Snapdragon SoC brings AI to more smartphones
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 SoC offers select features of the high-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for a wider range of premium Android smartphones. The less expensive 8s Gen 3 chip provides on-device generative AI and an always-sensing image signal…
Image sensor elevates smartphone HDR
Omnivision’s OV50K40 smartphone image sensor with TheiaCel technology achieves human eye-level high dynamic range (HDR) with a single exposure. Initially introduced in automotive image sensors, TheiCel employs lateral overflow integration…
Plastic ARM-based microcontroller is space-ready
Frontgrade Technologies has developed a plastic-encapsulated version of its UT32M0R500 radiation-tolerant microcontroller aimed at space missions. Built around a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0+ core, the plastic UT32M0R500 is set for flight grade production…
Kyocera AVX rolls out expansive line of capacitors
Wet aluminum electrolytic capacitors in the AEF series from Kyocera AVX come in 11 different case sizes with capacitance ratings from 2.2 µF to 470 µF. Voltage ratings for the V-chip (can-type) capacitors range from 6.3 VDC to 400 VDC.
Targeting…
2-A Schottky rectifiers occupy tiny footprint
Three trench Schottky rectifiers from Diodes deliver 2 A with low forward voltage drop in chip-scale packages that require just 0.84 mm2 of PCB space. The SDT2U30CP3 (30 V/2 A), SDT2U40CP3 (40 V/2 A), and SDT2U60CP3 (60 V/2 A) can be used as…
The role of cache in AI processor design
Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its presence felt everywhere these days, from the data centers at the Internet’s core to sensors and handheld devices like smartphones at the Internet’s edge and every point in between, such as autonomous…
Workarounds (and their tradeoffs) for integrated storage constraints
Over the Thanksgiving 2023 holiday weekend, I decided to retire my trusty silver-color early-2015 13” MacBook Pro, which was nearing software-induced obsolescence, suffering from a Bluetooth audio bug, and more generally starting to show its…
Silicon carbide (SiC) counterviews at APEC 2024
At this year’s APEC in Long Beach, California, Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe’s speech was a major highlight of the conference program. Lowe, the chief of the only vertically integrated silicon carbide (SiC) company and cheerleader of this power…
A self-testing GPIO
General purpose input-output (GPIO) pins are the simplest peripherals.
The link to an object under control (OUC) may become inadvertently unreliable due to many reasons: a loss of contact, short circuit, temperature stress or a vapor condensate…
15-bit voltage-to-time ADC for “Proper Function” anemometer linearization
Awhile back I published a simple design idea for a thermal airspeed sensor based on a self-heated Darlington transistor pair. The resulting sensor is simple, sensitive, and solid-state, but suffers from a radically nonlinear airspeed response,…
Harnessing the promise of ultracapacitors for next-gen EVs
Electronics design engineers bear the responsibility of overcoming the world’s concerns with electric vehicle (EV) power sources. Lithium-ion batteries are heavy, put pressure on natural resources, and sometimes are slow to charge. The logical…
Single button load switches on the chip 222
The 222-microcircuit project described earlier in [1, 2] is an analog of the 555 microcircuit. Her main purpose is the generation of rectangular pulses with an adjustable fill factor and independent frequency control. Such a chip is not produced…
