ICs & Semiconductors

ams AG has announced that it is approaching volume production of first automotive products developed along the new functional safety standard ISO26262. Released in 2011, the ISO26262 standard is the major global regulation governing functional safety in road vehicles. A growing share of safety critical systems under development in the automotive industry today follows this standard.

Communications infrastructure, imaging equipment, industrial instrumentation, defence electronics and other multi-channel, data-hungry systems require wider resolutions and higher sampling rates from the data conversion stage. Physical layout constraints of the parallel interface and bit-rate limitations of the serial LVDS (low-voltage differential signalling) have started to present technical barriers for designers.

ON Semiconductor, a supplier of high performance silicon solutions for energy efficient electronics, has joined the multi-partner, industrial research and development programme at imec, a leading nanoelectronics research centre based in Leuven in Belgium, to collaborate on the development of next-generation Gallium Nitride (GaN) on silicon (Si) power devices.

Pure-play foundry semiconductor manufacturers saw a robust second quarter following the enthusiastic consumer purchasing of wireless products like mobile handsets and tablets, but the industry is beginning to see a slowdown in the second half of 2012 as economic problems mount and begin to have an impact on the supply chain, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli.

NXP Semiconductors has announced that its SmartMX2 secure microcontroller has been awarded the world’s first Common Criteria EAL6+ certification for a secure microcontroller with a contactless interface based on 90-nm technology. Issued by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the EAL6+ security evaluation adds rigorous mathematical testing of the entire security architecture to resistance against various invasive, semi-invasive and non-invasive attacks.

HiWave Technologies, a developer of audio amplifier ICs, full frequency range speaker drivers and haptic touch devices, has announced Endfire, a new and highly efficient wireless stereo speaker reference platform that is capable of delivering 100 hours of high-quality audio playback at typical listening levels.

OMRON and STMicroelectronics have developed of a MEMS-based gas flow sensor with what they describe as an industry-unique built-in correction for differences in gas composition. OMRON will start sample shipments of the new sensor in November 2012.

Silicon Laboratories has introduced what it says is the industry’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based microcontroller (MCU) family along with the first-of-a-kind “power-aware” development tool. The Precision32 SiM3L1xx MCUs and the new development tools have been developed to leverage mixed-signal innovations and to help developers reduce power consumption to 175 µA/MHz in active mode and less than 250 nA in sleep mode with the real-time clock (RTC) enabled at 3.6 V.

The latest 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller from Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) looks to reduce the component count of industrial and digital consumer applications where high performance, low power and USB functionality are key design requirements.

Analog Devices (ADI) has introduced the industry’s first MEMS accelerometer with Min/Max offset sensitivity over the full temperature range. The ADXL350 3-axis MEMS accelerometer has maximum offset temperature sensitivity of ±0.31 mg/°C on the X/Y axes and ±0.49 mg/°C on the Z axis, guaranteeing predictable and quantifiable performance across the full temperature range of -40°C to +85°C.