ABOUT CATEGORY Components

Just when you thought all new voltage regulator chips were using switched-mode technology along comes X-REL semiconductor with a linear design. The company specialises in manufacturing high-reliability, high-temperature devices; its XTRM prefixed components have an operational temperature range from −60 to +230ºC.

IQD frequency products have introduced a new range of temperature compensated voltage controlled crystal oscillators (TCVCXO) in a miniature 8-pad 5 x 3.2 mm outline. The IQXT-210 series TCVCXO, offers frequency stability down to ±0.14ppm over the full industrial temperature range of -40 to 85ºC.

In a recent press release Cypress Semiconductor are trumpeting their latest fourth-generation ultra-low-power 2.4 GHz WirelessUSB NX transceiver chip type CYRF9935 designed to provide communication links for wireless mice, keyboards, trackpads, remote controls and other Human Interface Devices (HIDs).

Broadcom have introduced two new system on chip (SoC) controllers intended for integration into peripheral equipment such as remote controller handsets, keyboards and mice which interface to digital TVs, Over The Top (OTT) boxes, set-top boxes (STBs), PCs and tablets.

Intermittent short-term power outages caused by local storms or other transient behavior can play havoc with computer-based systems. A power supply with ride-through capability provides power for a limited time during the outage. The LTC3350 announced recently by Linear Technology is a high current backup controller and system monitor for power supplies using supercapacitors for ride-through energy storage.

Allegro MicroSystems have announced the release of its ATS605 range of rotation sensors. This device provides a single chip solution to rotational position sensing of a ferrous gear target. Using three integrated Hall sensors together with Hall interface amplifiers, AGC stage, A/D converter and a synchronous digital controller, the ATS605 is able to accurately resolve the movement of much smaller-toothed cogs than was possible with previous revolution detector solutions.

Texas Instruments have introduced the CC2541-Q1 wireless microcontroller with built-in dual mode Bluetooth (BL6450Q). It is targeted at the emerging market of Smartphone control and display of automobile systems using Bluetooth Smart technology. The SimpleLink CC2541-Q1 is based on TI's CC2541 which is already used in a wide variety of applications including consumer, industrial, medical and household devices.

Altera have announced they are the first FPGA producer to implement hardened IEEE 754 compliant, floating-point operators in their Arria 10 and Stratix 10 families of FPGAs. The IEEE 754 pipe comes as an addition to the 18b and 27b fixed point math pipes already available in the DSP. The 20 nm Arria 10 can also include a dual-core hard ARM Cortex-A9, serial transceivers up to 28.3 Gbit/s, backplane support up to 17.4G bit/s and support for DDR4 at 2.666 Gbit/s