New year, new products
29
Jan
2024
2024 is off to a great start with a very nice diversity of new products ranging from high-end graphics with hardware acceleration for ST Microelectronics, to Bluetooth best of breed for Nordic and the lowest cost Cortex-M0+ at $0.181 | 1ku by Texas Instruments. We couldn’t have asked for more!
Infineon announced in November the PSoC™ Edge family, dubbed “the next generation of MCUs for Machine Learning”. So far, no product have been announced yet.
North of 200 new variants were introduced, mostly in ATMega48, 88, 128 and 324, ATTimy461/861 and PIC16F131xx.
The nRF5340 specs were published: it sports two ARM Cortex®-M33 processors one for applications and one for the RF protocol. Features like Bluetooth® 5.4, high-speed SPI, QSPI, USB, up to 105 °C operating temperature, are combined with trusted execution, root-of-trust and secure key storage.
The nRF5340 is a Bluetooth 5.4 SoC and is capable of taking all angle-of-arrival (AoA) and angle-of-departure roles (AoD) in Bluetooth Direction Finding. It also supports LE Audio, Long Range, high-throughput 2 Mbps and Advertising Extensions features. Mesh protocols like Bluetooth mesh, Thread and Zigbee can be run concurrently with Bluetooth Low Energy, enabling smartphones to provision, commission, configure and control mesh nodes. NFC, ANT, 802.15.4 and 2.4 GHz proprietary protocols are also supported.
4 part numbers appeared with 2 packages.
Nordic also disclosed their newest family – currently sampling – the nRF54 with multiple Arm Cortex-M33 processors, clocked up to 320 MHz, Multiple RISC-V coprocessors, up to 2 MB Flash, 1 MB RAM and support for BLE, LE Audio, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, and Matter. It finally gets a High-speed USB, a CAN FD controller, 2 x I3C and 14-bit ADC.
2 devices are sampling, the nRF54H20 and the nRF54L15.
Nuvoton released variant in the M463 series, based on a CAN-FD/USB HS enabled Cortex-M4F core.
No change.
After the RA8D1 and the RA8M1, Renesas announced the RA8T1 MCU group, focused this time on motor control and still featuring the Cortex-M85 core running at 480MHz.
The RA8T1 Group integrates up to 2MB Flash and 1MB SRAM including TCM, PWM timers, analog features, multiple connectivity features, and also supports advanced security features and safety functions. The RA8T1 Group enables advanced motor control or additional functions on user systems including Ethernet and CAN-FD
10 parts were added with 1 or 2 MB of Flash.
No change.
ST unveiled its STM32U5G/F 7 and 9 series with advanced graphics capability and a large embedded memory.
The STM32U5F7/G7/F9/G9 integrate the NeoChromVG GPU, the second generation of STMicroelectronics’ graphics processing unit. This new graphics accelerator enables developers to reduce flash memory usage while delivering high-performance GUIs with vector support.
The STM32U5F7 and STM32U5G7 are available in LQFP-100 pin package, and offer the same performances as STM32U5F9/U5G9, with TFT-RGB display interface.
Developers can use the STM32U5 as an easy-to-develop solution running a complete high-performing and smartphone-like user interface on a simple microcontroller while saving external memory with now 3 Mbytes of internal SRAM and 4 Mbytes of flash. The Vector Graphic GPU (NeoChromVG) runs SVG and vector fonts while the JPEG Codec focuses on video playback.
10 part numbers were released.
TI released another 23 part numbers in its Cortex-M0+ portfolio. It is now targetting the automotive market (-Q1 suffix) with LIN and AEC-Q100 qualification.
TI has even lowered its prices from 0.204 to $0.181 | 1ku for the MSPM0C1104!
Top and bottom waves growing bigger in 2024
23
Dec
2023
Renesas adds more graphics power to its RA8 Cortex-M85 based group with 11 more parts in the RA8D1 group, while Infineon announced the PSoC Edge family based on the Cortex-M55. Be prepared in 2024 for more announcements on ML/AI at the edge.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Texas Instruments confirms its come back on the MCU scene with a whooping $0.204/1ku Cortex-M0+.
Revolution next year will continue at the top and the bottom.
Infineon announced last month the PSoC™ Edge family, dubbed “the next generation of MCUs for Machine Learning”
It is designed for applications that require hardware-assisted machine learning (ML) acceleration. The family includes multi-core products with the following main compute elements:
- A Cortex-M55 with Helium DSP support paired with Arm® Ethos™-U55
- A Cortex-M33 paired with Infineon’s ultra-low power NNLite neural network accelerator
Lead devices are built in ultra-low power 22-nm embedded-RRAM technology. PSoC Edge is available for early access customers now.
No information on the products portfolio has been shared yet.
Microchip announced the AVR EB family to support motor applications across consumer, automotive and industrial markets.
Many designers select Brushless DC (BLDC) motors to increase device longevity and lessen Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH).
AVR EB MCUs can adjust speed, timing and waveform shape—creating sinusoidal and trapezoidal waveforms—to improve the smoothness of motor operations, reduce noise and increase efficiency at high speeds.
AVR EB MCU key features include:
- New 16-bit Timer/Counter E (TCE) with four compare channels for Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and Waveform Extension (WEX) for smooth BLDC motor control with tunable dead band insertion
- New 24-bit Timer/Counter F (TCF) for flexible and accurate frequency generation and timing
- New Programming and Debug Interface Disable for advanced code security
50 products were released.
No change.
Nuvoton released the NuMicro NUC1263 series 32-bit microcontroller, based on the Cortex-M23. It supports a LED Light Strip Interface (LLSI), I3C, and USB2.0 full-speed device. Parts run up to 72 MHz and feature 64kBytes of Flash, 20 kBytes of SRAM, 2.5V ~ 5.5V wide operating voltage, and -40°C ~+105°C operating temperature.
4 parts were added.
No change.
Renesas announced the RA8D1 MCU group, a higher performance sibling to the recent RA8M1 both featuring the Cortex-M85 core running at 480MHz.
The RA8D1 adds a high-resolution TFT-LCD controller with parallel RGB and MIPI-DSI interfaces, 2D drawing engine, 16-bit camera interface, and multiple external memory interfaces, optimized to address the needs of diverse graphics and Vision AI applications.
These MCUs are available in 176 and 224 pin packages. Secure Element-like functionality is built-in with advanced cryptographic Security IP, immutable storage, a true secure boot, and tamper protection, for truly secure IoT.
11 parts were added with 1 or 2 MB of Flash.
No change.
ST had only minor changes to its portfolio.
TI extended its Cortex-M0+ portfolio with 16 new products in the MSPM0G11/15 and 35 groups. See below for the full portfolio. Source: Texas Instruments.
Prices now start at a whooping $0.204 per part at 1,000 volume break for the MSPM0C1104.
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