Dave talks about Tektronix’s new unreleased AGO3000 Gravity Compensated Oscilloscope with a high precision TCXO timebase with 2G tip-over gravity compensation.
Datasheet
Preliminary product launch page
Forum HERE
IBM says it will invest $3 billion over the next four years to establish an IoT unit, and that it is building a cloud-based open platform to help clients and ecosystem partners across industries better integrate real-time data and insights from dispersed sources directly into business operations.
IBM’s pipwork in Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities was based on the practical applications of IoT in the enterprise and led to the development of offerings to reduce crime, minimise risk for firefighters and monitor water conditions. The company’s enterprise IoT implementations combine and analyse data from a wide variety of sources.
With new industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools, IBM will build on that expertise to integrate data from an unprecedented number of IoT and traditional sources. It will be made available on an open platform to provide industrial “makers” and “operators” with the ability to design and manufacture better connected devices and create systems that take advantage of enterprise and IoT data for business decision-making.
“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” says IBM’s Bob Picciano,”this is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters. Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”
IBM estimates that 90% of all data generated by devices like smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analysed or acted upon. As much as 60% of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated. To address this challenge, IBM is announcing it will offer:
IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries: New analytics services to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions for industry clients on the IBM Cloud, an open platform that is also available to clients and ecosystem partners looking to build their own data-driven solutions. For example, IBM will introduce a cloud-based service that helps insurance companies extract insight from connected vehicles. This will enable new, more dynamic pricing models and the delivery of services that can be highly customised to individual drivers.
IBM Bluemix IoT Zone: New IoT services as part of Bluemix platform-as-a-service will enable easy integration of IoT data into cloud-based development and deployment of IoT apps. Developers will be able to enrich existing business applications – such as enterprise asset management, facilities management, and software engineering design tools – by infusing more real-time data and embedded analytics to further automate and optimise mission critical IoT processes.
IBM IoT Ecosystem: Expansion of its ecosystem of IoT partners – from silicon and device manufacturers to industry-oriented solution providers – such as AT&T, ARM, Semtech and newly announced The Weather Company – to ensure the secure and seamless integration of data services and solutions on IBM’s open platform.
IBM’s capabilities are illustrated in a new global partnership announced today with The Weather Company – including WSI, its professional division – which provides over 26 billion forecasts per day around the globe, drawing from data sources that include more than 100,000 private weather sensors, aircraft and drones, as well as millions of smartphones, buildings and even moving vehicles. The two companies will help industries understand the impact of weather on business outcomes and optimise those parts of their businesses.
Another lengthy mailbag, with plenty of diverse stuff.
RCA Airnergy Bullshit Video
Forum HERE
SPOILERS:
Kan Jam flying disc
Psion 3A Organiser
1974 808 RapidMan Calculator made in Canada.
Russian IN-9 Neon bargraph display tube.
Datasheet
Info & characteristic curves
Wifi cellphone battery charging bullshit Kickstarter
RF Energy Harvesting. Can a WiFi signal light up a LED?
Flir VP50 Non-Contact voltage detector.
Freescale PowerQuicc II security processor:
APC Netbotz Room Monitor
The most efficient 8051 microcontroller core ever, is the claim of Polish intellectual property firm Digital Core Designs (DCD).
Called DQ8051, the quad pipeline core benchmarks at 0.27292 DMips/MHz (Dhrystone 2.1) “29.01 times speed-up over the original 80C51 chip operating at the same frequency,” said the firm. “But the speed is not all. Dynamic power consumption can be as low as 1.2µW/MHz.”
In fast form, the processor core has 7,500 gates. Up to 27.297 VAX Mips are available at 100MHz.
Fully synthesizable, it is static synchronous with no internal tri-states and Technology independent – so it can be used in asics or FPGAs
Speeds range from 70MHz on a 0.35µm process up to 430MHz on 90nm – using around 10,000 gates in each case. 88% of opcodes are single instruction, average instruction 1.36cycle.
Available interfaces include: USB, Ethernet, I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, LIN, HDLC, Smart Card interfaces.
There is also a hardware debugger with a smart trace which doesn’t capture addresses of all executed instructions, only these related to the start of tracing, conditional jumps and interrupts. Captured instructions are read back by debug software, analysed and then presented to the user as ASM code and related C lines.
DQ8051 is delivered with automated test-bench and complete set of tests, allowing package validation at each stage of SoC design flow.
In the diagram above:
Memory:
An industrial-grade embedded vision system featuring PoE (power-over-Ethernet) support will be launched by Axiomtek in June.
It has:
Extended temperature, fanless operation design with 4-CH GbEPoE ports
Intel Core i7/i5/i3 & Celeron (Haswell & Haswell Refresh) processor with Intel Q87
Two 2.5” SATA HDD drive bay, mSATA and CFast™ slots
Two internal PCI Express Mini Card slots, 1 SIM Card slot
Support for HDMI, DVI-I and DisplayPort for triple independent display
Support for optional isolated 8 Channel Digital I/O
Support for RAID 0 & 1, Jumbo Frame (9.5K), WoL, PXE and Teaming
The four channel Gigabit PoE ports allow multiple cabling to cameras and any PoE power device. With high-end CPU and multi-I/O connectivity, this fanless embedded vision system is well suited to multi-camera imaging applications such as optical inspection, surveillance system and IoT & M2M-related applications.
With the system memory maximum up to 16 GB, the PC can support three independent hi-resolution displays and 4K resolution.
For storage, it is equipped with dual 2.5” SATA HDD drive bays (RAID 0 & 1 supported), one CFast, mSATA.
Two internal PCI Express Mini Card slots and one SIM card slot allow system to access the internet through 3G, Wi-Fi, GSM and LTE. Its compact size and wide range temperature (-20ºC~50ºC) support make the device suitable for most hardened industrial environments.
The I/O interface includes two Gigabit LAN ports, four Gigabit PoE ports, four COM ports (two RS-232/422/485 ports), one digital I/O, six USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, one audio, one DVI-I, one HDMI, one DisplayPort and three antenna openings. Wall mount kit is available upon request.
Having a physically uncloneable function PUF on board allows a chip to make a public-private key and manage its own secure communications with no human intervention. This can be used for firmware update and data transfer. Microsemi’s PUF is based around a patch of RAM that powers-up, partially predictably, in a pattern controlled by random proces variations.
The internet-of-things concept – using IPv6 addressing, standard protocol stacks and standard wireless links to connect products together – simplifies design because it removes the need for proprietary interfaces.
It also means that remote-control of products can be extended as far as the internet extends – a blessing for anyone wishing to check the living room temperature from the train home from work, for example.
However, this also means that anyone else on the internet could also potentially check the thermostat, unlock the front door, turn on the gas cooker, or interfere with any other internet-of-thing device.
And these other people might not just be thieves or vandals – don’t underestimate the temptation amongst marketing folk to ‘leverage’ the IoT and big data processing techniques to learn a bit more about you, or the desire of some people to adjust their own gas meter reading.
Plus, there is reliability. Cars are increasingly going to have a single computer system for everything, including entertainment and body electronics, and no one wants an IoT egg timer in Singapore to accidentally turn off the brakes of a car in Slough.
Product designers need to be aware that security is not just optional but essential in IoT devices, and processor companies like ARM and MIPS are doing their best to provide suitable hardware and firmware, as well as bang the drum to get people to use it.
The latest company to offer security for IoT devices is FPGA firm Microsemi, which has announced a reference design with ‘certificate authority’ (see box) Escrypt.
Sitting at the robust end of IoT security, it is aimed, for example, at smart grid, medical, industrial, and automotive applications.
It uses powerful hardware security blocks (see later) that have been embedded within the firm’s SmartFusion2 and Igloo2 FPGAs for a couple of years, but not enabled for data security – built in because they normally protect intellectual property (IP) on the FPGAs and provide a secure IP update.
“A multi-layered approach to security, such as ‘public key infrastructure’ [PKI, see box], is more important than ever. The use of hardware-based security creates a more secure system than software-only solutions, and forms the root-of-trust for secure software systems,” said Microsemi. “The Microsemi and Escrypt CycurKeys cloud-based solution enables state-of-the-art service that allows customers to cost-effectively integrate PKI functionality into their systems without the costs, complexity, risks and distraction from their core business associated with building and hosting their own infrastructure.” said Microsemi.
All security solutions and cryptographic mechanisms require cryptographic ‘keys’ or ‘certificates’ (see box).
CycurKeys is a security server that manages cryptographic keys and certificates, especially designed and implemented for automotive (Escrypt is part of Etas, owned by Bosch), industrial and embedded applications, and cyber physical systems (interacting embedded systems with physical interaction – robotics and automatic car control, for example).
“CycurKeys addresses all the weaknesses associated with using traditional PKI solutions for machine-to-machine [M2M] applications by targeting devices, not users, and addressing long lifecycles as well as the devices’ lack of full-time connectivity to a server,” claimed Microsemi. “It offers all commonly used cryptographic schemes and offers all standardised cryptographic algorithms including RSA, ECC [elliptic curve cryptography], AES and SHA. It supports the full PKI life-cycle from generating digital certificates in a choice of formats, to maintaining updated keys, and finally to certificate revocation.”
In the reference design, a user key pair (see box) is generated on SmartFusion2 FPGAs using the built-in hardware true random number generator (TRNG) and ECC engine with the secret key, which never leaves the chip, protected by the FPGA’s ‘physically uncloneable function (PUF, see optional figure).
The public key is securely exported, validated using credentials proving the FPGA’s and the key’s authenticity, and then digitally signed by the user’s root or intermediate certificate authority hosted in the secure Escrypt cloud server, “thus enrolling users’ systems into their own private PKI”, said Microsemi.
User PKI certificates enable positive identification of all authorised machines in the user’s virtual private network, and secure authenticated communications while rejecting imposter machines and forged messages.
Intended for system architects, program managers and security professionals, the reference design shows how to securely sign public keys.
What is on the FPGAs
In its data-security-enabled SmartFusion2 and Igloo2 FPGAs, Microsemi intends to provide secure hardware, design security and data security using a secure supply chain management system.
Secure hardware features include: proprietary differential power analysis (DPA) protection (there is an end-user DPA license), a true random number generator (TRNG), a physically uncloneable function (PUF), a DPA-protected elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) accelerator, and an integrated X.509 (ITU-T standard) device certificate.
There are also built-in tamper detectors and active tamper responses, including US National Security Agency (NSA)-approved ‘zeroization’ – the automatic deletion of critical numbers, as well as US NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology)-certified hardware implementations of AES-256, SHA-256, HMAC-SHA-256, ECCDH-P384 and a AES-CTR-based 256bit ‘deterministic random bit generator’ (DRBG).
| Why PKI? Encryption is all about getting information from one place to another without it being understood or corrupted by anyone who isn’t supposed to understand or corrupt it. On digital data, encryption is done by mathematical functions that are customised for particular Sender-Receiver pairs by numbers called ‘keys’.
If both the Sender and Recipient of a message have access to the same secret key, then the Sender can encrypt their message with the key and the Recipient can decypt it with the same key (see diagram 25mar15 Microsemi private key). No one in the middle can read the message without a lot of work. According to Microsemi marketing director Tim Moran, symmetrical key schemes still underlie the transfer of data in most secure communications systems, including AES, DES, and all the schemes further down this article, as they are not too computationally-arduous and are therefore fairly fast to execute. What follows is all about getting the secret unlocking key from the Sender to the Recipient without them actually meeting up and exchanging a scrap of paper with numbers on.
Some very clever people discovered that there are mathematical functions that have two key numbers. One, the ‘public key’ encrypts the information easily, but cannot be used to decrypt it without a giant amount of effort, and another, the ‘private key’, that will easily decrypt the information. This is the first part of ‘public key infrastructure (PKI). To transfer the secret key for unlocking the data, the Sender encrypts the secret key with the Recipient’s public key – which can be published on a website or in a file on the internet somewhere – and sends it to the Recipient, who decrypts it with their private key. Now the Recipient has the Sender’s secret key and can decrypt the data part of the message. Often, the secret key is a temporary one, used for one message only. Why not encrypt all of the data using the public key? According to Moran, you could, but public/private key encryption is far more computationally intensive that symmetrical key encryption, and therefore slow. This is a great scheme, but it is vulnerable to ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks.
Assume an evil doer with his own public key, generally called man-in-the-middle (MitM), can sneakily get between the Sender and the Recipient (See diagram ’25mar15 Microsemi man in middle’). If the MitM can get the Sender to believe that the MitM’s public key is the Recipient’s public key, then MitM can decode the secret key and get access to the data . Not only that, but the MitM can get the Recipient’s freely-available public key, re-encrypt the sneakily decrypted secret key with the Recipients public key, and send it on to the intended Recipient – still following all this? Done quickly enough, the Recipient will never know the message was intercepted, not whether or not the MitM corrupted the original data.
Foiling the MitM requires a trusted third party, called a ‘certification authority’ (see diagram ’25mar15 Microsemi signed’). VeriSign, part of Symantec, is a well-known certification authority, and Escrypt is a certification authority for machine-to-machine communications. The certification authority has a private/public key pair, but in this case the private key encrypts and the public key decrypts. The certification authority certifies (or ‘signs’) the Recipient’s public key by encrypting it with the certification authority’s private key. In use, the Recipient sends the Sender the Recipient’s certified public key. The Sender then picks up the freely-available certification authority’s public key and uses it to decrypt the Recipient’s certified public key – yielding the Recipient’s actual public key. This can be compared with the freely-available web version of the Recipient’s public key. If they match, it is the Recipient’s genuine public key and can be used. For this to work, the certification authority has to be famous – so that all potential Senders know exactly where to get the certification authority public key, and the certification authority has to have a very close relationship with all potential Recipients using its services. The rest of PKI is concerned with establishing the trusted bond between certification authorities and potential Receivers. |
Imec
Imec and Stanford University have demonstrated a compact germanium (Ge) waveguide electro-absorption modulator (EAM) with a modulation bandwidth beyond 50GHz.
Combining state-of-the-art extinction ratio and low insertion loss with an ultra-low capacitance of just 10fF, the demonstrated EAM marks an important milestone for the realisation of next-generation silicon integrated optical interconnects at 50Gb/s and beyond, said Imec.
The Belgium-based research body said that future chip-level optical interconnects would need integrated optical modulators with stringent requirements for modulation efficiency and bandwidth, as well as for footprint and thermal robustness.
Imec and its partners have improved the state-of-the-art for Ge EAMs on Si, achieving higher modulation speed and modulation efficiency, and lower capacitance, by fully leveraging the strong confinement of the optical and electrical fields in the Ge waveguides, as enabled in Imec’s 200mm Silicon Photonics platform.
The EAM was implemented along with various Si waveguide devices, highly efficient grating couplers, various active Si devices, and high speed Ge photodetectors, paving the way to industrial adoption of optical transceivers based on this device, Imec said.
“This achievement is a milestone for realizing silicon optical transceivers for datacom applications at 50Gb/s and beyond,” stated Joris Van Campenhout, program director at Imec. “We have developed a modulator that addresses the bandwidth and density requirements for future chip-level optical interconnects.”
Companies can benefit from imec’s Silicon Photonics platform (iSiPP25G) through established standard cells, or by exploring the functionality of their own designs in Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) runs. The iSiPP25G technology is available via ICLink services and MOSIS, a provider of low-cost prototyping and small volume production services for custom ICs.
Lapis semiconductor has announced a lithium-ion battery monitoring chip that supports 16 cells in series.
ML5239 can be stacked for higher voltages, and is consumes only 100nA in shut-down.
Applications are expected in power storage and uninterruptible power supplies.
Each chip has its own ADC, and it looks like it is set up to control passive cell balancing.
Sadly, little further information is available without registering on the company website.
| Parameter | Specifications |
| No. of cells supported | 16 cells in series (Scalable via multi-stage series connection) |
| Power down consumption | 0.1µA(typ.) |
| Integrated ADC | 12bit SAR |
| Cell voltage measurement accuracy | ±10mV (typ.) |
| Cell balancing function | Built-in external n-mosfet drive circuit |
| Temperature sensor measurement function | Thermistor connection pin (4ch) |
| Self-diagnostic function | Cell voltage measurement open/short detection pin, etc. |
| MCU interface | SPI aerial (CRC communication error detection function) |
| Operating supply voltage | +10 to +72V |
| Operating temperature | -40 to 85°C |
| Package | TQFP64 (12 x 12mm) |
Texas Instruments has introduced an ARM Cortex-M4F version of its MSP430 microcontroller family, taking it from 16 to 32bits, with no extra power draw.
“The integrated DSP engine and floating-point core of the ARM Cortex-M4F core enable a multitude of high performance applications, such as signal conditioning and sensor processing, while maintaining performance headroom for product differentiation,” said TI.
Using its ARM architectural licence to modify the core, and its own 90nm low-power chip process, TI claims this the lowest production Cortex-M4F yet. Running at up to 48MHz, power is 95µA/MHz active power and 850nA in stand-by. The process is flash only, so there will be no FRAM versions.
Called the MSP432 family, most peripherals are shared with the MSP430 family, although there is a new ADC – 14bit resolution (13.2 ENOB) at 1Msample/s consuming 375µA at full speed.
On EEMBC’s ultra-low power ULPBench, it scores 167.4 “outperforming all other Cortex-M3 and M4F MCUs on the market”, said TI.
What about Ambiq’s near threshold and sub-threshold design? This has lower figures.
But it is not in production, replied a TI spokesman – pointing out that TI made samples of a sub-threshold MCU available six years ago and could not get process variation under control.
Power comes through a choice of on-chip regulators – and LDO or dc-dc converter. Operating voltage is 1.62 to 3.7V, so it can be connected to lithium primary coin cells, but not Li-ion cells which peak at 4.2V when charged.
RAM is split into eight separately-powered banks to allow power saving at 30nA per bank.
Flash is up to 256kbyte in dual banks for simultaneous read and write.
Encryption for data and code is covered by (AES) 256 hardware.
Design support includes evaluation boards, evaluation software, and plenty of documents from day-one.
Sales of optoelectronics, sensors, actuators and discrete semiconductors collectively increased 9% to $63.8 billion in 2014, after rising just 1% in 2012 and 2013, according to IC Insights.
Modest gains in the global economy, steady increases in electronic systems production and higher unit demand in 2014 drove a strong recovery in discretes along with substantial improvements in sensors/actuators and greater growth in optoelectronics, said IC Insights.
Each of the three O-S-D market segments are forecast to increase at or above their long-term annual growth rates in 2015 and 2016 as the global economy continues to gradually improve and major new end-use systems applications boost sales in some of the largest product categories of optoelectronics, sensors/actuators, and discretes. After a modest slowdown in 2017, due to the next anticipated economic downturn, all three O-S-D market segments are expected to continue reaching record-high sales in 2018 and 2019, IC Insights indicated.
Optoelectronics sales are now forecast to rise 10% in 2015 to set a new record-high US$34.8 billion, after growing 8% in 2014 to reach the current annual peak of US$31.6 billion, IC Insights said.
Sales of sensors/actuators are also expected to strengthen slightly in 2015, rising 7% to US$9.9 billion, which will break the current record high of US$9.2 billion set in 2014 when this market segment grew 6%, IC Insights said.
The commodity-filled discretes market is forecast to see a more normal 5% increase in 2015 and reach a new record high of US$24.2 billion, after roaring back in 2014 with a strong 11% increase following declines of 7% in 2012 and 5% in 2013, IC Insights said. The two-year drop was the first back-to-back decline for discretes sales in more than 30 years and primarily resulted from delays in purchases of power transistors and other devices as cautious systems manufacturers kept their inventories low in the midst of uncertainty about the weak global economy and end-user demand.
In 2014, combined sales of O-S-D accounted for 18% of the semiconductor industry’s US$354.9 billion in total revenues compared to 16% in 2004 and 13% in 1994, IC Insights said. On the strength of optoelectronics and sensor products – including CMOS image sensors, high-brightness light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and devices built with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology – total O-S-D sales have outpaced the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ICs since the late 1990s. This trend will continue between 2014 and 2019 with combined O-S-D sales projected to grow by a CAGR of 6.9% versus 5.5% for ICs, IC Insights said.
Strong optoelectronics growth will be driven in the next five years by new embedded cameras and image-recognition systems made with CMOS imaging devices, as well as the spread of LED-based solid-state lights and high-speed fiber optic networks built with laser transmitters that are needed to keep up with tremendous increases in Internet traffic, video transmissions and cloud-computing services, including those connected to the huge potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), IC Insights said.
The sensors/actuators market is forecast to see steady growth from high unit demand driven by the spread of automated embedded-control functions, new sensing networks, wearable systems, and measurement capabilities being connected to IoT in the second half of this decade, IC Insights said.
Discretes sales are expected to climb higher, primarily due to strong growth in power transistors and other devices used in battery-operated electronics and to make all types of systems more energy efficient – including automobiles, high-density servers in Internet data centers, industrial equipment,and home appliances, IC Insights said.
