Presented here are recent news announcements regarding the following organizations: Renesas Electronics, Andes Technology, Radix IoT, Techstream Systems, CEA-Leti, Spectronite, Foundries.io, Variscite and Sigfox.
Renesas Electronics Offers MPU, BLE RF Transceiver for IoT Devices
Renesas Electronics, a supplier of semiconductor solutions, has announced its RZ/Five general-purpose microprocessor units (MPUs) built around a 64-bit RISC-V CPU core. The RZ/Five employs Andes Technology‘s AX45MP, based on the RISC-V CPU instruction set architecture. The RZ/Five is intended to augment Renesas’ Arm CPU core-based MPUs, the company reports, expanding customer options and providing greater flexibility in the product-development process. Samples of the RZ/Five MPUs are available now, with mass production scheduled to begin in July 2022.
“I am delighted that Renesas is among the first to announce a general-purpose MPU built around a 64-bit RISC-V CPU core from Andes,” said Hiroto Nitta, the senior VP and head of SoC business with Renesas’s IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit, in a prepared statement. “With the introduction of the RZ/Five MPUs, along with ecosystem support, Renesas is taking the lead in providing RISC-V solutions ahead of the market.”
“RZ/Five is the first general-purpose MPU on the market to be built around a 64-bit RISC-V core from Andes,” added Frankwell Lin, Andes Technology’s chairman and CEO, in the prepared statement. “Andes has collaborated with Renesas first on the 32-bit RISC-V core and now on the 64-bit AX45MP, and I anticipate that this development will lead to the early adoption of customers’ devices in the global market built with Andes’ advanced RISC-V processor families.”
The RZ/Five’s maximum operating frequency is 1 GHz. Peripheral functions include support for multiple interfaces, such as two Gigabit Ethernet channels, two USB 2.0 channels and two CAN channels, as well as dual A/D converter modules. Support is provided for connecting external DDR memory with error checking and correction and security functions. A Verified Linux Package featuring Civil Infrastructure Platform Linux, an industrial-grade Linux offering long-term maintenance support for more than 10 years, is available for RZ/Five. This makes the system suitable for corporate infrastructure and industrial applications requiring reliability and extended service life, the company reports.
The peripheral functions and package of RZ/Five are compatible with those of the Arm core-based RZ/G2UL, allowing for reuse. The RZ/Five also comes in a smaller, compact package for less complex designs. As an evaluation environment, an RZ SMARC Evaluation Board Kit will be offered with a module board conforming to the SMARC 2.1 standard, equivalent to the currently available environment for the RZ/G Series. This kit allows switching and evaluating between an RZ/Five CPU module and an RZ/G2UL CPU module, enabling evaluation and shortening product development cycles, according to the company.
Renesas has also announced the development of two 2.4 GHz RF transceiver technologies that support the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard. These include a matching circuit technology that covers a wide impedance range and enables ICs to match a variety of antenna and board impedances without an external impedance-matching circuit, and a signal-correction technology for locally generated reference signals that uses a small circuit to self-correct inconsistencies in the circuit elements and variations in surrounding conditions without calibration.
Renesas has verified the effectiveness of these technologies on a BLE RF transceiver circuit prototype built with a 22-nanometer CMOS process. With these technologies, Renesas has reduced the circuit area, including the power supply, to 0.84 square millimeters, by modifying the receiver architecture to reduce the number of inductors and making enhancements as needed.
Radix IoT, Techstream Systems Partner on IoT Smart-Building Solutions
A strategic partnership has been announced between Radix IoT and Australia-based Techstream Systems to expand Radix IoT’s Mango OS unified IoT platform throughout the APAC region. By integrating Mango with its wholistic buildings automation solution offerings, Techstream now supports building owners’ sustainability compliance with Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star Rating and the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, established to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and electricity consumption by commercial buildings.
“To help building owners achieve and maintain the designed Green Star Rating,” said Victor Wang, Techstream Systems’s founder, in a prepared statement, “we searched for an easy-to-engineer and easy-to-use solution to provide real-time metering and reporting of energy consumption to complement and enhance existing and new building management systems. After testing many solutions, I can confidently say that Radix IoT’s Mango is the best available solution in the market. Mango’s flexibility, open-Web technology and interoperability with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms makes it a powerful solution that allows users to create bespoke solutions should requirements arise.”
Mango’s alarming and integrated tools offer trending analytics via a Web interface, providing data visibility and insight to assist Green Star ratings verifications. Mango’s custom reports harness and organize data required to facilitate compliance reporting. One of its supported formats is Microsoft Excel documents, which can be produced on-demand or be scheduled and attached via email based on specific events. Using Mango’s open, flexible solution, Techstream can work with stakeholders to produce customized reports, in order to identify building-optimization potentials, reduce operating expenses and prepare ESG reports for portfolios of buildings.
The Mango solution can be scaled to work on projects of any size. With the APAC region’s manufacturing boom, Techstream is tapping into such manufacturing hubs as Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, which now require LEED certification and responsible sourcing for all factories. Additionally, Techstream says it plans to expand into the Gulf States, where a sustainable buildings surge requires smart-building automation solutions.
CEA-Leti, Spectronite Develop Software Radio
CEA-Leti, a French provider of research and development services, and Spectronite, which offers wireless backhaul technologies, have announced that they have adapted and optimized CEA-Leti’s spectrally efficient waveform with enhanced spectral efficiency for Spectronite’s X-Series modem for 5G systems. CEA-Leti is a technology research institute at CEA that offers micro- and nanotechnologies, while Spectronite offers a software-defined solution for wireless backhaul. The X-Series, its latest product line, has a capacity of up to 10 gigabytes per second, the company reports, and can reach multi-gigabit transfers over distances of up to 50 kilometers.
With this jointly developed radio technology, Spectronite says its goal is to disrupt the way operators interconnect 5G base stations. In the 5G rollout, operators are required to deploy an increasing number of base stations, each supporting a data rate multiplied by 10 compared to 4G base stations, to address user expectations in a context of mobile-data usage doubling every 18 months. Backhaul links rely on either optical fiber or wireless communication.
E-band radios in the 80 GHz frequency band can provide the required capacity for 5G backhaul over short distances in wireless applications, typically up to 5 kilometers, according to the company. For longer distances, traditional radio architectures in the frequency range from 6 GHz to 42 GHz are limited by design in scaling. Spectronite’s software radio architecture overcomes this limitation, the company reports, by enabling intra-band, non-contiguous carrier aggregation up to 10 gigabytes per second in these bands.
CEA-Leti’s patented optimization used in the collaboration is intended to provide a higher spectral efficiency compared to that of traditional radios, while respecting spectrum emission masks imposed by ETSI standards. The collaboration’s initial results show a data-rate increase of 20 percent compared to the conventional backhaul radio waveform. The increase in spectral efficiency provides throughput equivalent to a transmission with 8192QAM modulation, while the radio operates at 2048QAM modulation. CEA-Leti and Spectronite are now working on the technology transfer with an X-Series product targeted for the fourth quarter of 2022.
“Our collaboration with Spectronite strategically leverages CEA-Leti’s Systems Division’s deep expertise in wireless communications for an application that can keep up with the continuous spiking of global mobile data usage,” said Sébastien Dauvé, CEA-Leti’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “This success underscores the flexibility of our technologies to meet the challenges of innovative startups, SMEs and large industrial companies.”
“While our software-defined microwave products allow mobile operators to roll-out 5G networks faster and at lower cost compared to fiber connectivity, our collaboration with CEA-Leti takes us an order of magnitude further, by reaching the highest level of spectral efficiency ever achieved in this industry,” added Jean-Philippe Fournier, Spectronite’s CEO, in the statement. “With this unprecedented level of spectral efficiency, we provide huge savings to our customers on the cost of their spectrum rental licenses.”
Foundries.io, Variscite Provide Embedded IoT Platform
Foundries.io, a provider of cloud-native development and deployment solutions for secure IoT and edge devices, has announced a partnership with Variscite to simplify the development, deployment and management of secure IoT and edge products on Variscite’s system-on-modules and computer-on-modules, based on NXP Semiconductors‘ i.MX processors.
Variscite, an Arm-based SoM vendor, sells more than two million units per year, supporting more than 6,000 customers worldwide. “We are happy to collaborate with Foundries.io,” said Ofer Austerlitz, Variscite’s VP of business development and sales, in a prepared statement. “The access to the FoundriesFactory platform can facilitate our customers to develop, deploy, manage and update secure IoT and edge devices, enabling them to accelerate time to market while reducing engineering and maintenance costs.”
The Industrial IoT market is expected to grow to $1.1 trillion in 2028 from $216 billion. That growth requires a new way of building and maintaining Linux-based devices, the companies indicate, one that fosters security and resource efficiency. FoundriesFactory is designed to address these challenges, the companies add, with a cloud-based platform designed to simplify and reduce the cost of developing, deploying and maintaining secure IoT and edge Linux-based devices. It is built to accelerate product firmware, operating system and applications development, as well as shorten time to market and provide the ability to monitor and update devices and fleets.
“It’s a natural move to extend our cloud-based DevOps platform for embedded IoT and edge to Variscite’s customers,” added George Grey, Foundries.io’s CEO, in the prepared statement. “The nature of embedded development is changing, and FoundriesFactory delivers a common, easy way for developers to move quickly and to easily maintain devices for their entire lifetime from the cloud. We’re excited to make this available to millions of developers around the world.”
Sigfox Announces Update on Receivership/Rehabilitation Proceeding
Sigfox, a global network operator for low-power, wireless connectivity, had filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year as it sought a buyer or investor to continue operation as an IoT technology provider. In the context of the receivership/rehabilitation proceeding opened on Jan. 26, 2022, in respect to Sigfox SA and its subsidiary Sigfox France SAS (see IoT Network Provider Sigfox, with Bankruptcy Protection, Seeks Buyers), potential buyers had until Feb. 25, 2022, to submit takeover offers.
Sigfox’s management has confirmed that nine potential candidates—Actility, Buffet Investment Services Consortium, Greybull Capital, Heliot Europe, Iwire Innovation Management, OTEIS France, Sentiens, UnaBiz and Groupe Zekat—have formally reapproached the court-appointed administrators for Sigfox SA. Seven candidates have bid for Sigfox France SAS—the same list, with the exception of Actility and Buffet Investment Services Consortium.
According to Sigfox, these offers indicate interest in its technological profile, its market potential and the quality of its teams. During the next few weeks, the bodies involved in the procedure, particularly the receivers working alongside management and the employee representatives, will examine these offers and their implications for Sigfox.
In the interim, Sigfox says its management will have discussions with the takeover candidates to protect the interests of the company, its employees and its technology. The managers will communicate regarding the next steps of the procedure, in compliance with its rules, and respecting the primacy of information due to the court, insolvency officers and employee representatives.