Top 5 communication products in May

1. Hexagon NovAtel has introduced the PIM222A, part of a new family of automotive GNSS positioning products for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomy. The PIM222A harnesses NovAtel's decades of experience delivering precise positioning in the most demanding applications for mass deployment in ADAS applications and autonomous vehicles.

Built with automotive-qualified hardware in a package that is easy to integrate, the PIM222A leverages SPAN technology from NovAtel to provide accurate position data in urban environments that challenge GNSS availability. Deeply coupled GNSS receivers and inertial measurement units (IMUs) ensure continuous availability of position, velocity and attitude, even when satellite signals are briefly blocked.

“I'm excited to introduce the PIM222A, truly the best of both worlds for high-performance GNSS and automotive standards. It really helps our customers jump-start their development activity for high-precision GNSS, and it fully supports performance for all levels of autonomy, ADAS and positioning needs,” said Gordon Heidinger, Segment Manager for Automotive and Safety Critical Systems.

2. The nRF5340, a wireless SoC with Dual Arm Cortex-M33 processor for complex IoT applications is Nordic Semiconductor’s third generation of dual-core Bluetooth 5.2 SoC’s. The Nordic portfolio is available at Rutronik UK.

As an evolution of the nRF51 and nRF52 series, the nRF53 series combines their key features, such as high-speed SPI, Bluetooth 5.2 and tolerance to operating temperatures of up to 105°C, with higher performance, larger memory and lower power consumption.

This makes the chip especially suitable for applications in LE audio, professional lighting, industrial, advanced wearables, medical, smart home, goods tracking and RTLS.

The nRF5340 is claimed to be the first wireless SoC with flexible Dual Arm Cortex-M33 processors. The processor features a 1MB Flash and a 512KB RAM memory. A floating-point unit (FPU), as well as an 8KB 2-way cache and DSP instruction functions, ensure high performance of the chip.

3. EnOcean has presented the PTM 535BZ module, the latest addition to its range of transmitter modules for battery-free switch applications. In addition to the already established PTM 535 for the EnOcean wireless standard and PTM 535Z for Zigbee applications, PTM 535BZ offers a combination of supported wireless standards in the 2.4GHz radio band.

In conjunction with the EnOcean ECO 200 harvester, PTM 535BZ enables the realisation of energy harvesting wireless switches communicating based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Zigbee Green Power (ZGP) radio standards. Thanks to the integrated Near Field Communication (NFC) interface, it is easy to switch between the two radio standards depending on the application.

With the new PTM 535BZ module, EnOcean is setting a new standard among battery-free and wireless radio transmitter modules. Until now, energy harvesting modules were designed to use only one radio protocol – EnOcean, Bluetooth or Zigbee Green Power – for data transmission.

The newly developed PTM 535BZ is the first module that integrates the two 2.4GHz protocols BLE and ZGP into one product. This gives users the option of selecting one of these two protocols for transmission depending on their needs. On top, PTM 535BZ is also the first module from the product range to be equipped with an NFC interface; a technical challenge due to the very small form factor.

4. u-blox has specified Nordic’s nRF52833 Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) to power its NINA-B4 stand-alone Bluetooth 5.1 modules. The small (10x15x2.2mm) Bluetooth LE/Bluetooth 5.1 MCU modules with open CPU architecture are optimised for, and can be supplied preinstalled with, Wirepas Massive (previously Wirepas Mesh), a decentralised large-scale mesh networking solution.

Wirepas Massive has been developed by global software connectivity company Wirepas, and is designed for a wide array of massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The u-blox NINA-B4 series includes the NINA-B406, which comes with an internal PCB antenna (providing a robust low-profile solution with high performance and extensive range), and NINA-B400, which integrates a U.FL connector for use with an external antenna of the developer’s choice. This greatly reduces time, cost, and effort for u-blox customers integrating Bluetooth LE in their designs.

The NINA-B4 series also comes with u-blox’s u-connect software, supporting dozens of use cases and providing an easy-to-use interface to configure the connectivity required from an external application host.

The NINA-B4 module is suitable for running Wirepas Massive, an updated version of Wirepas’s proprietary mesh connectivity software. (The module is also able to run third-party device applications alongside the Wirepas protocol.) Wirepas claims the software is the only solution to combine sensing, monitoring, control, positioning, and large-scale inventory in a single technology.

5. Celeno Communications has launched single chip solution for client devices combining WiFi 6/6E, BT/BLE (Bluetooth / Bluetooth Low Energy) 5.2 and Celeno’s novel WiFi Doppler Radar.

Celeno’s new CL6000 ‘Denali’ product family provides a connectivity and sensing solution for devices such as consumer multimedia devices, IoT end points, home automation, industry automation, and healthcare applications. These new chips enable cloud connectivity with the latest WiFi 6/6E standard, audio streaming and on-boarding use cases with BT and BLE 5.2 support, and sensing functions to enrich edge AI with valuable sensed data through its Doppler Radar function.

The product family supports both WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E standards with the latest advancements driving superior latency and robust connectivity, even in the most crowded WiFi deployments. These include high bandwidth 160MHz channels, the new, recently approved 6-7GHz spectrum band, MU-OFDMA, MU-MIMO, Beamforming, 1024QAM, WPA3 encryption and Target Wake Time (TWT) for more efficient device power saving.

The CL6000 product family supports true simultaneous operation of WiFi connectivity and Doppler Radar. The Doppler Radar is a WiFi based, high-resolution sensing technology, that employs the Doppler effect and standard WiFi packets.