IoT interoperability – NXP refreshes up – Renesas loads up
15
Sep
2014
IoT seems to be catching all the buzz these days. One of the challenges to grow the market will be interoperability. A bit like Betamax vs. VHS or Blue Ray vs. HD DVD, a number of industry heavy weights have thrown their punches into the ring with competing interests and standards. The latest efforts come from Renesas with the R-In consortium focused on industrial equipment – manufacturing, cameras and robots. A month before, Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung and Wind River announced the Open Interconnect Consortium to “Drive Seamless Device-to-Device Connectivity”. On July 15th it was Google, Freescale ARM, Samsung and SiLabs to name a few who founded Thread to connect products around the home. In March it was AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel with the Industrial Internet Consortium . And it all started when the AllSeen Alliance sprung up with Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, Silicon Image, TP-LINK on board last year. Finally, we shouldn’t forget about the IPSO Alliance that has been advocating for “establishing the Internet Protocol as the basis for the connection of Smart Objects”.
We can be sure there will be epic battles to win a market that is planned to grow to $26B by 2020.
Back down to earth for us mortals, there are rumors of lots of new products including a low power Atmel ARM based MCU for November. More recently, NXP has woken up with a few refreshes. Were they consumed by the Apple M8 before the new iPhone launch?
Renesas in the meantime was busy spinning new versions of its 100MHz RX63, 90 in total.
Atmel has been quiet for the past month, but we should expect new ARM based silicon for Electronica in November. That silicon sampled early September. Likely low-end.
The K02 parts are now back on the site, but that was the only change. Only 4 came back up, in 64 and 128K Flash flavors, all 100MHz, but the VLF – LQFP48 packages are gone (2 parts).
NXP released the LPC810M021JN8 but we can now only find traces of it. Might have been a change in name since the LPC810M021FN8 has the same package (DIP8).
On the Cortex M3 front, NXP quietly released 6 products, 3 of which seem to be refreshes of existing products:
- LPC18S10FBD144
- LPC18S30FET256
- LPC18S50FET256
2 others are the LPC18UC and LPC18UK. UC suffixes are traditionally WLCSP packages. The last one is the more traditional LPC1817FDB44, for now in development.
Lastly, on the Cortex M4 front, 2 new products showed up, similar to the LPC18S, they seem to be refreshes of existing products:
- LPC43S20FBD144
- LPC43S57JET256
There were also documentation refreshes.
Renesas released not less than 90 products in the RX63 families.
- 630: 8 new parts: 100 MHz, USB, from 384 to 1024 kB Flash, 80 to 144 pins, adding to the 60 already present
- 631: 49 new parts: 100 MHz, from 256 kB to 2 MB, adding to the 152 already present
- 63N: 33 new parts: 100 MHz, from 768 kB to 2 MB, adding to the 177 already present
Renesas continues the ramp up of the RL78 G14 high performance family, adding 36 new produts.
Still no signs of movement at Silicon Labs last month.
There were 22 new parts at ST this month, but like last month most of them are either TR (tape and reel) or industrial temp (-40 +105C) of existing parts. The temperature code 3 had been elucidated, it is -40 to +125, for harsh environment industrial applications. A few parts drew our attention:
- Five F401xD parts give a 384kB Flash option to the portfolio
- The F072RBI6 is likely a UFBGA package, but why the redundance with the F072RBH6 at least in the datasheet, unless there is a typo?
Finally, the STM32F050 is now completely gone off the radar and replaced by a number of alternatives in the F03x, F04x and F051 families. A few of the F429/439 families were let go too.
Not much change on the Tiva side while, on the MSP430 front, we found lots of new parts
- MSP430A0 and A1: 45 new parts, seem related to the F1 family, but unclear from the web site
- MSP430F1: 5 new parts, adding to the 152 already present
- MSP430FR: 94 new parts, adding to the 152 already present
A hot dull summer, with TI and ST spices
15
Aug
2014
It’s been a hot dull summer where we would expect little activity on the MCU front when companies are getting ready for the post-vacation frenzy.
TI gave us a nice surprise by updating its Tiva 123 with a new silicon revision, quite interesting for a family that we heard would join the mature product shelves. Unless there are some customers to keep happy?
ST made also a few sparks with higher temperatures version of existing parts, nothing earth shattering though.
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Atmel
Atmel has updated a lot of documents this month, but there were no other changes detected
Freescale
Freescale continues the revamp of its web site this month. We had a typo in our update last month. We meant that the K02 parts were gone – not the KE02. The loss is confirmed this month with an empty K02 product list. Also, most of the Z parts which were either obsolete or NRND have been removed from the family pages.
Freescale released a dozen products, in the MK22 100 and 120 MHz and MKL03families. The new MK22 parts sport a USB OTG port and 128, 256 or 512 kB of Flash. While the MKL03 has 32 kB of Flash.
NXP
NXP is quiet this month, no product move. No price change.
Renesas
Renesas released 13 new RL78 products this month in the G14 high performance family, all with LGA 36 or 64-pin packages and -40 to 105C temperatures.
The RX family got 2 new members, the R5F564MFCDFB
and R5F564MFCDFP while 3 other were removed: R5F564MBGDBG, R5F564MFBDFB, R5F564MFPDFP. These are part of the top of the line RX64M with the new RXv2 core announced last year.
SiliconLabs
Well, maybe with the summer, the changes are scarce and event non-existent at SiliconLabs, but the suspens remains.
ST Microelectronics
A bit or a breather for ST this month with – only – 16 new part numbers. Actually, this is a bit stale since all the new version are either TR (tape and reel) or industrial temp (-40 +105C) of existing parts. We also have mysterious parts with a 3 suffix (6 is -40+85C, and 7 is -40+105C), namely the STM32L051C8T3 and the STM32L053R8T3. Are these 0 to +40C ? ;)
Texas Instruments
Another small surprise for TI this month with the release of 101 new Tiva 123 part numbers. Pretty much like ST micro, these are actually R (tape-and-reel) versions or versions with a silicon revision of 7. It looks like the Tiva family still lives…
On the MSP430 front, a few parts were released, 2 from the FRAM family, and 4 from the MSP430F6769 clan.