How Lattice’s MachXO2 Dramatically Cut LED Lighting Control Costs

One of the many compelling uses of the Lattice MachXO2 has been in control-oriented applications as a microcontroller (MCU) peripheral.

As an example, a Lattice industrial lighting customer uses the MachXO2 as the control interface to a large number of LED modules, dramatically reducing overall system cost.

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• The MachXO2 integrates the large number of IO-ports required by the design, reducing the cost per port dramatically over a MCU-only solution where additional expensive MCU IOs would be required.
• The MachXO2 on-chip SPI bus and User Flash memory provides another level of integration that requires no programmable fabric- thus keeping the MachXO2 cost at a minimum.
• The overall reduction in board space, lower MCU cost, power savings and User Data Flash integration is leveraged over many lighting modules in a typical installation and thus dramatically reduced overall system cost.

Download the "MachXO2 LED Lighting Case Study" to learn about the details of this innovative design approach.

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Tower Trivia: Which module has a magnetic personality?

Which Tower System module has a magnetic personality, operates with 3 phases, and can torque with the best of them? Despite its global use, this module wasn’t built in Washington "D.C." or in the "polar" regions. Torqued yet? Answer this week’s question for a shot at winning a Tower System module. More »

eDevice HealthGO platform gets integrated connectivity

Freescale’s Steven Dean recently joined eDevice at the 17th Annual American Telemedicine Association (ATA) exposition where eDevice’s HealthGO product was announced. Developed using Freescale’s Home Health Hub (HHH) reference platform, the HealthGO supports remote patient monitoring. Read more about this fully customizable data aggregation platform that features universal connectivity options such as Bluetooth, USB, cellular, Ethernet and PSTN. More »

Market Solutions

QorIQ P5 family goes quad-core

The QorIQ P5 family of control plane processors has expanded to include the quad-core P5040 and the dual-core P5021. Now supporting frequencies up to 2.4 GHz, this pin-compatible, scalable family targets compute-intensive and power-conscious control plane applications across enterprise networking, datacenter and aerospace and defense markets. More »

New baseband-to-antenna reference design for small cell base stations

The comprehensive baseband-to-antenna reference design combines the VortiQa Qonverge BSC9131 base station SoC with Freescale RF radio boards, and is a multi-protocol solution that scales across a range of cellular bands to ease the development transition from 3G to 4G LTE. The radio card contains the MMZ25332B and MMZ09312B GaAs MMIC power amplifiers and MML09211H/20211H low noise amplifiers. More »

VortiQa software: Improve data center performance and reliability

Tuned for Freescale’s high-performance PXS20, PXS30, PXD10, PXD20, PXN20 and PXR40 platforms, VortiQa intelligent traffic classification and load balancing (ITCL) software intelligently classifies and load balances application traffic to enhance performance and reliability of data center networks, while optimizing resource utilization and extending infrastructure investment. More »

32-bit PX series MCU parts now available

The PX Series provides unmatched performance, comprehensive enablement and ruggedized safety features for the most complex industrial control applications. The series of 32-bit microcontrollers built on Power Architecture® technology includes the PXS20, PXS30, PXD10, PXD20, PXN20 and PXR40 families. More »

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Lattice Website NEWS Subscription (May 08, 2012)

Products > Development Kits and Hardware

EB63 MT9M024 NanoVesta Head Board User’s Guide (version 01.1)

Updated: 05/08/12 – MT9M024 NanoVesta Head Board User’s Guide has been updated to support revision 2 of the MT9M024 NanoVesta Head Board.

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Anne-Françoise PELE    5/4/2012 2:06 PM EDT

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4372400/Talk-from-the-hip-at-Microchip

PARIS – Researchers at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, said they have defined an approach to developing sustainable and renewable photovoltaics devices. This approach paves the way for low-cost solar cells based on abundant metals, according to an article published in the Chemical Communications journal.
Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) consist of a semiconductor, titanium dioxide, which is coated with a colored dye. The dye absorbs sunlight and injects an electron into the semiconductor.

This is the primary event leading to the photocurrent, chemists said.
Researchers claimed they have achieved two breakthroughs. Firstly, they said they have developed a strategy for making and attaching colored materials to the surface of titanium dioxide nanoparticles. Secondly, they said that they have demonstrated that simple compounds of the readily available metal zinc may be used. The achievement was finding a method for the simultaneous synthesis of the dye and its attachment to the semiconductor surface, the team said.
Dye-sensitized solar cells have been assembled using a sequential approach: a TiO2 surface was functionalized with an anchoring ligand, followed by metallation with Zn(OAc)2 or ZnCl2, and subsequent capping with a chromophore functionalized 2,2′:6′,2″-terpyridine; the DSCs exhibit surprisingly good efficiencies confirming the effectiveness of the new strategy for zinc-based DSC fabrication.

Comparative testing of ruthenium and zinc dye-sensitized solar cells

The team of chemists noted that DSCs use ruthenium dyes, but ruthenium is very rare and expensive. Then, they have demonstrated that dyes from abundant and relatively inexpensive copper were effective in DSCs and the extension to cheap zinc compounds further increases the sustainability of the materials science.
"This is a significant step towards our dream of coupling photovoltaics and lighting in an intelligent curtain which can store solar energy during the day and function as a lighting device at night,” declared Ed Constable, professor at the University of Basel, in a statement. “This is at the core of our ERC research program Light-In, Light-Out."

Testing dye-sensitized solar cells under an artificial sun

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If you found this article to be of interest, visit SmartEnergy Designline where you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of clean technologies.

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Peter Clarke   5/3/2012 5:39 AM EDT

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4372207/TSMC-pushes-Cortex-A9

LONDON – Foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has announced it has made a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor test chip in its 28-nm high-performance mobile CMOS process that it has run at a 3.1-GHz clock frequency under typical operating conditions.
TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) said that this achievement demonstrates that the 28-nm HPM process is ready for use in a broad range of mobile, consumer and enterprise applications.
For mobile application signoff conditions the 28HPM process delivers clock frequencies in the range 1.5-GHz to 2.0-GHz, TSMC said.

But for high performance requirements it can be run up to 3.1-GHz the company said.

This could either for very short term use or where power consumption is less critical because a system is connected to a main supply of electricity.

The 28HPM implementation runs twice as fast as the 40-nm counterpart made by TSMC under the same operating conditions, according to Cliff Hou, vice president of R&D at TSMC.

Related links and articles:

ARM tips availability of ‘Seahawk’ A15 hard macro
ARM launches processor pack for big-little on TSMC 28-nm
Amlogic offers dual-core Cortex-A9 for consumer SoCs

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Junko Yoshida

5/2/2012 1:38 PM EDT

Micochip’s SMSC acquisition deal puts Microchip – long known as a “long-tail” company with 70,000 customers – on a new trajectory. NEW YORK – Microchip Technology has announced its signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Standard Microsystems Corporation (SMSC), a company focused on mixed-signal connectivity solutions, for $37.00 per share in cash, which represents a total equity value of about $939 million. SMSC’s balance sheet consists of cash and investments worth about $173 million, making a total enterprise value of some $766 million, according to Microchip.

The deal puts Microchip – long known as a “long-tail” company with 70,000 customers – on a new trajectory.
With the SMSC acquisition, Microchip will likely be more exposed to the fast-changing, low-margin consumer market it has long avoided. (SMSC has a sizable business in input/output connectivity technologies in computing and consumer products.)

On the other hand, the acquisition will surely help Microchip expand into the automotive “infotainment” market — a key to the company’s growth strategy. Microchip will ride on coattails of MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) bus, a high-speed multimedia network technology designed for the automotive industry, of which SMSC is a founding member and market leader, with close connections with automotive OEMs.
In a conference call Wednesday, Steve Sanghi, Microchip’s President and CEO, said of the acquisition, “We have very little product overlap, while we share many common customers.” That gives both companies “cross-selling” opportunities, he said.
Microchip is also attracted to SMSC’s rich IP portfolio and building blocks. Sanghi said that SMSC adds a strong patent portfolio to Microchip’s. Microchip takes over some 300 SMSC patents, in addition to 100 patents pending.

Among various SMSC product lines, Microchip identified two – automotive and wireless audio – as fast-growing segments.
In automotive alone, SMSC has leading positions in four key technologies: MOST bus for high-bandwidth infortainment backbone; Ethernet for diagnostic and software download; USB as consumer port (for mobile device connection); and Kleer, a proprietary standard, that provides low power, uncompressed, high-quality wireless audio and control.
Speaking of MOST, in which SMSC has strong working relationship with leading automotive OEMs, and has supplied USB, Ethernet and other wireless technologies, Sanghi said, “MOST is a dominant standard and I know SMSC has a leading position. We also know that the company has a number of design-wins in the pipeline.”
Sanghi expressed his hope that the deal will open doors for Microchip, allowing it to pitch its own microcontrollers and analog components for next-generation automotive infotainment systems.  “Automotive OEMs are making architectural choices right now,” said Sanghi.
Asked by financial analysts what divisions or product lines of SMSC Microchip might think about pruning, Sanghi declined to comment. Noting SMSC’s annual sales of $412 million (in the fiscal year ending Feb., 29, 2012) and its 54.4 percent non-GAAP gross margin, Sanghi said, “Not a tremendous number of surgeries are needed here.”
In merging the two companies, Sanghi said, the first step is to take SMSC to a horizontal market loaded with 70,000 customers – a strategy familiar to Microchip . Looking back on the time Microchip got into the touch controller business, Sanghi remembered skeptics who said the technology was exclusive to the cell phone market. “But we found a plenty of design wins in industrial and automotive markets for touch.” Sanghi is convinced that Microchip can perform similar magic on some of SMSC’s technologies.
Asked if Microchip might plan to drive its embedded memory into SMSC’s chips used in computers, Sanghi made it clear, “We have no intention to grow our memory business at the expense of margin disciplines.” He added that the company’s mindset for memory strategy is in going for profitability, not for market share.”
All of which comes down to the old refrain: How these two strangers are going to get along together is still, mostly, mystery.

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http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=VYBRID

Freescale’s Vybrid platform brings to market a family of devices that at the entry level provides, low-power, single-chip solution for application processing, and at the high-end provides customers a way to combine rich applications requiring high-resolution graphical displays and connectivity with real-time determinism.

The Vybrid platform enables customers to create systems that can either run a high level OS like Linux® or MQX™ stand-alone or concurrently on the same device.

This, along with a communication API between the rich domain and the real-time domain and a tool chain that eases debug of such systems, dramatically shortens customer time to revenue.
The devices in the Vybrid family span the entry-level product for customers who want to upgrade from the Kinetis MCU to an MPU with large on-chip SRAM to a highly integrated, heterogeneous dual-core MPU ideal for industrial markets.

Each device in the Vybrid family offers a rich suite of reference designs, app notes, Board Support Packages (BSP) and middleware.

Vybrid Controller Solutions

• VF3xx: Vybrid VF3xx Single-chip Solution with Dual XiP Quad SPI, Dual Ethernet and L2 Switch 
• VF4xx: Vybrid VF4xx Single-core Solution with Dual USB and Integrated PHY 
• VF5xx: Vybrid VF5xx Single-core Solution with Dual Ethernet and L2 Switch 
• VF6xx: Vybrid VF6xx Dual Heterogeneous Core Solution with XGA Display, Dual USB, Dual Ethernet and L2 Switch 
• VF7xx: Vybrid VF7xx Dual Heterogeneous Core Solution with Dual XGA Display and GPU

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New controller chips from Freescale for real time control

http://www.eeherald.com/section/new-products/nps201203272.html

Freescale Semiconductor has announced its new portfolio of Vybrid controller solutions for applications including building/home automation and control; industrial automation; point-of-sale systems; medical devices, such as patient monitors; smart energy equipment, including energy meters and data concentrators; and appliances. They are also said to be well-suited for many low-power and timing-critical wired and wireless network communication protocols, such as IEEE 1588, Smart Energy 2.0, low-power WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy and power line communication, and other proprietary interfaces.

"We’ve built our new Vybrid controller solutions to address the enormous challenge of adding advanced user interfaces to applications that traditionally have been focused on real-time control," said Reza Kazerounian, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Automotive, Industrial & Multi-Market Solutions Group. "With the Vybrid platform, Freescale is going beyond silicon to provide a full software-hardware solution, making it easier and faster for our customers to develop systems that need rich apps in real time."

"Asymmetrical multicore systems are well suited to embedded applications that need real-time control and intuitive user interfaces," said Tom R. Halfhill, a senior analyst at The Linley Group and senior editor of Microprocessor Report. "Some example applications are factory automation, medical devices and home appliances. Freescale’s Vybrid controller solutions are a new twist on ARM’s Big.Little strategy. They integrate a Cortex-A5 applications core with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller core and add features for real-time control, communications and user interfaces. A virtual hardware model speeds up software development, which is increasingly the most time-consuming part of a design project. Vybrid devices can reduce the product’s bill of materials and design cycle."

VF series features includes:

· Up to 1.5 MB on-chip SRAM with error correction code (ECC)

· DDR3/LPDDR2 controller with ECC

· Dual quad-SPI with double-data-rate capability and execute-in-place (XIP)

· NAND flash controller with ECC

· Dual Ethernet controllers with level 2 (L2) switch

· Dual USB 2.0 OTG with integrated high-speed PHY

· Dual display controllers with video/camera interface

· Real-time I/O subsystem, including pulse-width modulation (PWM), dual analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and dual digital-to-analog converters (DACs)

· OpenVG graphics processing unit (GPU)

· Multiple audio interfaces

· Secure boot with cryptography algorithm acceleration and tamper detection

"Freescale’s Vybrid controller solutions are well-suited to address the challenge of software diversity and complexity in embedded applications," said David Kleidermacher, chief technology officer for Green Hills Software. "The combination of Green Hills’ scalable INTEGRITY RTOS family, Multivisor secure virtualization, TimeMachine trace debugging and optimizing compilers makes it easier for embedded developers to manage this complexity while building ever more capable electronic products."

Availability:

Alpha samples of the first devices in the Vybrid VF series are planned for Q2 2012.

Broad availability of samples and tools is planned for Q3 from Freescale and its distribution partners.

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http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4370635/Solid-state-drives-jump-on-PCI-Express

Rick Merritt 4/9/2012 12:22 PM EDT

A coming wave of solid-state drives for the PCI Express bus will continue the SATA vs. SCSI protocol split and accelerate the shift to competition based on software. SAN JOSE, Calif.

– A wide group of vendors is poised to roll solid-state drives for the PCI Express bus, promising improved performance over current flash drives that mainly use serial ATA and Serial-Attached SCSI interfaces.

The wave of new products will continue the current split between SATA- and SCSI-based protocols, and accelerate the shift to competition based on new software features.
As many as 80 companies including Dell, Intel, Micron, Oracle and Stec are part of the trade group that defined the NVMe interface last year.

The first drives using the interface are expected to ship later this year.
Separately, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) recently announced it will adopt the SCSI over PCI Express standard being completed by the ANSI T10 committee. STA will hold a technology showcase in Silicon Valley on May 9 where members may demo some of the first SCSI Express flash drives.
The competing NVMe and SCSI Express drives are expected to continue the same split between SATA and SCSI command sets that exists in today’s SATA and SAS flash and hard-disk drives.
The NVMe and SCSI Express drives represent a challenge to Fusion-IO, a startup that soared to success based on pioneering the move to plugging solid-state drives into the fast PCIe bus, closely linked to system CPUs. Most first-generation solid-state drives used the slower SATA and SAS hard drive interfaces that reside lower in the hierarchy of interconnects on a server.
The performance benefits of PCIe helped Fusion IO tap into sales that soared to $84 million in its most recent quarter. The strong sales supported two successful public offerings in the past two years, raising more than $300 million.
With the advent of many more PCIe flash drives this year, Fusion faces a two-fold challenge. A wider supply of standard drives could help speed price decreases in the sector. In addition, the presence of more solid-state drives will likely narrow Fusion’s performance benefits based on its proprietary approach.
Fusion pioneered a method of giving host CPUs fast access memory stored on flash drives.

The company has a proprietary approach for sharing with the host processors a map that describes where all the data on a flash drive physically resides, enabling write access at latencies of as little as 15 microseconds. Most drives maintain less comprehensive logical-to-physical translation maps on the drive controllers and thus have higher latencies.
The new NVMe and SCSI Express specs will enable vendors to leverage common software stacks for PCIe drives, lowering their costs and time-to-market.
“Today most PCIe flash drives include a proprietary driver and no industry software standard,” said Amber Huffman, a spokeswoman for the NVMe group and a senior principal storage engineer at Intel. 

With NVMe’s consistent feature set, “we expect to see faster time-to-market and broader adoption,” she said.
For its part, Fusion will back the SCSI Express approach because it is based on the work of a recognized standards group, the ANSI T10 committee. Access to the NVMe spec requires signing a legal document managed by Intel Corp., the group’s leader, said Gary Orenstein, vice president of products at Fusion IO.
“Is too early to tell what the shift to NVMe and SCSI Express will mean,” said Orenstein. “Some people think there could be a merging of the two efforts eventually,” he added.
To date, nearly three-quarters of Fusion’s sales have gone to three large customers, likely the top server makers—Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Dell has already signaled its support for NVMe in its latest servers, casting a shadow over at least one of Fusion’s big customers.

Shift to software
Value-added software is increasingly the secret sauce for maintaining flash drive prices.

For its part, Fusion says software is now the key focus of its R&D efforts, and it acquired IO Turbine, a developer of storage virtualization software, in August for $65 million. 
Fusion is already shipping the renamed ioTurbine software.

It enables solid-state drives to be used as memory caches on a server running VMWare virtualization software. Fusion sees opportunities to roll software that enables other applications with its flash drives in areas such as database, enterprise search and social gaming.
In this way, Fusion may again be pioneering the direction for the rest of the flash drive market—a move to flash-enabled applications software. Long term, the industry still needs broader standards and support from operating systems for how flash storage can fit into the memory hierarchy.
The good news for all sides is it’s still early days for solid-state drives with plenty of growth seen ahead. International Data Corp. expects the market for PCIe-based flash drives to expand 85 percent on a compound basis from 2010-2015. Even the older market for slower SATA and SAS flash drives will grow a solid 56 percent over that period, IDC predicts.
PCIe-based flash drives came from virtually nowhere in 2009 to sales of 200 to 300 million units in 2011, according to various market researchers.
Long term, PCIe will supplant SATA and perhaps SAS as well, said Huffman.
SATA development ended at the current 6 Gbit/second generation with a SATA/Express merger planned as the next step.

“SAS will have trouble getting beyond 12 Gbit/s—we definitely see PCI Express as the future,” Huffman said.
Interest in the NVMe spec is strong based on engineers adding about 20 errata to the spec to date, a sign products are in development.

“We’re processing lots of clarifications, and that means people are using the spec,” she said.
The group has interoperability test labs set up at the University of New Hampshire and it is working on extensions to the spec. They include options for supporting multiple hosts and power-saving features.

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High-speed, high-performance, and high-code-efficiency

http://sg.renesas.com/products/mpumcu/rx/rx600/index.jsp

The RX600 is the high-speed and high-performance series in the RX Family.
The series is positioned as the upward successor to the H8SX and R32C, the 32-bit families of Renesas MCUs. Already released are the RX610 Group suitable for photocopiers, laser beam printers, home audio systems, and so on, the RX621 Group and RX62N Group suitable for networking equipment with enhanced connectivity and fail-safe functions, and the RX62T Group suitable for energy-saving motor and other inverter control applications.

The RX630 Group suitable for consumer electronics and office equipment, and the RX63N and RX631 Groups suitable for networking and industrial applications, all with 90% reduced power consumption at standby.

The RX63T Group has joined the RX Family. RX63T Group is a part of the smallest pin package lineup and controls small motor with inverter, best suited for consumer/industrial applications.

The RX62G Group has PWM output function which achieves high resolution (max. 312.5 psec).

The combination of high resolution PWM output function and high CPU performance of RX core achieved higher accuracy of inverter/converter control.

Looking forward, Renesas will enhance the RX600 Series by reinforcing the memory, packages, and peripheral functions focusing on a variety of applications.

High speed: 100 MHz;

high performance: 165 DMIPS@100 MHz (1.65 DMIPS/MHz)

Built-in multiply-divide unit, multiply-and-accumulate unit, and single-precision floating point unit (FPU)

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http://sg.renesas.com/products/mpumcu/rx/rx600/rx63n_631/Documentation.jsp

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