Microprocessors

Ahead of Computex 2019 in Taiwan, Arm has announced two processors for mobile computing. The Cortex-A77 CPU and Mali-G77 GPU target mobile computing for smartphones. The Cortex-A77 increases the instructions per cycle (IPC) of the previous Cortex-A76 CPU by 20%, to improve computing performance to meet the demands of untethered AR/VR and HD gaming. The Mali-G77 is built on the ...

Renesas announces its “RX Functional Safety” offering for industrial applications

Arm has announced a suite of IP, collected together under the provisional title of Project Trillium, to bring machine learning to edge devices. The suite includes scalable machine learning and object detection processors, claimed to enable trillions of machine learning operations per second on mobile devices. As well as machine learning, the suite is intended to deliver neural network functionality ...

Nokia has revealed more details about its ReefShark chipsets, using silicon developed by teams in Finland and California, USA. The chipsets can halve the size of MIMO antennae without affecting performance and also reduce power consumption in baseband units by 64%, compared to such units in use today, says Nokia. The chipsets comprise a ReefShark digital front end for LTE ...

Littelfuse has completed its acquisition of IXYS, bringing SiC expertise to the company. The deal, said to be valued at $750 million is the most recent, and largest made by the company, which acquired the TE Connectivity’s circuit protection business in 2015, for $350 million. “As the largest acquisition in our 90-year history, this is an exciting milestone for Littelfuse,” ...

  On the occasion of its 30th anniversary and the shipment of its four billionth chip, Peregrine Semiconductor has changed its name to pSemi. The Murata company has announced that it will broaden its scope and portfolio to include power management, connected sensors, optical transceivers, antenna tuning and RF front end products. “We’ve challenged the pSemi team to broaden their ...

Microchip’s PIC18F ‘K42’ microcontrollers are available with up to 128kbyte (from 16kbyte) of flash memory in packages from 28-48 pins. Max clock speed is 64Mbit/s and there is up to 1kbyte data EEPROM and 8kbyte of SRAM. The firm has gone big on its ‘core independent peripherals’ (CIP) to allow functions to be implemented in hardware, saving code, validation time, core ...

Microchip has announced Explorer 16/32, a development board for 16 and 32bit PIC microcontrollers that is backwards compatible with the Explorer 16 Board

Cavium is to start sampling OCTEON TX this quarter – a line of 64-bit ARM-based SoCs for control plane and data plane applications in networking, security, and storage. The product line has 4 product families – CN80XX, CN81XX, CN82XX and CN83XX with 1 to 24 full custom, enhanced 64-bit ARM v8.1 cores. The 1 to 4 core CN80XX and CN81XX ...

Renesas has released more details of its Synergy secure cradle-to-grave management system for programmable devices, and announced a beta release. “Secure life-cycle management is the foundation to maintaining the integrity of end-products,” said the firm. “The Synergy Platform Device Lifecycle Management [DLM] solution consists of Synergy security MCUs plus the associated Synergy software and tools enabling OEMs to better protect ...