Brewer Science is a global technology leader in developing and manufacturing innovative materials, processes, and equipment for the reliable fabrication of cutting-edge microdevices used in electronics such as tablet computers, smartphones, digital cameras, televisions, and LED lighting. Brewer Science provides process flexibility and a competitive edge for its customers and plays a critical role in the supply chain. Since 1981, when its ARC® materials revolutionized lithography processes, Brewer Science has expanded its technology to include products enabling advanced lithography, thin wafer handling, 3-D integration, chemical and mechanical device protection, and products based on carbon nanotubes and nanotechnology. Learn more in this interview made at the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA show. For more see http://www.IDTechEx.com
The vision of Atom NanoElectronics, Inc.is to innovate scalable and high throughput printing technologies for low cost, high performance optoelectronic devices, to democratize optoelectronic devices for every person. Atom NanoElectronics focuses on developing printed 3-D SWCNT electronics and SWCNT display backplanes that will become pervasive around the world. Atom NanoElectronics is currently printing organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) on the top of printed SWCNT display backplanes. Atom NanoElectronics is working toward building a manufacturing base for printed Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) displays and will become a dominant world-wide display supplier. Learn more in this interview made at the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA show. For more see http://www.IDTechEx.com
After spending Billions of dollars in the past year to buy market share in the tablet market, Intel’s mobile division reported an operating loss of $4.21 billion for 2014, Intel subsidized Shenzhen tablet design houses and factories, they probably want to stop that very expensive subsidy by trying to convince the design houses and factories to use Intel’s next generation x86 platform which Intel may claim to not be requiring subsidies to buy market share anymore. Previously code-named Sofia, Intel’s x3 platform is a two chip 3G solution using ARM Mali-400MP4 GPU in the Intel x3 C3130 dual-core, ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU in the quad-core Intel x3-C3230RK (marketed/designed with Rockchip) and 4G LTE with the ARM Mali-760MP2 GPU in the quad-core Intel x3 C3440. Will Intel manage to price their next generation x86 at MediaTek-like levels and will they really be able to keep design houses and factories interested if they stop subsidizing them, if they stop dumping the price and giving away their CPUs for free, giving factories PCB designs for free (reference design based), PCB and tablet productions subsidized, marketing subsidized, software development subsidized and etc? What is Intel’s real potential market share in tablets and smartphones when they stop this subsidy? And why doesn’t Intel just make more ARM devices in and out of their Fab like they did the Intel/Rockchip XMM6321 dual-core ARM Cortex-A5 that I filmed here: http://138.2.152.197/?s=XMM6321
ARM launches the ARM mbed IoT Starter Kit Ethernet Edition, an extremely easy to use development kit for Internet of Things, to channel data from Internet-connected devices directly into IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. The combination of a secure sensor environment by ARM with cloud-based analytics, mobile and application resources from IBM allows fast prototyping of new smart products and unique value-added services for the IoT market. It is particularly suitable for developers with no specific experience in embedded or web development, as it provides a platform for learning new concepts and creating working prototypes. After the initial out of box experience, the infinite possibilities of cloud applications can be explored through IBM’s production grade BlueMix platform, in which deployment and device management is as simple for one device as it is for a million of them. The starter kit hardware can be modified and extended to explore the device design space, and a finalised design can be taken to production using the mbed SDK and HDK.
Thinfilm is a Norway-based company focused on expanding the traditional Internet of Things into a much broader Internet of Everything using the benefits of printed electronics. Thinfilm’s NFC Barcode and Smart Label product platforms use 13.56MHz Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to communicate from Thinfilm labels (placed on everyday things, at the item level rather than the box/palette/case level) to NFC capable devices, including smartphones and industrial readers. The 128-bit NFC Barcode is manufactured on Thinfilm’s printed-dopant polysilicon (PDPS) manufacturing platform, which enables high-performance transistors capable of handling wireless communication and NFC frequencies and data rates. The payload consists of a mix of fixed ID ROM bits, which cannot be electrically modified for security purposes, and dynamic bits that can the assigned to sensors. Thinfilm recently announced OpenSense technology, which transmits information about the state of a seal (factory sealed or previously opened) to a smartphone. This is being demonstrated in Barcelona in the form of a Johnnie Walker whisky Smart Bottle, which can communicate a unique identification number and dynamic sensing data to a smartphone. The OpenSense technology can lead to improved consumer engagement and can be used to verify authenticity of the underlying product while the seal is still intact. Next, Thinfilm’s temperature sensing Smart Labels integrate batteries, sensing circuitry, optional visual printed electrochromic displays, and NFC wireless transmission function into a single self-contained smart sensing system. These systems use NFC to tell a smartphone or other compatible device whether a food or pharmaceutical shipment stayed within specified temperature limits or whether it became too hot or too cold during transport. That simple data can help caretakers, retailers, and supply chain partners to make smart decisions by providing a real time indication of the temperature behavior (within limits vs. exceeded limits), and the big data pushed to the cloud with every interaction will help brand owners and others to make smarter business decisions based on trends captured by thousands or even millions of units active at any point in time. Learn more at www.thinfilm.no
You can contact ThinFilm here:
Matthew Bright
Director, Product & Technical Marketing
Thin Film Electronics, Inc.
phone +1 408 503 7311
matthew.bright@thinfilm.no
www.thinfilm.no
Address: 2865 Zanker Rd, San Jose, CA 95134-2101, United States
Twitter: @thinfilmmemory
Facebook: Thinfilm
LinkedIn: Thin Film Electronics
PolyIC has developed its own printed electronics technology platform, including proprietary printing process, as well as roll to roll quality control methods. Web speed is at least 30m/min. With the recent focus on transparent conductive films (TCFs), the company now offers bare transparent conducting films or complete touch sensor (capacitive). The touch sensor can be single layer or 2 layers of film. The sensor comes with the tail (printed on same substrate), which is an advantage compared to ITO-based sensors where the tail (flexible PCB) has to be added. This interview was taken at the IDTechEx event Printed Electronics USA. For more information see http://www.IDTechEx.com.
Optomec provides two technology offerings. The LENS system, a blown powder laser-based 3D printer for metals which the company manufactures under license from the Sandia National Laboratory. The second is an Aerosol Jet system which provides for conformal, direct-write, non-contact deposition of materials for printed electronics, which the company developed in-house. It can utilize a wide range of materials, with less constraints compared to inkjet. It has been successfully demonstrated and used in metallization of solar cells. This interview with IDTechEx was taken at Printed Electronics USA, hosted by IDTechEx.
PST Sensors (pty) Ltd is a spin-out of the University of Cape Town NanoSciences Innovation Centre. It is positioned as a technology solutions provider, and works with its partners and customers to produce integrated temperature sensing and printed electronics products. Both its printed silicon technology and temperature sensing technology have received industry awards. PST Sensors has R&D facilities in Cape Town and offices in Cape Town and London.
Antoine Ravise of sports brand Decathlon talks to IDTechEx at the Wearable Technology LIVE! event about some of their innovations involving wearable technology, such as monitoring player performance during tennis. A sports top is also shown which monitors the heart rate of the player.
The Atmel | SMART SAM W25 Wi-Fi module brings the world’s lowest power Wi-Fi module with their ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and the Atmel WINC1500 low-power Wi-Fi 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n SoC (System on Chip) optimized for the IoT market. It provides integrated software solution with application and security protocols such as TLS, integrated network services (TCP/IP stack) which are available through Atmel’s Studio 6 integrated development platform (IDP). The Atmel SMART SAM W25 Wi-Fi module can run Wi-Fi for IoT applications for upwards more than 10 years on AAA batteries when pulling IoT data at a 30 minute interval speed.
The Atmel BTLC1000 Bluetooth Smart SoC can run at sub-1µA in standby mode in a 2.1mmX2.1mm Wafer Level Chipscale Package (WLCSP), while delivering the industry’s best dynamic power consumption with a potential battery life of up to 9 years on a coin cell battery. Atmel designed BTLC1000 specifically for the rapidly growing IoT and for wearables market, including portable medical, activity trackers, human Interface devices, gaming controllers, beacons and much more.
Expanding upon the Atmel SmartConnect wireless portfolio, the BTLC1000 is a Bluetooth Smart link controller integrated circuit that connects as a companion to any Atmel AVR or Atmel | SMART MCU through a UART or SPI API requiring minimal resource on the host side. The standalone Atmel | SMART SAMB11 Bluetooth Smart Flash MCU leverages the embedded ARM Cortex-M0 core combined with the integrated analog and communication peripherals to implement application-specific functionalities and is available as a system-in-package or a certified module. Both devices are fully integrated with a self-contained Bluetooth Smart controller and stack enabling wireless connectivity for a variety of applications to be quickly implemented without the wireless expertise typically required.
In this interview, Free Electrons CTO Thomas Petazzoni and Opersys founder Karim Yaghmour exchange some thoughts about embedded Linux vs. Android, and then Thomas moves on to describe in more details the activities of the embedded Linux services company Free Electrons. Both Free Electrons and Opersys are unique amongst others things by the fact that they provide all their training materials freely on the web! Thomas also discusses the numerous Linux kernel contributions made by Free Electrons, which is ranked the 7th contributing company for the next Linux kernel release, in number of patches, an impressive result for a 9 persons business: Free Electrons has developed a core expertise in pushing the support for ARM processors to the upstream Linux kernel. More specifically, the work done by Free Electrons engineers on Atmel ARM platforms is presented, since Free Electrons was demonstrating an Atmel SAMA5D3 platform with a brand new DRM/KMS graphics driver that has been developped by Free Electrons engineer Boris Brezillon and recently merged in Linux 4.0.
Cypress makes programmable system-on-chip solutions used in a wide range of applications, from consumer and automotive to industrial and military products. They are launching the $10 CY8KIT-059 development board to program their ARM Cortex-M3 PSoC 5LP at http://www.cypress.com/?rid=108038 The Cypress PSoC platform includes several families of devices that feature an ARM Cortex processor surrounded by a host of programmable analog and digital resources that can easily be customized with a simple drag-and-drop design tool called PSoC Creator. Cypress’s newest PSoC innovation includes the PSoC 4 M-Series, which, with its 32-bit ARM Cortex M0- core, 128KB of flash, programmable analog and digital components, dual CAN interfaces and 55 GPIOs, make it an ideal replacement for standard 8-bit and 16-bit applications. Another recent Cypress innovation is the Cypress PSoC 4 BLE, which adds Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to any device, and is ideal for a variety of wireless applications from fitness and health-monitoring wearables to sensor-based systems in homes.
MediaTek launches their MT2601 Android Wear ready (soon) Smartwatch platform, and also they show off their Kopin micro LCD Smart Glass solution on MediaTek Aster MT2502. In my opinion, these are the best looking Smartwatch and Smartglass at Mobile World Congress 2015. The Smartwatch that MediaTek is showing is designed by GoerTek and it runs Android 4.4 for now but Android 5.0 with Android Wear UI is coming soon for the MT2601 platform according to MediaTek. MediaTek MT2502 is running an ARM11 core to run the MediaTek LinkIt OS while MediaTek MT2601 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 to run a full Android Lollipop with Android Wear soon supported! This is perhaps the optimal low cost Smartwatch and Smart Glass solution for the market, finally available from MediaTek, with soon to come Lollipop thus Android Wear supported.
Specs of the GoerTek MediaTek MT2601 Smartwatch:
– 1.5” circular TFT LCD 320×320
– IPX7 waterproofing
– BT/BLE, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G cellular supported
– Android 4.4 OS (Lollipop Android Wear soon!)
– PPG heart-rate sensing
– Built-in microphone and speaker
The Atmel | SMART SAM S70 and E70 microcontrollers are based on the high-performance 32-bit ARM Cortex-M7 RISC processors with double precision floating point unit. They operate at a maximum speed of 300MHz and feature up to 2048KB of Flash, dual 16KB of cache memory and up to 384KB of SRAM. They can achieve 1500 CoreMarks or up to 645 DMIPS. On the memory side, they have a flexible SRAM which can be configured as Tightly Coupled Memory (TCM) up to 256KB. Allowing execution of deterministic code or fast processing data. Code executed from TCM is executed at full speed so at 300MHz. The SRAM is multi-port which is reducing the latency over the bus matrix. When they have a lot of burst the latency can be reduced by 16 thanks to the 4 ports. To accelerate the execution of the code from on-chip Flash or nonvolatile memory connected to QuadSPI or over the External Bus Interface, they have integrated a huge L1 cache of 16kByte for the instruction and 16kByte for the data. Both with ECC. The 384KByte of SRAM can be extended through the SDRAM interface. Looking at the features now, they have plenty of serial communications such as SPI, SDIO or USART. Atmel has one High-speed USB Host and Device, with integrated PHY which obviously save some cost and PCB space. There is one CMOS Camera interface for image acquisition. All the series offer two Advanced Analog Frontend (AFE) with Dual Sample and hold capability and Up to 16-bit resolution with hardware oversampling. They also have programmable Gain for small signal input. All series offer real-time event management through direct connection between PWM, Timer and ADC for motor control application. Both series are based on the same feature set, the only difference is coming from the Ethernet, CAN support (SAME70 integrates Ethernet and CAN). Atmel offers all series in BGA and QFP from 64 to 144 pins. Small 64-pin pincount option offers an entry level form factor high performance MCU. All series support the extended Industrial temperature range from -40 to 105°C.
Xilinx announces their next generation 16nm FPGA with quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 and dual-core ARM Cortex-R5, Mali400 GPU. The FPGA market is for designs where flexibility, high performance and fast time to market is important providing programmable hardware. The silicon is going to be available at the end of this year, so they are for now showing emulated version of their SoC. The dual-core ARM Cortex-R5 on the SoC are used for increased safety and security. By going with a 16nm 64bit design, Xilinx can pack a lot more performance without consuming more power than their previous dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based Zynq 7000 which I filmed here http://138.2.152.197/2011/03/04/xilinx-zynq-7000-series-cortex-a9-in-fpga-at-embedded-world-2011/
Android 5 on 64bit ARMv8 with Mali-T760MP8 shown running Epic Unreal Engine as well as the Mali-T760 MP4 on the Pipo P4 with 32bit Rockchip RK3288 ARM Cortex-A17.
World’s lowest power capacitive touch, the new Atmel QTouch Surface platform builds on the market-proven QTouch capacitive touch button sensing technology supported by Atmel | SMART MCUs. The new solution includes an on-chip peripheral touch controller (PTC), the cornerstone technology that enables higher performance capacitive touch on Atmel MCUs. Consuming less than 4µA, the QTouch Surface technology is perfect for wearables and other battery-powered applications that require a capacitive touch user interface.
