embedded news week: can we get anything as-a-service?

Here’s our weekly snapshot of some of the embedded news that has come through our inbox, covering products, funding, events and people news.

Two key announcements this week seem to highlight the proliferation of the ‘as-a-service’ business model. Both Qualcomm Technologies and Siemens Digital Industries Software announced details of their offerings, with the former defining 30 ‘smart’ verticals in its IoT as-a-service offer, and the latter offering its Xcelerator portfolio as-a-service to make it more accessible.

Another development is the open sourcing of Cambridge Quantum’s TKET quantum software development kit, giving algorithm and software developers access to most of the world’s quantum hardware in a single environment, allowing them to try out their code on different hardware platforms without the need for rewriting.

Also, if you missed the EE Times AI Everywhere Forum this week, do make sure you login and watch the recordings at the event web site, there are some excellent presentations from top speakers in the world of edge, device and data center AI.

News & Products

SEGGER’s J-Link debugging solutions are now fully compatible with Arduino Portenta boards and IDE. At the moment, Arduino can offer four of the SEGGER J-Link models: J-Link EDU Mini, J-Link BASE Compact, J-Link PLUS Compact and J-Link PRO. SEGGER J-Links are the most widely used debug probes on the market, maximizing visibility of the target system in a non-intrusive way. The J-Link debug probes open the door to all major development tools, from commercial toolchains to GDB-driven ones, with unique features such as real time transfer (RTT) for interactive user I/O in embedded applications, and high-speed sampling (HSS) for data acquisition.

Ceva, Beken Corporation, and VisiSonics announced the availability of a complete 3D audio reference design for rapid deployment of headsets and true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds supporting spatial audio for use in gaming, multimedia and conferencing.  The reference design leverages Beken’s BK3288X Bluetooth audio SoC series featuring the CEVA-X2 audio DSP running VisiSonics’ RealSpace 3D audio software, together with CEVA’s MotionEngine Hear head tracking algorithms. The single chip-based reference design provides a self-sufficient 3D audio solution, fully residing on the headset side, eliminating the need for a 3D audio rendering engine on the host device, which also enables a lower latency design.

Rohde & Schwarz and Vector Informatik are collaborating on closed-loop scenario testing of automotive radar sensors for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD). Coupling the DYNA4 virtual test drive simulation platform from Vector with the latest Rohde & Schwarz radar moving object stimulation system enables powerful verification of safety-critical ADAS functions. These include emergency braking in an integrated hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) environment. The Rohde & Schwarz radar test system comprises the R&S AREG800A automotive radar echo generator as the digital backend and the R&S QAT100 advanced antenna array as the frontend.

Blues Wireless announced the general availability of Swan, a low-cost embeddable STM32L4+ based microcontroller board designed to accelerate the development and deployment of battery powered IoT solutions. It is especially useful for applications requiring large memory or a high degree of I/O expandability at an affordable cost, such as edge-based inferencing and remote monitoring. Acting in this role, Swan is designed to be the ideal companion to Blues’s Notecard. Uniquely for Feather-compatible boards, Swan is designed to satisfy developers’ needs that span from early prototyping through high-volume deployment.  Developers may begin to use Swan in conjunction with Adafruit’s myriad sensors and FeatherWing-compatible carriers.

Sondrel is doubling its engineering staff in Hyderabad, India, to handle the ‘dramatic increase’ in business resulting from being able to take on new projects over the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to more staff, the company’s family of IP platforms is helping the handle the influx of new business. These comprise predefined chip layouts that have been specifically created to provide a nearly finished design for a customer’s ASIC where all that is needed is to integrate the customer’s own IP.

Funding, emerging startups

Astera Labs raised $50 million as part of an oversubscribed series-C funding round led by Fidelity Management and Research, joined by existing investors. The funding comes on the heels of Astera Labs’ launch of the Aries smart retimer portfolio for Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0 and PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 that enable workload-optimized platforms in the cloud. It will continue this momentum with an expanded focus to address connectivity bottlenecks throughout the data center with purpose-built ASIC and module solutions that unlock complex system topologies critical to mainstreaming data-intensive applications such as AI and ML.

Events

The Linley Fall Processor Conference 2021 willtake place on 20-21 October 2021 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, CA. As expected, there’ll be plenty of talk about edge AI, plus high-performance processing, IoT, sensors plus VC perspectives on emerging tech. Details here.

The 58^th DAC (Design Automation Conference) is takes place both physically in San Francisco and virtually between 5-10 December 2021. Keynote speakers include Jeff Dean of Google Research and Google Health, Bill Dally of Nvidia, and Missy Cummings of Duke University. For the first, DAC attendees will also have access to SEMICON West and the RISC-V Summit. Details here.

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