Inside Electronics

Intelligent connected devices offer functionalities like precise location tracking and enhanced security features, making them significantly more advanced than legacy solutions. However, the advanced functionalities of next-generation IoT and Edge products come with increased power demands, necessitating the need for effective battery life boosting technology and other efficiency measures.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Dirk Wittorf, VP of Corporate Strategy at Nexperia, about the state of the market and some of the predictions of the future. 

IoT empowers intelligent machines to provide advanced functionality to society, but it isn’t easy to get there from here. Key aspects of development include the importance of creating tools that empower others, the role of the market ecosystems in driving adoption, and the challenges in the infrastructure needed to bring connected technologies to the market. We talk to Alistair Fulton, CEO of IoT Labs, about the future of the marketplace 

Industrial subsystems are distributed so communication between these subsystems needs to preserve this information and deliver it in a timely fashion. This is where time sensitive networking (TSN) comes into play. We talk to Mark Geisler, Marketing Manager at Analog Devices, about the future of TSN in plug-and-play industrial networks as well as the technical and organizational challenges that engineers face when incorporating TSN into their systems.  

The PCI-SIG PCI Express Gen 7 standard is now available but work has not stopped there. PCIe Gen 8 is on the horizon and with a planned doubling of the bandwidth to 256 GT/s. This will be challenging from a number of perspectives from support copper connections at this speed to advancements in the protocol.  

In this episode, Electronic Design talks to Karl Wachswender, Senior Principal System Architect at Lattice Semiconductor. Lattice is well known for its power efficient FPGAs that support artificial intelligence (AI) applications. They also address post-quantum cryptography, and are found in demanding applications like automotive. 

Nanusens creates nanoscale sensor structures inside the CMOS layers using standard CMOS processes within the same production flow as making the control electronics on the same chip. This approach reduces the size and cost as it benefits from the vast economies of scale of using giant CMOS fabs. The resulting single chip solution has a packaged size of 0.5 mm³. This episode delves into the technology, its future, and some limitations.

Christian Bornschein, Manager of Marketing & Sales at Port Industrial Automation, talks about how Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is employed in industrial automation. We also discuss some real-world examples and how TSN enables simpler, more effective industrial control product development. 

RAID, redundant array of independent disks, uses redundancy to provide a more robust disk drive array capable of operation even with the loss of a drive. RAID 1 replicates data with a 50% overhead. RAID 5 and 6 are more common in larger arrays with less overhead as more drives are added to the mix but with a tradeoff in performance.  

Mark Anthony, Product Line Manager at Microchip Technology, talks about the company's SmartRAID 4300 Series, which is designed to accelerate the operation of RAID arrays implemented build on NVMe drives.

AI workloads and other advanced computing applications continue to expand, pressuring the development community with the dual challenges of performance and manufacturability. Traditional SoCs are approaching their limits in terms of size, yield, and cost, and one solution lies in chiplet-based architectures. In this episode, we talk to Larry Zu, CEO at Sarcina Technology, and how the company is deploying interconnect to minimize signal crosstalk and enhance signal integrity.

Synaptics is well known for their touch technology, but they do a lot more including their new Astra SL2610 family of system-on-chip (SoC) that incorporates Google’s open source, Coral artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator. Synaptics’ Vikram Gupta talks about the Synaptics' continuing push for edge AI and how that is tied into their other offerings that touch on everything from wireless connectivity to biometrics.