FEBRUARY 2020

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

France Has a
Quantum Plan
PAGE 7
Boards & Solutions:
Miniaturize
Current Sensing
38
PAGE
COVER STORY:
Special Report:
India’s Chip Industry Sensing the Environment
Grows Up
48
as with Human Senses
16
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Europe Confronts
a New World Order
Europe shouldn’t be in this mess.
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new world order.
The United States is forcing its partners globally to choose a side. It
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YEARS

— Bolaji Ojo, global publisher and editor-in-chief at AspenCore Media

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4 EE|Times EUROPE

VOL 3 | NO 1 | February 2020

OPINION
12 The High-Stakes Push
to Tackle Quantum-
Compute Challenges

ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
14 LeCun: ‘It’s Really
Hard to Succeed with
Exotic Hardware’

AI & INDUSTRY 4.0

19 In 2020, What Will Be
the Key Trends in AI and
Industry 4.0?

16 FEATURE STORY
20 Optimized for Success
COVER STORY
16 Sensing the Environment as INDUSTRY 4.0
with Human Senses 24 Designers Turning
to MEMS for Condition
Combined with appropriate software, robots and smart de- Monitoring of Power
vices can “intuitively understand” their environment, thereby Devices
simplifying our lives. The decisive factor is the interpretation ADVANCED PACKAGING
and linking o in ormation rom different sensors. AND ASSEMBLY
26 EU Project Targets
Packaging for Low-Cost
EDITOR’S LETTER
Manufacturing
3 Europe Confronts a New
World Order FEATURE STORY
28 New Sensor
OPINION
Capabilities Enable
6 Slowly But Surely, France Faster Adoption of IoT
Moves into Quantum Technologies
QUANTUM COMPUTING MEMORY
7 France’s Quantum Plan 31 Memory with
Integrated Secure Element
Ensures More Data
7
COVER IMAGE: INFINEON

Security

TTA AT CES
33 Taiwan Tech Arena
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SPECIAL REPORT:
INDIA
48 India’s Chip Industry
Grows Up
49 Is India Ready for the
Next Chip Wave?
50 India Must Focus on
Fabless Startups, Not
Building Fabs
52 India Needs Better-
Trained Talent to Move Up
Chip Value Chain
53 The Cadence India
Journey, 30 Years On
AUTOMOTIVE POWER
54 Galvanic Isolation in
EV and HEV Applications
ANALOG DESIGN
56 The Five Best Arduino
Projects
ARDUINO DIY
57 Let’s Cook Arrosticini
Using Open-Source
Hardware
HUMOR
60 Artifically Intelligent,
It Sees Everything
OPINION
62 What’s the Best
Strategy for AI Regulation?
IOT SENSORS & MEMS
63 Sensors Glue Virtual
and Real Worlds, Says TDK
InvenSense CTO
CONSUMER
ELECTRONICS SHOW
65 Eureka Park: The
Lower East Side of CES
EE|Times EUROPE 5
SENSORS
38 Miniaturize Current Sensing for Efficient
Power-Conversion Systems
The future of power electronics requires
the evolution of modern energy-conversion
systems to make them more e cient
cheaper and smaller than their predecessors.
Such systems require accurate current
measurement.
SYSTEMS - ON - CHIP
40 Intel Cryogenic Chip to
40
Facilitate Development of
Quantum Computing
orse idge is the rst cryogenically controlled processor designed
to accelerate the development of full-stack quantum computing
systems.
BIOELECTRONICS
41 Ultra-Low-Power Bionic Chip Promises
Alzheimer’s Treatment
The path to a long-sought treatment for one of the most dreaded
diseases could lead through some very small circuits.
COMMUNICATIONS
43 WRC-19 Congress Yields Positives for Satellite,
Cell Sectors
pectrum rights high speed internet access and harmoni ation
gured highly in delegates deli erations at the sponsored
orld adiocommunication on erence.
AUTOMOTIVE POWER
44 PCB Design Hints for Improving IGBT Thermal
Performance
ere we consider the effects on the thermal per ormance o
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POWER MANAGEMENT
46 Simplify Your Driver for Power Applications
he market is e pected to e pand or i power devices which
epitomi e high e ciency and are increasingly popular in new
generation inverters.
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6 EE|Times EUROPE

OPINION
Slowly But Surely, France
Moves into Quantum
By Anne-Françoise Pelé

Technological revolution after technological revolution, France

steps back to identify opportunities, assess risks, and define a strat-
egy for growth. Does too much thinking lead to failure? Not always.
In January, French Member of Parliament Paula Forteza presented
a report on France’s quantum strategy. Its title, “ uantum the tech-
nological shift that France will not miss,” outlines clear ambitions Image: Roland Berger/France Digitale
but implies that France has missed out on other technological shifts.
Objectively, France has not been among the first countries to lead In this frenetic race for innovation, France is
the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It came late to the internet and is working out the details of its quantum plan. No
lagging in robotics and automation. The scenario has been the same in big data, data centers, concrete action is announced for the moment.
and cloud computing. And now, France’s 5G spectrum auction will be delayed until at least A detailed roadmap is expected this quarter,
March 2020, three months later than originally scheduled. According to Reuters, the 5G delay but at press time, it had yet to be released.
originates in a disagreement between the French finance ministry and France’s telecom author- As I read the government’s 6 -page
ity, Arcep, over the exact size of the spectrum to be auctioned and the auction floor price. quantum-computing report and listened to
When it comes to never-ending debates and disagreements, France is the champion in all the two-hour-and- -minute ceremony that
categories. It shouldn’t, however, admit defeat so early. France has a strong institutional, presented its findings, a couple of questions
regulatory, and policy environment, and the excellence of French research in physics and struck me: France acknowledges it is anxious
mathematics is undisputed: On the list of Fields Medal winners by country, France ranks a to invest in quantum technologies, but isn’t
close second to the United States. it entering the ring too late? Won’t it be
French efforts in artificial intelligence (AI), initially plagued by a lack of strategic focus, have knocked out in the first round
gained momentum and made significant progress in recent years. Indeed, AI is a good example ric Mounier, fellow analyst at Yole D vel-
of France’s capacity to react and act before it’s too late. oppement (Lyon, France), helped me achieve
the necessary distance to analyze the situation.
THE AI RESURGENCE “We believe it is not too late,” he declared.
“I want France to be a startup nation,” declared French President Emmanuel Macron soon after “Quantum is a complex technology, and it
taking office in 201 — “a nation that thinks and moves like a startup.” Is it there yet Maybe not, requires time for industrialization. Today, we
but successive announcements have moved the country from stagnation to renewal. After spear- are entering a second quantum revolution,
heading a billion plan in 201 to support French-based tech startups over three years, Macron when engineering is needed to develop future
recently raised the bar to €6 billion. quantum systems based on photons, electrons,
Macron also vowed in 201 that France would be a world leader in AI research and innovation. atoms, or molecules. But it will take time.”
To achieve that goal, the government unveiled a 1. billion plan, including 00 million on There are definitely grounds for hope, given
competitive calls for proposal and 100 million to help launch AI startups. that, as Mounier noted, “we are strong in R&D,
Sometimes, money and good intentions are not enough. So where does Macron’s “startup especially for quantum technologies, with
nation” stand, two years into his AI initiative A new report, co-authored by consulting firm quantum computers being on the roadmap of
Roland Berger and trade association France Digitale, has identified 2 AI-related startups in some French industrial players.” Those include
France, up from 12 in 201 and 1 0 in 2016. Atos, an IT services and consulting company,
The number of startups that have attracted funding is another good indicator of the and Pasqal, a startup building a full-stack
dynamism of France’s AI ecosystem. For the first six months of 201 , French AI startups raised computer running on neutral atoms in D.
US$6 million, compared with US$621 million for the United Kingdom and US$ 2 million for Moreover, Mounier noted, France has numer-
Israel, according to the report, “The Road to AI,” which the pair released last month. ous potential users of quantum computing in
“For the first time, our data show a significant leadership change,” the authors wrote. “Follow- the banking, insurance, finance, and aero-
ing its regular average growth of per year, France is expected to score the highest absolute nautics markets. He cited AXA, Thales, BNP
growth, with US$1.2 billion by the end of 201 (projected results for the second half of the year) Paribas, and Airbus, among others.
due to booming investments in Series C during the first half of 201 with ContentSquare, Wynd, France is a solid competitor in the AI race.
Shift Technology, and record fundraising of US$2 0 million for Meero.” If it fulfills its promise, the country has a
Figures speak for themselves. It took some time and effort, but France is back in the AI picture. chance to catch up with its international
rivals and be a front-runner in the quantum
IN OR OUT OF THE QUANTUM RACE? race as well.
Not a day goes by without the announcement of further global developments in quantum tech- In technology and other industries, France
nologies. New milestones are reached. New frontiers are opened. In October, Google announced it is indisputably a long-distance runner, not a
had achieved quantum supremacy, claiming its -qubit Sycamore processor was able to perform a sprinter. ■
calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000
years. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, IBM announced that its newest Anne-Françoise Pelé is editor-in-chief of
2 -qubit quantum computer, Raleigh, had reached a quantum volume of 2, up from 16 in 201 . eetimes.eu.

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


QUANTUM COMPUTING
France as a uantum Plan
By Anne-Françoise Pelé
A
fter months of consultations with scientific experts, France
unveiled a national plan for quantum technologies in
January. 2020 looks like it could be the year when theories
become facts.
Commissioned by the French Prime Minister in April 201 , the mis-
sion on quantum technologies ended with the submission of a 6 -page
report titled “ uantum the technological shift that France will not
miss.” This article does not exhaustively describe the six ambitions, six
recommendations, and proposals but provides an overview analysis
of France’s quantum strategy.
“201 was a defining year for quantum technologies,” said Paula
Forteza, French Member of Parliament in charge of the report, during
its presentation ceremony. “China has developed the world’s first
quantum satellite station. Google, Amazon, and many other U.S. com-
panies have made significant announcements. European countries have
launched their action plans. The world is getting ready. The world is
investing. The world is gaining skills, and it’s urgent for France to work
on this subject and make the right investments.”
DEPLOYING INFRASTRUCTURE
uantum computing could change everything. It could solve prob-
lems we are not even aware of and open new avenues by addressing
key industrial simulation and optimization challenges in chemical
research, financial services, health care, life science, manufacturing,
and defense. Conscious of what is at stake, France announced its
ambition to develop fault-tolerant large-scale quantum computers
and create, by the end of the decade, Europe’s first fabless supplier of
silicon-based processors. In the meantime, France is considering the
development of noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers with
applications in chemistry, logistics, and artificial intelligence.
Are these ambitions realistic and achievable To assess France’s
chances for success, EE Times Europe consulted ric Mounier, quantum
expert and fellow analyst at Yole D veloppement. “France is world-
class for its strong competencies in mathematics, a critical discipline
for quantum computing ,” he said. “We also have strong knowledge in
engineering and software, which are key to the development of quan-
tum computers.
“France’s main weakness is — as always — industrialization, and
crossing the chasm of R D to commercial products is still challeng-
EE|Times EUROPE 7
ing in France. But we have interesting quantum startups and industry
champions that will support quantum technologies.”
APPS IN FIVE YEARS?
A key challenge is coming up with concrete applications in the near
future. uantum sensors and quantum communications could help in
that regard, with the first applications expected to arrive within the
next five to 10 years. A few banks in Switzerland already use quantum
communications, and quantum gra-
vimeters are seeing early adoption in
scientific applications, Mounier said.
To better assess quantum sensors’
potential, Mounier drew a parallel
between using quantum technologies
for sensing and adopting microelectro-
mechanical systems (MEMS) for sensors
years ago. “By using MEMS technology
for manufacturing sensors, we did not
create new sensors, but we improved
the sensitivity and reliability of existing
sensors” and optionally created a new Yole’s Éric Mounier
supply chain and more business, Mounier
said. Similarly, “quantum sensors do not necessarily measure differ-
ent things than traditional sensors’ but will do it with a much higher
accuracy.” uantum imaging, for instance, uses entangled photons for
imaging even when a lot of background noise is present.
Mounier called quantum sensors “very interesting” for industrial
applications (e.g., environmental monitoring, civil engineering,
underground resource exploration), but “quantum computers will
have the highest potential.” Current quantum sensor products, used
in high-end industrial and research applications, are superconducting
quantum interference devices (S UIDs) and gravimeters. The use of
S UIDs in oil prospecting, mineral exploration, earthquake prediction,
and geothermal energy surveying is becoming more widespread as
superconductor technology develops, Mounier said. uantum devices
are also used as precision movement sensors in a variety of scientific
applications such as the detection of gravitational waves.
Most commercial gravimeters use free-fall technology, the Yole ana-
lyst said. Apart from Muquans, AtomSensors, AOSense, and M Squared,
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
8 EE|Times EUROPE

France Has a Quantum Plan

“very few companies have turned quantum technology into industrial “not only, but mainly.” He added, “Not to be neglected are the very high
gravimeter products” thus far, he said. expertise levels required in engineering, cryogenics, and software. The
Among other proposals, the government’s quantum report under- quantum-technologies supply chain is currently setting up. Apart from
scores France’s ambition to gain industrial autonomy and be a the large internet and semiconductor companies like Google, Intel, and
world-leading supplier of sensors based on diamond impurities by Alibaba that developed their own quantum computer, there are many
2026. Diamond-based sensors use robust pieces of diamond and work other players developing the tools.”
at ambient pressures and temperatures. Active in that business, Thales For instance, he said, cryogenic technologies and software will
already has developed quantum micro-magnetometers. be critical parts of future quantum computers, and there will be “a
business for specialized foundries.” Mounier called for partnerships to
PROTECTING NATIONAL INTERESTS master all the different bricks of a quantum computer.
While quantum computing offers vast opportunities, it is not without
issues. Because quantum computers can decrypt keys used to encrypt FOSTERING STARTUPS
information, they could disrupt the confidentiality and integrity of Investment funds have a key role to play in bringing emerging technol-
secure digital communications everywhere and put national-security– ogies to light. But because quantum is regarded as a risky investment,
sensitive data at risk. That necessitates development of post-quantum there are no more than half a dozen specialized investment funds in
cryptography measures, according to some researchers. the world, Wavestone and France Digitale found in a study released late
“Some aren’t convinced, but I personally believe that quantum cryp- last year. In France, Quantonation, an early-stage venture fund dedi-
tography is important because security is guaranteed by the fundamental cated to deep-physics startups, is an exception. Created in 2018, it has
laws of quantum mechanics, not by rivals’ technological limitations,” completed eight seed investments in startups around the world, includ-
said Alain Aspect, a quantum guru and senior research director at The ing three on French soil (Pasqal, LightOn, and CryptoNext Security).
French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), speaking at The parliamentary report on quantum proposes the creation of
the report ceremony. “The message you are sending today could be a late-stage investment fund, in the range of €300 to €500 million,
decrypted by more powerful computers in 10 years. With quantum cryp- dedicated to quantum startups. “For French startups, Series B and C
tography, [messages] couldn’t be decrypted even when the computers fundings often require the support of non-European investors, with
are more powerful. For strategic applications in defense and diplomacy, I negative impacts on the technological sovereignty, thus slowing down
believe quantum cryptography should not be neglected.” the emergence of French unicorns,” the report states.
To ensure national security and sovereignty, France aims to develop the In recent years, the European startup ecosystem has evolved dynam-
first post-quantum cryptography solution for high-performance security ically to about 90 players, according to Wavestone and France Digitale.
systems by 2022. And within five years, it plans to deploy the first quan- The United Kingdom holds first place, with 20 startups, followed by
tum-key distribution solution that could resist side-channel attacks. France and Germany, with 16 and 14 startups, respectively. “We have
many French startups that are mastering key parts of quantum technol-
STIMULATING INVESTMENT ogies,” said Mounier, citing Pasqal (cold-atom–based qubits), Muquans
The sinews of war are money. Several countries have launched national (quantum sensors and quantum toolbox), Quandela (single-photon
quantum R&D strategies in recent years, with China and the United source), mirSense (industrial quantum cascade laser solution), and
States investing the most. In 2017, China laid the cornerstone of its CryptoNext Security (quantum cryptographic library). (For more on
US$10 billion National Laboratory for Quantum. In 2019, the United these startups, see page 10.)
States passed the National Quantum Initiative Act, a US$1.3 billion
plan to foster R&D and education in quantum technologies, particu-
larly quantum computing.
In Europe, the United Kingdom last year announced that investment
through its National Quantum Technologies Program, launched in
2014, had passed the £1 billion mark. In 2018, the German government
allocated €650 million for quantum technologies. That comes on top of
the 1 billion European Union flagship initiative.
Amid this spending frenzy, France is going through “the exercise of
calculating how much money will be needed to be up to the chal-
lenges,” said MP Forteza. “We came up with €1.4 billion over the next
five years, a financial effort that the public sector alone cannot support.
The private sector will have to participate.” Today, France invests
€60 million in quantum technologies every year.
Many groups worldwide have in-house programs dedicated to
developing quantum technology both for in-house application and for
commercialization. Microsoft, IBM, and Intel are leading the way. On
this side of the Atlantic, Atos launched a quantum program in 2016,
and in 2018, it released the Atos Quantum Learning Machine emula-
tor, the first large-scale, ready-to-use system, capable of emulating up
to 41 qubits on traditional Intel processors. Among other initiatives,
Mounier cited an R&D program in optics led by Thales, CEA, and the
Institute of Optics at Saclay, near Paris. Also, the development of CMOS
spin qubits at CEA-Leti in Grenoble is an interesting way to enable a
scalable qubit-manufacturing technology.
“Producing qubits in volume will be important for the development
of quantum technologies,” he said.
Asked whether quantum success is a matter of money, Mounier said

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

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10 EE|Times EUROPE

France Has a Quantum Plan

With creation of the late-stage investment fund, the French gov-
ernment expects to spur the creation of 50 quantum startups by 2024.
“We are seeing about 10 startups emerging today, maybe more if we
extend the scope to deep physics,” said Christophe Jurczak, Quanto-
nation’s co-founder, at the report presentation ceremony. “I think that
the objective of about 0 startups in five years is realistic, if we all get
involved and roll up our sleeves.”
CREATING AN INNOVATION ENVIRONMENT
Academia and business often operate in different spheres. “Quantum
technologies need to move out of research labs,” said MP Forteza. “We
need to enable a more direct dialogue between basic research and
industry.” France is therefore creating three R&D centers — in Paris,
Saclay, and Grenoble — to achieve continuity in research, innovation,
and industrialization.
A longer-term vision also requires developing an education system
that equips young people with the skills and knowledge necessary to
meet the country’s quantum research needs and compete in the global
economy. “We know that five to six years are needed to train someone
in quantum technologies and that it requires very rare and technical
skills at the cross-section of engineering, physics, and computing,” said
Forteza. “We don’t have a dedicated training scheme today, whereas
we should have masters [programs] in quantum engineering, as well as
in-house training and awareness programs within companies.”
The road will be long and winding, but France has the resources to
take part in the quantum race. ■

Five Quantum Startups with a French Pedigree

ith o the startups and o the venture capital rms rance now ranks second in the uropean uantum ecosystem
according to a recent study co authored y avestone and rance igitale. he ve startups outlined here span the spectrum
rom uantum computing to uantum sensing uantum photonics and post uantum cryptography.

CRYPTONEXT SECURITY and chemical analysis Pasqal builds quan-

Year founded: 2019 o gas li uids and tum computers and
Headquarters: Paris solids y in rared simulators out o
CEO & co-founder: Ludovic Perret laser absorption and arrays o neu
Funding: In progress spectroscopy. The tral atoms in a highly
Focus: Quantum cryptography company has a scalable way. The
Image: mirSense Image: Pasqal
What it does: A spin off rom the production unit at startup develops the
rench nstitute or esearch in om A eti in reno le. lasers, vacuum technology, electronic
puter cience and Automation A controls and so tware stack to make
and or onne niversity rypto e t MUQUANS the individual atoms accessible to
Security develops post-quantum cryp- Year founded: 2011 quantum programmers worldwide.
tography algorithms Headquarters: Talence Quantum guru Alain Aspect is a
and implementa- CEO & founder: runo esruelle co ounder and senior adviser.
tions to counter the Funding: €1.7 million
threat o uantum Focus: Quantum sensing QUANDELA
computers’ breaking What it does: uilding on years o Year founded: 2017
encryption and to academic research at the nstitute o Headquarters: Marcoussis
mage rypto e t protect all electronic ptics raduate CEO & co-founder: alerian ies
Security communications School and Paris Funding: Not known
in the long term. Formerly known as Observatory, Focus: Quantum photonics
Post Quantum Advanced Technologies Muquans spe- What it does: A spin off rom the
A rypto e t ecurity markets ciali es in very enter or anoscience and an
a hybrid application programming high-precision otechnology, Quandela develops
inter ace A that com ines classical Image: Muquans instrumentation solid state sources o ultra pure
public-key cryptography with a new and manu ac uantum light or uantum compu
generation o uantum compute tures quantum sensors based on tation and cryptography and, more
resistant cryptography. laser-cooled atoms. Its solutions, roadly or research in uantum
including an absolute-quantum gravi- physics. These
MIRSENSE meter and a high per ormance atomic light sources,
Year founded: 2015 clock, apply to geophysics, which operate
Headquarters: Palaiseau time re uency metrology and at cryogenic
CEO: Mathieu arras high per ormance synchroni ation. temperature,
Funding: €2 million can emit pho-
Focus: Quantum sensing PASQAL tons with very
Image: Quandela
What it does: uilding on years o Year founded: 2019 high e ciency
in a a common la oratory Headquarters: Palaiseau that e hi it identical characteris
etween Alcatel hales and A eti CEO & founder: eorges livier tics. n uandela success ully
mirSense develops and produces eymond installed its rst single photon source
uantum cascade laser diodes Funding: Undisclosed at the niversity o ris ane Austra
and advanced photonic devices such Focus: Quantum computing lia . uantum physicist Alain Aspect is
as wide and tuna le sources or real What it does: A spin off rom the on the scienti c oard.
time, high-sensitivity trace detection nstitute o ptics raduate chool — Anne-Françoise Pelé

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

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12 EE|Times EUROPE

OPINION superposition of three mutually orthogonal

quantum states. The management of 3D

The High-Stakes Push to quantum states could influence the future of

quantum technology being that these systems

Tackle Quantum-Compute
can carry more information than qubits.
In December, Intel announced what it
called the first cryogenically controlled

Challenges
processor, designed to accelerate the devel-
opment of full-stack quantum-computing
systems. Horse Ridge, produced using Intel’s
22-nm FinFET manufacturing process, was
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio created in collaboration with QuTech. The
researchers aim to drastically simplify the
Last fall, Google claimed to have crossed the “quantum supremacy” control electronics in order to develop a small,
threshold, demonstrating that a quantum processor could perform highly integrated chip.
a calculation technically beyond the capabilities of a conventional
computer. The 53-qubit Sycamore processor performed in 3 minutes Beyond the physics
and 20 seconds a calculation that would have taken a traditional
supercomputer 10,000 years, according to Google. IBM rebutted and well-established
the claim, but the achievement was just one indication that we are
witnessing a real revolution in quantum computing.
mathematics of quantum-
Companies and countries alike are investing huge sums in quan- computer science
tum-computer R&D. China is spending more than US$10 billion to build a quantum-compute
research laboratory that is expected to open this year, while the European Union has earmarked loom some unresolved
more than US$1 billion for its quantum master plan. The U.S. National Quantum Initiative Act engineering challenges of
provides US$1.2 billion to promote quantum information science over a five-year period. Intel
and Microsoft, as well as Google and IBM, are investing in facilities and training technical per- considerable importance.
sonnel. The companies are working to build hardware that reproduces the quantum model with a
targeted number of qubits. The cryogenically controlled processor
To achieve useful computational performance, machines must deliver hundreds of thousands operates at –269°C, or close to absolute zero.
of qubits. Beyond the physics and well-established mathematics of quantum-computer science Future improvements will aim to raise the
loom some unresolved engineering challenges of considerable importance. One challenge is chip’s operating temperature in order to cut
correcting the small random errors that result from the non-ideal elements of the circuit and the the complexity and cost of cooling the com-
interaction of qubits with the environment around them. plete system.
The engineering of a quantum computer requires not only perfect electronics but also a good The tasks ahead are daunting. But based on
software algorithm and good isolation from the environment to minimize decoherence. Efficient the size of their investments, companies and
quantum gates must be built to reduce the amount of control and time required for compute countries clearly believe quantum computing
operations and thereby improve the consistency of the quantum state. is worth the effort. ■
Scientists at Aarhus University have devised a superconducting circuit to implement a tunable
system consisting of 1 qutrit coupled to 2 qubits. The system can efficiently perform various Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff
quantum-computing tasks, including the generation of 2-qubit entanglement and 3-qubit correspondent at AspenCore, editor of Power
conditional quantum gates. A qutrit, or quantum trit, is a quantum unit that is described by a Electronics News, and editor-in-chief of EEWeb.

IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

14 EE|Times EUROPE
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
LeCun: ‘It’s Really Hard to
Succeed with Exotic Hardware’
By Sally Ward-Foxton
At NeurIPS, a neural-net pioneer shares his view of the
past and future of AI accelerator chips.
I
t’s really hard to succeed with exotic hard-
ware,” Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann
LeCun told the audience for his keynote
speech at NeurIPS.
Addressing the global gathering of AI
experts in Vancouver, Canada, in December,
LeCun surveyed the history of specialized
computing chips for processing neural-
network workloads, offered a glimpse of
what Facebook is working on, and made
some predictions for the future of deep-
learning hardware.
ANCIENT HISTORY
LeCun is a renowned visionary in the field of
AI, having been at the forefront of neural-net-
work research in the 1980s and 1990s. As
a Bell Labs researcher in the late 1980s, he
worked with the earliest types of dedicated
neural-network processors, which comprised
resistor arrays and were used to perform
matrix multiplication. As neural networks fell
out of favor in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
LeCun was one of a handful of scientists who
continued to work in the field. In his keynote,
he shared some of the things he learned about
hardware for deep learning during that time.
First, tools are really important. What killed
neural nets (temporarily) in the ’90s was that
only a few people — including LeCun — had
tools to train them. LeCun and his colleagues
spent a lot of time building what would
now be called a deep-learning framework:
a flexible piece of software that interpreted
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
front-end languages, allowing the researchers
to train and experiment with neural networks.
The researchers’ work advanced the concept
that deep-learning systems can be assembled
from differentiable modules and then auto-
matically differentiated. While novel at the
time, this is common practice now.
The right tools gave LeCun’s team its
“superpower” and were also an important fac-
tor in producing reproducible results, he said.
“Good results are not enough … even if you
get good results, people will still be skeptical,”
he said. “Making those results reproducible is
almost as important as actually producing the
results in the first place.”
Along with the right tools, hardware perfor-
mance is crucial to the research community,
as hardware limitations can influence entire
directions of research, said LeCun.
“[What] the hardware community builds
for research or for training actually influ-
ences what ideas people think of,” he said.
“Entire ideas can be abandoned just because
the hardware is not powerful enough, even
though they were good ideas.”
The answer may not lie with new and novel
forms of computing, he said, noting that many
exotic fabrication technologies failed to take
off when they didn’t fit in with the existing
computing environment.
One of LeCun’s frustrations with today’s
hardware solutions for AI acceleration is that
most are built for matrix multiplication, not
convolution, which is the key mathematical
operation used in most image-processing and
speech-recognition neural networks today.
“[The prevailing approach] will become more
and more wrong, in the sense that we are
going to have bigger and bigger requirements
for power,” he said. “If we build a generic
piece of hardware where 95% of the cycles are
spent on doing convolutions, we are not doing
a good job.”
KILLER APP
The future, as LeCun described it, will see
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used
in everything from toys to vacuum cleaners to
medical equipment. But the killer app — the
one application that will prove AI’s value to
consumer devices — is the augmented-reality
headset.
Facebook is currently working on hardware
for AR glasses. It’s a huge hardware challenge
because of the amount of processing required
at low latency, powered only by batteries.
“When you move, the overlaid objects in the
world should move with the world, not with
you, and that requires quite a bit of computa-
tion,” said LeCun.
Facebook envisions AR glasses that are
operated by voice and interact through ges-
tures via real-time hand tracking. While those
features are possible today, they are beyond
what we can do in terms of power consump-
tion, performance, and form factor. LeCun
noted a few “tricks” that can help.
For example, when running the same
neural network on every frame of a video —
perhaps to detect objects — it doesn’t matter
if the result for one frame is wrong, because
we can look at the frames before and after it
and check for consistency.
“So you could imagine using extremely
low-power hardware that is not perfect; in
other words, you can tolerate bit flips once
in a while,” said LeCun. “It’s easy to do this by
lowering the voltage of the power supply.”
NEURAL-NET DEVELOPMENTS
The rapid evolution of neural networks is
a major challenge for hardware design. For
example, dynamic networks — those with
memory that can be trained to learn sequen-
tial or time-varying patterns — are gaining
in popularity, especially for natural-language
processing (NLP). However, they behave
differently from many assumptions made by
current hardware. The compute graph can’t
be optimized at compile time; that has to be
done at runtime. It’s also rather difficult to
implement batching, a popular technique
through which more than one sample is pro-
cessed at once to improve performance.
“All the most common hardware that we
have at our disposal assumes that you can
batch, because if you have a batch with more
than one sample, then you can turn every

operation into a matrix multiplication, includ-
ing convolutions and fully connected nets,”
said LeCun. “[It] is a challenge for the hardware
community to create architectures that don’t
lose performance by using batch size = 1. That
applies to training, of course; the optimal size
of batch for training is 1. We use more because
our hardware forces us to do so.”
SELF-SUPERVISED LEARNING
Another challenge for hardware is that the
learning paradigms we currently use will
change, and this will happen imminently,
according to LeCun.
“There is a lot of work [being done] on
trying to get machines to learn more like
humans and animals, and humans and animals
don’t learn by supervised learning or even by
reinforcement learning,” he said. “They learn
by something I call self-supervised learning,
which is mostly by observation.”
LeCun described a common approach to
self-supervised learning in which a piece
of the sample is masked and the system is
trained to predict the content of the masked
piece based on the part of the sample that’s
available. This is commonly used with images,
wherein part of the image is removed, and
text, with one or more words blanked out.
Work so far has shown that it is particularly
effective for NLP; the type of networks used,
transformers, have a training phase that uses
self-supervised learning.
The trouble from a hardware perspective
is that transformer networks for NLP can be
enormous: The biggest ones today have
5 billion parameters and are growing fast,
said LeCun. The networks are so big that they
don’t fit into GPU memories and have to be
broken into pieces.
“Self-supervised learning is the future —
there is no question [about that],” he said.
“But this is a challenge for the hardware com-
munity because the memory requirements are
absolutely gigantic. Because these systems
are trained with unlabeled data, which is
EE|Times EUROPE 15
eC n t s ea ard to cceed it otic ard are
A Neural-Network Processing
Timeline
Late 1980s: Resistor arrays are used to do matrix multiplication. By the late
s the arrays have gained ampli ers and converters around them ut are
still uite primitive y today s standards. he limitation is how ast data can e
ed into the chip.
1991: he rst chip designed or convolutional neural networks s is uilt.
he chip is capa le o giga operations per second on inary data
with digital shi t registers that minimi e the amount o e ternal tra c needed
to per orm a convolution there y speeding up operation. he chip does not see
use eyond academia.
1992: A A an analog neural network A chip de uts. esigned or s with
it weights and it activations A A contains transistors in . m
M . t is used or optical character recognition o handwritten te t.
1996: A A a digital version o A A is released. ut with neural networks
alling out o avor y the mid s A A is eventually repurposed or signal
processing in cellphone towers.
2009–2010: esearchers demonstrate a hardware neural network accelerator
on an A the ilin irte . t runs a demo or semantic segmentation or
automated driving and is capa le o at a out . . he team rom
urdue niversity tries to make an A ased on this work ut the pro ect
proves unsuccess ul.
ource ann e un ace ook
abundant, we can train very large networks in consumption, and he questioned whether this
terms of data. Hardware requirements for the will always be possible.
final system will be much, much bigger than LeCun described himself as “skeptical” of
they currently are. The hardware race will not futuristic new approaches such as spiking
stop any time soon.” neural networks and neuromorphic comput-
ing in general. There is a need to prove that
HARDWARE TRENDS the algorithms work before building chips for
New hardware ideas that use techniques such them, he said.
as analog computing, spintronics, and optical “Driving the design of such systems
systems are on LeCun’s radar. He cited com- through hardware, hoping that someone will
munication difficulties — problems converting come up with an algorithm that will use this
signals between novel hardware and the rest hardware, is probably not a good idea,” LeCun
of the required computing infrastructure — as said. ■
a big drawback. Analog implementations, he
said, rely on making activations extremely Sally Ward-Foxton is a staff correspondent
sparse in order to gain advantages in energy at AspenCore.
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
16 EE|Times EUROPE

COVER STORY

Sensing the Environment

as with uman Senses
High-performance sensors are the drivers of smart devices.
By Rosina Kreutzer irector o usiness evelopment n neon echnologies A

W
hat had long been considered a vision of the future is now a controls, smart-home appliances, and alarm
reality Devices can detect their surroundings as if they were systems.

human senses and interact with them. Sensors close the gap WORLD’S SMALLEST AND MOST
to the digital world. Combined with appropriate software, POWERFUL 3D IMAGE SENSOR
smart devices and robots, for example, can see, hear, smell, or feel and, above all, Whether for reliable face authentication,
improved photo functions, or authentic
“intuitively and contextually understand” their environment, thereby simplifying augmented-reality (AR) experiences, the
our lives. The decisive factor here is the interpretation and linking of information mobile-device market in particular has mas-
sively increased the demand for “seeing in
from different sensors.
D” in various fields of application. D depth
Inspired by human nature, Infineon takes a holistic approach and sensors assume a key role in smartphones and for applications that rely
combines a variety of sensors. This results in smart systems that make on accurate D image data. A special and efficient technology for this
interaction between man and machine or device much easier while is runtime ToF technology. Much as a bat uses sound measurement for
reliably processing the situational information obtained. The Infineon echolocation, runtime ToF measures the travel time of a beam of light
ENSI sensor portfolio includes D time-of-flight (ToF) image to enable highly accurate D reproductions of an image. Compared
sensors, radar chips, microelectromechanical system (MEMS) micro- with other D sensor principles, such as stereoscopic or structured light
phones, and pressure and gas sensors. These smart sensors (Figure 1) technology, ToF delivers convincing imaging performance, miniaturiza-
benefit a wide range of applications — voice recognition, smart homes tion, and power consumption for battery-powered devices.
and smart cities, augmented reality, gesture recognition, biometrics, Infineon Technologies AG has collaborated with software and D ToF
robotics, automated autonomous driving, drones multicopters, lighting system specialist pmd technologies AG to develop the world’s smallest

IMAGE INFINEON

Figure 1: Smart sensors detect the environment as with human senses and connect the real world with the digital world.

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


Figure 2: The REAL3 3D image sensor is virtually a miniature
camera.
and most powerful D image sensor. The new REAL single-chip solu-
tion (Figure 2) measures just . .1 mm and is the fifth generation
of successful ToF deep sensors from Infineon. In addition to its small
dimensions, which allow it to be incorporated into even the smallest
devices with just a few elements, the chip provides high-resolution
data with low power consumption, delivering up to VGA resolution. The
high-performance pixel array achieves excellent outdoor performance,
especially in strong sunlight. This is made possible by the patented SBI
circuit in each individual pixel (SBI stands for “suppression of back-
ground illumination”).
The latest generation of the REAL chip is very robust, reliable,
powerful, energy-efficient, and, at the same time, decisively small.
Integrated in a related device, the new sensor allows the device to
be controlled via gestures, so that human-machine interaction is
context-based and touchless. The depth sensor’s ToF technology
enables an accurate D image of faces, hand details, or objects — a
relevant capability when it must be ensured that the image matches
the original. This technology is already applied in payment trans-
actions using mobile phones or devices that need no bank details,
bank cards, or cashiers, with the payment carried out via facial
recognition instead. This application requires an extremely reliable
and secure image and return transmission of the high-resolution
D image data. The same applies to securely unlocking devices with
a D image. The Infineon D image sensor also implements this
function, particularly in extreme lighting conditions such as strong
sunlight or in the dark.
Furthermore, the chip enables features for ambitious photography
and videography, such as enhanced autofocus, the bokeh effect for
photos and video, and improved resolution in poor lighting conditions.
Real-time full- D mapping also allows authentic augmented-reality
experiences.
Series production of the new D image sensor chip (IRS2 C) will
begin in the middle of 2020. In addition, Infineon Technologies offers
an optimized illumination driver (IRS 100C) that further improves
performance, size, and cost as a complete solution.
PRECISE VIEW WITH RADAR
Radar has evolved from a complex cutting-edge technology to a
solution that is becoming ever-more important in industry and the
consumer market. It is increasingly being used in robotics, cars, and
smart homes and supports new technologies that work with an intui-
tive human-machine interface. Radar sensors make it easier to locate
targets in three-dimensional space and can be used to detect vital
functions, to classify materials or movements, or for gesture control.
EE|Times EUROPE 17
Sensing the Environment as with Human Senses
Compared with passive infrared technologies, radar offers many
advantages in “seeing” and motion detection. These include higher
accuracy and the precise detection of the smallest movements,
so-called micromotions. The Infineon radar sensor portfolio of the
XENSIV family ranges from the world’s smallest 24-GHz monolithic
microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) to a highly integrated 60-GHz
transceiver. This chip features an integrated antenna and allows
“seeing” at the highest level, both under normal conditions but more
specifically under extreme conditions such as darkness, fog and dust, or
through materials.
ROBUST MOTION DETECTION
Smartwatches, wearables, and smartphones use air pressure sen-
sors to accurately detect differences in altitude, vertical speed, and
movements. In addition, these sensors can monitor airflow in vacuum
cleaners, air conditioners, and extractor hoods. Applications that ben-
efit from these exact and robust pressure sensors are also increasingly
found in medicine — for example, in smart inhalation devices, breath-
ing masks, fall-detection monitors, and non-invasive blood pressure
measurement.
The Infineon DPS 6 pressure sensor (Figure 3) is ideal for these
applications because it saves up to 0 of the required space compared
with other waterproof pressure sensors, offers accuracy of ±2 cm, and
requires up to 0 less energy than piezoresistive technology. The
digital sensor, which measures atmospheric air pressure, is resistant to
water, humidity, and dust (IP ). A gel protects the contact points and
membranes so that they can withstand the pressure at a water depth of
0 m for one hour.
Figure 3: The robust DPS368 air pressure sensor precisely detects
minimal differences in altitude, vertical speed, and movement.
The pressure sensor element of the DPS 6 operates with a capac-
itive-measurement principle that guarantees high accuracy even with
temperature changes. The sensor integrates both air pressure and
temperature measurement in an extremely compact eight-pin land-
grid array (LGA) package measuring only 2.0 2. 1.1 mm. The device
has an accuracy of up to 0.002 hPa ( 2 cm), can measure air pressure
between 00 hPa and 1,200 hPa at temperatures from 0 C to C,
and has a pressure temperature sensitivity of less than 0. Pa K. The
Meet Infineon at MWC 2020 at booth 6C41
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
18 EE|Times EUROPE

Sensing the Environment as with Human Senses

sensor is also able to detect individual steps, body movements, or

gestures. The high measuring frequency (up to 200 Hz) and the fast
readout enable rapid feedback from the sensor.

HEARING AND UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT

BACKGROUND NOISE
Whether for telephone calls or web conferences, for active noise
cancellation (ANC) in headphones when traveling, or for operating a
device with your voice, the “artificial sense of hearing” with micro-
phones has become an integral part of everyday life.
First-class MEMS microphones and state-of-the-art audio process-
ing are key elements in meeting consumers’ growing demands on
these devices, for applications such as voice-recognition systems that
understand you from the next room or audio recordings that sound Figure 4: n neon’s ne generation o M M microphones ith
live. This is made possible by MEMS microphones with the lowest encapsulation o the condenser ena les virtually noise ree
possible signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a wide dynamic range. recording o audio signals.
Infineon has already set new standards for digital MEMS micro-
phones with its IM69D130 XENSIV MEMS microphone. Together with
its partners in audio signal processing and software, Infineon offers The “encapsulation” of the condenser enables virtually noise-free
high-end reference solutions that can be quickly deployed in a wide recording of audio signals. The microphone also offers low self-noise
variety of applications. (high SNR), wide dynamic range, low distortion, and a high acous-
The latest-generation MEMS microphones feature a specially tic-overload point (AOP). It is precisely these specifications that
encapsulated dual-backplate technology (Figure 4) and offer enable extremely precise voice recognition and an increase in SNR to
enhanced features with even greater performance and robustness. 75 dB for an AOP of up to 140 dBSPL. ■

Focused on
POWER ELECTRONICS?
Exhibit at the PCIM Europe!
International Exhibition and Conference pcim-europe.com/exhibitors
for Power Electronics, Intelligent Motion,
Renewable Energy and Energy Management

Nuremberg, 5 – 7 May 2020

# pcimeurope

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & INDUSTRY 4.0
In 2020, What Will Be the Key
Trends in AI and Industry 4.0?
By Jos Martin, Senior Engineering Manager, MathWorks
2020 is set to be an important year for Industry 4.0 and
arti cia inte i ence A as t e tec no o ies are set to
contin a rede ne t e i its o at is ac ie a e or
en ineers and scientists. o o er t e ne t ear
t e e trends t at e can e pect to see e er e
COBOTS AND AI FACILITATE FLEXIBLE
PRODUCTION LINES
Collaborative robots, otherwise known as
cobots, that augment human capabilities and
that are parameterized and refined by AI will
be the technology that finally unlocks manu-
facturers’ ability to realize flexible production
lines in 2020. Visions of the future factory
floor have predominantly focused on auto-
mation, with production lines creating single
items, thereby aiding reduced inefficiencies
and long changeover times. However, for this
type of production to be realized, and for
Industry .0 to reach the next level, produc-
tion lines need to become more flexible. With
numerous mechatronic modules that can
be reorganized on an ad hoc basis, and with
additional cobots on standby — which can be
tuned by AI according to the following item
rolling down the manufacturing line — we will
be closer to the goal of full autonomy.
ACCESSIBLE AI BECOMES A REALITY
This year, AI project work will become more
widely available to engineers and scientists
as access to existing deep-learning models
and research improves dramatically. Con-
ventionally, AI models tend to be mainly
image-based, but in 2020, they will integrate
a much broader selection of data, from time
series to text to radar, sensor data, and more.
Engineers and scientists are best placed to
succeed with their AI plan due to their exten-
sive domain knowledge. However, to truly
excel, the use of tools, including automatic
labeling to quickly curate vast and high-qual-
ity datasets, is crucial. Teams with access to
a greater quantity of high-quality data have
a far better chance of producing accurate AI
models that generate the required outcomes.
EDGE COMPUTING IMPROVES PREDICTIVE
MAINTENANCE
New functionality of software on production
systems is becoming a reality as a result of the
use of cloud systems as well as the superior
calculation power of industrial controllers and
NOVEMBER 2019 | www.eetimes.eu
at are
edge-computing devices. As data is sourced
beyond an individual machine alone, from
across multiple sites and different vendor
equipment, predictive maintenance will
dramatically improve. Additionally, AI-based
algorithms will boost productivity in factories
because these tools can dynamically optimize
the entire production line throughput as well
as lower any energy costs that are imposed.
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING IN AN
INDUSTRIAL SETTING
When a computer learns to perform a task
via repeated trial-and-error interactions
with a dynamic environment, this is known
as reinforcement learning (RL). This year,
we will witness this technology progressing
from winning games like chess and Go against
human competitors to developing into a vital
support for engineers. The technology will
lend itself to implementing controllers and
decision-making algorithms for complex
systems, including autonomous systems
and robots. Key drivers for the deployment
of RL as a way to improve large industrial
systems include implementing simpler tools
EE|Times EUROPE 19
for engineers to create and train reinforce-
ment-learning policies and the development
of simulation data for training purposes.
Additional enablers for RL comprise
straightforward incorporation of reinforce-
ment-learning agents into system simulation
tools and code generation for embedded
hardware. Taking autonomous driving sys-
tems as a real-world example, by including
an RL agent into the system, it is possible to
refine and enhance driver performance, lower
fuel consumption, shrink response time, and
ultimately increase driving speeds.
THE MARCH OF MODEL-BASED DESIGN
TOOLS
AI-driven systems that are increasingly
design-complex are becoming more prevalent
in industry. However, these systems require
significantly more testing processes as a
result of the significant impact of AI model
behavior on the performance of the entire
system. Consequently, this year, it’s likely that
there will be greater adoption of model-based
design tools that deliver simulation, integra-
tion, and testing on an ongoing basis.
The benefits of these are that simulation
permits designers to analyze how artificial
intelligence interacts with a system, integra-
tion allows them to trial designs within the
context of the complete system, and contin-
uous testing makes it conceivable to easily
identify limitations in AI training datasets and
other design flaws in the system’s components.
Engineers and scientists are set to experi-
ence a plethora of benefits as a result of new
technologies. However, they must be careful
to make the most of the tools available to
them as well as encourage their teams to learn
new skills and adapt to working with bigger
datasets. They will also have to contend with
building new models and testing AI-driven
systems, which will be critical to realizing the
full potential of Industry 4.0. ■
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
www.eetimes.eu
www.eetimes.eu| |NOVEMBER
FEBRUARY 2019
2020
20 EE|Times EUROPE

FEATURE STORY

Optimized for Success

New AURIX TC3xx microcontroller generation delivers all the ingredients
needed for high-performance automotive and industrial applications.
By Ralf Ködel, Director Product Marketing Management, Automotive & Industrial Microcontroller,
n neon echnologies A

I
nfineon launched the 2-bit TriCore concept with the AUDO family, which Infineon has developed its own radar con-
was introduced in 1999. Thanks to its real-time performance and integrated troller portfolio as a sub-segment, including
TC3xx devices with specialized accelerators
safety and security features, the TriCore family quickly became the ideal for radar signal processing. The TC3xx family
platform for a wide range of automotive applications. The success story con- is also equipped for data sensor fusion. Up
to SAE Automation Level 2, the high-end
tinued with the introduction of the AURI TC2xx family (6 nm), which marked
controllers of the second AURIX generation
the transition to a multicore architecture. The advanced safety functions enable (TC xx) can completely cover sensor-fusion
AURI systems to achieve functional safety up to ASIL-D SIL , and, thanks compute requirements. With their wide port-
folio of peripherals, they are also suitable for
to an integrated hardware security module ( SM), the controllers meet OEM use in domain zone ECUs — an important
requirements for data security. prerequisite for automated vehicles and
future-proof vehicle network architectures.
The AURIX family was initially very peripheral functions, frequencies, tempera- TC3xx microcontrollers offer the ideal
successful, especially in powertrain applica- ture, and package options. combination of real-time capability, data
tions — a very harsh environment with high This, in turn, enables a wide range of security, and functional safety for ISO 26262
temperature demands and tough vibration applications in automotive as well as indus- system requirements up to ASIL-D IEC 61 0
conditions. This is how the controllers fur- trial electronics to be addressed, supported or SIL- . Certification of the TC xx family
ther proved their reliability and quality. by a comprehensive ecosystem. was carried out by TÜV Saarland and can
While the AURIX real-time capability The multicore architecture of the latest be used for ECU certification. This allows a
contributed to its success in engine man- AURIX TC3xx family further delivers a significant amount of time and effort to be
agement, the AURIX microcontrollers were significant performance boost (Figure 1) saved. The new AURIX generation is also
designed from the outset to address other over the TC2xx devices, coupled with a high ideal for safety-critical areas beyond the car,
domains as well, especially in the area of degree of compatibility with the previous such as transportation (trucks, agricultural
safety. For example, they are used very generation. TC3xx devices provide up to six and commercial vehicles, aviation, drones,
successfully in the chassis and traditional independently operating 32-bit TriCore pro- buses, trains, transport applications in
safety environments, such as brakes, airbags, cessor cores, as well as improved functions manufacturing, cranes, etc.) and safety-crit-
steering, suspension, and more. for vehicle communication, data security, ical industrial drives and inverters (solar
Now, the products of the latest AURIX and functional safety. inverters, robotics, elevators, etc.).
TC3xx generation (40 nm with embed- This means that, in addition to the
ded flash) are in production and offer all established applications, the TC3xx BROADLY BASED AND SCALABLE
the ingredients for high-performance and microcontrollers are now pre-destined The TC3xx family is highly scalable in both
efficient designs. Designers can choose from for advanced driver-assistance systems packages and resources (Figure 2). The high
a broad portfolio of scalable memory sizes, (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) designs. degree of integration and the wide range of
package options make flexible and compact
designs possible. The controllers are avail-
Figure 1: With up to six inde- able in T FP- 0 BGA1 0 (12 12 mm) up
pendently operating 32-bit to LFBGA- 16 (2 2 mm) packages.
TriCore processor cores, the They offer a range from one TriCore core
multicore architecture of (160 M z) up to six TriCore cores ( 00 M z
the AURIX TC3xx family each), from 1 MB up to 16 MB of embedded
delivers a signi cant flash memory, and more than 6 MB of inte-
performance boost grated RAM.
with a high degree Four of the six TriCore cores are coupled
of compatibility with lockstep cores. This sets new standards
with the previous of computing performance and safety inte-
generation. grated in a chip Up to about ,000-DMIPS
computing power is available for designing
systems with the highest ASIL-D safety level,
compared with about 2,000 DMIPS for the

2019| |www.eetimes.eu
NOVEMBER2020
FEBRUARY www.eetimes.eu www.eetimes.eu | NOVEMBER 2019

Figure 2: The new AURIX TC3xx generation is highly scalable in terms of computing
power, peripherals, memory, and packages.
previous TC2xx generation.
New features and enhanced updates have
been introduced. A new feature, in com-
parison to the first AURI generation, is an
extension of the subsystem for radar pro-
cessing with a signal-processing unit (SPU),
additional memory, and optimized data path.
Connectivity has been significantly enhanced
with up to two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces,
in addition to other traditional communica-
tion peripherals, and an eMMC interface for
external flash memory. Many other peripher-
als, including HSM and AD converters, have
been extended and improved.
Furthermore, AURI ’s integrated voltage
regulator supports a switch CAP DC/DC
topology in the low-end derivatives, saving
space and cost of up to two external MOS-
FETs and coils. With this topology, the power
consumption during operation can be halved.
ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION
With its high level of backward-compatibil-
ity, the TC xx AURI generation provides
an evolutionary path from the TC2xx
generation. This enables a fast and efficient
upgrade of designs based on the previous
generation to families with higher perfor-
mance and new features (Figure 3).
Within the same package, derivatives with
different performance levels offer high scal-
ability and flexibility. For example, all TC xx
families are available in the popular BGA-
292 package, allowing the designer to scale
performance higher and lower depending on
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
the resource needs of the program. High pin-
to-pin package compatibility and complete
software compatibility are ensured across the
entire TC3xx family.
The proven AURI safety concept has
been retained in principle. Safety features
from the TC2xx family can thus be reused,
and the additional LBIST MBIST hardware
features in the TC3xx family eliminate the
Figure 3: The main improvements and extensions in the TC3xx generation compared with
the TC2xx architecture are shown.
EE|Times EUROPE 21
Optimized for Success
need for safety software — different safety
mechanisms can now be exercised through
hardware built-in self-tests.
Computing performance has been
increased with the introduction of the new
TriCore generation (1.62) with new instruc-
tions, up to six CPUs running at 300 MHz, as
well as reduced latencies with direct path for
flash access.
On the memory side, not only have
capacities been increased, but the memory
protection unit (MPU) has been further
improved.
The TC3xx family incorporates various
high-performance AD converters. Four types
of converters are integrated: primary SAR (12
bit), secondary SAR (12 bit), fast compare (10
bit), and delta-sigma. The converters offer
conversion rates from 1 to 40 MSamples/s.
The optimized ADAS functionality of the
AURI TC xx family benefits radar systems
in particular (Figure 4), from blind-spot
detection to front and corner radar systems.
The TC3xx offers the previously mentioned
radar-processing unit with up to two SPUs,
which support the highest safety require-
ments. The SPUs run at a clock frequency of
300 MHz and enable the calculation of the
latest radar algorithms on a single chip with
very low power consumption compared with
conventional GPUs/DSPs. HF radar chips can
be connected directly via the high-speed
digital radar interface.
The improved HSM cryptographic
capability makes on-board communica-
tion more secure and renders hardware
manipulation more difficult. It integrates
new functions to support asymmetrical
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
22 EE|Times EUROPE
Optimized for Success
Figure 4: The new AURIX generation enables many high-performance applications in the
vehicle. For example, a complete chipset for 77-GHz radar is available.
encryption mechanisms according to EVITA
“full” requirements.
As host controllers in gateway and
telematics applications, the AURIX TC3xx
controllers support the latest communi-
cation interfaces. This includes up to two
Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, up to 20 CAN FD
channels according to ISO 11898-1, and up to
24 LIN channels. An additional eMMC inter-
face for an external flash interface enables
local data storage for software-update over-
the-air (SOTA) architectures.
Infineon is also one of the first providers
of a multicore architecture with Autosar 4.x.
For this purpose, MCAL drivers (up to ASIL-D
level) are offered according to the CMM3
level and Automotive SPICE (up to ASPICE
Level 1).
SAFE AND HIGHLY AVAILABLE
The trend toward ever-more sophisticated
driver-assistance systems and higher levels
of vehicle automation poses new challenges
to the robustness, availability, and functional
safety of the systems used. The electronic
systems must maintain their functions even
in the event of a fault (fail-operational).
ISO 26262 is the accepted safety standard for
vehicle electronics.
High availability plays an essential
role in fail-operational systems. Infineon
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
has developed a chipset architecture that
combines a microcontroller with a support
safety device (TLF35584/TLF30684) — in this
case, a safe power supply. The combination
of safety supply device and AURIX micro-
controller enables fail-operational systems
with high availability. The advantages of the
SMU come into play with this approach. The
SMU serves as the central collection point
for all safety-critical alarms. Because such
error handling should not be carried out on a
potentially faulty unit (i.e., processing core),
the SMU is designed as an independent unit.
Using the SMU, the internal and external
reactions for each error source (interrupt,
NMI, CPU core reset, CPU core idle, SOC
reset, fault signal protocol) can be config-
ured individually.
All AURIX microcontrollers utilize the
same concept for functional safety and use
advanced protection mechanisms including,
but not limited to, locksteps, error correction
code (ECC)-protected memory, and the SMU
mentioned above. Lockstep technology uses
two cores in a self-test configuration. The
same software thread runs on both cores, and
the outputs of the two cores are compared
with each other to detect errors. High func-
tional safety is achieved with such extensive
internal-monitoring safety mechanisms
implemented in hardware.
With the optimized architecture of the
new AURIX generation, availability is further
improved by increasing the independence
between the cores. Each core can now be sep-
arately set to reset, run, or idle status. This
means that a safety mechanism can perform
a reset on one or more cores, while the other
cores continue to run normally.
In addition, SafeTpack, offered by Hitex,
is a comprehensive safety solution that
considerably shortens the safety imple-
mentation for the second generation of the
AURIX microcontroller family. The complex
LBIST functionality and other safety features
of AURIX are managed by SafeTpack, which
also provides additional safety functions
such as program flow monitoring and cyclic
control of peripheral devices. SafeTpack
likewise coordinates the execution of startup
and cycle tests that ensure correct operation
of the CPU and internal buses.
SECURITY
Today’s vehicle architectures, including
those for autonomous driving, require faster
yet highly secure connectivity and com-
munication between critical control units,
such as the central drive computer and the
steering or braking system. Against this
background, the communication and security
functions have been further improved in the
new AURIX generation. For instance, the
controllers offer interfaces for CAN FD, Flex-
Ray, and, optionally, Gigabit Ethernet. The
HSM (Figure 5) enables both symmetric and
asymmetric encryption according to ECC256
and SHA256, message authentication
between different ECUs, and secure boot-
ing to protect against malware. The HSM is
based on a 32-bit Arm CPU and is separated
from the rest of the AURI chip by a firewall.
The HSM creates a trusted execution envi-
ronment, makes on-board communication
more secure, and renders hardware manipu-
lations, such as motor tuning, more difficult.
In addition, the TC3xx microcontrollers
support efficient and secure SOTA and help
prevent software hijacking.
IDEAL FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS
AURIX microcontrollers were originally
designed for the needs of the automotive
industry in which they are widely used. The
TriCore architecture combines the advan-
tages of a microcontroller, a RISC core, and
a DSP on one chip. This combination offers
clear advantages when it comes to high-
performance control. Also important
for the industry are the long-term availabil-
ity and zero-defect quality. Furthermore, the
AURIX architecture, with its high functional
safety, offers compatibility according to IEC
61508 and the corresponding standards for
railway technology (EN 50129), agricultural

Figure 5: n enhanced hard are security module ensures the highest level o
cy ersecurity.
engineering (ISO 25119), machinery (IEC
62061), and others.
High operating temperatures are also
common in many industrial environments.
The new generation of AURIX microcontrol-
lers is therefore not only available for the
extended temperature range from –40°C to
125°C, but also in “hot packages” for up to
150°C. Among various industrial applications
(Figure 6), this benefits applications such
as uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes),
PLCs, inverters, and robotics. There is also
cooperation with Xilinx to connect the
AURI to FPGAs via a high-speed interface
( SSL) for greater system flexibility.
EASY TO USE: QUICK AND EFFICIENT
DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION
A free toolkit is available for software devel-
opment and testing based on AURIX: the
EE|Times EUROPE 23
Optimized for Success
AURIX Development Studio ( .in neon.
com auri developmentstudio). This software
tool can be used with all AURIX starter kits
and application boards. The toolkit includes
an Eclipse-based IDE, a project wizard to
define project properties for device and board
support, a powerful C compiler, an integrated
source-level debugger, and on-chip support for
flash programming. Infineon also offers a DSP
library that has evolved over the years to meet
customer requirements. Additional tools are
available for configuration and pin mapping, as
well as driver files and a free flash loader.
In addition to the software tools, starter
and application kits are available. The
starter kits include Arduino-compatible
boards designed to use any Arduino Shield in
combination with the kit. Hardware support
ranges from low-cost entry-level kits and
demo boards to evaluation boards that
support all functions, including extension
boards for professional testing and software
development. Furthermore, there are many
application kits that facilitate a “quick start”
for applications such as motor controls,
radar, or wireless charging.
Technical questions can be answered
quickly and efficiently online in the AURI
forum ( .in neon.com auri orum) or on
the AURIX website ( .in neon.com auri ),
where many details and training materials
can be found.
CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
The new multicore AURIX TC3xx micro-
controllers offer optimized solutions for
a wide range of automotive and industrial
applications, supported by a comprehen-
sive ecosystem. Compatibility with the
previous generation in the safety concept,
hardware, and software — as well as package
and resource scalability in terms of cores,
memory, and peripherals — enables an effi-
cient upgrade path for existing
families and safeguards invest-
ments in the software and safety
architectures in the future.
Accelerator units for AI func-
tionalities are being developed
and will be integrated into the
controllers in future generations,
enabling even more advanced
functionality. ■
Figure 6: he scala le
microcontrollers ena le various
high per ormance and scala le
industrial applications or
e ample inverters or ind
tur ines or solar systems.
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
24 EE|Times EUROPE
INDUSTRY 4.0
Designers Turning to MEMS
for Condition Monitoring of Power Devices
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio
A
s a fundamental tool to improve
production efficiency, condition
monitoring is accelerating the
transition to Industry .0. It enables
continuous monitoring of electromechanical
equipment and power devices, facilitating
early detection and real-time diagnosis of
possible anomalies or failures. By identify-
ing and isolating potential problems before
they can compromise production, condition
monitoring makes it possible to optimize
the maintenance function and maximize
equipment uptime by scheduling mainte-
nance-related downtime periods efficiently.
Power devices such as electric motors,
pumps, bearings, and encoders are subjected
to electrical, mechanical, and environmen-
tal stresses that can negatively affect their
operation. In addition to monitoring electrical
parameters such as voltage and current,
it is essential to perform vibration, noise,
and temperature measurements to ensure
Microelectromechanical-
system (MEMS) sensors
provide extended
measurement ranges and
high reliability, even under
the most severe operating
conditions.
equipment health. A modern condition-mon-
itoring system typically comprises sensors
of various types, usually installed directly on
power devices; digital electronic circuits for
collecting and sending data to the cloud; and
an appropriate software application, available
both on desktops and on mobile devices.
By accessing data on cloud servers,
maintenance personnel can get a clear idea
of the health of the devices and take correc-
tive action to forestall problems. Condition
monitoring therefore changes the mainte-
nance approach from reactive to predictive,
potentially lowering maintenance costs
as it shortens downtime and increases pro-
duction efficiency.
CONDITION-MONITORING SENSORS
Sensors are deployed in condition-mon-
itoring systems to send data to the cloud
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
Figure 1: Block diagram of a typical condition-monitoring system (Image: Analog Devices)
automatically, reliably, and without human
intervention. To illustrate, let’s consider
a classic example that’s common to most
industrial production plants rolling-
element bearing failure that results from
bearing wear and tear.
Bearing wear occurs in virtually all types
of rotating machinery, including motors, tur-
bines, pumps, fans, and computer numerical
control (CNC) machines. Typically, a high-fre-
quency noise outside the audio band is the
first symptom of a worn bearing.
Low-noise, high-resolution wideband
vibration sensors are used to measure those
frequencies, enabling early detection of bear-
ing wear caused by the detachment of small
metal fragments. Mathematical techniques
such as envelope detection — usually com-
bined with complete spectral analysis in the
frequency domain — are deployed to detect,
diagnose, and understand the implications of
failures affecting the bearings.
Another important factor to monitor is
imbalance, which in this context is an uneven
distribution of mass that can cause the center
of mass to move away from the center of rota-
tion. Common causes include design error,
faulty installation, component wear, and the
presence of dirt or other contaminants.
For example, accumulation of dust or
grease on a fan used for cooling motors or
other power devices can unbalance the fan
and cause a blade to break.
Imbalance generates a signal with the
same frequency of rotation as the system and
amplitude proportional to the square of the
frequency. Therefore, imbalance detection
is performed through analysis in the fre-
quency domain.
Low-noise, wideband sensors are used for
imbalance detection, focusing the analysis on
the first-order harmonic components.
A third common problem is parallel or
angular misalignment of the rotating shafts.
Misalignment induces considerable mechan-
ical stress, which can cause components to
fail. The problem typically is detected by
analyzing the second harmonic speed (i.e.,
2 the fundamental frequency) of the system
rotation speed.
Misalignment measurement is carried out
using multiple accelerometer sensors capa-
ble of detecting the number of vibrations at
different points on the equipment. In this
way, it is possible to determine the phase
difference between the measurements and
thereby determine the type of misalign-
ment (parallel, angular, or a combination of
the two).
Figure 1 shows a typical condition-mon-
itoring system. The data acquired by each
sensor passes through a low-pass filter
(LPF), which eliminates undesired frequency
components a low-noise amplifier and an
analog digital converter. A digital system
(microcontroller or microprocessor) processes
information and transmits it to the remote
cloud server via a wired or wireless network
connection.
Most of the sensors used for this appli-
cation are now manufactured using
microelectromechanical-system (MEMS)
technology to provide extended measurement
ranges and high reliability even in the most
severe operating conditions.
COMMERCIAL-GRADE SENSORS
Analog Devices’ portfolio of MEMS inertial
sensors includes accelerometers, gyroscopes,
and inertial measurement units (IMUs) for
addressing complex application needs. The
company’s ADIS1622 is a highly integrated
vibration-sensing system that combines
triaxial acceleration sensing with advanced
 EE|Times EUROPE 25

Designers Turning to MEMS for Condition Monitoring of Power Devices

A58E_EETime_2_06x9_5.qxd.qxp_Layout 1 1/5

Figure 2: ADIS16228 functional block diagram (Image: Analog Devices)

.18" ht.
Size does
matter!
SURFACE MOUNT
AND PLUG IN
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APPLICATIONS
QPL UNITS STANDARD
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AND INDUCTORS
• Audio Transformers
• Pulse Transformers
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time- and frequency-domain signal process- conversion or signal-conditioning circuits; • Transformers
ing. Time-domain signal processing includes and the devices are robust, highly reliable, • MultiPlex Data
a programmable decimation filter and and small-footprint. Bus Transformers
selectable windowing function (rectangular, STMicroelectronics’ IIS2D , for example, is • Power &
EMI Inductors
anning, or flat top). an ultra-low power, high-performance three-
Frequency-domain processing includes a axis linear accelerometer with digital I2C SPI VISIT OUR EXCITING
512-point, real-valued fast Fourier transform serial-interface standard output (Figure 3). NEW WEBSITE with
(FFT) for each axis, along with FFT averaging, The MEMS accelerometer has user-selectable
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finer resolution. The 1 -record FFT stor- measure accelerations with output data rates
age system offers users the ability to track from 1 z to . k z. Pico Representatives
changes over time and capture FFTs with The device may be configured to generate England
multiple decimation filter settings. interrupt signals by two independent inertial Solid State Supplies/Ginsbury
E-mail: Russell.bennett@sssltd.com
The device, whose functional block diagram wake-up free-fall events as well as by the Phone: 44 1634 298900
is shown in Figure 2, provides a 20. -kSps position of the device itself. Fax: 44 1634 290904
sample rate and -k z flat frequency band, The IIS2D can be configured in three Belgium/Luxemburg/France
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making it suitable for machine-health appli- operating modes (low power, normal, and high
ELCOS/BVBA
cations such as vibration analysis, condition resolution), with power consumption down E-mail: info@elcos.be
monitoring, instrumentation, and diagnostics, to 2 A. Its integrated self-test capability lets Phone: 32 3 218 20 73
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according to the company. users check the functionality of the sensor in
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CAPACITIVE-MEMS BENEFITS The IIS2D is available in a small, thin, E mail: info@elbv.de
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Traditional vibration-sensing instruments plastic land grid array (LGA) package and is Fax: 49 089 460205442
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capacitive MEMS technology is gaining perature range from 0 C to C. ■ 143 Sparks Ave. Pelham, N.Y. 10803
popularity in this field for various reasons info@picoelectronics.com
The frequency response includes DC and has Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff www.picoelectronics.com
great stability over time and temperature the
digital output does not require external A D
correspondent at AspenCore, editor of Power
Electronics News, and editor-in-chief of EEWeb.
800-431-1064

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

26 EE|Times EUROPE
ADVANCED PACKAGING AND ASSEMBLY
EU Project Targets Packaging
for Low-Cost Manufacturing
By Anne-Françoise Pelé
W
hat if the growing demand for
more complex systems and
more advanced packaging,
including optics and photon-
ics, could maintain — or rejuvenate — the
manufacturing and packaging value chain in
Europe? With the Advanced Packaging for
Photonics, Optics and Electronics for Low
Cost Manufacturing in Europe (APPLAUSE)
project, the European Union has made its
ambitions clear.
The internet of things generates demand
for faster connectivity and expanded sensor
capability. To meet the required perfor-
mance, multiple chips are integrated into
one package, together with optics (sensors)
and photonics (interconnects). The increas-
ing heterogeneity of components results
in higher complexity, and eventually, the
package itself becomes an integral part of
the system: Its mechanical, electromagnetic,
and thermal behaviors have an impact on
the overall system’s performance, reliability,
and cost.
“Heterogeneous integration is a key topic,”
said Moritz Stoerring, APPLAUSE project
coordinator and R&D external relations
manager for ICOS Vision Systems N.V., a
division of KLA Corp. “Before, you would
usually have your wafer with all the chips —
not only for sensors but for anything — then
you would cut the wafer into pieces, pick
up each die one by one, and put them into
packages. With wafer-level packaging, you
do most of the packaging process when the
Research sites for the EU’s Advanced Packaging for Photonics, Optics and Electronics for
Low Cost Manufacturing in Europe project. (Image: APPLAUSE)
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
wafer is in one piece. We are further devel-
oping this and trying to integrate photonics
and optics interfaces into this process.”
Coordinated by ICOS Vision Systems, the
APPLAUSE project has 31 partners from 11
countries, including 12 large enterprises, 11
small to mid-size enterprises (SMEs), and
eight research and technology organizations
(RTOs). The €34 million (approximately
US$37.4 million) total budget is co-funded by
the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program as well as national
funding agencies and industries in Belgium,
Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Austria,
France, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Switzer-
land, and Israel, as a part of the Electronics
Components and Systems for European
Leadership joint undertaking.
The three-year project demonstrates
Europe’s ambition to be at the forefront of
sensor research and technology develop-
ment. Its results aim to enable smaller and
more cost-efficient sensors and photonic
interconnects, Stoerring told EE Times
Europe. “Europe is doing well in sensors. A
lot of MEMS, such as accelerometers, gyro-
scopes, [and] light/camera, pressure, and
RF MEMS, are designed and manufactured
in Europe.”
EASIER, FASTER, CHEAPER
The APPLAUSE project focuses on advanced
packaging and assembly technologies for
combined electronics, optics, and photon-
ics. The consortium members will develop
methods, processes, and tools with one
objective in mind: high-volume and low-cost
manufacturability.
Within the key technological building
blocks, the consortium will work on han-
dling and packaging solutions for ultra-thin
wafers and dies, high-precision photonic
packaging, bonding technologies for sensitive
optics components, medical and biocom-
patible photonic packaging, and molding
and 3D integration for optical component
manufacturing. Also on the agenda is the
development of test concepts and test
equipment platforms and failure analysis to
accommodate the reduced device size and
tightened alignment specifications. Members
will also work on proof of high-volume, low-
cost manufacturing capabilities for optics and
will define metrology methods and tools for
advanced packaging.
The technologies will be piloted in six
industrial use cases, which will move
the technology building blocks toward
manufacturability. The first use case, led
by Austria-based ams AG, is a substantially
smaller 3D integrated ambient-light sensor
for mobile and wearable applications. The
second, led by Integrated Detector Electronics
AS, is a high-performance, low-cost, uncooled
thermal IR sensor for automotive and surveil-
lance applications.
For the third use case, Israel-based DustPho-
tonics Ltd. will be in charge of developing
high-speed datacom transceivers with reduced
manufacturing costs. Datacom transceivers
are used to receive and transmit signals, noted
Stoerring. “Optical fibers need to be aligned to
a laser die out, and this alignment is usu-
ally done actively. Here, this should be done
passively, which would make the production
process much easier and faster.”
On the medical front, Precordior OY and
Cardiaccs AS are respectively leading use
cases for the development of a flexible patch
for cardiac monitoring and miniaturized
invasive cardiac sensors. The sixth use case,
led by Finnish company Vaisala Oyj, targets
optical humidity measurement modules with
cost-effective packaging of components.
TECHNOLOGY READINESS
Developed at NASA, technology readiness
levels (TRLs) are a method for estimating the
maturity of technologies during the acquisi-
tion phase of a program. TRLs are based on
a scale from 1 to 9, 9 being the most mature
technology. The APPLAUSE project, depend-
ing on the use case, is between 5 and 7, said
Stoerring. “The developments, ongoing
here, are not basic research but are oriented
toward products,” he said. “There are several
risks in this work therefore, it is difficult to
say how far from commercialization the use
cases will be.”
 EE|Times EUROPE

EU Project Targets Packaging for Low-Cost Manufacturing

Stoerring said that the flexible patch for
cardiac monitoring “could come close to
commercialization,” while the miniaturized
invasive cardiac sensors “would probably
need a lot of medical testing, and that takes
time.” The optical humidity measurement
modules will also need “a lot of testing
afterward.” And, because “the mobile
market goes so fast, the D integrated ambi-
ent-light sensor for mobile and wearable
applications shouldn’t be too long from
commercialization.”
Aiming to enable smaller,
more cost e cient sensors
and photonic interconnects,
the three-year APPLAUSE
project demonstrates
Europe’s ambition to be
at the forefront of sensor
research and technology.
TEST AND MEASUREMENT
ogy equipment, while E Group will work on
wafer-to-wafer bonding “so when we have two
wafers, they can put them very well-aligned
on top of each other,” said Stoerring.
NOW AND AFTER
During the first several months of the project,
the consortium members are defining the
specifications and requirements. “The use
cases have up to 1 partners,” said Stoerring.
“They need to define what is needed from
each partner and provide advanced draft
specifications. Several suppliers know in
which direction they are going and are already
working on feasibility. The use-case work is
starting now.”
Once the three-year project is finalized,
Stoerring said, “the use-case partners will
potentially have a demonstrator prototype
using cutting-edge innovative technology
that will be commercialized.” The other
industry partners, including many semi-
conductor suppliers, will have developed
technology enabling the use cases (e.g.,
process equipment, materials, and process
control equipment). “This technology will C
also be commercialized,” said Stoerring.
M
Finally, RTOs will have developed new
methods and processes. Academic researchers Y

Because there is no technology without will then be able to “bring this new knowledge
CM

measurements, no quality without testing, to the industry,” he said. ■

MY
RoodMicrotec Gmb will lead the Testing,
Reliability, Failure Analysis Metrology work Anne-Françoise Pelé is editor-in-chief CY

package. KLA will supply inspection metrol- of eetimes.eu. CMY

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www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

 FEATURE STORY

How New Sensor Capabilities

Enable Faster Adoption of IoT
Technologies for the Smart
ome, Office, and Factory
By Félix Marchal, Vice President of Global Application Marketing and Business Development, ams AG

B
uzzwords such as “smart home” or “smart factory” have entered the vocabulary of the electronics industry,
even though there is no agreed-upon definition of what they mean. Luckily, there is a widely held consen-
sus that the “smartness” implies a high degree of automation and personalization. In the smart home, for
instance, the living room of the future is a blend of an app, the cloud, and a sensor This might be realized
through a cloud-connected application enablement platform (AEP), which has trained itself to know the lighting,
sound, entertainment, fragrance, heating, and ventilation preferences of each family member and automatically
adjusts each setting depending on who is in the room.

IMAGE S UTTERSTOCK

New Sensor Capabilities Enable Faster Adoption of IoT Technologies
The smart-home scenario will provide users with a more com-
fortable environment precisely tuned to their preferences while
reducing energy waste or water usage, eliminating the need for what
will become old-fashioned user controls such as light switches and
thermostats.
This vision responds to users’ desire for an IoT system that is invis-
ible and automated. Just by walking into the room, the user would
trigger the heating, ventilation, sound, lighting, and other systems to
change their settings.
Figure 1: Smart-home features today are often discretely managed
or still visible to the user. Key technological developments are need-
ed to realize the autonomous smart home. (Image: iStock.com/ams AG)
While some luxury accommodations might offer many of these fea-
tures today, the features are often discretely managed or still visible
to the user (Figure 1). What are the key technological developments
needed to realize the vision of an autonomous smart home? Machine
learning and sophisticated software hosted in the cloud will be cru-
cial. Another important element is the ability to sense a huge range of
real-world phenomena so that machines can respond to the world in
the same way that a human does.
This will require a host of new, intelligent sensors. This article out-
lines new sensor capabilities that will enable IoT-based technology to
provide personalized and intelligently configurable operation. It also
suggests applications in which they are likely to be deployed.
THE CLOUD IS NOTHING WITHOUT DATA
Cloud-connected IoT technologies are already transforming the
efficiency, responsiveness, and convenience of common systems and
services. In the smart-city domain, Uber’s taxi-on-demand service is a
prime example, showing how coordinated user requests and real-time
data processed through sophisticated algorithms in the cloud can
transform transportation usage and patterns.
More generally, the IoT will trigger the deployment of millions of
cloud-connected services, performing the trick of combining multiple,
disparate streams of data to provide personalized, prompt service.
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
In discussions about the proliferation of IoT technologies, the focus
has understandably been on technologies and systems for connecting
nodes to the cloud, as well as the analytics capabilities required to
make sense of the big-data input from user devices and other types of
IoT nodes.
But what makes cloud-based intelligence useful and efficient is
usable data input. A large part of the data input to cloud systems will
EE|Times EUROPE 29
come from sensors, many of which are not yet installed, and some of
which have not even been invented. In lighting systems, for example,
smart automation requires highly accurate information about the
spectral composition and intensity of ambient light. Likewise, smart
ventilation systems need to “smell” the air that users are breathing
and analyze it. Smart traffic controls need to “see” and locate vehicles
on the roads to maintain safe operation and keep traffic flowing.
In other words, sensors play a “human” role: to see, smell, feel,
and hear what is happening in the real world in real time. In that
sense, sensor technology and solutions are as much at the frontier
of IoT technology as low-power radio ICs and cloud computing
systems are. And these sensors must be precise, highly accurate, and
always reliable.
SMART LIGHTING CONTROL
Traditional, manual lighting controls are limited in their scope to
turning a light on or off and dimming it.
Sensor-driven smart lighting embedded in an IoT infrastructure
promises to transform the user’s experience of lighting. One of
the most interesting use cases of smart lighting is “human-centric
lighting,” a concept grounded in the belief that the spectral con-
tent of artificial light has an important impact on users’ health or
well-being.
It is important to note that human-centric lighting is an emerging
field, and the science underlying functions such as blue-light suppres-
sion at night is not yet proven. Nevertheless, research has indicated a
connection between the spectral content of light and well-being, the
result of the body’s method for regulating its circadian rhythm. Bright
blue daylight triggers hormonal responses that awaken the body,
and the golden yellow of dusk or of firelight prompts relaxation and
restful behavior.
As a result, some users are concerned about exposure to specific
wavelengths of blue light in sources such as white LEDs. To regulate
the color of artificial lighting, some early smart-lighting implemen-
tations have used simple RGB color sensors or XYZ color sensors
(such as the TCS3430), which provide more accurate measurements
of chromaticity than RGB sensors offer. Today, lighting equipment
manufacturers are successfully implementing human-centric lighting
with the accurate color measurements provided by an XYZ color
sensor. Spectral analysis provides more detailed information about
a luminaire’s light output and ambient light for even tighter control
Figure 2: Spectral measurements obtained by an AS7350 sensor
(Image: iStock.com/ams AG)
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
30 EE|Times EUROPE
New Sensor Capabilities Enable Faster Adoption of IoT Technologies
Figure 3: A 3D infrared depth map enables accurate facial
recognition in a wide variety of operating conditions.
(Image: iStock.com/ams AG)
of the effect of lighting on health and well-being. And now, ams has
introduced a device, the chip-scale AS7350, which is small enough to
be embedded into any type of lighting fixture.
In tunable white-lighting fixtures, the spectral information pro-
vided by the AS7350 allows for the dynamic configuration of light
output in combination with ambient light to provide a user-spec-
ified spectral power distribution. Using spectral measurements
obtained by an AS7350 sensor mounted in a luminaire or control
panel, tunable white lighting can be made to mimic the natural
change in the spectrum of sunlight throughout the course of the
day, in a range from a strong skew toward blue hues in the hours
before and after midday to rich, golden yellow with reduced blue
content toward dusk (Figure 2).
Likewise, elderly people have less visual acuity in the blue end of
the visible light spectrum when compared with the young. To properly
see objects with strong blue content, the elderly need lighting that
emphasizes blue wavelengths. In a home shared by adults and one or
more elderly parents, for example, the lighting controls could produce
a personalized spectral output tuned to their different needs.
KNOWING WHO THE USER IS
IoT systems such as smart lighting can also benefit from another
advanced sensor technology to heighten the sense of automatic
operation: 3D optical face recognition. This optical technology, suc-
cessfully used in smartphones today, could register the identity of a
user and set operating parameters unique to them — for instance, by
adjusting the spectral content of the lighting to reflect the prefer-
ences of the occupant(s).
The operation of 3D sensing has already been proven to be reliable
in phones, achieving very low false-acceptance and false-recognition
rates. Increasingly, integrated chip-scale or modular solutions for 3D
face recognition are coming onto the market for use in any electronics
system, not only the mobile phone.
For example, the various infrared vertical-cavity surface-emitting
laser (VCSEL) emitters and IR photodetectors from ams are offered as
complete solutions, including the optical stack, and with software for
depth-mapping and face recognition configured to run on the Android
mobile operating platform (Figure 3).
2019| |www.eetimes.eu
NOVEMBER2020
FEBRUARY www.eetimes.eu
Integrated solutions from ams substantially reduce development
and production time and risk compared with assemblies of discrete
components, and they occupy a smaller area. These compact 3D sys-
tems for face recognition can therefore be embedded in a wide variety
of smart-building or smart-factory systems.
For example, face recognition could enable a resident’s home to
open the gate or front door when it recognizes the face of any resi-
dent, or other registered users, such as caretakers.
3D face-authentication technology could also be used to make
shopping a quicker and more convenient experience. In a supermar-
ket, for instance, the shopper might select goods from the shelves
and place them in the caddy. Upon exiting the shop, wireless scanners
would automatically log the products that the shopper is buying and
authenticate payment by matching the shopper’s face to a previously
registered D image, then automatically generate a bill in the user’s
bank account.
The capabilities of infrared optical sensing will even stretch beyond
face recognition to support more IoT use cases. IR single-dimension
(1D) time-of-flight (ToF) sensors are used today for accurate ranging
— for instance, to support the auto-focus function in cameras. Just as
in 3D face recognition, advanced VCSEL emitter technology and IR
photosensing capability can be integrated into miniature modules to
be embedded in almost any type of device.
The job of cleaning the interior of a building, for example, has
for decades resisted engineers’ efforts at automation and remains a
largely manual chore. ToF ranging sensors, however, could form a cru-
cial element in future robotic solutions that can autonomously learn
the layout of a house and then efficiently program the robot’s route
around each room, avoiding walls, steps, cables, and other obstacles.
NEW INNOVATIONS IN SILICON AND SOFTWARE
Many electronic product manufacturers have plans to introduce new
versions of their products that offer users the benefits of integration
into IoT infrastructure. Quite reasonably, they are often most con-
cerned with the difficulties of implementing data communication and
data analytics and of providing end users with valuable applications
hosted in the cloud.
New solutions to these problems are continually being brought
to market. But of equal significance to IoT device manufacturers are
the developments in sensor technology that are going to support a
new generation of smart, personalized systems in applications such
as home and building automation and lighting. These new sensor
types are characterized by their use of semiconductor technology to
achieve high measurement performance in a small footprint and by
their integration of peripheral components and of software to provide
complete solutions for sophisticated applications such as spectral
sensing and facial recognition.
Advanced sensor technology and solutions are thus at the leading
edge of technology developments for the IoT — and it is a field in
which ams continues to play a leading role. ■
Félix Marchal is vice president of
global application marketing and
business development for the Home
and Building Automation/IoT market
at ams. He is a leading expert in IoT/
M2M, with 28 years of experience in
the semiconductor and telecommuni-
cations industries. Before joining ams,
he worked for 12 years as executive vice
president for global sales and market-
in as e as c ie prod ct o cer or
Telit Communications, and led both direct and indirect sales teams for
n neon and e as nstr ents.
www.eetimes.eu | NOVEMBER 2019
 EE|Times EUROPE 31

MEMORY

Memory with Integrated Secure

Element Ensures More Data Security
By Hubertus Grobbel, Head of the Security Products Division, Swissbit AG

Car security no longer relates to function alone. Whether infotainment system,

on-board electronics, or system architecture for autonomous driving, a car is a rolling
IT network. Manufacturers increasingly need to take responsibility for data and com-
nication sec rit . ere e or and sec rit specia ists offer ne approac es.

In the future, infotainment systems

will perform increasingly more
tasks. (Image: Fotolia)

I
n 2015, Audi AG, BMW Group, and Daimler AG paid a total of a flash memory chip, an optional SmartCard, and a flash controller. Its
2. billion to take over Nokia’s geodata company. The significance special firmware with integrated AES and AS algorithms allows a
of navigation systems at the advent of autonomous driving couldn’t multitude of secure application scenarios.
be emphasized more clearly. Exact positioning is required for highly The optionally integrated avaCard SmartCard is certified as per
automated and even autonomous driving. For this, the most import- Common Criteria Level EAL . The combination of the identifier with
ant components are the accuracy of GNSS Galileo, expected at final
completion, and high-quality maps. Maps from HERE (previously Nokia,
previously NAVTEQ) are, according to the company, already used in four
out of five car-navigation systems in Europe and North America. The
investment in 2015 and all additional participations made since then
seem to have been worthwhile. But how are navigation systems pro-
tected from software pirates? Do licensees use the technical possibilities
available to protect data sufficiently The answer is probably no.
Usually, SD memory cards are employed to load map data into a
navigation system. Generally, the data image on those is encrypted
— but only using software. This type of copy protection is appar-
ently relatively easy to bypass, as the content encryption key must
be derived somehow from the publicly readable card identifier on
the very same card. An attacker — not knowing the encryption key
— clones a card fully, i.e., copies the encrypted content and clones
the card identifier. This is the reality in the age of the internet. Never
mind license or counterfeit protection or the option of a reliable
central license inventory.
Copy protection, on the other hand, requires a hidden authentication
feature that cannot be pirated. There are already solutions that use
flash memory cards in the field. Swissbit specializes in durable memory
products for industrial use with long-term availability and offers mem- Design of a secure microSD Memory Card with Secure Element
ory cards with security features. These secure memory cards combine (Image: Swissbit)

NOVEMBER 2019 | www.eetimes.eu www.eetimes.eu

www.eetimes.eu| |NOVEMBER
FEBRUARY 2019
2020
32 EE|Times EUROPE

Memory with Integrated Secure Element Ensures More Data Security

standard data memory offers a technically
elegant solution. Tap-proof mobile phones,
bodycams, and counterfeit-proof cash
registers are already secured with this type
of card. The simplicity of distribution and
content loading will not suffer. A high-res-
olution map update would be a stress test
— performance- and cost-wise — for mobile
data plans. ome loading or simple drop-in
replacement by a mechanic guarantees the
required simplicity.
AN APPROACH WITH POTENTIAL
Using flash memory modules with Secure
Element offers direct benefits such as
gaining control of navigation system
data and being able to ensure compliance
with license terms. Yet additionally, this
approach offers a broad range of applica-
tion scenarios relating to data protection
and cybersecurity in cars. Infotainment
systems are platforms that offer a base
for further communications services.
These systems are becoming increasingly
important as an interface to ICT devices
and the internet. When offering charge-
able services for this, receiving valuable
media content, paying toll charges, or
supporting e-charging use cases, the
issue of unique identity and, thus, a
secure authentication entity arises again.
ere, memory cards with an integrated
SmartCard offer the ideal solution as well
— especially because they can be securely
paired with the vehicle and replaced so
easily when necessary. Careful consider-
ation should be taken before abandoning
an SD card reader as an interface on
infotainment devices. Using the relevant
cards, new functions can be retrofitted and continuously secured at
the highest cryptographical level.
SECURITY AS A SAFETY ASPECT
In recent years, increasingly greater networking within and outside the
car — for instance, Car2Car Communication — has made security in the
sense of defending cyberattacks a subject for debate, mainly against the
background of possible effects on functional security. The suggestion
to use memory modules with Secure Element, introduced here, is also
(Image: Fotolia)
interesting regarding data traffic in elec-
trical car systems. The communication of
electronic control units (ECUs) via bus sys-
tems could be encrypted if, for example, an
embedded multimedia controller (eMMC)
with Secure Element serves as a Trusted
Platform Module at the nodes. Thanks
to this authentication feature, the risk of
tampering with in-vehicle communications
can be averted.
In the car, there are two categories of
The communication of ECUs via bus functional safety security-related and
systems could be encrypted if, for example, non-security related. This distinction
an eMMC with Secure Element serves as is generally made so that, for example,
a Trusted Platform Module at the nodes. the infotainment system has no access to
(Image: Swissbit) safety-related systems on the platform. Yet
even for the non-safety related elements,
the option to provide for flexible and sus-
tainable cybersecurity is required because
the life cycle of cars can easily exceed 10
years. By then, many as-yet-not-obvious
requirements will need to be fulfilled,
such as toll collection, billing of e-charges,
chargeable value-added media services,
subscriptions for updates of navigation
map data, and much more. The added value
of the infotainment system will increase as
it performs increasingly more important
tasks. On the other hand, automotive IT
systems will be exposed to increasingly
more sophisticated attacks over time.
For security reasons and as a pre-
A secure replaceable storage medium, such caution, a flexible, replaceable Secure
as the SD Memory Card from Swissbit, Element in a memory card should be
would be a suitable solution to keep the se- provided for the protection of future
curity of an infotainment system up to date business. The British Standards Insti-
during the life cycle of a car. (Image: Swissbit) tution (BSI) requires the consistent
application of state-of-the-art technology,
which cannot be achieved for security
solutions that are several years old and especially purely based on
software security, which offers the required flexibility but never the
required long-term security. Therefore, it is advisable to maintain the
option of a replaceable hardware security module. Another benefit in
addition to easy modification and retrofitting Different software-de-
pendent configurations of the same model are easy to manage. All
variants are configured, and with the help of Secure Element on the
memory card, the ones purchased by the customer are activated — an
effective way to simplify the variant diversity in production. And
when deciding between a soldered and removable flash memory, the
negative effect on the durability of the NAND chips in the memory
modules, caused by a combination of frequent access and challenging
thermal conditions in the car, should be considered. This means that
for memory cards that cannot be replaced by a mechanic, significantly
more expensive solutions need to be found.
The protection of maps using memory cards with a security feature
is just one example of an application in which the combination of
memory card and SmartCard allows for a higher degree of control
and security. When edging toward information and communication
technology and consumer electronics, other security considerations,
development cycles, and market mechanisms prevail other than in
automobile manufacturing thus, the use of a replaceable standard
element offers the option to create a high level of security using
hardware-based cryptography while remaining permanently flexible
regarding the integration of additional services. ■

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 EE|Times EUROPE 33

TTA AT CES

Taiwan Tech Arena Takes Record 2 Startups

to CES 2020
By Nitin Dahad

F
or the third year in a row, Taiwan had a significant
presence at one of the biggest electronics trade
fairs in the world CES 2020. A delegation of 2
startups, led by the Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA), came
to Las egas to present technologies and scout investment
partners. It was TTA’s largest delegation to date, and col-
lectively, the startups signed more than US$226 million in
business opportunities, the trade group said.
“We have 2 startup teams covering three areas
artificial intelligence, smart technologies, and health
care,” Yu-Chin su, deputy minister for Taiwan’s Ministry
of Science and Technology, told EE Times Europe in an
interview at CES. su emphasized the need for Taiwan and
its startups to be connected to the global tech ecosystem
in all key markets and applications, which is why an inter-
national trade fair like CES is a valuable platform for these
companies. “We believe that in the future in the AI age,
there will be a lot of our startups that become important.” The Taiwan Tech Arena is building connections with global organizations to
In addition to promoting its leading startups over- help their own startups with international expansion and growth. (Image: TTA)
seas and connecting them to the global tech ecosystem,
Taiwan’s government works hard to ensure strong
collaboration between academia and industry, given that so much ere, we highlight some of the companies that we spoke to while
leading-edge research is carried out at Taiwan’s research insti- visiting the TTA booth at CES 2020.
tutes. Chiou Chyou- uey, director general of the Department of
Academia-Industry Collaboration and Science Park Affairs for the HIPPOSCREEN NEUROTECH
Ministry of Science and Technology, told us at CES that the ministry A rapid, objective depression diagnosis system
encourages industry-academia collaboration “by providing incentives, ipposcreen Neurotech has developed a diagnostic tool to rapidly pro-
mentors, mature business models, and business plan support.” vide an objective indicator of a patient’s mental health. Its brain health
Support for academics sometimes extends to funding “to take their assessment system combines an electroencephalogram (EEG) record-
scientific research to more mature products or services,” he added. ing system and AI algorithm to provide doctors with a way of rapidly
“Taiwan Tech Arena is a good hub to connect to the international measuring key indicators. Using eight EEG electrodes to capture brain
market or international resources. Taiwan is very competitive in waves as input signals to an EEG amplifier, it uses an AI algorithm in
terms of talent and technology. That’s the reason why we bring a the cloud to perform feature extraction and data analysis. Doctors can
large delegation to CES.” then view the results via a web portal within about two minutes.
TTA supports startups by providing funding and a platform to grow “We built this system to help doctors to carry out depression diag-
their businesses. At CES, for example, it gave startups in the health- nosis, to save time, and the doctor can also use this report to explain
care industry the opportunity to highlight how AI will improve quality matters to the patient more easily and provide more accurate assess-
of life. The startups that presented at CES 2020 are trying to disrupt ment results,” a company rep told us at CES. The stress EEG assessment
current markets and push the boundaries of innovation. (SEA) system addresses the growing prevalence of major depressive
disorder (MDD) and is expected to be used as an indicator of the
volume of MDD cases. The SEA system can achieve accuracy of higher
than 0 on the EEG datasets collected as a result of collaboration
between the department of psychiatry at National Taiwan University
ospital and arvard Medical School (McLean ospital).

Hipposcreen’s AI-based SEA system assesses mental health.
(Image: Hipposcreen Neurotech)
ENOSIM BIO-TECH
An ‘electronic nose’ chip to detect disease
Enosim Bio-Tech has developed a real-time monitoring breath detection
and analysis system to identify the presence of biomarkers for ventila-
tor-associated pneumonia ( AP) and other diseases. The core technology
is a low-power-consumption nose-on-a-chip with software, integrated
sensors, interface circuits, processors, and memory. The system analyzes
data from a patient’s breath via the electronic nose to detect markers for
known diseases within its dataset. It overcomes environmental interfer-
ence using a neuromorphic recognition algorithm.
Whereas traditional gas-sensing solutions are single-sensor systems,

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34 EE|Times EUROPE
Taiwan Tech Arena Takes Record 82 Startups to CES 2020
Enosim Bio-Tech’s breath analyzer screens for disease in real time.
(Image: Enosim Bio-Tech)
the e-nose uses multiple sensors to classify a gas. These sensors are
combined into an array for odor recognition, and each of the combi-
nations represents a different odor. Compared with traditional gas
analysis instruments, such as gas chromatography/mass spectrometry
and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, the e-nose system is
easier to operate and to miniaturize.
The company said, “We are developing new technology to provide
fast screening of diseases by using your breath. If you have cancer or
cancer cells, you have bacteria [that] have multiple metabolisms, and
there will be components [of these] existing in your breath. We are
trying to detect these molecules.”
Hurdles to commercialization remain, including size and cost. Enosim’s
electronic nose has been in development for more than 10 years, and its
researchers are looking to break through the technological bottlenecks.
VAP refers to a bacterial lung infection that can occur in inten-
sive-care units (ICUs) when a patient has been treated with a respirator
for more than 48 hours. VAP is the most common nosocomial infection
in ICUs, and the rate of infection is about 7% to 14%. The mortality rate
can reach anywhere from 35% to 90%. Therefore, there is an unmet
medical need for rapid AP identification in ICU environments.
RELAJET TECH
Helping people hear clearly in noisy environments
RelaJet Tech has developed the R1898 DSP, a complete solution for
over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. The company has an AI-based
acoustic fingerprinting engine that carries out edge processing on
hearing aids. It said that the engine can extract human voice charac-
teristics within 10 milliseconds and amplify them so that people with
hearing difficulties can hear individual speakers in noisy environments.
“Our key technology is what we call speech separation,” said a company
spokesperson. “We can separate the human voice from environmental
noise within a millisecond using our DSP.”
Through just three to five seconds of a recording, Relajet’s solution
can label a specific voice, divide it, and enhance it in real time, the
company said. It can also cancel certain sounds and noise and remove
them in real time. Finally, it can convert 2D sound into 3D by analyz-
ela et ech’s hearing aid solution lters out environmental
noise. (Image: RelaJet Tech)
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
ing the sound and the environment and then simulating 3D surround
sound with its engine so that the user can “hear the space.”
TAIWAN USER-FRIENDLY SENSOR & TECHNOLOGY
Rapid detection of allergens in food
Existing point-of-care devices for food allergen detection can detect
gluten levels over 20 ppm but lack the ability to quantify smaller con-
centrations. Taiwan User-Friendly Sensor & Technology has developed
a point-of-care device based on connected electrochemical sensors that
can quantify targets below 10 ppm for multiple proteins simultane-
ously. With its rapid extraction techniques, the device can read out data
in less than two minutes and for just a few dollars per test, compared
with the thousands of dollars and several hours required to carry out
the gold-standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests
for allergens in food.
The solution consists of a handheld product that can extract allergens
from food and an electronic keychain reader for sensing allergens. The
reader connects wirelessly to a smartphone to communicate the results.
“Our company is providing a food allergen detection device that provides
Taiwan User-Friendly Sensor & Technology screens food for
allergens in minutes, at just a few dollars per test. (Image: Taiwan
User-Friendly Sensor & Technology)
very quick detection,” said co-founder and CTO Hsing-Yi Lin. With
current, lab-based detection techniques, “detection takes four hours, but
using our technology, we can detect allergens within two minutes.”
SWR TECHNOLOGY
E ective wireless power for smart G connected devices
SWR Technology has a solution that can deliver up to 65 W of wireless
power through windows, enabling faster deployment of 5G connected
smart devices within homes and buildings in the artificial intelligence
of things (AIoT) world.
In one application, its system solution, developed with RF IC
echnology delivers mid distance ireless po er or G.
(Image: SWR Technology)
 EE|Times EUROPE 35

Taiwan Tech Arena Takes Record 82 Startups to CES 2020

provider MaxLinear, can deliver more than a 1-Gbps symmetrical data

rate and up to 35 W of wireless power through triple-silver-coated,
low-emissivity (low-e) glass windows up to 35 mm thick. The design
allows G fixed wireless broadband (FWB) service providers to deploy
gigabit broadband speeds using millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum.
With SWR’s solution, consumers can self-install small indoor/outdoor
devices in the corner of a window, without drilling holes, running new
cables, or contracting with a professional installer. The small, low-
profile form factor enables aesthetically pleasing designs that will not
obstruct views through the window, according to the company.
SWR Technology’s wireless power module uses a proprietary
high-tolerance resonance transfer technology to transmit 20 W
through standard or triple-silver-coated low-e glass up to 35 mm thick.
CEO Shengming Shan told us, “SWR Technology is a mid-distance
wireless power technology company. At CES, we are looking to find a lot Mindtronic AI’s DMS and DMX interaction platform send driver
of great partners that could enlarge and change people’s expectations data to ADAS. (Image: Mindtronic AI)
and user experience with wireless power.”
The company offers a standalone DMS board for direct integration
MINDTRONIC AI with a vehicle’s dashboard system, as well as a software development
Embedded systems for automotive-cockpit DMS kit for integrating into any embedded hardware system. Mindtronic
Mindtronic AI, a startup with a focus on human-machine interaction, AI’s solution is already validated in a vehicle use case. Its adaptive
designs ultra-light embedded computer-vision algorithms serving algorithm guarantees high-quality image acquisition in adverse light-
a wide range of applications. At CES, the company demonstrated its ing conditions, and the algorithms work in concert with the adaptive
expertise in automotive AI solutions with its cockpit driver-monitoring near-infrared (NIR) array and allow the DMS to deliver constant,
system (DMS) and interaction platform, the DMX. The solution utilizes noise-resistant, quality output to the car system, according to the
high-quality biometric technology for a luxury user interface, plus a company. The acquisition speed and quality are enabled by a high-per-
DMS that assesses a driver’s cognition, and connects that data to the formance, ultra-lightweight deep-learning framework design for
vehicle’s advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). low-power embedded systems.

Taiwanese Startups Look to Expand into Europe

he show is o ten used y startups and high growth emerging companies to e pand into international markets. ere we
highlight some o the aiwanese companies that were at speci cally looking or opportunities to e pand into urope.

CARKIT AI INC.
Focus: Automotive
Website: www.carkit-ai.com
Carkit’s Roxie is a plug-and-play mobile
karaoke pod for cars. It comes with a
powerful ambient microphone that lets
drivers and passengers sing along to
their favorite songs hands-free. Roxie
works with any music from any music
player on an iPhone or Android phone.
It supports Apple Music and Spotify.
MINDTRONIC AI
Focus: Automotive
Website: www.mindtronicai.com/
Mindtronic AI enables the wide adop-
tion of AI by simplifying the design
process of AI-embedded devices in the
automotive industry. See main article
for details on the company.
FACEHEART
Focus: Health care
Website: www.faceheart.com/
Most of the health-monitoring prod-
ucts currently on the market are
general monitors or wearable devices;
relatively few are AI-enabled. Face-
Heart’s Face A-Ma uses facial detection
to monitor heartbeat, heart rate
variation, and blood pressure without
requiring the user to wear a device,
enabling contactless methods to detect
and integrate physiological informa-
tion. Working with various hospitals
and medical professionals, FaceHeart
has assembled a symptoms database
and is working on professional clinical
trials or effective disease prediction.
he developers aim to add more A
functionality over time to enable better
health care.
IBLE TECHNOLOGY
Focus: Health care
Website: www.airvida.co
he i le Airvida weara le air puri er is
thought to be the smallest air puri-
er in the world ut its unctions are
still very powerful, according to the
company. Its battery life is 28+ hours,
while its negative ion output equals
that “of 100 waterfalls.” Negative ions
are neutralized by positive ions in the
air, so the distance is a key factor in
an air puri er s per ormance. he
compact Airvida was designed to be
worn very close to the user’s face.
Finally, because of the compact size
of the air-purifying solution, the Air-
vida product designers were able to
achieve a fashionable accessory that
people will want to wear.
LESSDO
Focus: Smart tech for personal care
Website: www.lessdo.com.tw/?lang=en
LESSDO says its competitors are
traditional personal-care companies
such as Unilever, DHC, and LUSH.
he company provides a highly
customized and modularized solu-
tion for people to make their own
cleaning products at home, easily
and sa ely. he traditional soap mak-
ing process is accomplished with one
machine and four-step ingredient
packages provided by LESSDO. “We
provide service by demand and
produce by demand,” the company
states.

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

36 EE|Times EUROPE

Taiwan Tech Arena Takes Record 82 Startups to CES 2020

LIXEL We are still developing this market, and of course, we will work very
3D images without special headsets closely with our partners to develop new applications.”
Addressing opportunities for presenting 3D visual images without the
need for special glasses or headsets, Lixel has developed a technology NESTECH
called D floating image with interaction. The approach uses a light Smart access control systems
field and Lixel’s patented Nestech combines edge computing and AI to develop smart access con-
flat display, which can be trol systems. At CES, the company showed its smart building control
viewed with the naked system and smart hazard-detection system to enable both management
eye and features oblique and safety for the hospitality and property management industries.
viewing and interaction Nestech provides complete turnkey solutions for intelligent cities,
capability. hotel automation, smart homes, intelligent offices, and other potential
The development is
rooted in the founders’
collective expertise in
light field technology
and aims to make images
more natural, intelligent,
Lixel enables 3D without glasses and and responsive. Lixel’s
adds touch interactivity. (Image: Lixel) technology and hardware
can be integrated into
products to provide more natural vision and more intuitive interac-
tion experiences.
Potential uses for the technology include virtual assistants and com-
munication, infotainment applications within cars (floating buttons
to enhance safety and navigation), gaming and entertainment, online
advertisement, and online shopping. Lixel’s technology can be used in
everything from general displays to consumer electronics and profes- Nestech enables smart access control and hazard detection for
sional displays, such as in laptops, smartphones, and game consoles. smart cities and structures. (Image: Nestech)
A spokesperson for Lixel told EE Times Europe, “We develop new
technologies beyond 2D, including vision and touch technology. We uses of smart connected devices. It specializes in system integration for
bring the D floating image into action. The main purpose to come to internet of things (IoT) device and system development, as well as AIoT
CES is to introduce our D technology to the world, because CES is a systems. ■
very important show in the entire world.
“This year, we will push ourselves to develop and release our product. Nitin Dahad is a staff correspondent at AspenCore.

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

Technical Magazine for the Embedded Systems Designer February 2020

COVER STORY:
Miniaturize Current Sensing for
Efficient Power-Conversion Systems
PAGE 38
38 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert
SENSORS
Miniaturize Current Sensing for Efficient
Power-Conversion Systems
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio
T
he future of power electronics requires the evolution of mod-
ern energy-conversion systems to make them more efficient,
cheaper, and smaller than their predecessors. Such systems
require accurate current measurement. Open-loop all-
effect sensors are often used for this purpose: A conductor produces a
magnetic field comparable to the current that is then concentrated by a
magnetic core and measured by the all sensor.
Recent introductions of custom ASIC solutions have helped to
increase measurement accuracy. The evolution of ASIC technology has
paved the way for the development of open-loop all-effect sensors
that match the performance of closed-loop technology.
OPEN- VS. CLOSED-LOOP SENSORS
Open-loop current sensors (Figures 1 and 2) consist of a all sensor
mounted in the air space of a magnetic core. They measure both AC and
DC and provide electrical isolation between the input and output sec-
tions, with the galvanic isolation ensuring non-contact measurement.
The amplified all signal represents the sensor output. Open-loop
sensors are usually less expensive than other options, and their low
operating-power requirements and small footprint suit them for use in
battery-powered circuits. Their disadvantage is that they can be prone
to saturation and temperature drift.
Figure 1 illustrates the principles behind the all current sensor.
The magnetic flux produced in proportion to the primary current,
If, induced in the magnetic circuit, passes through the all element
inserted in the gap of the magnetic circuit, resulting in a potential
difference, h, expressed by the formula shown in the figure.
Closed-loop current sensors offer fast response, high linearity, and
low temperature drift, with low output noise, suiting them for applica-
tions requiring exact measurements. The closed-loop sensor takes the
concepts of the open-loop version and adds a secondary winding to the
output. The closed-loop device is sometimes called a “zero flux” sensor
Figure 1: The physics of the Hall effect (Image: Tamura)
Figure 2: Hall-effect open-loop current sensor (Image: LEM)
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
Figure 3: Layout of a backup power supply system monitor with
open-loop technology (Image: Honeywell)
because it feeds an opposite current into a secondary coil, wound on
the magnetic core, to zero the flux produced in the magnetic core by
the primary current.
The output current of a closed-loop sensor is converted into a
voltage value by connecting a resistor to the sensor output and ground.
Selecting the resistor value may result in the output being resized.
The choice of technology, whether open- or closed-loop all-effect
or some other type, will largely depend on the particular constraints of
the application (Figure 3).
LEM’S HMSR SERIES
LEM’s new MSR series of miniature integrated-circuit sensors for AC
and DC isolated-current measurement can handle overload current
bursts of up to 20 kA. LEM tailored the series to meet the market demand
for cost reduction, performance improvements, and miniaturization.
The sensors include a low-resistance primary conductor to minimize
power losses and ensure ease of use. The sensor ASIC and ferrite
G
magnetic element enable direct current
measurements and maintain insulation
performance.
The MSR series uses a proprietary
W
open-circuit all-effect ASIC combined
with a single low-resistance primary
conductor to minimize power loss,
allowing measurement of direct current
and high-transient-overload current
without damage. Manufactured as SO16
surface-mount devices, they measure Figure 4: LEM HMSR
6 mm high and can be mounted directly 20-SMS (Image: LEM)
onto the PCB using the same process
used for other board-level components, saving cost and space. An inte-
grated E2PROM is used for internal temperature compensation and to T
counteract offset and gain drift through compensation.
The use of ferrite for the magnetic element enables a high-frequency •
bandwidth of 2 0 k z ( dB) and provides excellent rejection against
external fields, according to LEM. The mechanical design of the sensor
results in dispersion and clearance of 8 mm when using materials with •
a comparative tracking index (CTI) of 600, allowing for reinforced insu-
lation according to IEC 60 0-1, the company said.
MSR sensors’ unique primary conductor allows an overload of pri-
mary currents and a high level of insulation. The ferrite-based circuit
provides the requisite immunity against the inhomogeneous fields
present in various power electronics applications, such as solar panels.
EMB_A
 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert 39

iniat ri e C rrent ensin or cient o er Con ersion ste s

Built-in overcurrent detection (OCD) units separate the control appli-

cation path to the safety loop. With two separate OCD units, the sensor
can monitor overload and short-circuit events simultaneously.
The protection and detection features of the MSR series target
AC or motor-driven applications. For solar-industry applications,
which need to be surge-tolerant to provide adequate lightning protec-
tion, LEM has designed and tested the MSR to deliver the required
performance per the standard 20- s surge test profile.
LEM provides an MSR evaluation board for quick prototyping and
test (Figure 4).

TAMURA’S L32P SERIES

Tamura produces current sensors based on all- and fluxgate-effect
technology. The company states that the high accuracy and mechanical
robustness of its open- and closed-loop products make it a world leader
together with LEM and oneywell in all industrial sectors. Driver modules
complete the product range for driving silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET
IGBT and DC DC isolated converters.
Tamura’s solutions feature fast response times high-frequency
operation with minimal internal temperature rise excellent d dt
noise immunity magnetic field stability and sulfur-proof options,
depending on customer application requirements (Figure 5).
The company’s L 2PxxxS0 (B)FS series of open-loop sensors
uses a ferrite core for PCB mounting design. eat generation due to
high-frequency current is reduced with a wide electrical current range
(saturation current of 1 0 to 600 A).
The use of electronic controls for engine, transmission, and wheel
speed control in vehicles and industrial systems continues to rise,
Figure 5: Tamura’s lineup (Image: Tamura)
driven by regulatory and market mandates to improve efficiency and
safety. The control of these systems requires robust magnetic sensors
that can operate reliably in harsh environments. A frequent challenge
is the presence of common-mode noise and interference, which can
limit measurement. Wear and tear on the gears can also lead to a
reduction or loss of control signals.
The use of all sensors addresses these problems. Sensor performance
can be significantly improved by incorporating them into a system and
leveraging synergistic relationships as feedback and compensation. ■
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff correspondent at AspenCore
editor o o er ectronics e s and editor in c ie o e .

Giant steps.
With us.
Hall 1 | Booth 578 | 25 - 27 February 2020

TQ-Embedded and our strong alliances.

• Experience the wide array of our newest embedded
modules and solutions.
• Including the latest processors from our outstanding
technology partners.

Learn more – live or online

tq-group.com/together

EMB_Anz_boards&solutions_2-2020_216x154_Rev100.indd 1 29.01.20 14:18

40 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert
SYSTEMS-ON-CHIP
Intel Cryogenic Chip to Facilitate Development
of uantum Computing
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio
I
ntel has unveiled a new hardware solution focused on quantum
computing orse Ridge is the first cryogenically controlled proces-
sor designed to accelerate the development of full-stack quantum
computing systems.
Quantum computers promise to address problems that conventional
computing solutions cannot handle. The underlying technology is
quantum physics because a quantum bit (or qubit) can exist simul-
taneously in multiple states, it can be used to conduct multiple
calculations at the same time, significantly speeding up the resolution
of complex problems.
At the beginning of the development of quantum computing, scien-
tists focused on the realization of qubits. If we imagine the bit like a
coin that, once tossed, can reveal its face with the value 1 or 0, a qubit
is a coin that spins like a top — allowing it to have more values simul-
taneously — until it is stopped to read the measured value. Intel and
several other organizations are pursuing silicon quantum processors
that measure the property of electron spin.
Quantum computers can perform multiple calculations at the same
time, but in doing so, they generate excessive amounts of heat. Con-
sequently, to be effective, they must operate at temperatures close to
absolute zero (i.e., very close to 2 .1 C).
These devices, which are often custom-designed, tend to require hun-
dreds of cables in and out of the cryogenic fridge to control the quantum
processor, making many quantum computing systems look like weird
steampunk machines, with cables popping out from all sides (Figure 1).
Researchers are in a furious race to build quantum computers. In
the early years of quantum hardware development with testing and
characterization, Intel identified a significant bottleneck toward the
realization of quantum processing on a commercial scale interconnec-
tions and control electronics.
orse Ridge, named after one of the coldest places in Oregon (where
Intel has some of its most extensive operations), was developed
together with researchers from uTech, a partnership between TU
Delft and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research
(TNO). In the race to create quantum computers, many are focusing
on implementations in silicon, in large part because silicon quantum
computers can be made using common CMOS silicon processing. orse
Ridge was manufactured using Intel’s 22-nm FinFET process. This
should dramatically accelerate Intel’s ability to design, test, and opti-
mize a commercial quantum computer.
Figure 1:
Google quantum computers
im Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, explained that,
until now, much emphasis has been placed on the qubit itself, but one
of the main challenges is the simultaneous control of multiple qubits.
Intel’s new chip simplifies the design and size of quantum computers.
orse Ridge is a highly integrated mixed-signal system-on-chip
(SoC) that reduces the complexity of quantum control engineering.
It is programmed with instructions that correspond to basic qubit
operations. The SoC translates these instructions into electromagnetic
microwave pulses that can manipulate the state of the qubits.
A quantum computer works in the milliKelvin range, which is only
a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Silicon spin qubits have
properties that could allow them to operate at 1-Kelvin-or-higher
temperatures, which would drastically reduce the cooling challenges of
quantum technology.
Intel aims to ensure that cryogenic controls and qubit spindles
operate at the same temperature level to create more advanced and
more compact solutions. By making it easier to control multiple qubits,
orse Ridge is helping to define a path toward scaling more com-
plex systems. Intel expects the result to be more easily manipulated
quantum computers that will also allow the company to leverage its
expertise in advanced packaging and interconnected technologies.
Intel’s investment in research and development ensures a complete
hardware and software base in the development of an efficient and
commercially viable quantum system. It is necessary to stress the
importance of small-scale quantum systems to demonstrate the abso-
lute potential of qubits. In orse Ridge, Intel has developed a scalable
control system that should accelerate the testing and the potential of
quantum computing. ■
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff correspondent at AspenCore
editor o o er ectronics e s and editor in c ie o e .
 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert

BIOELECTRONICS

Ultra-Low–Power Bionic
Chip Promises Alzheimer’s
Treatment
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio

T
he path to a long-sought treatment for one of the most dreaded diseases could lead
through some very small circuits. An international research team led by scientists from
the University of Bath in the United Kingdom has created artificial neurons in the lab
that demonstrate the possibility of making bionic chips that can reproduce the electrical
response of biological nerve cells, with an eye toward repairing damaged nerve circuits and
restoring function to patients. Scientists hope to use bionic chips to treat both cardiac and neuro-
degenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Alzheimer’s disease involves the progressive death of neurons, with cognitive, behavioral,
and motor consequences; it is a bit like taking away the soul of the person affected. According
to a 2016 study by Trust Source, every 66 seconds, a new Alzheimer’s case occurs in the United
States alone; in total, about 5.4 million adults in that country are living with the condition.
Currently, there is no cure, though there are clinical treatments that can delay progression of
the disease and extend the amount of time that individuals are able to carry out daily activities.
Now, researchers are exploring nanotechnology solutions that might help improve the quality
of life of those afflicted.

UNDERSTANDING INTRACELLULAR DYNAMICS

The electrical properties of biological cells have long been studied to understand intracellular
dynamics. The difficulty of measuring microscopic parameters that control the dynamics of ionic
currents and the nonlinearity of ionic conductance have so far hindered efforts to construct
quantitative computational models and create neuromorphic devices able to replicate the exact
response of a biological neuron.
The growing attention paid to implantable bioelectronics for the treatment of chronic dis-
eases is driving technology toward low-power solid-state analog devices that accurately mimic
biological circuits. Analog asynchronous electronics are the most promising way to integrate

Figure 1: Biomimetic solid-state ion channel. (a) The conductance of ion species α is
modulated by an activation gate and an inactivation gate. The net ionic current, Iα, is
the difference between the activation current (Im) and the inactivation current (Ih ).
The Heaviside function, θ speci es that the current mirror outputs a positive current α
when Im > Ih and 0 otherwise. (b) Electrical equivalent circuit of the neuron membrane.
(c–g) Block diagrams of subcircuits for (c) the gate recovery time, (d) current mirror, (e)
current multiplication ( ) transconductance ampli cation and (g) sigmoidal activation
inactivation. (Image: Nature Communications)

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

 42 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert

tra o o er ionic C ip ro ises A ei er s reat ent

raw nerve stimuli instantly, regardless of the size and complexity of

the system.
Recent efforts to construct quantitative neuronal computational
models have focused on the generalization of the Hodgkin-Huxley
(HH) model to multichannel models.

The miniature silicon devices model

biological ion channels to mimic the work
of real neurons. In practice, they represent
connecting bridges at points where a neural
canal is interrupted.

The Bath researchers collaborated with scientists from the Swiss

University of Zurich and the University of Auckland (New Zealand),
as well as Italian researchers, to design artificial neurons intended
to restore functions compromised by neurodegenerative disease.
They published their results in Nature Communications.
The team’s miniature silicon devices model biological ion chan-
nels to mimic the work of real neurons. In practice, they represent
connecting bridges at points where a neural canal is interrupted.
“[For] any area where you have some degenerative disease, such
as Alzheimer’s — or where the neurons stop firing properly because
of age, disease, or injury — in theory, you could replace the faulty
Figure 2: Twin experiment with a solid-state neuron. (a) Mem-
brane voltage of a sub-threshold neuron (black line) stimulated by
a current protocol mixing hyperchaotic oscillations with current
steps (blue line). (b) Membrane voltage predicted by the model for
a different current. (c) Detail of membrane voltage oscillations.
(d) Predicted time dependence of several state variables. (e) Phase
portrait of action potentials over the assimilation window.
(Image: Nature Communications)

bio-circuit with a synthetic circuit,” said Alain Nogaret, a physicist

who led the project at the University of Bath.
The implantable chips consume only 140 nanowatts, roughly
a billionth of the energy required by a microprocessor. Ultra-low
energy consumption is important because it means the chip can
operate battery-free, relying entirely on energy harvesting.
The next goal for the scientists will be to examine less invasive,
non-surgical methods for applying deep brain stimulation to deliver
the treatment, making it easy to support artificial-intelligence

WE ARE Customer satisfaction is a implementation and bringing access to more patients.

Solid-state neurons, as a stream of electrons, respond almost
top priority at Elma.
identically to biological neurons under stimulation by a wide range

READY Our engineers have been

by your side for over 30
years in the fields of
ma.com
ma.de FOR SYSTEMS, ENCLOSURES
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of current algorithms that simulate the brain environment. Future
work will look to increase the efficiency of the response and improve
the model through deep-learning tools.
NANOELECTRONICS IN MEDICINE
The Bath team’s silicon neurons are an example of bioelectronic

YOUR We advise you -

individually and adapted to
medicine, which uses artificial materials to mimic natural circuits and
processes. Figures 1 and 2 show the study of circuit analysis and the

PROJECT
your needs and projects. relevant simulations published in the scientific article.
Contact us! The chip is a technological leap for the implementation of nano-
electronics in medicine. There is even the possibility of installing
GPS and other control solutions for several vital parameters. The
chips can activate various signals at specific times and might be
used to measure heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose levels,
and more.
CONTACT US VISIT US AT THE In short, the progress of nanoelectronics is transforming us into digi-
info@elma.de EMBEDDED WORLD tal human beings, increasingly “connected” in all senses of the word. ■
+49 7231 9734 0 25.02. - 27.02.20
www.elma.com Halle1 - Stand 473 Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff correspondent at AspenCore
editor o o er ectronics e s and editor in c ie o e .

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


COMMUNICATIONS
WRC-19 Congress Yields Positives
for Satellite, Cell Sectors
By John Walko
pectr ri ts i speed internet access and ar oni ation red i
delegates’ deliberations at the ITU-sponsored World Radiocommunication Conference.
T
he World Radiocommunication Conference is held every four
years, with technologists and regulators setting the rules for
allocating the prized radio frequencies used for applications
from weather forecasting to emerging wireless networks
such as 5G. WRC-19, held in the fall, attracted 3,400 delegates from
165 member states to sunny Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt. They addressed
a huge range of concerns, including improving internet access via
satellites for passengers on planes, trains, ships, and roads; enabling
communications in underdeveloped regions; setting crucial parameters
for the design and operation of massive machine-to-machine systems;
and achieving ultra-reliable, low-latency communications.
Intense negotiations yielded rules to ensure that radio astronomy
stations are protected from RF interference (from other space stations
or orbiting satellites) and that satellite services focused on meteorol-
ogy and climatology are likewise protected.
A major theme was how to ensure the global harmonization of
emerging of 5G mobile networks. If different parts of the world
deployed different spectrum bands for G, the resultant difficulty in
supporting roaming would drive up the cost of components. The indus-
try also has been calling for new frequencies because ultra-low-latency
and very high-bit-rate applications will need larger continuous blocks
of spectrum than those available in the bands already identified.
WRC-1 delegates identified more high-frequency spectrum that
could be set aside for G services. The agreement specified the 2 .2 -
to 2 . -G z, - to . -G z, . - to -G z, .2- to .2-G z, and
66- to 1-G z bands. It remains to be seen to what extent these very
high frequencies will be put to use. Building out the huge number of
small cells that would be required to make use of the proposed spec-
trum will be a huge and expensive task.
“Countries struck the right balance in opening up groundbreaking
possibilities for G while protecting existing radio services worldwide,”
said Mats Granryd, director general of the GSM Association (GSMA).
“The mobile industry’s goal going into WRC-19 was to identify enough
G spectrum to deliver long-lasting socioeconomic benefits. WRC-1
delivered on this goal and also secured a pathway to 5G’s future success
in the agenda for WRC-2 .”
It has long been a quirk of these events that the agenda starts being
devised for the next one, even if it’s four years off. One obvious target
for the 202 event will be to identify additional mid- and low-frequency
bands. Other planned themes include Earth Stations in Motion (ESIM),
high-altitude International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) base
stations, aeronautical mobile applications, and novel Global Maritime
Distress and Safety Systems (GMDSS).
SATELLITE INDUSTRY CONCERNS
David Meltzer, director general of the GVF, the global trade association
for the satellite industry, also welcomed the outcomes for potential
satellite-based services, calling the allocated spectrum the “oxygen
that brings such services to life.”
The decisions reached that protect existing satellite spectrum and
provide access to more bands “will enable satellites to maintain and
EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert 43
in
grow these and future services, with advances in satellite and antenna
technologies and increased capacity,” said Meltzer.
Delegates adopted a milestone-based regulatory approach for
deploying non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) satellites in specific
bands and services so as to preserve spectrum rights. Operators will
need to hit deployment milestones that commence seven years after
requesting the spectrum and must be completed within the next seven
years. NGSO constellation operators will have to launch 10 of their
satellites within two years after the initial period, 0 within five years,
and all by the end of the seven-year milestone period. If constellation
ventures have not launched the target number by the milestones laid
out, or within the total 14 years allotted, their spectrum rights will be
limited in proportion to the number launched before time ran out.
This agreement was negotiated to ensure faster rollout of high-speed
internet to remote regions. Until now, constellation ventures had to
launch a single satellite within seven years of applying for spectrum,
operate it for just 0 days, and then file so-called “bring into use”
paperwork with the ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau in order to
preserve the desired frequencies. Delegates and regulators were con-
cerned that this allocation left room for ventures to hoard spectrum for
perhaps thousands of satellites with the launch of just one satellite.
Companies such as Space , OneWeb, Telsat, and Amazon each plan
thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to connect broadband
access to rural or underserved areas around the world. The new rules
also apply to constellations targeting Earth observation and astronomy.
Ahead of the meeting, the giant U.S. commercial communications
satellite suppliers, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup
Grumman, had advocated for milestones that would require constella-
tion ventures to launch 10 of their birds within three years, 0 after
five years, and the total within seven years. European satellite makers
Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space suggested slightly
different time scales.
ITU Secretary General oulin hao said in his closing remarks that
WRC-19 had “made it possible to connect the unconnected and bridge
the digital divide.” ■
John Walko is a technology writer and editor and a contributor to
EE Times Europe.
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
44 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert

AUTOMOTIVE POWER

PCB Design Hints for Improving engines, including spark-ignition (SI) as well
as the more efficient, compressed-ignition

IGBT Thermal Performance (CI) types.

To address the demand for more efficient,
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio less polluting engines, vehicle manufacturers
are following three basic strategies:

C
• Engine right-sizing and hybridization.
limate change and society’s growing Thermal management and cooling solu- These techniques resize the engine based
sensitivity to environmental issues tions are a growing concern for IGBTs because on the class of the vehicle, maintain-
require the development of technical of increased heat loss in their application. ing the same power value. As a result, a
solutions for fossil-fuel–powered Heat losses fall into two categories: conduc- higher number of revolutions is obtained,
vehicles. Regulatory mandates for progressive tion losses and switching losses. which in turn involves a higher switching
reductions in emissions dictate the design Conduction losses occur during the frequency of the injection system and
of internal-combustion engines with lower switched-state voltage drop through the higher operating temperatures.
volumes, higher engine revs, and the ability to IGBT and depend on the current being con- • Dilution of the mixture. This approach
operate with less rich fuel mixtures. ducted. The loss of switching power occurs requires the use of wider gaps (necessary
during the switch-on and switch-off phases for proper heat dissipation) and higher
Insulated-gate bipolar of the IGBT and is dependent on the current, voltages for triggering the spark plug.
operating cycle, switching voltage, and Therefore, it is necessary to use IGBTs
transistors used in ignition switching frequency. with higher operating voltages.
• Direct injection during the compres-
systems must withstand COMBUSTION ENGINE’S EVOLUTION sion stroke. This technique causes the
high currents and have high New emissions regulations require substantial formation of an area rich in combustible
changes to the design of internal-combustion mixture near the spark plug, maintaining
clamping voltages under
operating conditions that will
inevitably produce a greater
amount of heat.
Those technological imperatives inevitably
have implications for the operating condi-
tions of insulated-gate bipolar transistors
(IGBTs) used in engine ignition and control
systems: The devices must attain higher
clamping voltages and switching frequencies, Figure 1: impli ed diagram o the test circuit (Image: Littelfuse)
with the attendant ability to dissipate
excess heat.
Here, we consider the effects on the ther-
mal performance of IGBTs using different
thermal PCB pads under different operating
conditions.

IGBTS AND THERMAL PERFORMANCE

The operating junction temperature (Tvj(op))
is fundamental to the operation of the
device and should be considered as a prac-
tical value. When calculating the junction
temperature for normal switching using con- Figure 2: PCB pads considered during the thermal analysis (Image: Littelfuse)
duction losses, switching losses, and thermal
impedance, the junction temperature must
always remain between the specified mini-
mum and maximum values of Tvj(op) even in
overload situations.
In practice, before the last switching event,
the temperature of the joint must remain
below Tvj(op) max. The transient temperature
increases that result from switching losses
in the switching event can be ignored,
provided that the device is used within its
safe operating area and that Tvj does not
exceed Tvj max. Figure 3: Effect of a lower Vce(ON) on the steady-state temperature (Image: Littelfuse)

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


Figure 4: NGD8201A steady-state temperatures obtained with different switching
frequencies and PCB pads (Image: Littelfuse)
a poorer mixture globally. owever, the
high local and temporal variation that
occurs around the spark plug risks com-
promising the injection system, designed
to cover more space with longer ignition
periods. This solution requires IGBTs with
a very high breakdown voltage.
IGBTs used in ignition systems must there-
fore withstand high currents and have high
clamping voltages under operating condi-
tions that will inevitably produce a greater
amount of heat.
In particular, IGBTs with a low collec-
tor-emitter ON voltage ( ce(ON)) value will be
Figure 5: Plot of the NGD8201A steady-state case temperature using PCB PAD 2 and
PAD 3
EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert 45
PCB Design Hints for Improving IGBT Thermal Performance
required so as to reduce power losses and
junction temperatures.
TEST PROCEDURE
To verify the effect on temperature of a low
Vce(ON) value and to evaluate the impact on the
thermal performance of an IGBT with differ-
ent PCB pads, a simplified testbench can be
used (Figure 1). Here, an inductance emulates
the electrical characteristics of a commer-
cially available ignition coil.
By varying the switching frequency and
the dwell time, the device under test (DUT) is
placed in correspondence with different types
of pads made on the PCB (Figure 2) and kept
operative for a time that’s sufficient to reach a
stable temperature.
The test was conducted using a PCB with
five types of pads, each with its own thermal
conduction (Figure 2). More precisely, the
test used:
• a pad in which there is no heat conduc-
tion path from the collector of the IGBT
to the PCB (PAD 0);
• a pad with the same area as the IGBT
package (PAD 1)
• a pad with the same area as the IGBT
(PAD 2); and
• two pads with the recommended pad
area for the specific device, without
(PAD 3) and with thermal heat spreads
from the top to the bottom of the PCB
(PAD 4).
To quantify the improvement in thermal
performance attributable to a lower ce(ON),
researchers compared the measurements
obtained with a Littelfuse DPAK-packaged
NGD 201A ( ce(ON) typ. 1. ) and those
obained with a commercially available igni-
tion IGBT (Vce(ON) typ. 1. , labeled Ignition
IGBT A in Figure 3).
The obtained results shown in the figure
indicate that a slightly higher ce(ON) results
in a slightly higher steady-state temperature,
regardless of the PCB pad used. As expected,
this effect is more noticeable at high switch-
ing frequencies.
The effect produced by the use of different
PCB pads is shown in Figure 4. The results
indicate that higher switching frequencies
result in higher steady-state temperatures.
Of more interest is that PCB pads reduce the
measured temperature, especially at high
switching frequencies.
The plot obtained with the steady-state
case temperature, under different frequencies,
for PCB PAD2 and PAD3 (Figure 5) shows that
the two pads offer the same average thermal
dissipation capability.
This result is relevant for ignition plat-
forms, in which size is a crucial factor.
To learn more about IGBTs, download the
Littelfuse Inc. application note “Understand-
ing Littelfuse Ignition IGBTs Datasheets”
(https://bit.ly/392deov).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We extend special thanks to ugo Guzm n,
applications engineer for power semiconduc-
tors at Littelfuse, and os Padilla, product
marketing manager for discrete IGBTs and
ignition IGBTs at Littelfuse, for contributing
their technical assistance and expertise to
this article. ■
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff
correspondent at AspenCore, editor of Power
Electronics News, and editor-in-chief of EEWeb.
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
46 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert

POWER MANAGEMENT

Simplify Your Driver for Power Applications

By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio

W
ith the emergence of new fields
of application and markets,
global power requirements have
skyrocketed in recent years,
making energy savings an essential aspect of
equipment design. This has made high-
efficiency inverter circuits and converters
indispensable, especially for power supplies
and drivers requiring high power conversion.
Along with the need to achieve high
efficiency, the challenges of reducing the
device size have increased. This reduction is
generally achieved by increasing the operat-
ing frequency. That increase, in turn, requires
more complex drivers and optimization of
the drive voltage of the silicon carbide (SiC)
MOSFET or IGBT.
The objective of increasing efficiency
while reducing device size has increased the
demand for high-performance power devices
and gate drivers. The market is therefore
expected to expand for SiC power devices,
which epitomize high efficiency and are
increasingly popular in new-generation
inverters. SiC diodes are already used in the
power-factor correction (PFC) circuits of
power supplies and high-power inverters, and
SiC MOSFETs are increasingly used in switch-
ing applications. SiC MOSFETs can improve
inverter efficiency by enabling high-speed
switching, along with circuit layout of fault
protection and configuration to reduce the
noise generated in the gate control circuit.
TAMURA GATE DRIVER MODULE
With a core competency in magnetic circuits,
Tamura has several years of experience in the
development of SiC IGBT gate driver modules
(GDMs). The company targets the design of
highly integrated devices, such as modules,
rather than individual components. The
modules simplify circuit design because they
are essentially plug-and-play Designers need
only define the input and output signals, and
everything else is performed internally by the
module, according to Tamura.
A notable characteristic of the gate driver
module is that the gate-driving signal is
transmitted using magnetic coupling, a
technology with which Tamura has extensive
experience. Its modules are available both in
a standalone version (“driver module”) and
with a connector board (“driver unit”) able
to fit on a corresponding power module from
any manufacturer. Tamura looks to optimize
the footprint and profile of its modules and
recently introduced devices that swap out a
larger transformer for a planar equivalent.
Switching to the planar transformer increased
Figure 1: Soft turn-off protection (Image: Tamura)
the insulation voltage to k , according
to the company.
Most of the modules are rated for maxi-
mum output power of about 1 0 kW, but a
“ in1” driver unit able to provide up to
1 MW is also available. First-generation (up to
1,200- ) products include the driver module
and driver unit. Second-generation (up to
1, 00- ) devices also include three-level
DC DC converters and a in1 driver unit.
Depending on the specific application,
designers can decide whether to design a
complete driver around the DC DC converter
or use the 2in1 solution (module and driver
units). Tamura says that its all-in-one solu-
tion saves the time and costs required by a full
design activity, and the company cites other
benefits of its modules as well.
For example, suppose there is a problem
with common-mode noise, and we want to
eliminate any malfunction caused by it. A
typical solution would be to raise the d dt,
but that requires low parasitic capacitance.
Tamura modules have very low stray capac-
itance ( pF for the 2DD series and 12 pF for
the 2DMB series) and therefore can suppress
the common-mode noise that results from
high d dt, preventing equipment malfunc-
tion due to noise propagation to the input
side and the other channels.
The driver circuit internal impedance
is a very low 0 m or less, even at higher
switching frequencies, according to Tamura
therefore, switching speed is not inhibited
by the gate impedance. The small module
packages fit within the footprint of most
power module types, affording the designer
some freedom in arranging the module
layout to maximize efficiency and minimize
noise. Tamura has designed its own planar
transformer, which is suitable for the 1, 00-
module series.
The company’s GDMs include several
protection modes, such as soft turn-off. As
shown in Figure 1, by adding a resistor to the
soft turn-off pin, it is possible to define the
turn-off time.
A Miller clamp function in the GDM pre-
vents malfunction of the SiC power module
with a low threshold voltage and high d dt.
This protection prevents an increase in gate
voltage due to the Miller current of the power
device connected to the output pin. Finally, an
active clamp gate feature protects the power
module from surges affecting the collec-
tor-emitter voltage ( CE) signal.
ROHM, TI, MAXIM, AND INFINEON
RO M Semiconductor has created gate
drivers with an integrated isolator that
takes full advantage of the performance of
IGBT and MOSFET power. The BM610 F
integrates short-circuit protection, while
the BM6001 F ’s simple design accelerates
the product development process, according
to RO M. The gate drivers are housed in
compact packages that the company says
are the smallest in the industry to include
the isolator. The products combine the
company’s Bi-CDMOS technology with new
on-chip-transformer technology.
Late last year, Texas Instruments intro-
duced isolated gate drivers with integrated
detection for IGBTs and SiC MOSFETs. The

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

 EE|Times EUROPE — Boards & Solutions Insert
Simplify Your Driver for Power Applications
new offerings feature advanced monitoring
and protection systems and improve total
system efficiency in automotive and industrial
applications, according to TI. The gate drivers
let designers create particularly compact
designs while achieving higher efficiency and
higher performance for applications such as
traction inverters, integrated battery chargers,
photovoltaic inverters, and motor drivers. The
new devices offer integrated sensing features
for SiC IGBTs and MOSFETs, simplifying
designs and enabling higher system reliability
in applications up to 1.5 kVrms.
The new MAX22701E driver from Maxim
Integrated has a high common-mode-tran-
sient immunity (CMTI) of 300 kV/µs,
extending system uptime. Common-mode
transients may result from the driving circuit
of the spurious-pulse gate, resulting in a
short-circuit condition. The drive circuits
controlling the power converters must be
designed to withstand these noise sources.
Maxim Integrated’s driver is designed for
switching power supplies in high-power
industrial systems such as solar inverters,
motor drives, and energy storage systems.
The MAX22701E is compatible with both
SiC and gallium nitride (GaN) FETs and
features technical specs that the company
said reduce downtime and losses. The driver
is available in an eight-pin, 3.9 × 4.9-mm
narrow-body small-outline IC package with
an extended temperature range from –40°C
to 125°C (Figure 2).
Infineon Technologies has a family of
two-channel EiceDRIVER integrated circuits
for use in high-performance power-conver-
sion applications. The gate drivers are suited
for high-voltage PFC and DC/DC stages and
synchronous grinding stages in server, telco,
and industrial switching power supplies.
Further applications include 48- to 12-V
DC/DC converters, battery and electric-
Figure 2: Block diagram of the MAX22701E (Image: Maxim Integrated)
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Figure 3: The EiceDRIVER family
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vehicle charging stations, smart grids, and
solar micro-inverters.
The EiceDRIVER family offers 7-ns accuracy
for input-to-output propagation delay and PCAN-MicroMod FD
3-ns channel-to-channel accuracy, supporting Universal plug-in module with I/O
the required efficiency level of the power-con- functionality and CAN FD interface.
version system. The family’s robust integrated Available with an evaluation board
galvanic isolation is important for half-bridge for the development of custom
configurations, both from input to output applications.
and between output channels. In addition,
reinforced integrated input-to-output isola-
tion provides electrical safety where needed,
according to Infineon.
The low-resistance output stages of the
EiceDRIVER family minimize internal power
dissipation, so the gate driver can provide
maximum power to the power MOSFET gates.
Isolated gate drivers are widely used to
drive MOSFETs and IGBTs in many applica-
tions and provide galvanic isolation. As the PCAN-PCI/104-Express FD
recent introductions make clear, SiC- and
GaN-based systems can operate at even CAN FD interface for PCI/104-Express
higher switching frequencies without signifi-
systems. Available as single-, dual-,
and four-channel version with drivers
cant power losses during the transition. ■
for Windows® and Linux.
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff
correspondent at AspenCore, editor of Power
Electronics News, and editor-in-chief of EEWeb.
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64293 Darmstadt / Germany
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020 Phone: +49 6151 8173-20
Fax: +49 6151 8173-29
info@peak-system.com
48 EE|Times EUROPE

SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA

India’s Chip Industry

Grows Up
By Nitin Dahad

I FIRST STARTED WRITING about India’s electronics

industry in 1 . Back then, India was regarded as a place
to source engineering talent at a low labor cost — often
just a tenth the cost of an equivalent hire in Europe or the
United States.
Consequently, India developed a reputation for the
back-office function, whether in software or hardware, Engineers at Signalchip, founded in India
whether for British Telecom or Texas Instruments. It by TI alumni, developed a multiple-input,
became the butt of jokes about cheap talent. There have even been television com- multiple-output (MIMO) RF transceiv-
edy series about the goings-on at Indian back offices, especially for call centers. er-on-chip. (Image: Signalchip)

Today, nearly 0 years after I filed my
first article, times are changing. Both India
and China are finding their own confidence.
China is clearly motivated to clear the hurdles
erected by the U.S.-China trade war, and India
is awash in nationalist sentiment, propagated
by the country’s prime minister and the
enthusiasm he stirs up for everything Indian.
Indeed, this newfound fervor isn’t restricted
to India and China nationalist sentiment is
popping up everywhere.
In India, one result has been a spate of
programs focused on creating self-sufficiency
in many areas, including electronics and
semiconductor industries. But it’s not just
political and social change that’s driving
India’s electronics-industry resurgence.
The last three decades have seen Indian
engineers gain confidence, demand higher
salaries, figure out how to move up the value
chain, and even branch out from the corporate
environments of companies like TI, N P, and
Cadence to create their own startups. One
high-profile example is Ganapathy Subrama-
niam, a former director at Texas Instruments
in India who co-founded Cosmic Circuits in
200 . When Cadence acquired Cosmic Circuits
in 201 , Subramaniam branched out again
to invest in other semiconductor-related
companies, working alongside Lip-Bu Tan at
WR I Capital.
India’s fledgling fabless semiconductor
ecosystem is also getting fresh impetus with
the help of Indian engineers and entrepre-
neurs who have returned home after building
successful careers in Silicon alley. I caught
up in London last year with one such veteran,
Sateesh Andra, who came back to India to set
up a fund that invests in intellectual property
(IP)-led product startups. Andra told me the
firm looks for companies whose developments
are “globally relevant.”
Sanjay Gupta, vice president of engineering
and India country manager for N P Semicon-
ductors, shared the perspective of a 2 -year
industry veteran when I visited him at his
office in Noida, India, late last year. “I’ve seen
the industry transforming from a back-office
industry with a lot of translation work coming
to India, like the back-end technologies for
technology transformation, or maybe low-
end verification work,” Gupta said. “In the
last two-and-a-half decades, there’s been a
Sanjay Gupta
(Image: NXP)
complete transformation in the value chain
both for Indian companies and also for global
companies like N P operating out of India.
We see more and more talent base in India
contributing to cutting-edge technologies,
next-generation architectures for prime areas
of focus for the company.”
Indeed, he said, these engineers are “not
just contributing they are leading some of
the very key, global-impact projects from
India. At N P, a lot of next-generation ADAS
advanced driver-assistance system products
for targeting driverless cars are actually being
driven out of India.” Those products include
“a radar-based product line, vision-based
product line, and many more.”
I asked Gupta to assess the Indian
industry’s potential impact both locally and
globally. “In the next five years, the scenario
may not change much,” he said, “but beyond
five years, I believe transformational changes
and structural changes will be happening at
multiple levels. There’s a big mindset change
in government and bureaucracy that India
needs to play a very active role in next-gener-
ation semiconductor development, and it will
be a big enabler even for bridging the physical
deficit challenges that India has — semi-
conductor imports being one of the biggest
imports, after oil. This is why there’s a very
significant focus from government directly on
initiatives like Make in India, Invest in India,
and Design in India.
“The second factor is from the industry
itself. The kind of talent we have in the
country today, compared with 20 years ago,
means we are all set for a lot of indigenous
development, enabling a stream of local
semiconductor development. And I see a lot
of startup companies within India that are
actually growing up.”
That’s what I see, too The Indian semicon-
ductor industry is growing up. It’s no longer
just about outsourcing. But there’s still some
way to go before we see major Indian chip
companies starting to dominate globally.
The debate about whether India can build
and sustain its own semiconductor fabrication
facility will probably persist for some time,
without much progress, because of the level
of investment and the infrastructure required.
owever, there may be progress toward a
viable homegrown fab if the planners focus
on older process technologies rather than
manufacturing at the bleeding edge.
In this Special Report, contributors with
a front-row seat to the Indian electronics
industry’s evolution shed light on its progress
and its promise. ■
Nitin Dahad is a staff correspondent at
AspenCore.

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA
Is India Ready for the Next Chip Wave?
By Faisal Kawoosa
I
ndustry, government, and other stakeholders in
India are cognizant of the electronics industry’s
potential not only to strengthen the country’s
presence on the global stage but also to advance
technology in other domains for the greater
societal and economic good. Fully exploiting that
potential, however, has proved elusive.
New efforts in electronics are unfolding against
a backdrop of haphazard economic development in
India. Growth initiatives have been skewed toward
the country’s urban centers, even as the majority
of the population remains rural (about 66.46%,
according to the World Bank), meaning that a large
percentage of the populace does not see the full
benefits of investment and development. For too many, access to qual-
ity infrastructure, education, and health care is a dream unfulfilled.
Since 2010, there has been a focus on the role that technology, and
especially electronics, can play in harmonizing growth across India. For
the chip industry in particular, four pillars of growth have been identi-
fied an enabling and visionary policy regime, world-class infrastructure
capable of creating world-class products and services, access to adequate
and easy funding to propel growth, and a deep talent pool with the
proper training to develop intellectual-prop-
erty (IP) and knowledge repositories.
The government’s National Policy on
Electronics (NPE) 2012 laid out a formal
foundation for growth in the sector. The
recently announced NPE 201 is funda-
mentally aligned with the earlier policy but
adds initiatives to promote exports out of
India as well as enable the requisite vol-
Faisal Kawoosa umes to give companies the justification to
establish operations in the country. Those
goals apply to the entire electronics industry, not just the chip sector.
Since the policy framework was created in 2012, government initia-
tives have included establishment of incubation centers for product
and IP development, modified special incentive packages (M-SIPs) to
attract investments in the sector, creation of an electronics devel-
opment fund (EDF) to enable more risk-taking and provide funds for
R&D, establishment of manufacturing clusters, and funding for Ph.D.
programs in electronic-systems design and manufacturing. In addition,
a preferential market access (PMA) policy was invoked in February
2012 to promote the procurement of domestically sourced electron-
ics for use in security-related products and by government agencies.
Around the same time, the government also approved plans to build
two fabs in India, and a couple of global players expressed their intent
to participate.
Looking at these policy interventions, especially between 2010 and
2014, one would assume that by now, India would have charted a strong
new growth trajectory for the chip industry. There has been some prog-
ress in manufacturing, especially with the “Make in India” initiative,
but overall, the domestic value addition has been negligible, even in
marquee products. In mobile handsets, for example, the domestic value
addition is not more than 1 , and India still relies significantly on
imported components from a global supply chain.
The small value-add clearly does not result in any real growth in
opportunities for the chip industry within India, other than in design
services and embedded software — contributions to the value chain
EE|Times EUROPE 49
that are exported out of India and then consumed via products or
components imported into the country. The entire Make in India
program, including the phased manufacturing-program roadmap for
components, mainly promotes assembly of electronic systems and
components and has done little to foster homegrown manufacturing-
and engineering-level companies.
Industry has voiced two primary concerns with respect to imple-
mentation of the policy. First, setting up a business under the single
policy objective is a time-consuming process that can take years to
implement in a tangible form. Second, the bureaucratic procedures and
strict guidelines that need to be followed strip risk out of the process
but leave decision-makers too little leeway for discretionary, creative
problem-solving.
While positive overall about the policy, aswinder Ahuja, corporate
vice president and managing director at Cadence Design Systems India,
said that the country still lags in the implementation and time to
execute.
P. .G. Menon, president and CEO of ANN Consulting and former
president of the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, took
issue with the one-size-fits-all approach. “The implementation of the
policy has to be tailor-made for the vertical,” Menon said. “We cannot
look at each vertical with the same vision.”
THE FAB QUESTION
The three weak links in India’s chip industry — semiconductor fabs,
incubation centers, and manufacturing clusters — are at different levels
of progress.
The house is still divided on whether India should have its own
fab. Those who argue in favor of a fab presence cite emotional as well
as strategic reasons. Ahuja comes down on the side of a domestic
fab but has suggested that 28 nm might be the most economically
viable technology node for such a facility. Not only would it be less
capital-intensive than a 10- or -nm fab program, but in the history
of semiconductor manufacture, the 2 -nm node has been the lon-
gest-serving and has yielded the highest volumes.
As for incubation centers, there are two potentially good ones. Elec-
tropreneur Park, the first systems-design focused incubation center,
is funded by the Indian government, managed by Software Technology
Parks of India (STPI), and located on Delhi University’s south cam-
pus. The other center is Maker’s illage Cochin, a startup initiative of
the government Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
(MeitY) with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Trivandrum and
Kerala Startup Mission.
These two institutions lead product development and IP creation for
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
50 EE|Times EUROPE

Is India Ready for the Next Chip Wave?

electronic systems in India and are fostering the startup ecosystem.
There could be more incubation centers to come that would target
specific industry verticals and geographies. For example, the city of
Pune, which is the hub of automobile design in India and caters to
global markets as well, could accommodate an incubation center for
automotive electronics.
FUNDING SHORTAGE FOR FABS AND STARTUPS
Funding is the most serious concern for the chip industry in India,
especially in relation to a potential fab buildout and the funding eco-
system for startups.
Even after a commercial launch of its product, a chip startup
might find it doesn’t have access to the capital that could help
it become self-sustainable. There aren’t enough avenues in the
venture-capital and private-equity markets, probably because of a
lack of benchmarks for investors to evaluate business plans and the
potential return on investment.
Furthermore, the boom in digital startups, whose business models
are often easier for the investor communities to understand, makes
those startups potentially more lucrative investments in terms of
returns with known risks. In comparison, the risks in the chip industry
are rarely exposed to the funding ecosystem available to Indian start-
ups, especially outside of India.
TALENT IN ABUNDANCE
The least of the chip industry’s challenges is talent, though the higher up
the value chain you look, the scarcer the required expertise becomes. If
India is to catch the next wave of chip industry growth, it has to nurture
a talent pool of engineers whose skills extend beyond the country’s tradi-
tional strengths in design, verification, and embedded software.
Cadence’s Ahuja pointed to one significant development globally.
“ istorically, there have not been many chip architectures available
but as we see more AI artificial intelligence , ML machine learning ,
and other forms of deep tech scaling up and posing new challenges,
the chip architecture also needs to change,” he said. “This is what
startups globally are working on. India also stands a chance and must
focus on this area. owever, we may not have the requisite talent levels
to do this.”
If the country pursues the requisite skills with vigor and steers its
knowledge base in the right direction, it could see a couple of startups
emerge in the semiconductor value-chain domain. But Indian compa-
nies need an environment to accelerate this potential, or they will find
it frustrating to build a business in India.
For example, it took Saankhya Labs, developer of a software-de-
fined-radio SoC platform, 10 years to reach a point where it could see
a sustainable future, said CEO Parag Naik. It would have taken only
three to five years to achieve the same result if Saankhya Labs had been
based in Silicon alley, he said.
Over the past decade, government intent has been somewhat aligned
with industry’s aspirations. But implementation of chip-industry
friendly initiatives has been slow, and the government and private
investors alike remain averse to the risks associated with investment in
electronic-systems design.
India isn’t quite ready to lead the next wave of the chip industry. But
it does have the potential if conditions are right. ■
Faisal Kawoosa is founder and chief analyst at techARC, which
provides market insight and advice in areas such as consumer tech,
telecom, and semiconductors in addition to contributing to policy advo-
cacy in India.

SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA

India Must Focus on Fabless Startups,

Not Building Fabs
By Meenakshi Vashist

A
s a technologist who transitioned
from telecom-system R D to IC
design in the mid-1 0s, I have wit-
nessed nearly the entire evolution
of the IC design industry in India from its
beginning to its present form. So what are my
main observations
The industry started off in the mid-1 0s
with a strong talent pool of engineers from top
schools who had many opportunities to work
on exciting projects in India and overseas.
Some took jobs in the United States. Others
worked at homegrown, largely state-funded
electronic-system and -product companies
as part of vertically designed organizations
in these, an engineer would be involved in
the project starting with development of the
product specs and take the product through
architecture, implementation, validation, field
trials, and industrial qualification.
These were engineers who were passion-
ate about their work and performed it at
significantly lower labor costs than their
counterparts elsewhere in the world.
The first wave of semiconductor compa-
nies leveraged this talent pool to set up their
offshore IC design centers in the country. The
significantly higher salaries, multinational
work environment, and opportunity to work
in the emerging LSI design field acted as
the right motivation for the transition. These
engineers were ready to put in long hours
to learn and deliver, and their work fueled
the growth of the sector for nearly a decade,
through most of the 2000s. Even as 2001
ushered in a recession in the tech industry in
other parts of the world, several tech compa-
nies were setting up their design operations
in India, driven by the need to cut costs at
their home-based development centers and
bolster operational margins.
Encouraged and motivated by the impact
they were making, participants in the LSI
sector in India moved up the value chain
from teams who did odd jobs, such as library
characterization and running regressions, to
teams who integrated large systems-on-chip
(SoCs). It was like a never-ending party where
everyone was a winner. LSI design became
the most coveted sector for job seekers, and
India quietly emerged as a strong IC design
hub for the world.
From 200 to 201 , however, several devel-
opments unfolded that had a negative impact
on the growth of the IC design sector in India
The startup ecosystem in India gained
traction, with new business models pig-
gybacking on the top of smartphones and
the newfound benefits of mass internet
access. Entrepreneurship became a viable
career path in the country. ence, more
engineers coming out of India’s top
schools emigrated to the U.S. or became
entrepreneurs at home, and only a hand-
ful chose to pursue once-coveted jobs in
the IC design sector.

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

 EE|Times EUROPE
IMAGE S UTTERSTOCK
As it became increasingly difficult to
hire from top schools, semiconductor
companies looked to second-tier schools
to fulfill their hiring needs.
New electronics-engineering graduates
were far less equipped than the previous
generation to deliver on projects, largely
because the engineering curriculum had
become outdated. Some schools touted
a LSI curriculum but taught only the
basics of digital and analog circuits, with
a chapter on fabricating a 2u transistor.
This slowed the pace of capability devel-
opment and diversification in India’s IC
design industry.
With the heavy influx of Chinese con-
sumer products into the country and
with IT software jobs taking over product
design, most of the Indian companies that
had provided a strong pool of ready talent
trained in electronics design either closed
up shop or became shadows of their
former selves.
During the Great Recession of 200
200 , the LSI sector in India, for the
first time, experienced job cuts and lost
some of its sheen.
2012 began a period of tremendous con-
solidation in the semiconductor industry,
with reductions in year-over-year (YoY)
growth rates worldwide. The IC design
industry in India became top-heavy as
hiring freezes barred fresh talent from
entry and as experienced engineers opted
to stay cozy in their roles rather than
diversify and venture into related indus-
tries. As a result, offshore design centers
in India began losing their significant
cost advantage.
I believe the IC design sector in India has
slipped from its former position as one of the
most sought-after segments for tech workers.
Does this inevitably mean an irreversible
India Must Focus on Fabless Startups, Not Building Fabs
plateau in the sector’s growth Will India’s
semiconductor tech sector go the way of
Singapore’s, which lost a large chunk of its
outsourced IC design business as it lost its
cost advantage over the years
Some industry watchers argue that serious
policy intervention is required in India to
reinvigorate growth, including concrete steps
toward building a semiconductor fab in the
country. But I believe India should focus on
becoming a global hub for the fabless semicon-
ductor ecosystem, focusing on strengthening
that ecosystem by moving up the value chain.
India’s design sector should learn from the
evolution of IC companies like Broadcom,
ualcomm, and Nvidia, as well as Arm — a
company that achieved tremendous growth
based on soft intellectual property (IP) alone.
India’s industry participants need to
evolve. SoC integrators that perform only
parts of IC development and design must
move up the value chain to become self-
sufficient in defining and architecting
complete specifications of an IC or an IP
core, building analog and RF IP, integrating
SoCs, validating and characterizing silicon,
and enabling designs and products based on
the designed chipset. This would extend the
country’s cost advantage by at least another
decade and make India the destination of
choice for establishing a complete IC busi-
ness group that directly interfaces with global
customers and markets.
Long-term growth of this sector also
requires supportive startup policies and mat-
uration of the investor mindset to encourage
startups and businesses in deep tech. The
archetype of startup founders in India is
young college grads, but companies pursuing
deep tech, including chip design, need found-
ers who have significant experience in the
sector and its application domains.
India is a cost-sensitive mass market. A
EE|Times EUROPE 51
country that was not considered a target
market for smartphones a couple of decades
ago now has more than 00 million smart-
phone users. iaomi has grabbed the bulk of
the market share for smartphones in India
by focusing on low-cost smartphones, as
problem-solvers on the street have found
innovative ways to use those devices to run
their micro-businesses and field solutions
related to mobility, last-mile connectivity,
and education.
Indeed, with an economy approaching
US$ trillion and a population exceeding
1 billion, India confronts growing challenges in
those areas as well as in pollution containment
and energy, water, and food supply. Those
societal challenges all pose opportunities for
startups willing to funnel energy and resources
into building solutions. omegrown IC design
companies therefore have a chance to up
their game by becoming providers of low-cost
chipsets and IP for design sockets in products
that might ship in the millions of units to meet
the requirements of India’s market alone.
In my opinion, that is the best way for
Indian IC design companies to build global
visibility and achieve attractive valuations. ■
Meenakshi
Vashist is CEO
of TekUncorked
AIIoT, which
provides IoT-, AI-,
and ML-based
smart mainte-
nance-product
solutions for the
infrastructure and power sector in India. She
has been associated with the Indian semi-
conductor and systems industries for more
than 30 years, having worked at the Indian
Space Research Organization, C-DoT, Temic,
Motorola, and Freescale Semiconductor.
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
52 EE|Times EUROPE

SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA

India Needs Better-Trained Talent

to Move Up Chip Value Chain
By Faisal Kawoosa

I
ndia’s contribution to the global chip industry
is undisputed. There is no major name in the
chip industry that isn’t present in the country.
Through its captive design centers as well as
third-party offshore design-services suppliers,
India contributes more than US$12 billion to the
global semiconductor industry annually.
Because of strict confidentiality guidelines,
we rarely come to know which chips have been
significantly designed in India. But when the
various aspects of LSI design, verification, and

embedded-software development are all taken
into account, it’s fair to say that some of the most
popular products of recent times can trace aspects
of their design back to Indian engineers.
“There is probably no chip in the world [that]
hasn’t been ‘touched’ by India in some way,” said
P.V.G. Menon, president and CEO of VANN Consult-
ing and former president of the India Electronics
and Semiconductor Association.
What makes India so significant in the global chip supply chain ow
have Bengaluru and adjoining cities become such prominent points on
the chip industry map, perhaps next to Silicon alley
The not-so-secret sauce is the wealth of engineering talent available
in India at very attractive price points relative to global labor costs. The
starting salary of an R&D engineer in India ranges between US$1,500
and US$2,500 a month. That’s 40% to 50% of what one could expect
in countries like the United States. It’s thus no surprise that the U.S.
industry sources much of its chip-engineering talent in India, just as it
has done for software. Rather than pay for high-cost homegrown talent,
it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to recruit from India —
and some Indian engineers aspire to move to countries like the U.S. at
virtually any cost.
While India has a wealth of engineering talent, however, it could
do a better job preparing its new engineers for evolving industry
requirements. “Talent is not a problem at all,” said Parag Naik, CEO at
Saankhya Labs, one of the few success stories in India’s semiconductor
ecosystem. “At the mid- and senior levels, we have the people available
abundantly. The challenge we face is at the entry level.”
This is a result of an archaic educational infrastructure at the coun-
try’s technical colleges. The top-tier tech institutes, namely the Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs) and some of the National Institutes of
Technology (NITs), do a good job of ensuring academics are tightly
aligned with industry requirements, but that is not the case elsewhere.
In the National Policy on Electronics (NPE) 2012, the first comprehen-
sive blueprint to foster the electronics and semiconductor industry in
India, the government proposed a roadmap to address industry needs
by awarding 2,500 doctorates in electronic-systems design and manu-
facturing annually by 2020. The plan hasn’t gone as expected, though
not even those deeply connected with the industry have a clear grasp of
the country’s progress toward its goal.
The aim of the Ph.D. target was to nurture more homegrown talent
for product development and intellectual-property (IP) creation. This
is critical for India, and most industry leaders in the country approve
of the significance that the government has attached to it. “Our talent
is one of the best in the chip industry globally,” said Jaswinder Ahuja,
IMAGE S UTTERSTOCK
corporate vice president and managing director at Cadence Design
Systems India. “What we now require is empowerment of talent to take
higher-order skills in the chip industry for product development and IP
creation.”
Clearly, both the government (with its policy intervention) and the
industry (with its aspiration) understand the need for India to move up
the hierarchy of skills in the chip industry if the country hopes to foster
the emergence of high-tech startups in the domain. Where the country
continues to fall short is in implementing the plan.
For instance, as part of the Ph.D. initiative, the government in 2014
sanctioned a US$56 million fund for a period of nine years that would
be spent on stipends and other grants for full-time as well as part-time
Ph.D. scholars in electronic-systems design and engineering services.
But the actual awarding of funds to beneficiaries, particularly in elec-
tronic-systems design, is believed to have been negligible (again, there
is no publicly available data on the program).
One reason for the poor uptake of this scheme is the dearth of
relevant talent in sufficiently high numbers to exploit it. Even now,
in the target year of 2020, India may not have a large-enough pool of
potential students and professionals to yield 2,500 Ph.D.s annually in
electronics. Indian universities’ Ph.D. programs have historically been
oriented toward academic research rather than the practical research
that could fuel a product- and IP-development ecosystem. The link
between academics, product development, and the startup environ-
ment needs to be significantly strengthened, modeled along the lines
of systems in the U.S., China, South Korea, and Taiwan.
India now has more than a decade of experience in chip design, a
record that represents thousands of man-years of domain knowledge
and practical experience. And the consumption of electronics in India
is only increasing. The country needs products and solutions that could
fire its ambition of a US$1 trillion digital economy by 202 , or 20
of the US$ trillion GDP target that the government hopes to hit five
years from now.
The potential is there for a strong ecosystem. The remaining weak
leak is the creation of opportunities to help the country’s tech talent
convert knowledge and experience into products and IP developed both
in and for India. ■

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

 EE|Times EUROPE 53

SPECIAL REPORT: INDIA evolve into a center of innovation for Cadence

The Cadence India Journey,

worldwide.
This included a blueprint for Cadence
India to develop world-class capabilities and

30 Years On work on mission-critical projects. As part of

the blueprint, Cadence India was one of the
By Jaswinder Ahuja few semiconductor ecosystem companies
in the country at that time to become ISO
Cadence has been present in India since 000-certified.
Turning our vision into reality required a
1987, after the acquisition of Gateway stable, mature, experienced leadership team
Design Automation. How has the com- capable of taking on bigger challenges and
providing the confidence to forge ahead with
pany evolved in the country over the past the strategy. We did so by motivating the
30 years, and what has changed in the team and inculcating a risk-taking mindset,
encouraging learning and knowledge sharing
broader ecosystem in India? Jaswinder at every level, hiring the right talent, and

Ahuja, corporate vice president and managing director building deep domain expertise.
Today, 1 years on, all Cadence global R D
at Cadence esi n ste s ndia t. td. offers is business groups are represented in India:

thoughts on the journey and India’s transformation so far. digital and signoff, system and verification,
and custom PCB and IP, as well as global

I
t has been a journey of what I consider
excellence in execution and innovation
for us at Cadence India. Like many of the
early multinational company entrants to
the country, we started out in the late 1980s
and early 1990s as a resource center for our
corporate headquarters in the United States.
This was the exploratory phase, focused on
building the team, ramping up infrastructure,
and showing we could succeed with a few
selected projects.
The biggest challenge during this phase
was the hiring of talent. When we visited
campuses for this purpose, we discovered that
not many students even knew about VLSI
design, so training had to start from scratch.
In 1994, we partnered with IIT Kanpur (one
of the tier-one technology institutes in India)
for a three-month training program, half
of which was at the college and half at the
Cadence office in Noida, near Delhi. After
training, the new hires were deployed on proj-
ects we were working on for our parent.
The engagement with universities that
began back then persists today. We currently
have roughly 350 colleges and universities
enrolled in the Cadence University Program
in India. Globally, we reach more than 30,000
students each year through Cadence Univer-
sity Programs.
RAMP-UP AND ECOSYSTEM
DEVELOPMENT
The exploratory phase to demonstrate the
team’s capabilities led us to the second phase
of growth the ramp-up. Building on the first
few, critical years, the next 10 to 15 years were
about increasing investments in building
world-class infrastructure, procuring equip-
ment, and expanding our teams. The goal
was to build credibility in delivering quality
and predictability in execution while scaling
operations at a sustainable pace. We gained
a reputation within Cadence for consistent,
on-time, high-quality delivery.
Those years of learning gradually gave
us recognition as a center of excellence in
execution for Cadence worldwide. We tran-
sitioned from working on interfaces in the
early days to engineering on core products
and technology and eventually to innovation
and new product development. We achieved a
milestone in 1997, when product engineering
for the company’s flagship product in logic
simulation moved to India.
During this time, in the 1 0s and early
2000s, the semiconductor ecosystem in
India was in its nascent stages. Cadence was
a founding member of the VLSI Society of
India; I served as president of the society
from 2011 to 2018. The industry was growing,
with more semiconductor companies estab-
lishing offshore R D centers in India. The
government recognized that microelectronics
was an important upcoming sector in the
country and launched Phase 1 of the Special
Manpower Development Program to support
it. Cadence was a key partner in the program
at its beginning and remains so today.
In 200 , the India Semiconductor Asso-
ciation (ISA) was established, with Cadence
as a founding member. That group has since
expanded its scope and changed its name
to the India Electronics and Semiconductor
Association (IESA).
THINKING GLOBALLY, INNOVATING
LOCALLY
While we were going through the ramp-up
phase locally, at headquarters, it was becom-
ing clear that globalization was going to be
critical for company growth. Capitalizing on
this strategy, the leadership team in India
articulated a vision for our operation to
customer support, global IT, field engineering,
and all the support functions. With four sites
and about 2,200 employees in the country, we
have been ranked in the top 50 in the “India’s
Best Companies to Work For” study conducted
by the Great Place to Work (GPTW) Institute
in partnership with The Economic Times, a
national business daily newspaper in India.
The bedrock of our success is a culture
based on trust and respect, a focus on our
customers’ success, and a commitment to
give back to society. We are a trusted partner
to many market-shaping customers, as we
enable them to build products that transform
lives. We have also supported many programs
across the country that focus on expanding
Indian children’s access to quality education.
In terms of the semiconductor ecosys-
tem in India, the industry has talked about
electronic system design and manufacturing
(ESDM) as a huge opportunity in both the
domestic and global markets. Over the past
few years, we have witnessed growth in the
number of entrepreneurs in both ESDM and
fabless semiconductor design.
Opportunities abound for Indian start-
ups that aim to solve “India’s problems,”
and that activity will be key to the growth
of the industry. Areas that could benefit
from innovative solutions include educa-
tion, security, the environment, renewable
energy, agriculture, transport, urbanization,
and employment generation. Even if there
currently are startups in these verticals, the
domestic market alone is so big that there is
room for many more.
Cadence India is keen to continue creating
breakthrough products and solutions to solve
the challenges in each of these verticals. We
believe we’ve moved beyond just providing
a center of excellence in execution. We now
are recognized as a center for excellence in
innovation, too. ■

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

54 EE|Times EUROPE

AUTOMOTIVE POWER

Galvanic Isolation in EV and HEV Applications

By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio

T
he worldwide proliferation of electric
and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs and
HEVs), which must withstand higher
operating voltages and currents than
gasoline-powered vehicles, has underscored
the importance of electrical isolation for
automotive design. Electrification of the car
has mandated the use of high-power devices
— notably batteries, inverters, and regenera-
tive braking systems — whose interfacing with
digital control circuits requires the adoption
of appropriate galvanic isolation techniques.
Electrical, or galvanic, isolation is the con-
dition in which no direct current circulation
takes place between two points of differing
electrical potential. More precisely, it is not
possible to move charge carriers from one
point to another while electrical energy (or
a signal) can still be exchanged by other
physical phenomena, such as electromagnetic Figure 1: Block diagram of NXP’s EV/HEV motor control power inverter solution
induction, capacitive coupling, or light. This (Image: NXP Semiconductors)
condition is equivalent to an infinite electrical
resistance between the two points, even if in
practice, a resistance on the order of 100 M is sufficient. galvanic isolation performs the dual function of ensuring the electrical
In short, galvanic isolation means an electrical separation between safety of the vehicle and protecting its on-board low-power electronic
two circuits, which occurs when the insulation resistance that sepa- circuits from dangerous voltage and current levels.
rates them is infinite or very high There is no electrical connection The galvanic isolation products that can be applied to electric and
between the two circuits. hybrid vehicles include isolation transformers, optocouplers (also
called photocouplers), capacitor-based semiconductor isolators, and
WHY GALVANIC ISOLATION? transformer-based semiconductor isolators. Isolation transformers
In EVs and HEVs, when the grounds of two distinct circuits are at exploit the electromagnetic field to transfer information from one side
different electrical potentials, galvanic isolation is necessary to prevent of the insulating barrier to another. Photocouplers typically use an LED
the triggering of dangerous ground loops, which can generate noise and a photodiode to transfer information in the form of an optical sig-
that could compromise the safety of the vehicle. The currents flowing nal. To obtain a high degree of insulation, a dielectric tape is inserted
in these types of vehicles can be lethal to humans, so it is essential to between the LED and the photodiode, allowing the device to withstand
ensure the highest degree of safety. very high voltages.
Both EV and HEV platforms generally use a 48-V power bus and are Semiconductor-based isolation uses a pair of differential capacitors
equipped with high-voltage and high-energy-density batteries that can or a microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based transformer as an
be charged in a very short time. The first high-power circuit encoun- insulating element. Semiconductor-based isolators have numerous
tered in an EV or HEV is the on-board charger (OBC), used to recharge advantages over photocouplers, including greater durability, bet-
lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. The charger includes an analog-to- ter stability over time and temperature, better noise immunity, and
digital converter (ADC) equipped with a power-factor-correction (PFC) higher switching rate. Semiconductor-based isolation is particularly
circuit and is supervised by a battery management system (BMS). The suitable for the automotive sector. The use of components based on
BMS has the task of safely and efficiently managing the charge and wide-bandgap materials (such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide)
discharge processes of the battery cells, monitoring their health status. in automotive platforms requires insulation systems that can operate
The second power device is the DC/DC converter, capable of con- at higher temperatures and withstand the electrical noise produced by
verting and reducing the voltage supplied by the batteries to the 12-V high switching frequencies.
value normally used by accessory devices. There are also one or more In high-voltage applications, insulation resistance is an important
auxiliary inverters for controlling the air-conditioning system compres- element in determining whether the system can be operated safely.
sor, the water pump, fans, and other auxiliary systems. Finally, there is The insulation resistance must be measured periodically, as it is
the main inverter, used to drive the electric motor and to manage the subject to early degradation due to high electrical voltage and thermal
energy produced by regenerative braking to recharge the batteries. stress. Therefore, it is important that the system include an insulation
All of these circuits are affected by high-intensity currents (tens of resistance measurement function to monitor degradation and take
amps or more) with peak voltages that can exceed 400 V. preventive measures before a malfunction occurs.
Furthermore, circuits that include a logic part (such as the OBC)
must interface with the low-power communication buses commonly PRODUCTS
used in automotive applications, such as Controller Area Network NXP Semiconductors, through its automotive HEV/EV power inverter
(CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN), and FlexRay. In these cases, control reference platform, offers a complete solution for EV traction

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


Figure 2: The 2ED020I12FA evaluation kit mage n neon
motors and DC/DC converters. The reference platform, whose typical
application is shown in Figure 1, includes up to four boards based on
multicore 2-bit MCUs, an advanced Motor Control Timing software
library, and interconnect cabling. The reference design can efficiently
drive a 100-kW three-phase motor from a 00- supply with integrated
galvanic signal isolation in insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)
gate drivers.
Infineon’s EiceDRI ER single- and dual-channel automotive IGBT
driver ICs provide galvanic isolation and bidirectional signal transmis-
EE|Times EUROPE 55
a anic so ation in and App ications
sion. The products are ideal for the main inverter
systems in automotive applications, in which
efficiency, space savings, and monitoring functions
are mandatory requirements, according to Infineon.
The EiceDRI ER offers stable operation in harsh
EMC environments and drives up to 100-A 1,200-
IGBTs with its integrated 2-A output stage. Collec-
tor-emitter saturation voltage ( CE(sat)) detection
and active Miller clamp features complete the
layout of this IGBT driver IC family.
Infineon’s 2ED020I12FA E ALKIT, shown
in Figure 2, is an evaluation board for the
2ED020I12FA dual-channel isolated IGBT driver for
600- 1,200- IGBTs. The board allows designers
to accelerate the development phase of critical
automotive projects, evaluating the functionalities
offered by the EiceDRI ER device family.
Galvanic isolation has two main objectives func-
tionality and safety. From a functional perspective,
it allows the signal transmission (master) circuits
to operate separately from the acquisition (slave) circuits, thereby
allowing independent voltage references and preventing the formation
of noise-generating ground loops. From a safety perspective, it protects
circuits and people from high voltages between the input and output cir-
cuits that can result from failures or overvoltages of atmospheric origin.
Clearly, then, galvanic isolation is a critical aspect of E E design. ■
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff correspondent at AspenCore
editor o o er ectronics e s and editor in c ie o e .
100
95
75
25
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
56 EE|Times EUROPE
ANALOG DESIGN
The Five Best Arduino Projects
By Nick Habby
A
rduino is a network for open-source electronics focused on a
technology that is easy to use. By giving a list of instructions
to the microcontroller on the board, you can tell your board
what to do.
Arduino has been the brain behind thousands of projects over
the years, ranging from everyday objects such as battery chargers to
complex scientific devices like portable electrocardiographs (ECGs).
Arduino was founded as a convenient tool for easy prototyping at the
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and was aimed at students
without an electronics and programming background. All Arduino
boards are completely open-source, allowing users to create them
freely and eventually improve them to suit their specific needs. The
software is also open-source and is developing worldwide through user
inputs. Arduino has been used in numerous projects and programs due
to its easy and open user experience. The software is simple enough for
beginners and versatile enough for advanced users.
Here are some fun Arduino projects to try.
ROBOT ARM
With so many uses, robot arms play a major role in automated manu-
facturing. They have been used to weld, assemble, pack, paint, pick and
place tasks, and more.
This robotic arm is comprised of D-printed parts, joined to servo
motors, and operated using an Arduino Nano. We can use a smartphone
and a specially made Android
application to manipulate the
robot arm wirelessly. The robot
arm has five degrees of freedom,
so five servo motors are required,
plus the added servo of the gripper
system. The MG 6R servos were
used for the first three points
the waist, the shoulder, and the
elbow. The smaller SG 0 micro
servos were used for the two other axes — the wrist roll and wrist pitch
— as well as on the gripper. The C-0 Bluetooth system was used to
connect with the device.
The movement of each servo or axis of the robot arm can be man-
ually controlled using the sliders in the device. We can also log each
position or step using the “Save” button, and then the robot arm can
run and repeat these steps automatically. We can interrupt the auto-
mated process with the same button, and we can restore or erase all
measures so we can write new ones.
ALARM SYSTEM
If you’ve ever thought of developing your own security system, this
concept is a good starting point. The ultrasonic sensor is used here to
detect movement. The warning will be triggered if a person or entity
moves in front of the detector. You will need to enter a password
using a keypad to deactivate the alarm. Upon clicking the “A” button,
the alarm will sound in 10 seconds. This uses an ultrasonic sensor to
identify objects, and a buzzer begins emitting a sound once the alarm
senses it.
We need to insert a four-digit password to end the alarm. The stan-
dard password is “12 ,” but we can change it as well. We access the
password update list by clicking the “B” button, where we first need
to enter the existing code to start and then enter the new four-digit
password. Once the password is modified, we can stop the alarm only
by entering the new password the next time we activate the alarm.
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
Arduino alarm system components (Image: How To Mechatronics)
When we type an incorrect password, we will receive a message that we
must try again.
WIRELESS WEATHER STATION
This practical design concept from Arduino includes calculation
of indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity. It is based on
the D T11 D T22 sensor, the wireless communication NRF2 L01
transceiver module, and the DS 2 1 real-time clock (RTC). For display
purposes, we can use either a 16-inch LCD character or a .2-inch
TFT touchscreen.
The outdoor unit can be powered by batteries, and an AC converter
can be used to power the indoor unit. The outdoor unit tests the tem-
perature and humidity, and the measurements are sent to the central
indoor unit. Together with the date and time values from the DS 2 1
RTC unit, these values are written on the LCD. We can also use the SD
Card unit to store the data on a Micro SD card.
HOME AUTOMATION
Home automation for smart homes is one of Arduino’s most popular
projects. The goal of this project is to remotely monitor anything in
your house, such as lighting, appliances, heat, and security devices,
with a single device or your smartphone. The idea here is to have a
master unit that includes a touch display and several slave units that
execute master commands. We can use the NRF2 L01 radio frequency
modules for wireless communication, and each slave unit can have dif-
ferent functions, such as temperature monitoring, power outlet control,
light control, and security alarm.
There are, of course, loads of options and configurations to use the
Arduino board to create a home automation network. You will switch
and connect more apps over time. You can also use your smartphone to
make a Bluetooth connection so you can monitor all of this activity.
ANDROID SMARTPHONE-CONTROLLED POWER OUTLET
The first step in home automation is managing your home power
outlets via a smartphone. Together with the Arduino panel, you need
just two components for this design. You can use a 220- 110- AC to
- DC converter to power the Arduino and the relay. You can attach
and monitor your power outlet using your mobile with Bluetooth. You
can either use existing software from the Play Store to power Arduino
or make your own custom app. It is also possible to monitor the power
outlets through voice-control orders. ■
Nick Habby is a digital marketing manager at Meee Services.

ARDUINO DIY
Let’s Cook Arrosticini Using
Open-Source Hardware
By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio
A
rrosticini — sheep or lamb skewers —
are a staple of the cuisine of Italy’s
Abruzzo region. A typical dish of the
pastoral tradition, they are said to
have been invented early in the last century
by hungry shepherds stuck in the fields during
the seasonal movement of their flocks to fresh
pastures. The shepherds would butcher an old
sheep, cut the meat into small pieces, slide
the pieces onto sticks, and cook the skewers
over a flame.
Cooking an arrosticino to perfection
requires careful control of the cooking tem-
perature and cooking time as well as even
heat distribution. The traditional method is to
grill the skewers on a fornacella charcoal grill.
According to purists, electric cookers compro-
mise the traditional flavor of an arrosticino
(and the self-respect of the chef).
Grilling arrosticini the traditional way, how-
ever, is a labor-intensive, exacting process. Is
it possible to achieve grilling perfection using
a motorized setup?
The following schematic project proposes
a way to automate the process with a sensor
system and motor control to yield perfect
arrosticini. The simplicity of the feedback
system allows for implementing any solution.
The components used include temperature
sensors, a display to view the temperature,
and a motor control solution.
INTRODUCTION
The first concern when grilling meat is to
bring the interior to the desired temperature
Table 1: Values for erfc
Figure 1: Variation of temperature with
time for different sensors. The tempera-
ture starts from an initial value and then
reaches its maximum and remains within a
certain tolerance.1
while maintaining a constant cooking process.
Suppose you have a plate piled high with
meat at the initial temperature To. At the start
of cooking, the surface of the meat is placed
in contact with the surface of the grill at
temperature Tg. For this simple condition, the
temperature of the meat for any time, t, and
any depth, z, can be modeled by the formula
where D is the thermal diffusivity (or heat
diffusion coefficient) of the meat and erfc is
the complementary error function (whose
Figure 2: Each arrosticino is positioned on the fornacella at a distance of 7 to 15 cm
(adjustable) from the coals. The basic setup will vary depending on the number of
arrosticini to be cooked.
EE|Times EUROPE 57
approximate value can be found in special
tables).
In mathematics, the error function (also
called the Gauss error function) is a particular
function encountered in probability, statistics,
and partial derivative differential equations. It
is defined as
and is valid for each real number x. The values
in the erfc table can be obtained by developing
the Taylor series error function and integrat-
ing for the whole real axis.
The aim is to prepare the coals by keep-
ing the temperature under control so that it
remains constant in time. The distribution
that we should obtain is of the type shown
in Figure 1.
Thermal diffusivity (unit of measurement
mm2 s) is a specific property of the material
that characterizes the non-stationary heat
conduction. This quantity describes how
quickly a material reacts to a temperature
change. Thermal diffusivity is a prerequisite
in solving the Fourier equation for non-
stationary heat transfer.
The model equation can be solved to deter-
mine the time required for the meat to reach
the desired temperature, T(z,t)
The only tricky part of this equation is to
find the values for erfc. Surely, we would be
dealing with values of <1. Table 1 shows some
possible values of the temperature difference.
The typical arrosticino consists of meat
that is cut to a thickness of roughly 1 cm
(depending on the type) and is inserted onto
a skewer measuring about 25 cm long. The
www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
58 EE|Times EUROPE

Let’s Cook Arrosticini Using Open-Source Hardware

meat extends down roughly half of the skewer are available in small diameters
length, and the skewers are positioned on the suitable for robotic applications.
stove with the bare wood extending over The motor has a diameter of
the edge, allowing the cook to turn them so 30 mm and is characterized by
that the meat cooks evenly on all four sides high dynamics and high torque. It
(Figure 2). After defrosting and before grilling is available in two lengths, each in
the meat, the cook would dry it with absor- a standard version and a high-
bent paper and wait for its temperature to torque version, with a maximum
reach approximately room temperature. nominal torque up to 110 mNm at
The average grilling time is about 1 to 2 75 W. In all versions, the new EC-i
minutes per side (related to the temperature 30 motors can be expanded with
of the coals and the relative distance from the encoders, gearboxes, servo con-
arrosticini). trollers, or positioning controllers.
The DC Motor Control Shield
DESIGN from Infineon Technologies is one
The project must include temperature sensors of the first high-current motor
to control the temperature of both the arrosti- control boards compatible with
cini and the coals. The optimum temperature Figure 4: n neon’s M Boot it Arduino as well as with Infineon’s
of the meat will determine the degree of XMC1100 Boot Kit, based on the
cooking, so it will be necessary to assess the BTN8982TA IC. The DC Motor
difference in temperature during the design tion, a defective temperature variation Control Shield can drive two unidirectional DC
phase. The hardware structure comprises: should reduce the speed of the motor so motors (half-bridge configuration) or one bidi-
1. an Arduino board2 that the cooking remains optimal. rectional DC motor ( -bridge configuration). A
2. temperature sensors The temperature sensors used are PT100 PWM can control the BTN8982TA NovalithIC
3. a display to show the temperature of the
sensors, which commonly find application half-bridges via the IN Pin (Figure 4).
coals and the arrosticini. The two tem-
in industry settings such as laboratories for The arrosticini in our project can be
peratures must be different the operator
measuring temperature during work sessions. connected to a motorized system to rotate
must keep the coals under control so The nominal resistance of these sensors is them 90° every 1 to 2 minutes. Once the 360°
that the temperature is the same as the
established by the IEC 751 standard and is rotation is complete, an arrosticino must be
starting temperature. 100 in a temperature condition equal to removed from the coals. The taste of the meat
4. a fan to ensure uniform heating and, 0°C. The use of thermal resistance in the depends on the temperature of the coals,
therefore, uniform cooking. In this case,
PT100 allows it to operate in a broader tem-
the model described above will pres- perature range, between –200°C and 850°C,
ent a coefficient to multiply that takes
with excellent accuracy and interchangeabil-
Automating the grilling
ity, stably and durably (Figure 3).
ventilation into account. According to the process with a sensor system
programming, the fan can be switched on Conditioning is accomplished via the
where necessary, i.e., when the tempera-
MAX31865, an easy-to-use resistance-digital and motor control will yield
ture difference between the coals and the
converter optimized for platinum resistance
meat begins to deviate. temperature detectors (RTDs) such as the
perfect arrosticini.
5. an I2C display to indicate the tempera-
PT100. An external resistor sets the sensitivity
ture and control text on the cooking of
for the RTD used, and a precision delta-sigma which can vary widely (900°C can be reached
the meat ADC converts the ratio of RTD resistance to inside the coals, at a distance of 10 to 20 cm,
6. two stepper or DC motors — one to turnreference resistance into digital form. Arduino whereas in the fornacella, they reach tempera-
the arrosticini and the other to slidemakes this easily manageable through the tures of 1 0 C to 00 C) bringing the meat
them off the grill. The speed of these two
libraries that can be implemented in the inte- to a temperature of approximately 150°C
motors must be synchronized. In addi- grated development environment (IDE). starts the so-called Maillard reaction — the
Brushless DC (BLDC) motors chemical reaction that gives browned meat its
offer high efficiency, but above all, distinctive flavor and aroma.
excellent torque and speed values Calibration will be required to coordinate
that suit a broad range of applica- the movement of each arrosticino with the
tions. The design of a brushless DC temperature of the grill and of the arrosticino
motor aims to optimize the torque, itself, together with the movement of the slid-
or the amount of rotational force, ing mechanism that will transfer the cooked
which is related to the magnet and meat to the plate. The slides can be removed,
coil winding. The greater the num- and the operator must take care to remove
ber of pole pairs in the magnet, the them once the cooking time has passed.
greater the motor torque.3 Therefore, the software will have to provide
Portescap’s Ultra EC platform temperature reading/setup and display func-
offers a range of brushless motor tions a grid temperature control algorithm
families to target different torque evaluating deviations within 5% of the origi-
and speed requirements. The parent nal temperature and control alarms, such as
company’s patented coil minimizes an LED and/or a buzzer module.
Figure 3: Arduino and PT100 sensors with condi- iron losses to maximize efficiency. Cooking on the grill will still present the
tioning circuit Maxon’s EC-i brushless motors practical problem of keeping the temperature

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

 EE|Times EUROPE 59

Let’s Cook Arrosticini Using Open-Source Hardware

Figure 5: Motorized grill

Figure 6: General system layout. A display can be added by con-

as constant as possible. But that’s where the fun (and the taste) lies!
Before starting cooking, novice grillers will need to study up on how the
cooking time affects the taste. The skill of the cook in positioning and
removing the arrosticini at the right time is also very important.
The motorized control system requires using a fornacella grill, as
shown in Figure 5. We will connect our motor at one end of the grill to
perform the rotation.
The “calibration” of the system will determine the cooking time, usu-
ally about 1 to 2 minutes per side, depending on personal taste as well as
the temperature of the fire. The important thing is to keep the tempera-
ture constant when adding coal. Figure 6 presents a general layout.
CONCLUSION
The hardware project presented here is a basis for having fun
implementing other solutions. We have not described the firmware
necting it to Arduino via I2C.
implemented on Arduino. But the hardware solutions already have
libraries that allow you to manage operations, easily taking the mathe-
matical model into account. ■
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio is a staff correspondent at AspenCore
editor o o er ectronics e s and editor in c ie o e .
REFERENCES
1. Application Note: The Science of Grilling Meat (http://bit.ly/36faJfW)
2. Arduino Projects (http://bit.ly/2NLPhcg)
3. Motor Tutorial (http://bit.ly/36fOR4n)

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Embedded World: 25 – 27 February, Hall 3, Booth 249

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

60 EE|Times EUROPE

HUMOR Tastefully, Plinck ignored this. “Somehow,

even after I outgrew my Peeping Tom phase,

Artificially Intelligent, this idea haunted me. Everybody said, ‘Stavvy,

forget it. It’s impossible ’ But I kept at it,
maniacally. Then one night two years ago,

It Sees Everything while I was smoking a joint in the hot tub and
rereading Rabindranath Tagore, it hit me.”
“ it you ” I demanded, burning with
By David Benjamin curiosity.
“The cosmic interstice.”
I waited for an explanation, but the only
LAS VEGAS — The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) inev- sound was the click, click of Dr. Plinck’s ippo.
itably introduces at least one technology that poses the potential Finally, he spoke. “All my files and diagrams
to shake the universe to its very foundations. I stumbled upon this are in the pile here. All the hardware, all the
year’s world-altering breakthrough, incongruously, in a distant cor- software.” e splashed kerosene onto the
ner of the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot. stack. “But it’s still in my head. I don’t know if
There, clicking away at a vintage Zippo lighter and dolefully
regarding a pile of debris that I recognized as the remains of a small
CES show-floor display booth, was Dr. Stavros Plinck, inventor of
Just how smart do we want
Infini ision, an idea that — according to its modest and introspective our AI to get? Don’t ask
creator — “could have changed everything.”
“Could have ” I asked. stupid questions.
“It’s under there,” he said. e pointed to a matte-black object, resembling night-vision gog-
gles, inside the booth wreckage. “I’m going to burn it to a molten lump, with all my notes. I only I can flush my brain clean. If I can’t, I’ll have
hope I can somehow erase it from my memory.” to kill myself.”
Reading Dr. Plinck’s anguished expression, I sensed that this device was his pièce de résistance, “Kill yourself No Why ” I said with alarm.
the pinnacle of his career. Why would he destroy it “I can’t take the chance that I’ll blurt out
I said, “Please, what is it ” the secret of the cosmic interstice while I’m
“It’s a mobile, wireless, 6 0-gigapixel, 60-degree, magnetic resonating, tomographically drunk, or asleep, or falling in love.”
computerized, ultrasonic, infra-metaphysical, paranormal, armor-piercing View-Master X-ray “I don’t understand. What does this cosmic
camera that — God help me — sees everything.” whatchamacallit do ”
“Sees everything ” I scoffed. “What do you mean, everything ” “Interstice,” said Plinck. “I told you. It sees
“I had no idea, you see,” said Plinck. “I just wanted to see through stuff.” everything.”
“See through stuff ” I replied emphatically. “No way. Nobody,
“Well, girls’ clothes, actually,” said the inventor, smiling forlornly. “When I was a teenager, I nothing can see everything ”
thought it would be cool to have X-ray vision, like Superman. You know, see through the walls of “Wanna bet ” said Plinck. “Look, you know
the girls’ locker room.” these super-cameras — with sensors, LiDAR,
I understood. “Who wouldn’t ” I said. Gratuitously, I added, “ ubba hubba.” radar, infrared displays — that they’re putting

IMAGE S UTTERSTOCK

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu


in cars now? They can spot a deer up the road
1,000 yards, around a hairpin curve, during
a blizzard? And the car warns you to slow
down?”
“Of course,” I said glibly. “Advanced driv-
er-assistance systems.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Plinck. “Infini ision
leaves those kiddy toys in the dust. I can see
that dumb buck in the incipient headlights a
mile away. I can track his hoofprints through
the snow. I can tell you what he ate for his
last meal and the last time he got lucky with a
doe. I can tell you whether he’s going to stand
there in the road and, if he does, whether
you’re going to hit him or not. I can foresee
the damage to your car and give you a repair
estimate. I can envision your injuries and tell
you how long it’s going take poor Bambi to die
in the ditch.”
I wondered if Plinck was crazy, as he ram-
bled on.
“Infini ision can see it all, everywhere. It
sees the dark side of the moon and the edge of
the universe. It sees the flutter of a butterfly
in the Amazon jungle and the glint in the eye
of a great white shark off the Cape of Good
Hope. It can penetrate the memory of an
addled grandmother dying alone and see into
the heart of a young girl. It can even find the
tiny, cold, shrunken soul of ladimir Putin.”
Plinck shook his head and took a deep
breath.
“I’m not even sure how it works.” said
Plinck. “That’s the scary thing about artificial
intelligence nowadays. It gets away from you.
It does stuff on its own. My cosmic interstice
just sees everything. But only God knows— ”
Plinck suddenly stopped, rubbing his chin.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure even God knows,” said
Plinck. “I mean, the first time I realized what
this sucker could do, I called it Ojo de Dios
— Eye of God. But it turns out this was an
understatement. Because, well, there’s one
thing God can’t see. But, with that gadget…”
— he pointed at the Infini isor — “ I can.”
“What’s that?” I asked fearfully. “What
can’t God see?”
“God,” said Plinck.
“Come on,” I said. “What you’re saying is
beyond human possibility.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t human. You know when
I realized I had to destroy it?”
“No idea,” I said.
“The other day, standing at my booth in
Hall D, over there, I was showing off my pro-
totype to a couple of buyers from Mobileye,
right? I put it on, turned a few dials, and
suddenly, there I was.”
“There you were?”
“All of me. Everything I’ve done or thought
I was going to do. Everywhere I’ve been or
wanted to go. Everyone I’ve known or wished
I’d never met — all the way back to the day
EE|Times EUROPE 61
Arti cia nte i ent t ees er t in
I was born. I was a breech birth. I’d never “Saved?” I asked, fearful again.
known that before. I saw myself taking my Plinck sighed. “Infini ision is an evil tech-
first step, saying my first word, and spelling nology, created in innocence,” he said. “Those
my name in alphabet soup. I saw myself two forces — evil and innocence — work,
getting beaten up on the playground, striking somehow, in balance. Too much of one or the
out in Little League, and placing second at the other, either way, and we’re screwed.”
state science fair. I saw my dog, Teddy, run “But ” I asked hopefully, watching flames
over by a bus. dance in the gloaming.
“I saw the girl who broke my heart in my “Well,” said Plinck, “if we know how it’s
freshman year and the other girl I cast aside all going to come out, and we think we have
two years later. I saw that drunken leap off no choice, then what the hell? We just sit
the pier into shallow water that shattered my back and let it happen. We might even unite
tibia and ended my Olympic hopes. I saw my in our despair and help it along. We keep on
wife’s pain and my daughter’s loneliness and screwing one another, because we think that’s
my inability to talk to either one. I saw every all there is.”
colonoscopy I ever had, and I saw, with vivid, “I think I see,” I said grimly. “But maybe if
horrifying clarity, the futility of a land war in we don’t know, if we can’t see what you saw,
Asia. But worst of all, I saw…” we can cling to a shred of innocence. Make
For a moment, Dr. Plinck, his eyes bulging, different choices. Maybe it won’t come out
his hands shaking, couldn’t speak. that way after all.”
“What did you see?” I demanded. “Please, I gazed into the fire. “There’s hope, right ”
please tell me.” I said.
“I saw,” said Plinck haltingly, “I saw how it’s Dr. Plinck looked up, searchingly, into the
all going to come out.” His face turned dark. evening sky. As far as either of us could see,
“Not good, huh?” I said. from sunset to far horizon, there was not a
Plinck flicked the ippo. A tongue of blue single pig on the wing. ■
flame leapt up. e dropped the lighter into
the gas-soaked kindling. A cloud of acrid David Benjamin is a no e ist and o rna -
smoke rose from the bonfire. ist o sp its is ti e et een aris and
“This might just work,” said Plinck softly. adison isconsin. or ore o is or isit
“We might be saved…” lastkidbooks.com.
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www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020
62 EE|Times EUROPE

OPINION
What’s the Best Strategy
for AI Regulation?
By Sally Ward-Foxton

During CES, the White House issued a draft memo to U.S. govern-
ment agencies with guidance on creating regulations for the use of
artificial-intelligence technology in the private sector. The memo,
from the White ouse Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP), was intended both to promote the trustworthy use of AI
technology and help avoid its overregulation. Preventing authoritarian use of AI
Are those two goals at odds depends on becoming a global leader in
The White ouse thinks not. Its position is that the way to become the technology. (Image: Scott Webb/Pexels)
a global leader in AI is to avoid unnecessary regulation, and the best
way to ensure ethical use of the technology is to be a global leader in it.
Indeed, the White ouse went as far as to warn Europe in strong terms not to overregulate.
“Europe and our allies should avoid heavy-handed innovation-killing models,” reads a As the White House warns
statement issued by the OSTP. “The best way to counter authoritarian uses of AI is to make sure Europe against overregulation,
America and our international partners remain the global hubs of innovation, shaping the evolu-
tion of technology in a manner consistent with our common values.” is ethical use of AI necessarily
Europe’s approach to AI regulation is not yet set in stone, but all the signs point toward strin-
gent legislation — the opposite of the approach favored by the U.S.
an innovation killer?
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen set the tone when she made the human
and ethical implications of AI a cornerstone of her pre-election manifesto, promising to put the public is essential to the development of a
forward legislation for a coordinated European approach. sustainable AI industry and, by extension, the
A recent report by Germany’s Data Ethics Commission recommended tough new rules for AI evolution of AI technology.
ethics, with strong measures taken against “ethically indefensible uses of data.” This was widely Public trust is not something to gamble
seen as an indication that any new EU rules on AI uses would be just as tough, given that a previ- with — once it’s lost, it’s gone forever — so
ous report from the Data Ethics Commission was the basis for the EU’s General Data Protection regulation is needed to maintain it. GDPR has
Regulation (GDPR). been widely copied, from apan to Brazil. If it
plays its hand wisely, Europe could once again
TO REGULATE OR NOT TO REGULATE? lead the world in this area.
It’s clear that regulation will play a key role in shaping the emerging landscape as global super- Proving that ethical use of AI is not neces-
powers jostle to gain expertise in this game-changing technology. But which strategy is better, sarily an innovation killer will be hard, but it
and what is the right balance between regulation and innovation is not worth compromising over. ■
Is regulation required to prevent the authoritarian use of AI — already an alarming trend for
applications such as facial recognition in some countries My gut says that the industry cannot Sally Ward-Foxton is a staff correspondent
be expected to police itself on issues as critical as civil liberties. Ultimately, earning the trust of at AspenCore.
IMAGES S UTTERSTOCK

Maintaining the public’s trust in AI technology is essential to the development of a sustainable AI industry. (Image: Andy Klly/Unsplash)

FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu

 EE|Times EUROPE 63

IOT SENSORS AND MEMS

Sensors Glue Virtual and Real Worlds,

Says TDK InvenSense CTO
By Anne-Françoise Pelé

T
he internet of things (IoT) is changing the way we interact with the world
around us. Everyone — and everything — is connected and soon will be
interconnected. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices and
sensors assume an essential job in collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data,
often in real time.
In an interview with EE Times Europe, Peter Hartwell, CTO of TDK Inven-
Sense, laid out a future in which IoT technologies transcend the individual
experience and become invisible. It’s a future in which sensors are the glue
between the virtual and the real worlds.
Peter Hartwell, CTO of TDK InvenSense
EE TIMES EUROPE: [Last year], you something that was just sort of esoteric, just
were inducted into the SEMI-MEMS & for the geeks and just for the early adopters to
Sensors Industry Group Hall of Fame, really see. Hartwell: opefully, there will be a beneficial
a distinction that acknowledges your One of my favorite memories was literally in relationship.
substantial and lasting impact on this a restaurant [where] I watched a grandfather We were a young fabless company. We very
industry. How do you feel about it?  and his granddaughter looking at something much understood the sensors and the impor-
Peter Hartwell: If I had to summarize in one on an iPhone. You literally had a 70-something tance of the software. TDK is a materials and
word how I feel: old. I still feel that MEMS is a and a four-something looking at something manufacturing company, driven fundamen-
new industry. I have been doing this literally on an iPhone, and a 70-something and a tally by quality. There is this Japanese word
since high school; I have not deviated from four-something using a computer, and we had we use, monozukuri, which means “if you
the path. I have watched a lot of people go off enabled that. [Just] four years before, neither of want to build something, build it well.” We
and do other things. It is a huge honor to be them would have been computer users. [Now], now talk about the concept of kotozukuri,
recognized by your peers for [your] contribu- not only were they using a computer, but they which is the idea that if you want to build
tions [in] moving the technology forward. So I were having such a good experience that the something, build it well but build it with pur-
would say old and honored. mum took a picture of them. pose, try to do something for the customer,
The technology transcends and becomes understand the customer’s needs. It allows
EETE: You have more than 25 years of transparent. So when I look at where I am us to look across the whole vertical, from the
experience in commercializing silicon trying to go, moving forward, it’s … how we raw materials that go into building some-
MEMS and working on advanced sensors make that technology just disappear into [the thing, which is fundamental to the quality
and actuators. You also have over environment] around us to where we are no and performance, all the way up to how that
40 worldwide patents on MEMS and longer surprised that technology worked or experience is going to affect our customers
sensor applications. What are the main did something. It just becomes natural. and our customers’ customers.
achievements or determining decisions Coming back to the voice interface concept, It has been a great mix of two different
in your career?  the computer keyboard is 140 years old, if competencies and strengths. Together, we
Hartwell: For me, it has been looking at how you go back to the time that typewriters are much more than [we were] when apart
sensors are going to be the driver for change. were invented. My son, who is eight, looks because we get that system level now across
It was a realization I came to early. My first at a keyboard [and] sees only one button. It all sectors, whether it is in IoT, in automotive,
MEMS job was at Hewlett-Packard, and from is the Siri button or the Ok Google button. or in consumer electronics. We have a better
there, it was, “What is a computer company [His expectation is,] “I am just going to push toolset to attack the whole market.
going to do with sensors?” We were building it and talk to it, and it just works.” With that
these brains, and they were blind, deaf, and expectation, what is it going to look like when EETE: Looking ahead, what are the next
numb to what was going on in the world. the technologies just disappear into the back- steps in TDK’s InvenSense expansion
Sensors gave them the ability to see the world ground and we are more efficient and have in terms of product development and
and eventually to interact with the world. better and safer experiences? technology roadmap? 
It seems so natural to us now, and we have Hartwell: We are doing a lot of work right
the compute power behind that to interpret EETE: In 2017, TDK made its sensor now on ultrasonics. Before the acquisition,
commands as simple as changing the music. ambitions clear when it acquired inside InvenSense, we had a very nice ultra-
We are realizing that sensors are going to be InvenSense and its strong software sonic fingerprint sensor, acquired by TDK
the interface between the digital world and team, well-versed in AI, predictive [when it purchased InvenSense]. We have
the real world. control, and analysis of movement. [since] acquired another company, Chirp. It is
My second job was at Apple. There, I was How has InvenSense technology been a great fit inside TDK because of TDK’s knowl-
able to see the impact of making technol- leveraged in TDK’s smartphone and IoT edge in ultrasound materials. [The Chirp
ogy accessible to the masses and not having businesses?  business] is one of the very big business units

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

64 EE|Times EUROPE
Sensors Glue Virtual and Real Worlds, Says TDK InvenSense CTO
inside TDK. So it is just the perfect marriage
of new materials, new MEMS devices coming
together, and I think that is where we are see-
ing the application space explode. We heard at
[last year’s MEMS & Sensors Executive Con-
gress] conference that electrostatic actuators
have gone far, and now the piezoelectric stuff
is maybe going to take us to the next step.
For me, personally, I like the expansion
because we are looking not just at sensors
now, but we are [also] looking at actuators,
[with the] Chirp device putting out a sound
and then looking at the echo coming back. It’s
both the sensors and actuators.
Back to my original comment on sensors
making computers smarter in sensing what’s
going on, if you can manipulate what’s going
on, that’s really the next step toward actua-
tion. For us, ultrasound is a first step toward
actuation, toward smart systems being able
to influence stuff in the physical world. That’s
the direction we are looking at right now.
EETE: As a CTO, you are probably
keeping an eye on what’s emerging from
research labs. Which interesting MEMS
and sensor technologies, excluding
TDK’s, have you seen recently?  skiing with my grandson.” [He didn’t think,]
Hartwell: To me, one of the places is
medtech — not necessarily the bioMEMS to
replace laboratory equipment, but more mass
market, with things we will be able to do at
home or with a wearable device. That’s what
I am keeping an eye on. It is logical to say
that somewhere in 20 to 40 years from now,
you are going to be wearing [a continuous]
diagnostic monitoring system. The question is
how you get there, what steps we need to take
to get us there.
The other one is the explosion of opti-
cal sensors. We are seeing this in LiDAR, in
structured-light 3D imaging. What is neat
about these technologies is that a lot has been
developed for automotive. The reason we all
have accelerometers in our phones now is
because they started out for automotive.
You are going to start having toys with
radar. I can’t wait to see what the toy guys
think of when suddenly you can put a radar in
a toy robot. I can’t wait to see where optical
3D sensing, radar, and LiDAR are going to go,
especially in the toy space.
EETE: At the MEMS & Sensors Executive
Congress, the Technology Showcase
amplified awareness of the latest MEMS
and sensor technologies and applica-
tions, including a DNA search engine and
a 4D LiDAR for autonomous vehicles, as
well as wearable biosensors for health
care. Any takeaways on the technology
you would like to share with us? Has one
of the startups caught your attention?
Hartwell: You get to see people who believe
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
in an idea so much, they are going to risk
their ability to put food on the table to
pursue that idea. I am very much into AR
and VR right now. I believe the way we are
going to record experiences and share them
with people is really what is going to bring
VR into the non-gamers’ hands. Gaming will
always be there, but that is not what is going
to drive the market. I am trying to see how
we can solve that problem ... Where are the
sensors? How are we going to get to content
creation for VR? That’s where we are stuck
right now. You can buy a headset, but you
don’t know what to watch. It’s like the days
of black-and-white TV. If you go back to
the early TV shows, [they were] vaudeville,
because that was entertainment. It took 70
years to come up with “Game of Thrones.”
So the question is how we accelerate [so
that] VR becomes a platform to consume and
experience what we could not do before. I
think it’s going to be travel; it’s going to be
shopping [and] personal content. I have been
able to digitize myself skiing and [then] put
my dad skiing with me and his grandson in
VR. He took the headsets off, looked at me,
and went, “I never thought I would get to go
“That was a cool picture you showed me,”
[but,] “I went skiing with my grandson.” That
is really how he felt.
EETE: A sense of mission and purpose
filters through your words, as you seem
to be willing to add some humanity to
everything you are developing.
Hartwell: It should be natural for us to do
that. We do form relationships with things
that aren’t alive. As they begin to talk and
react to us, it is only natural for us to make
those experiences with those devices, [with]
something we can relate to. To me, sensors
are the glue between the virtual world and the
real world, so we are trying to give robots sen-
sors to put them into our world, which means
they have to see, and they have to hear, to feel
and smell. And we are trying to put people
in a virtual world, which means you have to
create the content. Sensors are the glue there.
The next step is when smart speakers follow
you around the house. If the Sony Aibo was
able to do all the things that Alexa could do,
suddenly you would have the perfect pet, a
companion. It would follow you, charge itself.
It would change the music, take care of the
lights, and if you fall down, it would come over
and see if you are OK and call for help. That’s
what we are going to have, and I can’t wait.
Autonomous companions, that’s how I
would like to [characterize] them. And the
technology is going to disappear. ■
Anne-Françoise Pelé is editor-in-chief
of eetimes.eu.
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 EE|Times EUROPE 65

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW

Eureka Park: The Lower East Side of CES

By David Benjamin

starting at about US$300. The drive is just a

black rectangle, so we asked Lokly CEO Benoit
Berthe, a good-looking guy, to pose with it.

YOUR BATH MAT IS WATCHING YOU

The smart mat developed by Mateo (Neuilly-
sur-Seine, France) looks like a regular bath
mat, which is not that thrilling to look at, so we
opted for an image of the much more photo-
genic Mateo representative, Coraline Gag-
nadre, talking with a curious convention-goer.
The Mateo mat gets more interesting when
you step on it: It measures your weight, makes
judgments about your posture, and even
reminds you of your shoe size. “Not only can
it identify users by their footprint,” reads the
promo material, but “it can also create a heat
map of how your foot makes contact with the
ground. And an awful lot more.”

LAS VEGAS — During the great wave of European immigration to America, by way of Ellis
Island, New York’s Lower East Side absorbed a vast number of newcomers, struggling to gain
a toehold in the U.S. economy, sell their ideas, and work their way to the top. It wasn’t a fancy
neighborhood, but it seethed with human and intellectual promise.
CES 2020 had a similar enclave: Eureka Park, a slightly out-of-the-way area in Halls A and D at
the Sands Convention Center where many smaller European up-and-comers set up their booths
and hawked their wares. Some of the companies — like Hitblu (Luxembourg), a digital clearing
house for private air charters — had no products to show but sent their ambassadors. Hitblu, for
example, presented debonair founder Federico Podesta, who explained the service and men-
tioned — offhand — that new investors would be more than welcome to pitch in. Mateo’s Gagnadre (r.) pitches its mat.
The common denominators at Eureka Park were ingenuity, a vastly eclectic range of prod-
ucts (and investment opportunities), and youthful enthusiasm, as indicated by the companies A BANDAGE WITH A BRAIN?
profiled here. The WoundLAB smart bandage can’t give you
(Photos by David Benjamin for EE Times Europe) investment advice, but it can tell you if your
cut is getting infected. Connected via smart-
phone app, a tiny hexagonal electronic patch
YOUR GRANDFATHER’S VOICE Pimely touts the device as a teaching aid and a embedded in a larger bandage continuously
Pimely (Villeurbanne, France), part of the means to keep kids close to far-flung family. measures biomarkers like heat and acidity
growing presence of the La French Tech ini- in a healing wound and conveys the data
tiative at CES, showed a recording technology DATA SECURITY IN CANDY-BAR FORM via secure near-field communication. The
affiliated with children’s book publishing. A Lokly (Massy, France) makes an encrypted USB WoundLAB patch is in clinical trials now, with
compact plastic square with a smiley face and a flash drive, controlled by a user’s smartphone, a goal of receiving Food and Drug Adminis-
heart on its surface, Bookinou plays stories — that can store up to 64 Gb of data and can’t tration (FDA) approval in the United States.
recorded in the voices of a child’s loved ones — be cracked by an intruder. The drive is smaller Grapheal, WoundLAB’s developer, is part of
as the child reads along in a hard-copy book. than the average candy bar, but it costs more, a large and growing research community in
Grenoble, France.

CAR INSPECTION IN A HEARTBEAT

Pimely’s Bookinou (unicorn not included)
Lokly’s Berthe flashes its secure drive.
(OR TWO)
Getting your car inspected is always a pain.
ProovStation (Lyon, France) has found a way
to ease it with a 360° drive-through scanner
that uses artificial intelligence to diagnose
everything about a vehicle, from license
number to paint scratches (including repair
estimates), in 10 seconds. The application
secures exchanges, simplifies inspections, and

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020

66 EE|Times EUROPE
Eureka Park: The Lower East Side of CES
Pull into a real ProovStation, get a report in seconds.
creates a certified inspection photo report
on a secure tool that’s available on mobile,
tablet, and web platforms. The photo shows a
ProovStation model. The real thing is bigger.
LORD OF THE (SMART) RINGS
Forget about carrying around all those
clunky credit cards, wallets, purses, keys, and
maybe even your phone. ICARE Technologies
(Ajaccio, France) will soon launch a connected
ring — with Wave Control data security and
a product design
by Paris luminary
Philippe Starck — that
provides contactless
payment and ID. Thus,
the jewelry doubles
as a personal badge
or loyalty card, useful MI WEBSITE ES TU WEBSITE
for public transit,
ICARE’s connected stadium ticketing,
ring: Starck look and unlocking doors
and devices. ICARE
promises lots more downloadable functions as
the Aeklys ring evolves.
DON’T WASTE THAT WINE
Invineo (Gemblou, Belgium) has come up
with a wine dispenser — including a line of
vacuum- and temperature-controlled “bot-
tles” — that provides single-glass servings
without exposing the remaining wine to
the air. Founder and CEO Thierry Tacheny,
shown below enthusiastically explaining his
product, said that Invineo has commercial
customers now and that a home-cellar version
is in the works. It already has a wine roster of
Tacheny dispenses wisdom on Invineo.
FEBRUARY 2020 | www.eetimes.eu
more than 60 vintages from many
producers.
A WEATHER EYE ON YOUR
CROPS AND COWS
An agricultural-monitoring product
from Dilepix (Rennes, France) uses
images from “connected traps,” sur-
veillance cameras, and smartphones,
linked with analysis software, to
warn farmers about threats like
pests, weeds, and diseases and to
tell when seeds are germinating,
flowers are blossoming, and cows
are calving. The data can be com-
pressed for embedding in a tractor or drone,
said Dilepix representative Alban Pobla. We
eavesdropped as Pobla explained the system
to Brent Fisher, a convention-goer from Sense
Photonics (Research Triangle, North Carolina).
Pobla (r.) sells Fisher on smart farming.
Adapti is a website service that uses
machine-learning algorithms to evaluate visi-
tors to a client’s website, customize it to their
individual tastes and tendencies, and ply each
visitor with recommendations. The “intuitive”
interface “can be installed in minutes,” said
Adapti co-founder Daniel Antunes. “After
that, artificial intelligence does the work for
Co-founders Antunes (l.), Antoine Granjon
you.” Whether every website visitor is eager
to have Adapti (Luxembourg) pick his or her
brain and parse his or her personal tastes is
another issue.
A LITTLE BANKING ON A BIG CONTINENT
Africa is a huge continent with countless
remote pockets where the banking ser-
vices commonplace in advanced countries
are either scarce or nonexistent. Koosmik,
based in Luxembourg and driven by founder
Gregoire Yakan, is working to fill the gap —
starting in Togo, where Koosmik now has
100,000 users able to access savings and
checking accounts, credit, insurance, mobile
wallets, and other services, usually for a small
fee but often for free. Yakan noted that Koos-
mik raised US$2 million in investment last
year and is seeking more investors to help the
company expand into more African nations.
Koosmik’s Yakan (l.) has expansion plans.
SKIN IN THE GAME
Duolab, a part of Groupe L’Occitaine (with
headquarters in Luxembourg and Switzer-
land, among other countries), has developed
a skin-care system that takes personalization
seriously. It begins with a diagnostic tool,
wielded at Eureka Park by genial Parisians
Cecile Tourel, Magali Millet, and Aude Petiet.
After analyzing your skin, the device generates
(L.-r.) Tourel,
Millet, and Petiet;
Duolab formulator
a personal-care
protocol and rec-
ommends the right
mixture of mostly organic ingredients. A Duo-
lab formulator then blends those ingredients
into an ultra-thin emulsion, heated to skin
temperature and dispensed in two capsules (a
moisturizing base and a targeted concentrate)
through a smart applicator. If this sounds too
complicated, you’re not worried about your
complexion. ■
David Benjamin is a novelist and journal-
ist who splits his time between Paris and
Madison, Wisconsin. For more of his work, visit
lastkidbooks.com.
Lighting Industry
Newly developed NFC-PWM series for NFC programming with CLO

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Dual-mode NFC configuration ICs with PWM output: NLM0011, NLM0010
Primarily designed for LED applications.

What is special?
The NLM0011 is the first on the market with integrated constant lumen output (CLO)
function. Both ICs come with advanced features such as operating-time counting,
and on/off counting. No firmware development. No microcontroller integration.

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www.infineon.com/NFC-PWM