MCU+ wireless rapid growth
With the rapid changes in processor performance and wireless communication technology, the Internet of Things is expected to quickly enter our lives in the next few years. Microcontrollers (MCUs), as the core components of the Internet of Things, will be further developed both in terms of market size and technology. The purpose of the Internet of Things is to make everything accessible, so as to form a huge application system and create a smart living environment. Therefore, IoT devices are bound to have networking capabilities, while also taking into account cost and power consumption. This demand has prompted the power of wireless microcontroller solutions. Many MCU manufacturers have noticed this trend and began to integrate communication technologies such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and ZigBee into system single-chip (SoC), and gradually expanded their product portfolio.
Jin Guangyi, product manager of GigaDevice MCU, believes that IoT applications put new demands and challenges on MCU processing power, peripheral configuration and cost price. More and more IoT connected applications require MCUs to have excellent performance. Performance and real-time response speed to achieve information flow processing and transmission with high efficiency. In addition, the Internet of Things also requires the MCU to have a large capacity of Flash and RAM space, and integrate a rich combination of communication interfaces to meet the resource requirements of the system and multiple peripherals running simultaneously. Cost price is an important factor in determining whether IoT terminals can be widely used. GigaDevice's interconnected and value-added GD32 Cortex-M3 MCUs are aimed at these IoT market needs and incorporate enhanced processing power and highly integrated peripheral configurations at a minimum price of $0.32. Suitable for cost-sensitive embedded interconnect applications.
Greg Hodgson, director of product marketing for Silicon Labs microcontrollers, said: "The Internet of Things, as its name implies, is the connection between things and things, the connection between things and the Internet. The basic technologies of the Internet of Things include sensing, processing and wireless connectivity. Based on user usage. Connectable devices require robust ZigBee, WiFi, Bluetooth Smart and sub-GHz based wireless networks. Silicon Labs is currently the leading supplier of ZigBee chips and a leading sub-GHz IC supplier for connectable device applications. Most of the semiconductor devices are based on mixed-signal CMOS technology. These devices (sensors, MCUs, and wireless ICs) must be energy efficient, low cost, and flexible enough to be suitable for a wide range of IoT applications." Silicon Labs said it will launch in the future. IoT SoC" integrates MCU, wireless transceiver, flash memory and sensor interface in an energy-saving single chip. "This will greatly reduce the cost and complexity of IoT endpoint applications," Greg Hodgson said.
MCU+ sensor is the trend
“In response to the growing demand for connectivity, MCUs need to provide more peripherals to interact with external analog and digital worlds; for intelligence, MCUs need to obtain information for efficient and intelligent information processing; for processing needs, MCUs need to be satisfied on the one hand. Real-time processing requirements, on the other hand, to be able to exchange information with remote centers. These are the MCU needs of the Internet of Things era." NXP Semiconductors microcontroller product technology marketing manager Zhang Xiaoping said, "At the same time NXP also found The integration trend of MCU and sensor.†Cao Jindong, senior manager of MCU market in ST China, reminded: “In the Internet of Things, in addition to the MCU, another component that cannot be ignored is the sensor. It needs to be interpreted in the Internet of Things. Signals need to be captured through sensors. Without the sensor element, the Internet of Things will not exist."
However, integrating MCUs with sensors is not technically easy. Jin Guangyi said that the sensor network is an important part of the Internet of Things. As the core device of the system control, the MCU needs to collect data from sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, thermometers and hygrometers, and analyze and process the MEMS used by the sensors. There are differences in process and MCU processes, and the integration of the two SOCs poses certain challenges in semiconductor technology. "But it does not prevent the two as widely used modules in the Internet of Things. We are more concerned with the system application itself, that is, how to use the MCU's software algorithms to achieve sensor control, thereby optimizing the data acquisition process and energy efficiency. And process data for more efficient use. We are also working with third-party software partners to launch MCU application software and solutions based on different types of sensors, to play the core advantages of MCU control." Jin Guangyi said.
Toshiba Electronics Co., Ltd. technical director of the company, said that Toshiba has been committed to the research of related technologies, but the current Chinese market lacks a unified standard, so it is too early to integrate. But in the long run, once the standards are unified, integration will be a trend.
Greg Hodgson said: "Sensor technology is developing more rapidly than MCU. When sensor innovation slows down and sensor types are more standardized, we will see MCUs and sensors integrated into SoC or SIP solutions. Now, many MCUs have There is a mature sensor interface architecture. In the future, we will see the emergence of an MCU architecture designed for automatic acquisition of sensor data, enabling sensor data aggregation on IoT-optimized ultra-low power platforms."
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