Claimed to increase battery life by up to three times longer than other solutions on the market today, the low power Atmel SmartConnect XR and ZR modules consume less than 4mA in RX and less than 3mA in TX with 3.6V, and below 1.2µA in sleep mode.
ICs & Semiconductors
NXP’s Bluetooth SoCs and development kit, shipping from Mouser Electronics
Low-power Bluetooth SoCs, the QN902x series, and the QN9020 Bluetooth development kit, by NXP Semiconductors, are available from Mouser Electronics. The integrated, ultra-low-power Bluetooth v4.0 Low Energy (BLE) SoCs can be used for Bluetooth Smart applications such as sports and fitness wearables, human interface devices, and app-enabled smart accessories. They integrate a high-performance 2.4GHz RF transceiver with a 32bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller, 128kbytes of flash memory, and 64kbytes of system memory. In addition to the BLE radio and microcontroller, the SoCs incorporate the BLE protocol stack and profile software on a single chip.
ECG readout chip keeps consistent beat for wearable devices
Imec and Holst Centre have unveiled a time-based electro-cardiogram (ECG) readout chip for wearable applications. The 0.6V ECG readout chip is based on time-domain circuit techniques. It maintains consistent beat detection capabilities, even under movement (around 40mV pp), and paves the way, says the research centre, for a low cost, low power multi-sensor SoC for wearable medical applications. Todayís digital ICs and memory ICs benefit from technology scaling in terms of power and area, yet this has not been achieved for analogue readout electronics. Current analogue circuit techniques do not result in a significantly reduced area in scaled technologies. In addition, the reduced supply voltage (VDD) with scaled technologies, presents challenges in combining a large dynamic range with small size and low power consumption.
Automotive SoCs implement 3D graphics clusters
The first member of SoC in the R-Car family have been announced by Renesas. They can be used in 3D instrument cluster systems and provide a migration path as more automotive systems are expected to shift to 3D graphics instrument cluster systems in the near future.
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