Microprocessors

Mikroe, the embedded specialist, is to provide development tools for 500 of Renesas’ most popular MCUs, plus upcoming new releases. A ‘Planet Debug’ remote board farm, which enables developers anywhere in the world to remotely debug code without having to invest in any hardware, has  been established – the first of its kind for Renesas. Tool support for the Renesas ...

Jim Wallace looks at how a secure infrastructure can be built using CHERI architecture to redefine how processors handle memory and authority. When Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) suffered a major cyber attack in August, global manufacturing and retail systems went down for weeks. Suppliers faced financial strain, production halted and recovery took more than a month. It was a stark ...

At CES, Nordic Semiconductor announced a wireless MCU with a 128MHz neural processing unit, 512kbyte of ram and 2Mbyte of non-volatile memory. Called nRF54LM20B, it is aimed at battery-powered local AI processing with no need for a cloud connection. It is also the company’s first large memory nRF54L processor to get the Axon NPU, acquired when Nordic bought Atlazo in ...

STMicroelectronics has introduced stripped down versions of its STM32MP2 MCU family for smart factory applications. Called STM32MP21, they all get a single 1.2 or 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A35 application processor and a single 300MHz Cortex-M33 for booting and sleep-wake control. Arm’s TrustZone is available for secure code separation, and ST’s proprietary ‘resource isolation framework’ (RIF) is present to defend against tampering. ...

Avnet Silica has announced a franchise agreement with South-Korean hardware and software manufacturer, DEEPX. DEEPX produces low power AI accelerators for edge devices. According to Avnet Silica, the new signing “significantly bolsters” its AI offering and addresses growing customer demand for low power, AI for edge devices. The portfolio includes the DX-M1 AI processor, which delivers 25 TOPS and the ...

Last year, the ecsn (Electronic Components Supply Network), the body which represents authorised distributors in the UK and Eire, reported that its members were entering 2025 with “extreme caution”. Customer demand was difficult to judge amid trade issues and high customer in-house inventory levels. Its forecast for 2026 is in a similar vein as global trade issues, such as trade ...

Microchip is aiming at ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 compliance with a functional safety variant of its 8bit AVR family that has two cores operating in lock-step. Called AVR SD, the devices have 32 or 64kbyte of flash, 4 or 8kbyte of ram and 256 bytes of eeprom, and they come in packaes with 20, 28, 32 or 48pins. The ...

Arm plans to start incorporating Nvidia’s NVLink into chip designs with Arm adding NVLink to its Neoverse platform. “Extending the Arm Neoverse platform with NVIDIA NVLink Fusion brings Grace Blackwell-class performance to every partner building on Arm — a milestone that reflects the incredible momentum we’re seeing in the datacentre,” says Arm CEO Rene Haas. “NVLink Fusion is the connective ...

Mouser Electronics has teamed up with Tandem Ventures to develop a prototype underwater seed harvester to restore seagrass in UK waters. The distributor supplied components for the prototype underwater harvester, which collects seagrass seed 100-times faster than manual harvesting. The seeds are then grown and replanted to restore the seagrass stocks. Seagrass naturally protects coastlines from erosion by stabilising ocean ...

GigaDevice has announced smaller, slightly faster, members of its Arm Cortex-M33 based GD32F5xx MCU family. GD32F505 (right) operates up to 280MHz and has up 1Mbyte of flash (up to 192kbyte code flash) and 192kbyte sram GD32F503 operates up to 252MHz and has up to up to 1Mbyte of flash (up to 256kbyte code-flash) and 128kbyte sram. This compares with 200MHz, ...