Semiconductor Products Insight

Semiconductor Products Insight

More Bluetooth for the new year

06

Jan

2020

To close the year, Renesas uncovered the RX23W group, featuring BT 5.0 with integrated RF and NXP released a powerful 4xCortex-A53+Cortex-M7 roaster of devices while everybody else enjoyed the holiday season. Renesas’ BT is one more set of devices to attack the proverbial IOT market, following Dialog and Nordic’s latest announcements.
Welcome to 2020.


Dialog
No change.
Infineon
Infineon is set to announce the closing of the acquisition of Cypress in the next months. The ARM portfolio of Infineon is pretty thin and has little overlap with Cypress’s.
Microchip
Microchip released 40 D variants of the SAMD21 family. According to the datasheet, this corresponds to the silicon revision G with RWW support in 128kB memory options. There were also a smilar number of DSPIC33CH parts mostly with high temperature range (-40+150C) and new packages (UQFN). Finally, the PIC12/16/24 got automotive grade variants (VAO extension).
Nordic
No change.
Nuvoton
Nuvoton unveiled the NUC29SEE, a base Cortex-M0 core, 2.5V ~ 5.5V and – 40 ℃ ~ +105 ℃ , with support for USB 2.0 FS.
NXP
NXP added the i.MX 8M Nano with up to 4 Cortex A53 coupled with a single Cortex-M7. 12 products were launched.
Renesas
Renesas has just launched the RX23W group to support the Bluetooth 5.0 low energy, long range and mesh networking markets. We found 8 products, and the group uses a RXv2 core running at 54MHz with 1.8V to 3.6V operation and -40 to 85C temperature range.
Flash/RAM sizes go up to 512/64kB with 2 packages so far, QFN56 and BGA85. On the Bluetooth side, it supports one channel BT5.0 (LE 1M PHY, LE 2M PHY, LE Coded PHY 125kbps and 500kbps, LE Advertising Extensions) with integrated RF. There is a dedicated AES-CCM (128-bit) encryption circuit.
Finally, the RX23W embeds a rich portfolio of peripherals:

  • 1x USB 2.0 Host/Function/OTG, Full speed (12Mbps), low speed (1.5Mbps), battery charger support
  • 1 ch CAN, ISO11898-1 compliant, Max. 1Mbps
  • 1 ch SD Host with SD memory/SDIO 1 or 4-bit SD bus support
  • Capacitive Touch Sensing with up to 12 keys supported in a 1-terminal 1-key configuration or up to 36 keys in a 12-terminal matrix configuration
  • 14 ch 12-bit A/D and 2 ch 12-bit D/A converters
  • Trusted Secure IP Lite (AES/TRNG)
SiliconLabs
In the EFM32 family, 63 EFM32LG parts moved to a new revision or a new nomenclature. The documentation (datasheet) is inconsistent with the part names, e.g. EFM32LG230F128G-QFN64 part number vs. a pattern of EFM32LG230F128G-F-QFN64

Finally, 3 new parts were added to the EFM32GG12 family, they are 125C, BGA112 variants of existing parts.
On the wireless side, the following family were removed from the user’s path (i.e. a user can only access them if they perform a search), maybe a fluke on the website:

  • EFR32BG14
  • EFR32MG1B
  • EFR32MG1P
  • EFR32MG1V

EFR32MG14 is being phased out to EFR32MG13 for battery powered Zigbee or Thread apps, EFR32MG12 for Zigbee, Thread and multiprotocol applications and EFR32MG21 for mains powered mesh applications including lighting, gateways and voice assistants.

Spansion/Cypress soon Infineon
No significant change.
ST Microelectronics
ST disclosed a few variants of existing parts.
Texas Instruments
No significant change.
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