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CONTENTS

Special Features

Powering the IoTBy Eric Faraci, Texas Instruments 6

Power Systems Design for Wearables: Life’s No PMICQ&A with Silego TechnologyBy Anne Fisher, Managing Editor 10

Healthy Gains Thanks to Innovative Wireless SensorsBy Herman Morales, Microsemi Corporation 14

Battery-less Smart Autonomous IoT ApplicationsBy Daniel Luthi, Vincent Peiris, and Yves Théoduloz,

EM Microelectronics 16

Product Showcases

Low Power Boards and Modules

Data Acquisition

EMAC, Inc.

SoM-iMX6U 19

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IN THIS ISSUE

April 20176

engineers guide to Ultra Low-Power & Power Management

Powering the IoT The smart energy sector is but one of several where the IoT calls for designers to

balance performance, energy consumption, and cost competitiveness.

The Internet of Things (IoT)—how sweet the sound

that saved the wretched life of our appliances.

Devices once lost, but now are found, were dumb but

now communicate. While these features enable appli-

ances to interconnect and work seamlessly with our

phones and the rest of the home, they do not come free.

More features mean more power, so while all the atten-

tion is on the new-found communication, the power

supply must be redesigned to allow everything to work.

Unfortunately, adding power to IoT devices is not

trivial. The power requirements of these devices are

different than what traditionally has been required.

For example, electric meters once consumed power at

a level low enough that designers could use drop capac-

itor-based solutions for powering the bias circuitry. As

the IoT brought communication to this space, turning

electric meters into “smart” meters, the power-supply

rating crept high enough to render the existing solution

no longer adequate.

Designers had to change the power supply to a flyback

converter to maintain reasonable performance. But

this didn’t relax the requirements of the power supply,

which still needed to operate from residential 120VAC

and 240VAC inputs to commercial 208VAC and 480VAC

inputs. On top of handling this very wide input range,

the efficiency had to remain high to prevent the system

from overheating and reduce the energy consumed in

losses, as millions of these units draw from the grid.

None of these are trivial problems to solve.

ADDING SMARTS—AND CHALLENGESThe issue is not limited to power meters, as communi-

cation and other “smarts” are added to devices such as

light switches/dimmers, smoke/carbon dioxide detec-

tors and proximity detectors. Customers select these

parts for features such as a user interface and commu-

nication capability—not because of a fancy power supply. The focus on

the design of these parts should reflect this priority as well, with the

majority of time and care focused on those specifications to ensure

that they provide the best experience.

Power cannot be ignored, however, so designers must devote some

time to selecting and designing an adequate power supply. This

extends development time. Designers could experience, not the

relief and satisfaction of completing the perfect design, but rather a

Sisyphean existence of trying to stay ahead of the competition.

However, support and tools are available to avoid that fate. For

example, Texas Instruments offers a plethora of devices addressing

power problems, from highly integrated controller and FET solutions

like the UCC28880 and UCC28910, which minimize board size; to

high-performance flyback controllers like the UCC28704, UCC28740

and UCC28722, which enable trade-offs between size, performance

and cost. These devices include advanced control features such as

Figure 1: Tools exist to shorten development time even in the face of such nontrivial challenges as higher power supply ratings, overheating concerns, and cost effectiveness. [Source: TI]

By Eric Faraci, Texas Instruments

April 20178


valley switching and advanced AM/FM modulation schemes to

maximize performance while minimizing losses and size. Design

tools to accelerate development accessible on the device landing

page include:

Descriptive data sheets with functional explanation and appli-

cation sections

Application notes providing further detail on design and use

Excel and/or MathCAD design calculators for parameter and

component selection

SPICE models to verify functionality before building hardware

Online-orderable evaluation modules to immediately have

working hardware in the lab

Reference designs to show size and performance at other oper-

ating conditions.

Despite not being something that customers pay attention to when

selecting a new IoT device, power is something that cannot be

neglected. While these new IoT features enable new and exciting

functionality, at the same time they require a completely new

power supply to be designed. Texas Instruments offers high per-

formance devices for any requirement, which along with abundant

design support tools, allow engineers to quickly get optimized

power supplies up and running. For more information about fly-

back controllers, visit www.ti.com/flyback.

Eric Faraci is a Product Marketing Engineer at Texas Instruments, where

he supports parts that are targeted for low power offline AC/DC conver-

sion. He has had previous roles as an applications engineer for GaN-based

power devices. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

April 201710


Power Systems Design for Wearables: Life’s No PMICQ&A with Silego TechnologyConsidering an approach to power management that could re-invigorate wearables

Editor’s note: In late 2016, Silego Technology announced a major expansion

of its Configurable Mixed-signal IC family to include power management.

With this announcement, designers can create “Flexible Power Islands” to

slay the frustration of lengthening battery life for portable devices such

as handhelds and wearables. Nathan John and Mike Noonen spoke with

EECatalog not long after the announcement. John and Noonen are the

company’s Marketing Director, Mixed-signal Matrix Products and WW VP

Sales and Business Development, respectively. Edited excerpts from the

conversation follow.

EECatalog: What’s needed in the wearables market?

Mike Noonen, Silego: I used to be at National

Semi, and more than 10 years ago National did

a chipset for Microsoft when Microsoft intro-

duced its first smartwatch, SPOT Watch. Nobody

remembers it because the battery life lasted all

of one day.

Now, fast forward a decade later, and in the

more advanced smartwatches the battery life is

two days. One of the reasons smartwatches have not taken off to the

degree that people had hoped and expected is that it requires care and

feeding of a battery that is definitely a gigantic step backward with

regard to the maintenance that people have had to put into watches

for the past century.

At Silego, we’re approaching the problem and the opportunity in a dif-

ferent way. We believe that for a lot of sensors and the most basic of

wearables, what most designers are proposing or doing is overkill, and

consumers are frustrated.

However, by using a Configurable Mixed-signal IC—in many cases

asynchronous state machines—a lot of functionality can be done at

an order of magnitude lower power [compared to] throwing an ARM

microprocessor at the problem. Not to say that we can do everything,

but we think that innovative solutions like ours are part of attaining

the functionality as well as the user experience that customers want.

Having to plug something in every night isn’t the answer, nor is or

having a form factor that requires a battery that makes the smart-

watch less decorative and not very fashionable.

We think this is an opportunity for Silego to re-invigorate wearables,

and the customers we’ve engaged with are seeing our solution, our

technology, as a step in the right direction to get that longer battery

life, small form factor and functionality that users expect.

Nathan John, Silego: Silego has been successful in wearables, but

that is not because we have been focused on

wearables; it has more to do with the fast pace

of the wearables market. Customers in that space

have big challenges, and they are inventing new

architectures, and—typical of our customers—

they are boldly going where nobody has gone

before.

We use configurability to allow customers to

make solutions their own. In industries that are in the midst of dis-

ruption, as wearables is right now, configurability and flexibility are

valuable.

By Anne Fisher, Managing Editor

Mike Noonen, Silego Technology

Nathan John, Silego Technology

Figure 1: Design challenges for power systems designers. [Image courtesy Silego].

April 2017 12


EECatalog: What are Flexible Power Islands and why are they needed?

John, Silego: Smartphones and other consumer electronic devices

with relatively complex electronics (Figure 1) often have a battery that

the manufacturer wants to be large to improve battery life, but at the

same time, the physical form factor of the device can’t get bigger.

So, this delicate balancing act occurs: How do you make it last longer and

not get bigger, heavier, less portable? Power designers in particular face

a host of challenges with small form factor consumer electronic devices.

If the device is a smartphone, among the keep-you-up-at-night problems

it presents to power designers are complex board shapes, the clustering

of amplifiers and microphones at the edge, and worries about heat. And

all that is on top of the battery muscling in on PCB space.

What you’d typically have in the smartphone would be a Power

Management IC (PMIC) at the center. With a distance of as little as

two inches from the edge though, that PMIC is less effective than

power management at the edge, where the microphones, etc. are. The

SLG46125M device we’ve introduced can be used as a Flexible Power

Island to augment the capabilities of the PMIC. Designers do not have

to replace the PMIC or change the device’s fundamental architecture.

EECatalog: You noted that distance from the edge, are there other

drawbacks that PMICs have?

John, Silego: One thing about the suppliers that sell these PMICs:

They don’t make changes very fast. So often our customers say, “I

would love to have my PMIC supplier just make this change for me,”

but either the PMIC supplier won’t do it because they expect a really,

really high volume to do that, or they say, “Yes, I’ll make that change

and I’ll give you that change in six months.” Whereas we would say,

“Hey, take one of our little devices, configure it in a couple of days,

drop that on your board, and you’re off and running.

EECatalog: PMIC suppliers might have reason to look over their

shoulders?

John, Silego: Over time we expect to build more devices that will

serve in this role of Flexible Power Islands, and the ultimate end game

could be for a customer to say, “Well, if I put two of these FPI parts on

there, can I remove the PMIC altogether?” That is certainly the long-

term vision for how we are attacking this.

EECatalog: What are some of the characteristics of the Flexible Power

Islands that support Silego’s being comfortable with taking that long-

term vision?

John, Silego: One of the things that we are touting to our customers

is that besides getting the ability to perform functions—switching

regulation; linear regulation; power gating/slew rate control; control/

sequencing /timing; power monitoring; RTC; GPIO—they should now

expect to have flexibility as one of the extra added benefits that they

might not have had before.

Also, the SLG46125M can capitalize on the full flexibility of our

GreenPAK architecture. Customers can mix and match the functions

that we supply and do the interconnect so that they can turn it into

their own little ASIC. We also supply a set of software that allows

them to do that.

So quite literally, our typical design time is a couple of days, and some-

body has an ASIC. They can program a few samples of their own to test

it out in their system. Next, they supply that as a design file to us, and

we say, “How many do you want to buy?” We program it; we test it; we

sell it to them as if it was an ASIC.

This particular device has a set of power switches, so not only can you

do the control aspects, but you can also switch on and off the different

power rails. The SLG46125M device is also small, a 1.6 x 2.0 mm

MSTQFN package.

Figure 2: The blue rectangles represent physical pins; the green wires represent connections. [Image courtesy Silego Technology]

13eecatalog.com/lps


And with regards to long term, we’ll be offering new resources that we

don’t offer in this first device, making it possible for designers to have

all the functional elements in their power system included in one of

our tiny flexible devices.

EECatalog: Some of the frustration designers have been experiencing

as devices shrink could be alleviated.

John, Silego: Absolutely, and the frustration will be avoided

especially for power systems designers, who feel they get the least

attention of anybody—they [traditionally] get the oldest, boring-est

technology, so when we tell them these parts are small and flexible,

the power systems designers are interested in that.

EECatalog: What else is in the works?

John, Silego: We want to make our fast design cycles even faster. We

want to give customers tools so that they can be more accurate in the

development process and do it more easily and at less cost.

To support those goals, we’re enhancing our development tools by

including SPICE simulation. The little blue rectangles shown on Figure

2 are the physical pins on the device. Customers cannot only add the

functional elements, they can also add the little green wires to con-

nect them all together.

Figure 3: Green circles show simulation test points. [Image courtesy Silego Technology] One way for designers to debug their designs is by downloading that

design directly into a part and then testing it out at the physical board

level. What we are adding here is a new capability enabling customers

to do this is a simulation environment, using SPICE. The little red

indicators on Figure 3 are the signals being generated in a simula-

tion world, and then there are little green circles to indicate where

the designer has dropped down a simulation test point. It’s possible

to view the signals at those various parts in the circuit as it’s running

in the simulation environment. Customers gain the ability to quickly

assess their design and look for mistakes that they might have made.

They can do all the debug steps in a faster and more efficient manner.

Simulation environment debugging is also complementary with our

existing debug methodology, which is a hardware-centric model. For

each one of their devices, we have a development board, and you can

download the capability for your custom solution into that board and

then test it out at a hardware level. That certainly won’t go away, but

[simulation environment debugging] adds a new parallel methodology.

EECatalog: Does simulation environment debugging save time?

John, Silego: Yes, although we were not taking much of their time in

the first place. I mentioned earlier that we have development cycles of

a couple of days—that’s from assembling the specifications; designing

the circuits; doing debug and testing, and saying, “It’s a done deal.”

We have already given them valuable tools that allow them to do this

process quickly. This is just another way to maybe save a couple of

hours off the debug process. We are not saving them days and weeks,

because we never asked them for days and weeks in the first place.

April 2017 14


Healthy Gains Thanks to Innovative Wireless SensorsUltra-low-power radio technology is enabling wireless wearable technology featuring

long battery life and small form factor for medical and other fields.

In today’s wearable technology, long battery life and

small form factor are critical design requirements for

wireless sensing and monitoring devices. Radio trans-

ceivers embedded within these wearable devices need

to support continuous data streaming with extremely

low power consumption. This is especially critical for

wearable platforms systems that are used in environ-

ments where frequent battery replacement would be

difficult and impractical. Although systems previously

required AA or AAA batteries, many can now operate

using +3V coin cell batteries. Making this possible are

ultra-low-power short-range radio transceivers whose

circuit design has been optimized for power efficiency

across several key parameters. With improved ultra-

low-power consumption, which allows the use of tiny

coin cell batteries, wearable applications can be further

reduced in size with the use of radios available in a

smaller chip-scale package (CSP).

RADIO REQUIREMENTS FOR WEARABLE TECHNOLOGYSeveral factors must be considered when selecting a short-range

radio transceiver capable of optimizing power efficiency in wearable

technology. Power supply voltage is particularly important. Many of

today’s sensors can operate from a +3V supply voltage that allows

wearables to operate using a single low-cost, readily available coin cell

battery. Other key power supply considerations include the ability to

maintain transceiver and receiver performance and the use of a low

supply current profile without excessive peaks to fit supply impedance.

Another key issue is peak current. All wireless-based sensor networks

require operation at a predetermined duty cycle to save power and

restrict radio space usage. Low peak current consumption in the radio

transceiver reduces constraints on the wireless sensor’s power supply.

Low sleep current is also critical for low duty extended battery life.

The choice of frequency also influences power consumption. Available

frequency bands within the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM)

radio band are 2.4 GHz or sub-GHz frequencies. The

most prevalent 2.4 GHz protocols are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,

and ZigBee. In low-power and lower-data-rate wireless

monitoring applications, however, sub-GHz wireless

systems offer several advantages, including reduced

power consumption and longer range for a given power.

The Friis equation quantifies the superior propagation

characteristics of a sub-GHz radio, showing that path

loss at 2.4 GHz is 8.5 dB higher than at 900 MHz. This

translates into 2.67 times longer range for a 900 MHz

radio because range approximately doubles with every

6 dB increase in power. To match the range of a 900

MHz radio, a 2.4 GHz solution would need greater than

8.5 dB of additional power. Sub-GHz ISM bands are

mostly used for proprietary low-duty-cycle links and

are not as likely to interfere with each other. The qui-

eter spectrum means easier transmissions and fewer

retries, which is more efficient and saves battery power.

By Herman Morales, Microsemi Corporation

Figure 1: Simplified RF Circuit Design with embedded loop antenna using CSP package.

15eecatalog.com/lps


Choice of the transceiver device package is a key parameter for any

miniaturized platform. Not only are package dimensions critical, but

so are the pin array configuration and the RF circuit impedance match

necessary for the final design. CSP is an ideal platform that allows for

miniaturization of the PCB circuit and high-density layouts on both

rigid and flexible substrates. Pinouts on the CSP’s ball grid arrays

allow for much simpler layouts and simplified RF matching circuits,

using fewer components on RF ports. Figure 1 shows an example of a

CSP package with a simplified RF circuit with embedded loop antenna.

BALANCING POWER AND PERFORMANCE THROUGH PROPER CIRCUIT DESIGNIt is challenging to achieve desired radio performance capabilities

while meeting requirements for extremely low power consumption

and small package size. The careful choice of radio architecture and

building blocks is critical to meeting communication requirements

and power consumption mandates.

Figure 2: Block diagram of a typical wireless sensor based on the ZL70550 transceiver.

One example of a solution derived from a

careful balance of these trade-offs is the

ZL70550 transceiver from Microsemi. Housed

in an approximately 2 mm × 3 mm CSP, it

has standard two-wire and serial peripheral

interfaces for control and data transfer using

any standard microcontroller. Combined with

the ZL70550 transceiver, the resulting solu-

tion can be used to develop a wireless sensor

solution that can run continuously from a CR

series coin.

The ZL70550 choice is ideal for low-power

applications with an ultra-low current of 2.4

mA in RX mode, 2.75 mA in TX mode, and an

industry-leading ultra-low sleep current of 10

nA. The ZL70550’s low-power performance

enables low-cost button cell or small lithium ion batteries to support

continuous data streaming in wearable devices. Figure 2 shows the

Microsemi ZL70550 in a low-power application.

With the advent of micro-power batteries combined with advances

in ultra-low-power transceiver technology, it is now possible to build

smart, flexible wireless sensors. Proper transceiver selection is critical

for addressing a variety of key design issues so that wearable wireless

devices can perform continuous monitoring of bio-signals for long

periods while using a single small battery. Today’s ultra-low-power

transceivers deliver a combination of performance and power effi-

ciency by balancing the trade-offs associated with the use of inversion

techniques to achieve the highest possible gain from a low current.

Herman Morales is a Technical Business Development Manager for

Microsemi Corporation’s Ultra-Low-Power Medical Products. Morales has

held key applications and design positions at Skyworks, SiGe Semiconductor,

and Magnavox Defense Systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical

Engineering, with an option in Biomedical and Clinical Engineering from

California State University, Long Beach.

ENGINEERS’ GUIDE TO ULTRA LOW-POWER & POWER MANAGEMENT • April 2017 • ENGINEERS’ GUIDE TO ULTRA LOW-POWER & POWER MANAGEMENT16


Battery-less Smart Autonomous IoT ApplicationsUltra-low power chipsets pave the way.

The IoT revolution is now gaining speed with the recent emergence of a variety of innovative home

automation, wearables, and industrial applications. The key challenges are to miniaturize sensing and communication electronics for ease of portability and unobtrusive deployment.

Most of today’s solutions are battery operated, with coin-sized CR2032 cells as a popular low-cost choice for energy capacity in a small form factor. Although several years of system operation are feasible with tiny coin cells, the cost to operators of replacing batteries on large numbers of sensor nodes and devices, many of which could be installed in inaccessible locations, is a major hurdle for high-volume IoT device deployment.

As a viable alternative to primary batteries as the energy source for the required sensing/processing/transmitting/receiving operations of an IoT device, energy harvesting elements with dedicated electronic components are now available. Different types of har-vesting elements (solar, thermal, electro-mechanical)

have existed for a number of years. However, these elements have only recently reached a level of industrial maturity with regard to efficiency, power density, and volume production that opens the door to IoT systems’ use.

FOCUS ON PREVALENT ENERGY HARVESTING FRONT ENDSAt the system level a harvesting element is combined with purpose built power-optimized integrated circuits, for which an ultra-low-power design approach must be applied to its complete architecture. A power management chip must offer maximum efficiency when converting the small absolute amount of energy a harvesting ele-ment generates, whereas a companion radio chip must feature lowest transmit and receive currents and efficient transients to function properly within the same energy budget.

EM Microelectronic-Marin addresses these system constraints with a family of best-in-class integrated semiconductor solutions supporting IoT product providers with embedded low-power intelligence for their connected objects.

EM’s power management products focus on two of the most prevalent energy harvesting front ends, solar cells and thermo-electric generators.

TRUE DIFFERENTIATIONSolar cell equipped systems have traditionally been operated in high-illumination environ-ments in which even electronic components with moderate efficiency operate satisfacto-rily. A typical outdoor system functions with incident light at 10000 lux or more. For a solar system to be a true alternative in emerging IoT applications, operating in low-light environ-ments while maintaining key system functions (sensors, MCU, wireless link) is the true differ-entiating capability. Running a sensor-equipped

By Daniel Luthi, Vincent Peiris, and Yves Théoduloz, EM Microelectronics

Figure 1: EM8900 Power Efficiency Over Input Voltage

Yves Théoduloz

Vincent Peiris

17 • ENGINEERS’GUIDETOULTRALOW-POWER&POWERMANAGEMENTeecatalog.com/lps


battery-less solar beacon in an indoor setting offering no more than a few hundred lux illustrates the concept.

The EM8500 power management silicon solution was specifically cre-ated to excel in these very use scenarios in which illumination is limited.

It incorporates the flexibility/configurability needed to handle a variety of solar cells (single element, multi-element cells), operate short- and long-term energy storage elements that might be present (caps, primary or secondary batteries), and power a collection of “users” (MCUs, wireless links, sensor banks, timers, displays etc). As a one-chip solar power manager the EM8500 device drastically simplifies integration into IoT devices, while presenting the best per-formance in power-efficiency figures of merit. A measured EM8500 solar energy harvesting benchmark is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: EM8500 Bench Mark VS Competitors Solar Cell CYMBET CBC-PV-02

Figure 3: EM9304, the tiniest Bluetooth low energy 5.0 chip (2.3x2.2mm)

Thermoelectric generator (TEG)- based harvesting solutions have been attracting attention for devices that need to exploit temperature differentials around heat-producing appliances. Thermal harvesters have featured in specialty applications in environments in which substantial thermal energy (in the form of temperature deltas) was available and in which efficiency and cost considerations might have been some-what secondary priorities. As with the solar system case, the ability to power a consumer or industrial system with a small and inexpensive TEG element, operate on temperature differences as low as 5 ºC, and run the above mentioned IoT functions are key to a usable thermal harvesting system. In the wearables segment running a watch

or other wrist-worn device has now become feasible through the use of consumer-grade TEG elements combined with high-efficiency front end DCDC converters.

The EM8900/EM8502 pair of silicon components is EM’s silicon solu-tion for TEG power management front ends. These EM devices target the handling of very small output voltages generated by physically small TEG elements. The use of EM Microelectronic’s own wafer fabrication, combined with modified transistor elements, yields the required converter efficiency in the TEG power management seg-ment. Figure 2 shows the measured EM8900 efficiency at ultra-low input voltage.

REALIZING IOT EVERYWHEREUbiquitous IoT will be enabled only with tiny and ultra-low-power connectivity solutions. This is the primary underlying focus of EM Microelectronic’s recently introduced EM9304 Bluetooth low energy (BLE) chip.

It combines a 32-bit microprocessor with a state-of-the-art BLE radio on a single die. To enable a variety of application categories, it is designed with a flexible architecture for use as a companion IC to easily add BLE functionality to any ASIC or MCU-based IoT product. Alternatively, the device operates as a complete System-on-Chip (SoC) for standalone applications.

To handle supply from coin-cell batteries or from energy harvesters, the EM9304 includes a sophisticated on-chip power management unit with automatic configuration for 3V or 1.5V batteries, allowing the chip to be supplied with input voltages as low as 1.05V.

The BLE radio section achieves excellent RF sensitivity of -94dBm and offers an output power range from -34dBm to +6dBm. The current consumption has been optimized with as low as 3mA peak receiver current, 5.2mA peak transmit current (for 0dBm output power), less than 1uA in connected sleep mode, and below 5nA in disable mode.

April 2017 18


The chip’s architecture is designed for rapid startup and power-effi-

cient sequencing to reduce the energy overhead, namely the energy

wasted when the chip is not communicating BLE signals. This allows

best-in-class low-energy figures. A mere 25μJ is required for a non-

connectable beaconing mode. The device is ideally suited to implement

Bluetooth beacons, operating in combination with energy harvesting

circuits like EM850x.

The EM9304 achieves the level of performance described above while

offering a tiny foot print, tailored to IoT applications’ demand for a

high degree of miniaturization. The chip, shown in Figure 3, measures

2.3mm x 2.2mm and is the smallest BLE 5.0 chip on the market today.

IoT devices and systems are routinely equipped with a series of sensing

elements. Many platforms include a set of internal sensors, namely

accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetic sensors, combined with

various environmental sensors (pressure, humidity, temperature, gas).

Performing energy-efficient sensor signal processing on the IoT plat-

form itself has become a system design priority. For example, the latest

Figure 4: Small footprint and low power consumption.

Figure 5: EMBC family of low-power Bluetooth beacons.

generation motion-sensing tags rely on internal sensors (9-DOF)

combined with sophisticated sensor fusion algorithm processing to

generate a reliable orientation vector for an object in 3D space.

The EM7180 silicon solution is an elegant answer to these require-

ments, providing leading heading accuracy (2 degrees RMS), lowest

power consumption for sensor fusion calculations, and smallest foot-

print at 1.6 x 1.6 mm. It is a simple add-on function, bridging sensors

and host MCU, and off-loading the latter from power-hungry fusion

math (Figure 4.)

These key bricks are mandatory to enable smart IoT devices and have

been developed with the system integration mindset of enabling

miniaturized modules without jeopardizing operation at the lowest

energy levels.

Bluetooth Beacons typify a major IoT deployment driver and are esti-

mated to exceed 400 million units by 2020, according to ABI Research.

Bluetooth beacons may be easily added to objects, assets, buildings,

or infrastructure to enable message sending and location awareness

functionalities for any user’s smartphone.

EM Microelectronic-Marin leverages the Swatch Group’s watch related

expertise to produce standard products including its line of smart bea-

cons, the EMBC01 proximity beacon, the EMBC02 3D-accelerometer

beacon, or the long-life rugged EMBE01 multi-format beacon, or even

flat beacon embodiments just the size of a credit card (see Figure 5).

The availability of energy-efficient silicon components such as

EM9304, EM850x or EM7180 is key to the development of next-

generation no-battery IoT solutions and BLE beacons.

Vincent Peiris is heading the Wireless and Sensing Business Unit of EM

Microelectronic in Switzerland. His principal activities are low-power and

low-voltage wireless ICs and modules for Bluetooth low energy and propri-

etary protocols. He holds MSc and PhD from EPFL, was postdoc at MIT, and

has 25+ years of experience in analog and RF microelectronics at LeCroy,

CSEM and EM.

Daniel Luthi is a Business Unit manager at EM Microelectronic-Marin SA

where he oversees several sensor and energy harvesting product lines. He

holds electrical engineering degrees from ETH Zurich and Stanford Univer-

sity with 20+ years of experience in the semiconductor industry.

Yves Théoduloz is a System Architect in the Intelligent Power Solutions

Business Unit of EM Microelectronic in Switzerland. He is developing power

management IC’s particularly in the Energy Harvesting area. He got an

engineer diploma at the “School of Engineering and Management Vaud” –

HEIG-VD – in Switzerland.

19 eecatalog.com/lpsLow Power Boards and Modules

CONTACT INFORMATION

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EMAC, Inc. SoM-iMX6U

Supported Architectures: ARM

Compatible Operating Systems: Embedded Linux

Designed and manufactured in the USA, the SoM-iMX6U is an Ultra Low Power System on Module (SoM) designed to plug into an EMAC carrier board that contains all the connectors and I/O required for a system. The recommended development/carrier board for the SoM-iMX6U is the SoM-150. A SoM is a small embedded module that contains the core of a microprocessor system.

The SoM-iMX6U is based on an industrial temperature, Freescale/NXP i.MX6 UltraLite (MCIMX6G1) Cortex A7 528 MHz system on module with 512MB of LP DDR2 RAM, 4GB eMMC Flash and 16MB of serial data flash, which allows it to run the Linux Operating System. The module has APM Sleep Mode of 3.5mA, 1x 10/100 BaseT Ethernet, 5x serial ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 22x GPIO (3.3V) lines, 1x SDIO SD port, 2x I2S audio ports with line in/out, 1x CAN, 1x SPI, 1x I2C, 2x timer/counters/PWMs and internal real-time clock/calendar (with external battery backup), External reset button provision and green Status LED.

http://www.emacinc.com/sales/som-imx6u

Please contact EMAC for OEM & Distributor Pricing. Quantity 1 pricing for the SoM-iMX6U is $150/ea.

FEATURES & BENEFITS

◆ APM Sleep Mode of 3.5mA

◆ Typical Running Current Approximately 160mA

◆ 22x GPIO (3.3V) lines, 1x SDIO SD port, 2x I2S synchronous serial I/O audio ports with line in/out, 1x CAN, 1x SPI, 1x I2C

◆ External reset button provision and green Status LED

◆ 4x A/D channels with 12-bit A/D resolution (0 to 3.3V)

◆ EMAC OE Embedded Linux

TECHNICAL SPECS

◆ Freescale/NXP i.MX6 UltraLite Cortex A7 528MHz Processor

◆ 512MB of LP DDR2 RAM, 4GB eMMC Flash and 16MB of serial data flash, 1x SDIO SD Flash interface

◆ 1x 10/100 BaseT Ethernet, 22x GPIO (3.3V) lines, 1x CAN ports, 2x Timer/Counters/PWM channels, Internal Real-Time Clock/Calendar with external battery backup

◆ 5x serial ports, 1x USB 2.0 high speed host port, 1x USB 2.0 high speed OTG port (host/device)

◆ Wide Temperature -40° to +85°C

APPLICATION AREAS Industrial IoT, Industrial Control, Industrial Automation, Data Acquisition, Test & Measurement

AVAILABILITY

Now

EMAC, Inc. 2390 EMAC Way Carbondale, Illinois 62902 United States Tel: (618)529-4525 Fax: (618)457-0110 [email protected] www.emacinc.com

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