burst Power and CCDF, the WPS series will work with any modulation scheme.The vast majority of RF power meters on the market today, in the milliwatt range, are all focussed on measuring power levels of typically -10dBm +/- 30dB. However, Bird Technologies are one of the few manufacturers to offer RF enquirers equipment capable of measuring “real world” transmitter power levels without the need to use directional couplers or high power attenuators.These new USB Power Meters for “real world” RF power measurements cover; 350MHz to 4GHz (150mW to 150W); 350MHz to 4GHz (25mW to 25W); 25MHz to 1GHz (500mW to 500W); 150MHz to 4GHz (100mW to 25W) and 25MHz to 1GHz (100mW to 100W).Insertion loss is less than 0.1dB (typically 0.05dB) with a VSWR of 1.1:1max (typically 1.05:1), plus a directivity specification of typically 30dB. These parameters contribute to an average power accuracy for all models of ±4% of reading, or 0.17dB, over the full power range at +15 to +350C.All Bird Wideband Power Sensors come with ‘Virtual Power Meter’ software to allow connection to a PC. In addition the WPS will interface with the Bird 5000-XT Digital Power meter, or the majority of the Bird SA / SH series of Site Analysers or SignaHawks.Also announced is the new 7020 Power Sensor, a low cost USB Power Meter similar in operation to the 501XB range. The 7020 contains the same ‘True Average Power’ measurement capabilities within the frequency range of 350MHz to 4GHz (0.15W to 150W), and has an identical accuracy of reading at ±4% +0.05W, or 0.17dB. The 7020 Power Sensor is an ideal low cost, but accurate, USB power meter for many applications.Reference:1005919-1PCUC30M72AV  

A bump circuit with flexible tuning ability that uses 500 times less power and is smaller than previous circuits has been demonstrated by researchers at the University of Tennessee in the US."The challenges and requirements of the analogue deep-learning system inspired us to come up with this radically new design," said Junjie Lu, the lead author. "We implemented the bump circuit by preceding the current correlator with a novel nano-power tunable transconductor to achieve variable width and height. By significantly reducing the power consumption of the bump circuit, this work makes possible the realisation of analogue learning and signal processing systems that achieve better energy efficiency than their digital equivalents, and ultimately fully autonomous systems, which are able to get both information and energy from the environment without external intervention."Towards flexible transferThe bump circuit is a family of circuits with bell-shaped, non-linear transfer functions. First appearing in 1991, they are widely used to provide similarity or distance measures in analogue signal processing systems such as support vector machines, neural networks and analogue machine-learning systems.The original bump circuit design lacked the ability to change the width of its transfer function, which is desirable in many applications to represent distributions with different variance or templates with different model parameters. A common approach to solve this is to pre-scale the input voltage, but the circuits required are physically large and consume a lot of power. Other approaches also have limitations such as complex circuitry, large physical size, and a restricted number of possible widths achievable.Hidden depthsThe researchers from the University of Tennessee designed their circuit as an important building block in an analogue deep-learning machine, which is able to perform unsupervised learning and extract salient features from high-dimensional input data, with a much better power efficiency than the existing digital machine learning implementations.Large-scale systems require the computational element, or bump circuit in this case, to be very efficient in both power and area. It is also important that the output features, which are the confidence scores that the current input belongs to each of the previous observations, take both the mean distances and probabilistic variances into account. A bump circuit that has a tunable centre for mean tuning, width for variance tuning, and height for normalisation is therefore highly desirable, and if these three bump parameters can be individually tuned and controlled by a single signal, this would greatly help with on-chip trainability.To achieve the variable height and width, the researchers designed and incorporated a novel transconductor, linearised using the drain resistances of saturated transistors. They adopted a pseudo-differential structure to allow operation with a low supply voltage, and designed a common mode feedback circuit to provide common mode rejection for the pseudo-differential structure to get a tunable bump height.The whole circuit uses 18.9 nW power from 3 V supply which is 1/500 th of the power of the next best bump circuit with tunable width. Implemented in 0.13 µm CMOS, it is smaller in area by 6%, and has maximum flexibility through the individual tunability of the three key bump function parameters. Another feature is that multiple bump circuits can be easily cascaded to represent multivariate probability.A vision of the futureWith power scaling in CMOS tapering off, there has been renewed interest in analogue computation recently, and the researchers expect to see some very exciting results in this area. They are currently working to integrate low-power circuits, such as their bump circuit, into larger systems for real-world applications."One application area we've been working on is machine vision," said Lu. "We've been working with image processing and machine vision researchers to build a complete pipeline using analogue circuits. This circuit helps to provide a path to implementing multi-dimensional kernel methods for machine learning."Systems using the bump circuit could find application in many areas such as healthcare monitoring, environmental monitoring, process control and battlefield surveillance. In addition, the nano-power tunable linear transconductor developed in this work, which has the advantages of ultra-low power, large input range and gm tunability, could be used in a huge range of applications such as amplifiers, filters and oscillators.Related products:LMV1031UR-20LM4889MALM4867MTE

Texas Instruments today announced the industry's first flexible high frequency 13.56 MHz sensor transponder family. The highly integrated ultra-low-power RF430FRL153HCRGER system-on-chip (SoC) family combines an ISO 15693-compliant Near Field Communication (NFC) interface with a programmable microcontroller (MCU), non-volatile FRAM, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and SPI or I2C interface. The dual-interface RF430FRL153HCRGER NFC sensor transponder is optimized for use in fully passive (battery-less) or semi-active modes to achieve extended battery life in a wide range of consumer wearables, industrial, medical and asset tracking applications.Non-volatile FRAM combines the speed, flexibility and endurance of SRAM with the stability and reliability of flash – while providing the industry's lowest power consumption and virtually unlimited write cycles. FRAM allows developers to create products that can quickly store sensor data and enables easy configuration of the transponder and sensors to meet any application's needs.Integrating NFC sensors into medical, industrial and asset-tracking applicationsDevelopers can now design products that require an analog or digital interface, data-logging capabilities and data transfers to an NFC-enabled reader. The RF430FRL153HCRGER transponder acts as a sensor node for these applications and generates an IoT-ready solution when an NFC-enabled device pushes the data to the cloud.In medical or health and fitness applications, the RF430FRL153HCRGER can be used in disposable patches that sense temperature, hydration and more. This allows patients to monitor and share vital data securely with their health providers. The device monitors and logs data in local storage (FRAM) before transferring it to an NFC-enabled tablet or smartphone.The RF430FRL153HCRGERenables the design of maintenance-free and hermetically sealed galvanic isolated sensor systems in the industrial markets. These sensors are powered out of the RF field and communicate wirelessly through NFC to collect and log data.Logistics applications such as food tracking need constant temperature control, which can be monitored and logged with the RF430FRL153HCRGER transponder. It allows the design of highly integrated, size-optimized and easy-to-use data loggers with several sensors that connect to NFC-enabled devices and readers throughout the distribution channel.Features and benefits of TI's RF430FRL153HCRGER NFC sensor transpondersSupports wireless communication via the ISO/IEC 15693, ISO/IEC 18000-3 compliant RFID interface.Optimized for 1.5 V single-cell-battery-powered designs or battery-less designs that harvest energy from the RF field generated from an NFC reader at the same reading distance. Intelligent power management includes a battery switch to ensure long battery life.14-bit sigma-delta ADC with ultra-low input current, low noise and ultra-low offset enables developers to connect up to three additional external sensors in addition to the integrated temperature sensor.SPI or I2C interface can support digital sensors or connect the device to a host system.Application code embedded in ROM manages RF communication and sensor readings to provide the ultimate flexibility in configuring the device. Developers can configure sampling rates, measurement thresholds and alarms.Universal non-volatile memory (FRAM) allows data storage as well as extension and adjustment of application code.Integrates a 16-bit ultra-low-power programmable MSP430 CPU core that is supported by a robust ecosystem of development tools.Fully integrated into TI's Code Composer Studio (CCS) and IAR's Embedded Workbench® integrated development environments (IDEs). 

By combining 3D holographic lithography and 2D photolithography, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a high-performance 3D microbattery suitable for large-scale on-chip integration with microelectronic devices."This 3D microbattery has exceptional performance and scalability, and we think it will be of importance for many applications," explained Paul Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois. "Micro-scale devices typically utilize power supplied off-chip because of difficulties in miniaturizing energy storage technologies. A miniaturized high-energy and high-power on-chip battery would be highly desirable for applications including autonomous microscale actuators, distributed wireless sensors and transmitters, monitors, and portable and implantable medical devices.""Due to the complexity of 3D electrodes, it is generally difficult to realize such batteries, let alone the possibility of on-chip integration and scaling. In this project, we developed an effective method to make high-performance 3D lithium-ion microbatteries using processes that are highly compatible with the fabrication of microelectronics," stated Hailong Ning, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and first author of the article, "Holographic Patterning of High Performance on-chip 3D Lithium-ion Microbatteries," appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."We utilized 3D holographic lithography to define the interior structure of electrodes and 2D photolithography to create the desired electrode shape." Ning added. "This work merges important concepts in fabrication, characterization, and modeling, showing that the energy and power of the microbattery are strongly related to the structural parameters of the electrodes such as size, shape, surface area, porosity, and tortuosity. A significant strength of this new method is that these parameters can be easily controlled during lithography steps, which offers unique flexibility for designing next-generation on-chip energy storage devices."Enabled by a 3D holographic patterning technique—where multiple optical beams interfere inside the photoresist creating a desirable 3D structure—the battery possesses well-defined, periodically structured porous electrodes, that facilitates the fast transports of electrons and ions inside the battery, offering supercapacitor-like power."Although accurate control on the interfering optical beams is required to construct 3D holographic lithography, recent advances have significantly simplified the required optics, enabling creation of structures via a single incident beam and standard photoresist processing. This makes it highly scalable and compatible with microfabrication," stated John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering, who has worked with Braun and his team to develop the technology."Micro-engineered battery architectures, combined with high energy material such as tin, offer exciting new battery features including high energy capacity and good cycle lives, which provide the ability to power practical devices," stated William King, a professor of mechanical science and engineering, who is a co-author of this work.