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Montage Technology has introduced the M88MX6852, a CXL 3.2 Memory eXpander Controller (MXC) chip for AI infrastructure and data center applications. The device has entered trial production and has been integrated into next-generation CXL products developed by memory module manufacturers including Samsung and SK hynix.  It is also designed for interoperability with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms.

By converting host CXL memory requests into DDR commands in real time, the M88MX6852 manages data exchange between the host processor and DDR5 memory. It supports multiple CXL memory expansion form factors, including PCIe AIC cards and EDSFF modules, enabling memory expansion, sharing, pooling, and tiering.

The M88MX6852 integrates a CXL controller, dual DDR5-8000 controllers, two RISC-V processor subsystems, and an on-chip PVT sensor. Its CXL controller complies with the CXL 3.2 specification, including CXL.mem and CXL.io protocols, as well as CXL 1.1 and CXL 2.0. Based on a PCIe 6.2 interface, it achieves data rates up to 64 GT/s over eight lanes.

Montage Technology provides an SDK along with analysis and testing tools to support product development, system validation, and production ramp.

M88MX6852 product page

Montage Technology 

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Innodisk’s DDR5 Multiplexed Rank DIMM (MRDIMM) uses a multiplexed registering clock driver and a multiplexed data buffer to achieve data rates up to 12,800 MT/s. By enabling simultaneous access to two ranks, the memory module increases bandwidth by 60% compared to conventional DDR5-8000 registered DIMMs (RDIMMs). The architecture reduces memory controller load and lowers latency, improving performance for AI model training, LLM inference, cloud computing, and robotic automation.

Designed to fit standard 287-pin DDR5 RDIMM slots, the Innodisk DDR5-12800 MRDIMM simplifies system upgrades. Built-in eFuse and TVS safeguard against power surges, while the integrated multiplexed registering clock driver and data buffer support stable high-speed data transmission. The company says the module’s energy-efficient design minimizes power consumption, supporting the sustainability goals of modern data centers.

The DDR5-12800 MRDIMM will be available in Q4 2026 with capacities ranging from 32 GB to 128 GB.

Innodisk

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Entry-level MCUs in Toshiba’s TXZ+ Series M4L Group integrate dedicated hardware and security functions for single-motor control applications. The devices feature an 80-MHz Arm Cortex-M4 core with an FPU and target home appliances, consumer products, industrial equipment, and factory automation systems.

Integrated motor control hardware includes a vector engine, programmable PWM motor control, and encoder input circuitry for motor position and speed detection. Offloading these functions to dedicated hardware reduces CPU load, allowing the MCUs to execute precise single-motor control more efficiently.

Built-in security functions help protect systems against unauthorized access and program tampering. Integrated chip protection, secure access memory, and non-rewritable flash protection safeguard firmware and system integrity. The MCUs provide 128 KB or 256 KB of code flash, 64 KB of data flash, and 32 KB of SRAM. In the 256-KB devices, the code flash is organized into two 128-KB banks, allowing one bank to execute code while the other is rewritten for firmware updates without interrupting system operation.

The TXZ+ Series M4L Group of MCUs are now in mass production.

TXZ+ M4L product page 

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage 

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Renesas announced its third-generation DDR5 Multiplexed Rank DIMM (MRDIMM) chipset, delivering server-class speeds of up to 16,000 MT/s. The memory interface components, including the RRG5013 multiplexed registering clock driver and the RRG5103 multiplexed data buffer, are designed to meet the high memory bandwidth requirements of AI data centers, cloud infrastructure, and accelerated computing workloads.

Renesas says the Gen 3 MRDIMM chipset achieves 25% higher bandwidth than its second-generation devices while preserving standard DIMM form factors and system compatibility within existing DDR5 infrastructure. Gen 3 also introduces Device Equalization Self-Train Mode (DESTM) Quality Indication Status to improve system visibility and robustness. This feature enables users to fine-tune timing and receiver equalization training to maximize signal margins.

Renesas is working with leading CPU and platform partners to enable MRDIMM Gen 3 adoption in future server platforms. The RRG5013 and RRG5103 are sampling to select customers, including all major DRAM suppliers. Production availability is expected in the second half of 2027.

More information about Renesas’ DDR5 memory interface devices is available on the company’s DDR5 Solutions page.

Renesas Electronics 

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Two battery monitoring ICs (BMICs) from Nuvoton, the KA49703A and KA49713A, are designed for battery backup units used in AI servers and energy storage systems. They can monitor up to 16 lithium-ion cells, while daisy-chain communication enables up to 55 BMICs to be connected in series using a single MCU. This configuration minimizes wiring, ensures robust communication, and reduces the need for additional MCUs and isolation components.

Both devices support battery stack voltages from 12.5 V to 76.8 V. They measure individual cell voltages with a maximum error of ±2.9 mV. The KA49703A and KA49713A provide alarm outputs for overcharge, overdischarge, and abnormal high- or low-temperature conditions. Additionally, the KA49713A includes a dedicated transportation and storage mode that reduces shutdown current to less than 0.1 µA to minimize battery self-discharge.

The BMICs are supplied in 7×7-mm QFP-48 packages. Samples are available now, with mass-production shipments scheduled to begin in September 2026.

KA49703A product page 

KA49713A product page

Nuvoton Technology 

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Minimal circuit converts input frequency to a precision current source that also accommodates grounded inputs.

I recently had the opportunity to share a design for frequency to current loop conversion using the versatile (if somewhat ancient) LM29x7 series. Taking shameless advantage of the flexibility of these legacy devices, that minimalist design made do with just nine paltry passive parts.  Figure 1 shows its (nearly painful) simplicity (so simple it almost Hz).

Wow the engineering world with your unique design: Design Ideas Submission Guide

Figure 1 In this circuit, the LM2917 needs no added actives to make a frequency to 4-20mA current sink converter.

However, it was pointed out in the comments (thanks, RJ!) that its current sink output may not be compatible with some industrial control and monitoring hardware.  So here comes Figure 2 with a frequently friendlier current source output.

Figure 2 Four frugal extra external parts (bringing the total to 13) convert Figure 1 into a flexible current source that’s useful if the load is grounded.

Converting Figure 1’s converter from current sink to current source begins with tying pin 6 to the +24v rail.  This lets the internal voltage shunt reference Z1 float the internal “ground” reference pin 8 at 16.4v instead of at zero.  R5 provides the necessary bias current (just as it does in Figure 1), and C4 gives us some noise-bypassing insurance.  Adding cascode Q1 completes the conversion.

Although U1’s spec’d linearity and temperature coefficient are good, its initial tolerances aren’t so great. Therefore some post-assembly final calibration is unavoidable, which necessitates R1’s (4mA zero) and R2’s (20mA full-scale 5kHz) tweakability.  If you do the adjustments in the right order (first R1, then R2), they won’t interact, and calibration can be completed in s single pass.

An additional helping of flexibility comes from the fact that, if your application doesn’t need or want a 4mA baseline current, just omit R3.  Then adjust R2 normally for a top end of 20mA.  That’ll give 0-20mA with no other mods required.

References

1. https://www.ti.com/lit/an/sboa574/sboa574.pdf

Stephen Woodward‘s relationship with EDN’s DI column goes back quite a long way. Over 200 submissions have been accepted since his first contribution back in 1974.  They have included best Design Idea of the year in 1974 and 2001.

Related Content

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During a severe sandstorm, a transport aircraft attempts to land at a remote forward operating location. Visibility is nearly zero, forcing the crew to rely on navigation, communications, and landing-assistance systems. If the aircraft were to lose its GNSS signal, local timing sources would drift. Even a few microseconds of drift could cause these systems to lose synchronization.

This can cause communication disruptions, impacts to radar and ranging systems, higher inertial navigation error, and ultimately reduce the accuracy of information displayed to the pilot. Lives and the mission could be at stake. In this scenario, the fallout would not stem from a hardware failure or cyberattack, but from a small timing error.

Take, for instance, MicroPNT GDO-1000, a GNSS-disciplined oscillator (GNSS-DO) module from VIAVI, a supplier of test and measurement, optical, and position, navigation and timing (PNT) technologies. The module, built for situations mentioned above, features MEMS-based Endura Epoch or Elite X oscillators to deliver microsecond-class, 24-hour holdover in a tiny package.

The Viavi µPNT GDO-1000 module nears atomic-clock timing holdover precision, but with a low size, weight, power and cost (SWAP-C) profile—in a footprint the size of a postage stamp. The solution provides greater flexibility to keep networks synchronized, sensors aligned, and mission systems operating with confidence across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains—even in extreme environments.

What is a GNSS-DO?

GNSS signals can be vulnerable to jamming or spoofing. Signals can be interrupted in urban or geographic canyons and subject to outages. A GNSS-DO combines a local precision oscillator with timing from GNSS to provide accurate and resilient timing required by modern defense systems. Typically, GNSS-DOs are comprised of the following:

• GNSS receiver
• High-stability local oscillator (crystal, MEMS TCXO or OCXO, or an atomic clock)
• Disciplining algorithm (servo loop)
• 1 pulse per second (PPS) input and a 1 PPS and 10 MHz output

Under normal operating conditions, the GNSS receiver serves as the primary timing reference for the GNSS-DO, providing output signals, such as 1 PPS and 10 MHz synchronized to the GNSS 1 PPS rising edge. During this phase, GNSS-DO continuously learns and characterizes the drift behavior of the local oscillator relative to the GNSS reference.

If GNSS signals become degraded, jammed or denied, GNSS-DO seamlessly transitions to the local oscillator as the timing source. Leveraging this learned behavior, the system actively compensates its outputs to maintain accurate time alignment.

This unique combination of long-term accuracy and short-term stability makes GNSS-DO a critical enabler for military communications, radar systems, electronic defense platforms, sensor fusion networks, and autonomous systems—where precise timing is essential for mission success and operational continuity.

Choosing an oscillator with the right stuff

Drift can be caused by temperature fluctuations, vibration, mechanical stress, power supply variations, and long-term aging effects. Left unchecked, drift accumulates over time, degrading synchronization accuracy and potentially impacting system performance.

The role of GNSS-DO is to continuously correct these errors when a reference signal is available and minimize their impact when it’s not. The better the oscillator’s inherent stability, the longer and more accurately the system can maintain synchronization during a GNSS outage.

This is how the different types of oscillators compare:

• CSACs

Chip-scale atomic clocks (CSACs) offer great stability and the longest holdover performance, making them the benchmark for resilience in GNSS-denied environments. However, these advantages come with trade-offs in size, weight, cost, and procurement lead times that can limit their practicality for many deployed systems.

• Crystal TCXOs and OCXOs

Traditional crystal-based TCXOs and OCXOs provide lower-cost alternatives and are widely used across communications, aerospace, and defense applications. While they can deliver strong timing performance, quartz is very susceptible to shock, vibration and mechanical stress, causing them to crack, break, or severely degrade performance. This makes them less suitable for increasingly rugged and mobile platforms.

• MEMS TCXOs and OCXOs

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS)-based TCXOs and OCXOs are emerging as a viable solution. They provide robust resistance to vibration, shock, and environmental stress while significantly reducing size and power consumption. In many cases, MEMS OCXOs offer near atomic-level frequency stability over temperature and occupy 75x less volume. This combination enables system designers to achieve precise timing and extended holdover without the SWAP-C penalties.

Figure 1 MEMS OCXOs can outperform the alternatives for SWaP in critical military defense applications. Source: SiTime

About GDO-1000 module

The µPNT GDO-1000 module features dual-frequency L1/L5 GNSS reception with microsecond-class, 24-hour holdover, enabling highly accurate timing even in degraded or contested conditions. “Its holdover performance approaches what customers expect from atomic-class clocks, in a module that fits on a standard M.2 slot and draws approximately half a watt,” said Doug Russell, senior VP and GM for aerospace and defense at VIAVI.

Figure 2 The VIAVI µPNT GDO-1000 module featuring an advanced MEMS oscillator has dual frequency L1/L5 GNSS reception and microsecond-class 24-hour holdover and draws less than half a watt of power. Source: SiTime

Moreover, it integrates directly into modern compute platforms, time appliance cards, and embedded systems without custom mechanical design.

The module performance is enhanced by patented AI and ML algorithms which model and compensate for oscillator behavior across varying environmental conditions. At its core, MEMS oscillators provide improved thermal stability across the full military temperature range compared with traditional quartz OCXOs, while maintaining phase noise and Allan Deviation performance under vibration and shock.

The system also accepts an external 1 PPS input, allowing discipline from M-Code GPS, alternative navigation sources, or other external references without hardware modification. Despite its miniature size, it supports multiple 1 PPS and low-phase-noise 10 MHz coaxial inputs and outputs, providing flexible integration across complex systems.

Modern precision timing solutions such as the advanced OCXO platform and high-performance Super-TCXO architectures are designed to directly address the combined challenges of SWaP constraints and oscillator drift and loss of reference time in GNSS-degraded environments. By improving intrinsic frequency stability, reducing phase noise, and minimizing long-term aging effects, the devices help maintain more accurate local timekeeping when external references are unavailable.

As defense systems evolve from standalone platforms into interconnected networks of sensors, communications systems, and autonomous assets, timing is becoming as fundamental to system design as power and memory management. Precision timing enables everything from PNT to secure communications, sensor fusion, and synchronized operations across distributed missions.

The future belongs to timing solutions that deliver precision, resilience, and performance while minimizing SWaP and system complexity.

Tyler Hohmann is business development director for aerospace and defense at SiTime, where he leads strategy and execution across prime contractors, startups, and sub-system manufacturers to advance precision timing adoption in mission-critical systems. Prior to SiTime, he was VP of sales and marketing and co-founder of Safran Federal Systems.

Related Content

• MEMS Resonators Drive Advanced Timing Solutions
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• GNSS Receiver Frequency Reference for Successful Satellite Navigation

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Front-panel push button controls can conveniently adjust a PCB-mounted internal potentiometer’s resistance.

Digital potentiometers in conjunction with MCUs find common use in analog circuits. The processor can adjust the gain of an amplifier, frequency of an oscillator, time delays, etc. using a digital potentiometer whose resistance is controlled via software. However, plenty of MCU-less applications also exist; in some cases, they implement conventional potentiometers mounted in system front panels for manual resistance control purposes.

Wow the engineering world with your unique design: Design Ideas Submission Guide

Imagine the convenience, however, if two push buttons are alternatively provided in the front panel to increase or decrease the resistance of each potentiometer, which can then be alternatively located on the PCB within the system. Such an approach may, for example, be a welcome capability in audio, high frequency, automotive, and other applications. This is exactly what the circuit shown in Figure 1 does.

Figure 1 Each press of the “INC” (increment) push button increases resistance by one step. Similarly, each “DEC” (decrement) push button press decreases resistance by one step. The power supply and ground pins of the various ICs are not shown in this schematic.

This simple design uses only two ICs to adjust the digital potentiometer, shown here as an example 128-step 10K ohm AD5220BN10 (PDF) and labeled U3. A more complex implementation can include multiple versions of the circuit, each based on a different-value potentiometer, and each separately managed via unique control of the CS, CLK and U/D pins.

U3 pins A and B are resistor ends, and W is the “wiper”. How does the circuit work? When you momentarily push the “INC” (increment) push button, a pulse is generated which sets flipflop U2A. Its Q output is connected to the U/D pin of the digital potentiometer. Hence U3 is set to the “up” tap direction and the wiper advances by one position.

For every subsequent “INC” push button press, the wiper further advances by one step. Similarly, when you momentarily push the “DEC” (decrement) push button, flipflop U2A is reset, causing U3 to subsequently reverse course and adjust resistance in the “down” direction. Additional “INC” push button presses further decrease the wiper, by one step each time.

And how can you test the circuit? Connect U3 pin A1 to a 5V supply and B1 to ground. Now connect a digital voltmeter to wiper W1. If you press the “INC” push button, the voltage should increase, and if you push the “DEC” push button, the voltage will decrease, if the circuit is functioning correctly. The following video shows a simulation of the circuit, complete with my narration.

Jayapal Ramalingam has over three decades of experience in designing electronics systems for power & process industries and is presently a freelance automation consultant.

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Radar, communications, and sensing systems increasingly rely on phased array antennas to achieve agile, precise beam steering without mechanical motion. As bandwidths widen to support higher data rates and better resolution, traditional phase-shifter-based architectures reach their limits, particularly due to beam squint and degraded performance at band edges.

True time delay (TTD) techniques, implemented using time delay units (TDUs), address these challenges by providing frequency-independent delay across the array, enabling accurate wideband beamforming in advanced active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs).

Phased array antenna fundamentals: AESA architecture and electronic beam steering

Phased arrays use multiple antenna elements arranged in uniform linear arrays (ULAs) or uniform rectangular arrays (URAs), with each element driven by a controlled phase or time delay. By adjusting these controls, the array forms narrow beams in desired directions and suppresses unwanted directions, eliminating the need for mechanical steering.

In AESA architectures, each element—or small group of elements—typically has its own transmit/receive (T/R) module, enabling multi-beam and multi-frequency operation for radar, satellite links, and advanced wireless systems.

Figure 1 Simplified phased array antenna features multiple elements with controllable phase or time delay, enabling electronic beam steering without mechanical motion. Source: Qorvo

Phased array performance may be summarized by two system-level figures of merit. Equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) is expressed in dBm (referenced to 1 mW) or dBW (referenced to 1 W) and equals transmit power plus antenna gain (in dBi), assuming no cable or connector losses.

Gain-to-noise-temperature ratio (G/T) measures receive sensitivity by comparing antenna gain to system noise temperature; higher G/T values correspond to better detection and signal quality, especially important for satellite and deep-space links.

Wideband beam squint: Why phase shifters fail in high-bandwidth phased arrays

Wider instantaneous bandwidths have benefits: operation over multiple channels or bands, improved range resolution in radar, and higher data rates in communications. However, wideband operation exposes a key limitation of pure phase-shifter-based beamforming: the phase shift needed for a given steering angle depends on frequency, so a single-phase setting at the center frequency does not steer all frequencies to the same angle.

This misalignment creates beam squint, where the main beam moves with frequency across the band. At the center frequency, the beam points at the desired angle, but at the band edges, it becomes under-steered or over-steered, redistributing gain and degrading EIRP and G/T in the intended direction.

Figure 2 Illustration of beam squint in a phased array: a single-phase setting at the center frequency steers the beam correctly at F0, but under‑steers at Fmax and over‑steers at Fmin. Source: Qorvo

Why beam squint occurs for wider-band systems is illustrated in Figure 3. Beam steering using phase shifts per element attempts to ensure that energy at each element in the array arrives at the same phase for coherent summation in the beamforming network. When the beam is steered off-boresight (θ > 0), some energy arrives at one edge of the array before it arrives at the opposite edge; the extra path length is N * d * sin θ, where N is the number of elements across the array, θ is the beam steering angle, and d is the element spacing.

Figure 3 Path‑length difference in an off‑boresight phased array, showing how the extra distance N * d * sin θ at the farthest element translates into a frequency‑dependent phase shift requirement and leads to beam squint when only fixed phase shifters are used. Source: Qorvo

Dividing this longer path length by the wavelength at F0 and multiplying by 360 degrees gives the phase shift that must be applied at the farthest element. At Fmax the wavelength is shorter, so the required phase shift is larger; at Fmin the wavelength is longer, so the required phase shift is smaller, which is why a single phase shift per element at F0 leads to under‑steering at Fmax and over‑steering at Fmin.

In high-gain, narrow-beam arrays, even modest squint can cause large link-budget penalties at the band edges, while lower-gain, wide-beam arrays are more tolerant of the same angular movement.

Whether an array needs true time delay depends on the relationship between beam squint and beamwidth. Smaller arrays with broader beams can often accept the squint induced by phase-only steering, whereas large arrays with narrow beams and wide bandwidths require TTD to maintain beam pointing and gain across the full band. Design factors such as array size, element spacing, scan angle, and center frequency all feed into this assessment, with wide scan angles and high frequencies typically increasing sensitivity to timing errors.

Figure 4 Example gain patterns for the same beam movement in high‑gain, narrow‑beam and low‑gain, wide‑beam antennas, showing how beam squint produces much larger gain loss at the band edges in high‑gain arrays and necessitates the use of true time delay. Source: Qorvo

True time delay vs phase shifters: Performance comparison for wideband arrays

Traditional phase shifters implement a fixed insertion phase at a given frequency, which works well for narrowband systems since phase and delay can be treated interchangeably over a small bandwidth. As bandwidth increases, the frequency dependence of phase shift becomes problematic: the constant phase setting no longer corresponds to the correct time delay across the entire signal spectrum, causing beam squint and waveform distortion.

True time delay elements, by contrast, provide a fixed time delay, so the resulting phase shift increases linearly with frequency. This linear phase slope ensures that signals of all frequencies within the band experience the same effective delay through the array, aligning their phases at the combining point and maintaining beam direction. So, for wideband, high-performance arrays, especially those requiring fine resolution or long range, TTD becomes essential rather than optional.

In practice, many systems adopt hybrid architectures that combine phase shifters and TDUs. Phase shifters can handle fine steering around a nominal direction or serve narrowband modes, while TDUs provide coarse or wideband delay control to prevent squint across the full band. The design challenge is to balance cost, die area, power, and complexity against bandwidth and performance goals, choosing where in the array hierarchy (element, subarray, or tile level) TDUs should be inserted.

Integrating TDUs into AESA tile and subarray architectures

In AESAs, antenna elements are often grouped into modular tiles, each containing beamforming ICs (BFICs), RF front-ends, and other control circuitry. Within each tile, TDUs can provide precise synchronization across elements or subarrays, ensuring that signals combine coherently in the desired direction over wide bandwidths. Typical TDUs offer delay steps in the picosecond range, allowing fine-grained control of beam pointing and compensation for channel-to-channel variations.

Wide instantaneous bandwidth is particularly important for high-resolution radar, where shorter pulse widths improve range resolution but demand larger bandwidth. For example, a ULA operating at a 10 GHz center frequency with a 1.5 GHz signal bandwidth and 16 elements with half-wavelength spacing may be limited to a 60-degree scan range if phase-only steering is used and signal degradation must be held within acceptable bounds. Beyond such limits, true time delay, rather than approximate phase-based delay, is required to preserve beam integrity and resolution across the full spectrum.

Calculating TTD requirements for ULA design

In uniform linear arrays, the delay required at each element can be derived from the desired scan angle, element spacing, and operating frequency. A phase shifter with a given resolution, say a 6-bit device with a least significant bit (LSB) of 5.625 degrees, corresponds to a particular minimum time delay increment at the operating frequency; at 10 GHz, this phase step translates to approximately 1.5 picoseconds of delay. To replace such a phase shifter with a TDU, the delay unit must support at least the same or finer time resolution to maintain equivalent steering granularity.

For arrays with up to 16 elements per side and scan angles up to about 60 degrees, the total required delay at the outer elements can reach around 650 picoseconds. Designers may implement this total delay using cascaded TDUs or a combination of coarse and fine delay stages, distributing the delay across the RF chain to meet both performance and implementation constraints. This approach enables larger or more agile arrays while maintaining precise control of beam pointing over wide frequency ranges.

TDU topologies: Switched lines, ATLs, and LC networks

TDUs can be realized with several circuit topologies, each offering trade-offs in terms of noise, insertion loss, die area, and linearity. Switched delay lines use multiple physical line lengths selected by RF switches to create discrete delay values; they tend to provide low noise and low insertion loss but require more chip area, especially at longer maximum delays.

Artificial transmission lines (ATLs) use synthetic line structures to achieve compact delay implementations, trading size for higher loss and potentially increased noise. LC-based delay networks implement analog delay using lumped inductors and capacitors, offering fine control and tunability but adding design complexity and sensitivity to component tolerances.

Digital delay lines, familiar with digital signal processing, use switched digital paths to provide quantized delays, making them attractive for architectures that need both coarse and fine control and may integrate closely with digital beamformers. Each topology represents a different balance between delay precision, footprint, insertion loss, and linearity, and system-level simulations are typically required to identify the optimal choice for a given application.

Integrating TTD in RFICs: Monolithic microwave circuits for wideband phased arrays

Historically, true time delay could be implemented with coaxial cables, optical fibers, or microstrip and stripline networks, but these approaches often struggle with size, weight, and cost in large, high-frequency arrays. Monolithic microwave integrated crcuits (MMICs) now provide a more practical and scalable solution, integrating delay elements, switches, and equalization within compact RFICs.

Advances in CMOS, GaAs, and MEMS technologies have reduced the size and power consumption of TTD circuits while improving bandwidth and delay resolution.

A typical MMIC-based TDU may combine switched or artificial transmission lines with wideband distributed gain amplifiers and gain-slope equalizers to compensate for frequency-dependent loss and maintain flat group delay across the band. Integration with beamforming ICs and RF front-end modules allows designers to place TTD functionality at the element, subarray, or tile level, trading semiconductor area against array-level performance and flexibility.

Why TTD matters: Wideband array performance and future-proof AESA design

From a system perspective, true time delay provides consistent beam steering across wide frequency ranges, improving signal quality, resolution, and link margin at the band edges. By effectively eliminating beam squint across the operating bandwidth and preserving coherent combining across the array, TTD enhances both EIRP and G/T, directly impacting radar detection performance and communications reliability.

In demanding environments and applications, such as defense radar, satellite payloads, and next-generation wireless backhaul, this can be decisive in meeting performance requirements. Beyond immediate performance gains, TTD also supports future proofing. As bandwidth requirements continue to grow and spectral environments become more complex, architectures that already incorporate wideband-capable TDUs and hybrid TTD/phase-shifter beamforming are better positioned to adapt without wholesale redesign.

For engineers and decision-makers, the key takeaway is that while phase shifters remain suitable for narrowband or cost-sensitive systems, TTD is becoming a critical enabler of competitive, high-performance wideband phased arrays.

David Schnaufer is technical marketing communications manager at Qorvo, where he leverages his extensive technical and strategic experience to develop insightful, thought leadership content. Throughout his career at Qorvo, he has served several roles, including senior manager of strategic marketing and product marketing manager.

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Picture a satellite holding its course high above Earth, its mission dependent on flawless orientation, or an electric vehicle with a high-voltage battery that demands exact current monitoring to safeguard performance and safety. In these moments, precision is not a luxury—it is mission-critical.

Conventional magnets and commodity sensors falter under the weight of noise, drift, and limited sensitivity. The fluxgate sensor changes that equation, harnessing magnetic saturation to deliver scientific-grade accuracy and bridging the gap between everyday detection and the uncompromising demands of advanced engineering.

Fluxgate: Saturation as the gatekeeper

At the core of a fluxgate sensor lies a high-permeability ferromagnetic material that acts as a magnetic modulator. Driven by an alternating current, the core is periodically pushed into saturation—a state where its ability to conduct magnetic flux collapses. This creates a “magnetic gate”: when unsaturated, the core concentrates the external magnetic field into the sense coil; once saturated, its permeability drops, effectively closing the gate to that field.

This controlled gating modulates the external flux, inducing a voltage in the sense coil. In a perfectly balanced, zero-field condition, the drive signal produces only odd harmonics. The presence of an external field breaks that symmetry, introducing even harmonics, most notably the second harmonic, which provides a precise, linear measure of the field’s strength. By exploiting the non-linear transition into saturation, fluxgate sensors achieve sensitivity and stability far beyond ordinary inductive detection.

Fluxgate anatomy: Core, drive, and sense

A fluxgate sensor is built around three essential elements working in concert. At its heart is the magnetic core, typically a ring or rod made from high-permeability alloys such as Permalloy or Mu-metal, where hysteresis and saturation take place. Wrapped around this core is the drive coil, the “motor” that pushes the material into saturation by applying an alternating current.

Completing the system is the sense coil, the “ear” that listens for changes in magnetic flux and captures the second harmonic signal produced when the external field interacts with the saturated core. Together, these components transform invisible magnetic influences into precise, measurable data.

Figure 1 A fluxgate sensor employs a ferromagnetic core, drives it periodically into magnetic saturation via a drive winding, and captures the modulated magnetic flux with a sense winding. Source: Author

Note at this point that while standard open-loop fluxgates typically rely solely on drive and sense windings, closed-loop configurations introduce a feedback winding to enhance precision.

Interestingly, some advanced designs consolidate these roles, utilizing a single winding for both sensing and feedback. By employing time-multiplexing—rapidly switching between sensing the field and applying a compensation current—or using frequency filtering to isolate the signals, engineers can achieve closed-loop performance without a physically distinct third coil. Even in these integrated designs, the fundamental function of feedback remains the key to the sensor’s accuracy and long-term stability.

Ring-core revolution: How Goubau redefined fluxgate

The Goubau-type fluxgate sensor, developed by Rudolf Aschenbrenner and Georg Goubau in the mid-1930s, represents a pivotal milestone in the evolution of magnetic field measurement. Moving beyond earlier parallel-rod designs, they pioneered the ring-core architecture, which utilized a closed-loop magnetic path to achieve a remarkable resolution of 0.3 nT, a precision that was revolutionary for its time.

By driving the core into periodic saturation via an excitation current, the sensor “gates” external magnetic flux to induce a voltage proportional to the ambient field, specifically isolating the second harmonic frequency. This robust, self-shielding design effectively minimized magnetic noise and established the fundamental blueprint for modern high-precision magnetometry, eventually enabling the transition from land-based geophysical observatories to the sophisticated, solid-state sensors deployed in contemporary space exploration missions.

Why use fluxgate sensors

Fluxgate sensors distinguish themselves through a blend of sensitivity, stability, and versatility that makes them indispensable in demanding applications. Their high sensitivity allows them to detect magnetic fields thousands of times weaker than Earth’s, opening the door to ultra-fine measurements in geophysics and aerospace. They exhibit exceptionally low drift, delivering long-term stability that outperforms Hall-effect sensors and ensures accuracy over extended periods.

Equally important, they operate effectively with both DC and low-frequency AC fields, giving engineers a versatile tool that adapts to a wide range of measurement scenarios. Yet these high-performance capabilities come with trade-offs: fluxgate sensors are generally larger, more complex, and consume more power than compact, chip-based alternatives such as Hall-effect or magnetoresistive sensors. As a result, they are best suited for precision-critical environments where data integrity outweighs the need for extreme miniaturization.

Getting to modern integration, digital fluxgate sensors address the traditional limitations of size and complexity by combining the sensing core with on-board electronics for signal processing, compensation, and calibration. By digitizing the harmonic output directly at the sensor, they reduce noise, simplify interfacing, and improve long-run stability.

These integrated designs make fluxgates more practical for embedded systems and field instruments, ensuring the technology remains relevant even as compact alternatives such as Hall-effect and magnetoresistive sensors dominate consumer applications.

Figure 2 This 1-axis fluxgate magnetometer delivers linearized, temperature-compensated magnetic field data directly in nanotesla (nT) for precise and stable measurements. Source: FG Sensors

From principles to applications

Building on these principles and modern integrations, fluxgate technology finds compelling expression in real-world applications. Whether guiding a compass to resolve Earth’s faint magnetic field, stabilizing aircraft heading systems, or measuring current with precision in power electronics, the same saturation-based gating mechanism underpins each use case. By translating subtle magnetic influences into stable, linear signals, fluxgates bridge the gap between theory and practice, proving their worth wherever accuracy and reliability are paramount.

Fluxgate compass

Among the earliest and most enduring applications of fluxgate technology is the fluxgate compass. Unlike mechanical compasses that rely on a freely moving needle, fluxgate compasses electronically resolve Earth’s magnetic field by measuring its vector components. The sensor’s saturation-based gating mechanism allows it to detect the field with remarkable precision, even when the signal is thousands of times weaker than ambient noise sources.

This electronic approach offers several advantages. Fluxgate compasses provide continuous digital output, making them easy to integrate with navigation systems in ships, aircraft, and spacecraft. They remain stable in dynamic environments where mechanical compasses falter—such as near ferrous structures, in turbulent motion, or under vibration. Their low drift ensures relatively long-time accuracy, which is critical for heading reference systems and autopilot integration.

However, these benefits come with trade-offs. Fluxgate compasses are more complex and consume more power than simple magnetometers, and their size can be a limiting factor in portable consumer devices. As a result, they are best suited for mission-critical navigation where reliability and precision outweigh the need for extreme miniaturization.

Figure 3. An electromagnetic fluxgate compass measures the Earth’s magnetic field directly to provide heading data, serving as a reliable alternative or backup to the primary gyro system. Source: Marine Data Systems

Current sensing

Fluxgate sensors also play a critical role in precision current measurement. When a conductor carries current, it generates a magnetic field proportional to the flow. By placing a fluxgate sensor around or near the conductor, this field can be resolved with exceptional accuracy, enabling non-intrusive current sensing.

The saturation-based gating principle ensures linearity across a wide dynamic range, making fluxgates particularly valuable in high-power systems where both small leakage currents and large load currents must be monitored reliably.

The advantages are clear: fluxgate current sensors offer DC capability, unlike many transformer-based solutions that only respond to AC. They also deliver low drift and high stability over extended periods, which is essential for monitoring in power electronics, grid systems, and aerospace applications. Their ability to detect minute variations makes them suitable for fault detection, efficiency optimization, and protective relaying.

As with other fluxgate applications, trade-offs exist. These sensors are larger and more complex than compact Hall-effect devices, and their higher power consumption can be a limiting factor in portable or consumer contexts. Yet in mission-critical environments—such as aircraft power distribution, renewable energy systems, or precision laboratory instrumentation—their accuracy and reliability outweigh these constraints, making fluxgate current sensing a trusted solution.

Figure 4 This fluxgate closed-loop current sensor measures DC, AC, pulse, and irregular waveform currents while providing galvanic isolation. Source: Chen Yang Technologies

As a quick aside, you think of DRV421 from TI. It’s a great pick for magnetic closed-loop current sensing because it handles both AC and DC with robust isolation. What makes it stand out is that it packs a proprietary fluxgate sensor and signal conditioning into one chip, keeping your part count low. Because the fluxgate has such low offset drift, the overall measurement precision is hard to beat.

Heading and attitude reference systems

Fluxgate sensors also underpin heading and attitude reference systems, where precise orientation data is vital for navigation and control. By resolving the vector components of Earth’s magnetic field, fluxgates provide a stable magnetic heading that can be fused with gyroscopes and accelerometers to deliver complete attitude information. This integration is especially important in aircraft and spacecraft, where reliable orientation must be maintained despite vibration, acceleration, and environmental disturbances.

The strength of fluxgates in this role lies in their ability to deliver accurate, drift-resistant magnetic references. Unlike mechanical compasses, they remain unaffected by motion dynamics, and unlike gyroscopes, they do not accumulate error over time. When combined in modern inertial navigation systems, fluxgates serve as the magnetic anchor that ensures long-term stability and confidence in heading data.

As with other applications, trade-offs exist. Fluxgate-based reference systems are more complex and power-hungry than compact magnetometers, and they require careful calibration to mitigate local magnetic interference.

Yet in mission-critical aviation, marine, and space contexts, their precision and reliability make them indispensable, ensuring that orientation data remains trustworthy under demanding conditions. As an aside, you may look at the systems called HARS or AHRS; regardless of the acronym, the fluxgate remains the indispensable ‘magnetic North’ for the entire sensor suite.

Future directions

While fluxgate sensors have long been valued for their precision and stability, ongoing research continues to push the technology forward, and this is where enthusiasts, makers, hobbyists, and engineers can play a role. Here, miniaturization efforts aim to reduce size and power consumption, making fluxgates more competitive with compact magnetoresistive and Hall-effect devices.

Hybrid designs that combine fluxgate cores with MEMS or digital compensation circuits promise improved performance in embedded systems. At the same time, advances in materials and signal processing are extending sensitivity into new ranges, opening opportunities in geophysics, defense, and renewable energy monitoring.

For those eager to experiment, prototyping with modules, integrating fluxgates into navigation projects, or blending them with modern microcontrollers offers a chance to push boundaries and contribute to the next wave of innovation.

As sensor ecosystems evolve, fluxgates are likely to remain the choice for applications where accuracy, drift resistance, and DC capability are non-negotiable. Their integration into modern electronics ensures that, even as alternatives dominate consumer markets, fluxgates continue to serve as the trusted backbone of high-reliability instrumentation.

Fluxgates remind us that precision isn’t just measured; it’s built, tested, and carried forward by those who dare to innovate.

T. K. Hareendran is a self-taught electronics enthusiast with a strong passion for innovative circuit design and hands-on technology. He develops both experimental and practical electronic projects, documenting and sharing his work to support fellow tinkerers and learners. Beyond the workbench, he dedicates time to technical writing and hardware evaluations to contribute meaningfully to the maker community.

Related Content

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The post Fluxgate basics: How magnetic saturation changes everything appeared first on EDN.

As the automotive industry continues to shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), autonomous driving, and connected vehicles, it raises challenges around performance, reliability, and security. Component makers have a big role to play by delivering next-generation designs that support the transition to these new automotive architectures.

The July/August issue takes a look at advances happening at the component level that are enabling next-generation automotive technologies. These range from zonal microcontrollers (MCUs) and gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) power devices to connectors and LEDs/LED drivers. We also look at safety and security challenges in SDVs.

As vehicle electrical/electronic architectures evolve and the automotive industry transitions to SDVs, it raises new technical challenges for automakers. In particular, the move from domain-based to zonal architectures that group vehicle functions presents challenges, as each zone controller needs to handle a wide range of tasks. This means the ECUs in a zonal design require compute capabilities that can handle both time-sensitive and compute-intensive workloads concurrently.

“In a zonal architecture, each zone of a vehicle, such as front, rear, or cabin, has a high-performance controller managing local devices and communicating with other controllers over high-speed networks,” said Paul S. Lee, senior director, automotive microcontrollers, zonal segment leader, at NXP Semiconductors.

Although this approach is faster to update, easier to scale, less complex, and even cheaper, it also presents new technical challenges for automakers, Lee said. He discusses key challenges in the move to SDVs and how zonal MCUs are building the foundation for the next generation of SDVs.

Another big challenge in SDVs is the cybersecurity threat. Rambus is calling for a collaborative effort among engineers, security teams, and end users to create a secure SDV ecosystem.

“SDVs continuously evolve through over-the-air updates, unlocking new features, optimizing performance, and enhancing safety over time,” said Paul Karazuba, VP of product marketing for silicon IP at Rambus. “While this shift continues to enable greater connectivity, automation, and personalization, it also expands the cybersecurity threat landscape,” and as “SDVs integrate with cloud systems, mobile apps, and AI-driven features, they become more vulnerable to cyberattacks.”

Karazuba discusses this expanding cybersecurity threat landscape and how to ensure security frameworks that enable SDV features while protecting user safety and data privacy. “Security must be integrated from the ground up, beginning at the chip and silicon IP level to prevent hardware-based exploits.”

(Source: Adobe Stock)

Advances in autonomous vehicles (AVs) and advanced driver-assistance systems are also driving the need for improvements, particularly in radar, LiDAR, and cameras for safer systems. Innovations in these technologies, powered by sensor fusion, are enabling vehicles to understand their environments in real time.

Contributing writer Stefano Lovati explores how perception and sensor fusion are driving evolution and innovations in the three main categories of automotive sensors: radar, LiDAR, and cameras. Lovati said that while every sensor type has its own limitations, sensor fusion “bridges this gap by intelligently combining data from sensors using advanced algorithms.”

Bitsensing tells us that 4D imaging radar is critical to AV commercialization and safe autonomous driving. The latest radar systems work at ranges of more than 200 meters, have low power consumption, and can easily be integrated into vehicle systems, with manufacturers already building systems designed specifically for the commercial AV market, said Jae-Eun Lee, CEO of bitsensing Inc.

However, Lee explained that many 4D radars are developed for ADAS rather than being built for full driverless functionality.

4D radar is important for the rapid commercialization of AV technology because it enables the rapid classification of different kinds of road users, but “to really drive the commercial AV market forward, it’s also vital that sensors are purposely designed for full autonomy, rather than being repurposed from devices for the consumer market,” he said.

Also reshaping automotive electronics are GaN and SiC power devices. These devices are being increasingly adopted into vehicles thanks to their faster switching and higher efficiency.

Lovati reports that GaN and SiC are no longer considered exotic semiconductors, and the automotive industry is leveraging their capabilities to switch faster, tolerate higher blocking voltages and temperatures, and dissipate less energy than conventional silicon.

He examines the current state and next steps for both SiC and GaN technologies across key automotive areas, including traction inverters, on-board chargers, DC/DC converters, and auxiliary power systems.

Don’t miss the connector and cable product roundup, looking at the latest rugged and flexible interconnects for high-reliability applications, including automotive, industrial, and military/aerospace. These connectors deliver miniaturization, reliable performance, and easier integration.

We also look at some of the latest innovations in automotive LEDs and LED drivers. Many of the latest LED developments focus on delivering smaller form factors for space-constrained and sleeker designs, improved thermal performance, and flexible color control. LED driver manufacturers also deliver simpler designs for easier integration and space savings, as well as advancements in areas such as packaging and heat dissipation.

The post Next-gen components power safer, smarter vehicles appeared first on EDN.

The premise that a supposed-clone rechargeable battery is more economical than its “branded” counterpart is all well and good…unless you’re unable to actually recharge it.

As my accretion of previously-owned photography equipment continues unabated, so too grows the pile of batteries for powering them. Many of the cells are camera manufacturer-branded, but in a few situations, what’s arrived post-purchase are third-party “clones”, with the quotes referencing the hit-or-miss reality in achieving the suppliers’ desired exact-duplicate aspirations.

Recently added to my gear inventory, for example, is an OM-1 (the newer digital version, not its same-named film-based classic precursor) from Olympus (now OM System).

It showed with a third-party BLX-1 battery (7.2 V, 2280 mAh) inside it. Olympus’ BCX-1 charger unsurprisingly had no issue with the official BLX-1 cell.

Unfortunately, however, it balked at accepting the third-party mimicker.

Typically, this outcome results from a failed upfront interrogation of the battery by the charger (or camera, for that matter), done over an identification, status, or functionally equivalent bus. While cloning a simple manufacturer-and-device ID code combination stored in nonvolatile memory is rather straightforward, impersonating more complex hardware such as the entire embedded battery management system (BMS) is a more challenging endeavor.

I also wasn’t up for the common “solution” to this situation—the third-party battery supplier encouraging the user to buy its own charger—even if it were feasible. Since this battery is supplier-unbranded, I wouldn’t know where to even start looking for a copacetic charger companion. So, it went under the internal-analysis knife for my and readers’ shared educational benefit.

Electrical contact-function guesstimates

Here are some overview shots of the third-party BLX-1, as usual accompanied by a 0.75′′ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes. Top:

Bottom:

Note the four sequential contacts marked “+”, “T”, “I” and “-“.

Published specifications for batteries like the one I’m looking at today are hard-to-impossible to come by, given that the camera manufacturer understandably doesn’t want to encourage cloning for economics (“branded” batteries are more expensive, therefore highly profitable to the supplier) and broader camera and brand damage-avoidance reasons. That said, the functions of “+” and “-“ are, unsurprisingly, related to the voltage and current involved in the fundamental cell-charging and -discharging functions, the latter for camera-powering purposes.

“T” typically references “temperature”, with the contact connected to an integrated negative temperature coefficient (NTC) thermistor or other sensor to monitor the internal cell(s) and alert the charger to potential overheat conditions. And “I”, perhaps short for “information” or “identification”, references the earlier-noted interrogation initially done by both charger and camera after battery insertion and power-on, and ongoing from that point on, presumably implemented by a bidirectional single-data-pin serial communications protocol of some sort.

Onward, with the comparatively bland other end, followed by the left and right sides.

Actualizing unexciting-dissection aspirations

Now to get inside. You’ve likely already noticed the tempting seam running along the entire circumference, dividing the battery roughly into two halves. Its ultrasonic welded foundation meant that simple heat application wouldn’t suffice to get them apart…not that I’d want to do that anyway, given the just-alluded-to battery chemistry overheating side effects.

I also didn’t know how (if at all, vs. elementary “pouch” structures) the cell(s) inside were encased, giving me pause when it came to contemplating alternatively cutting into the seam. And construction aside, I also didn’t want to inadvertently short out a cell via a misplaced blade. Yikes!

I eventually settled on a methodology involving my hobbyist vise and the meticulous back-and-forth use of my hacksaw blade (versus my also-considered Dremel tool’s cutting wheel…heat concerns again, though…), which thankfully worked like a charm with no “exciting” side effects.

The two serial-connected 3.7V Li-ion cells were cylindrical in form factor and unmemorable.

Note that I straightaway severed the metal straps connecting them both to the PCB and to each other, in a nod to my earlier mentioned short-circuit outcome concerns.

I’d wager, however, that the mini-PCB, with contacts on one side and componentry on the other, was always of greater interest to all of you (as it certainly was to me).

Mystery ICs

Flip it over, remove the obscuring rubberized strips that normally provide the mini-PCB with both shock-absorptive and electrically insulative isolation from the cells’ terminals.

And the electronics “guts” come into full view.

The eight-lead IC U1 at far left is labeled:

8205A
Q121M1

It appears to be a dual N-channel MOSFET, a common element of elementary lithium battery protection circuits. The six-lead IC U2, seen directly to its right, is labeled:

20DBUE

Reader insights are welcomed on this one; Google was of no help! Although I can’t help but wonder, revisiting the earlier-referenced schematic, if it’s a rudimentary battery-protection IC?

Skipping past a mess of passives, the next notable chip is a 20-lead IC whose topside markings were unfortunately buffed out…that is, if they ever existed in the first place! I presume it’s the battery charge controller; make and model unknown, alas. That said, as a conceptual example, I’ll point you toward Texas Instruments’ bq2400x series, multiple of which support dual-cell assemblies (for which balancing will be necessary) and come in various 20-contact packages.

At far right is another enigma, this one six-lead and PCB-notated as U4 (or at least I think that’s what it says; the inconveniently located through-hole vias at the top don’t help). Character(s) at far left on the topside stamp represent(s), I’m guessing, an unfamiliar-to-me company logo that my limited available keyboard options won’t allow me to represent. The last four, ironically, are:

U4UH

I presume the commonality of the first two with the PCB mark is nothing more than a mere coincidence. IC identity suggestions, readers?

And with memories of recent-past short-circuited, overheating batteries still fresh in my mind.

And knowing that the battery’s guts would be sitting in my office for several more weeks prior to publication of my teardown writeup, I concluded this portion of the project by amply wrapping both cells in insulating masking tape prior to moving on.

More to come

I’ve got two more batteries still sitting in the teardown queue, but as this initial segment went longer than initially anticipated (then again, what else is new, right?) I’ve decided to save them for part 2 in this now-series, scheduled for publication next week. Until them, I welcome your feedback in the comments on what I’ve covered so far!

—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.

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• Not smart, but solar: Analyzing another thermo-plus-hygrometer

The post Dissecting third-party camera batteries, part 1: Functional misbehavior appeared first on EDN.

Advances in autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) now enable vehicles to understand their surroundings in real time, a complex process based on the concepts of perception and sensor fusion.

Perception refers to the ability to detect and classify objects, recognize traffic signs, track pedestrians, and map the road. However, every type of sensor has its own physical limitations. Sensor fusion is the technology that bridges this gap by intelligently combining data from sensors using advanced algorithms.

In this article, we will explore how perception and sensor fusion are driving evolution and innovations in the three main categories of automotive sensors: radar, LiDAR, and cameras. We also highlight several radar, LiDAR, and camera products with advanced features to improve ADAS imaging and perception.

Radar performs in harsh environments

Automotive radar offers excellent performance in tough conditions, such as fog, rain, and darkness, where cameras and LiDAR are less effective. The introduction of 4D imaging radar has added elevation (height) to the standard range, velocity, and azimuth outputs. 4D radar can thus generate dense point clouds that were once available only with LiDAR. According to MarketsandMarkets, the 4D imaging radar market was valued at $390 million in 2025 and is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 25.2%.

Hirain Technologies has developed the LRR615, a long-range imaging radar built around Arbe Robotics Ltd.’s 4D imaging radar chipset solution. The radar system is the first to be equipped with a high-density waveguide antenna. This feature provides improved image clarity, detection sensitivity, and signal integrity.

Designed to be cost-effective and manufacturable on a large scale, the LRR615 can be paired with cameras in autonomous-driving systems, providing an alternative to LiDAR. After integrating, calibrating, and validating the device, Hirain is setting up the manufacturing process to achieve an annual production of 10,000 units.

Arbe’s chipset (Figure 1) is a multichip architecture that integrates three proprietary, automotive-grade integrated circuits that process ultra-high-resolution data. The chipset can process real-time data from 2,304 virtual channels, achieve 3-Tbits/s equivalent processing throughput, and provide over 10,000 detections at 20 fps.

Arbe’s chipset is based on GlobalFoundries’ (GF’s) proprietary 22FDX process technology. This platform, specifically addressing automotive radar, integrates RF, analog, and digital processing blocks on the same die. This reduces system costs and accelerates time to market. According to GF, using its technology, Arbe is the first in the industry to create a real-time, 4D image of the surrounding environment, achieving a 1° resolution.

Figure 1: Arbe’s automotive-grade chipset integrates a safety processor, security, dual-core DSP, and application processor. (Source: Arbe Robotics Ltd.)

Another relevant application of automotive radar is in-cabin monitoring. An example is Texas Instruments Inc.’s AWRL6844, a 57- to 64-GHz mmWave radar sensor designed for occupancy monitoring, including seat-belt reminder systems, child-presence detection, and intrusion detection (Figure 2).

The AWRL6844 is a low-power device integrating four transmitters and four receivers. This high-resolution sensing data is processed by specific AI algorithms running on a customizable, on-chip hardware accelerator and DSP. This single-chip solution improves detection accuracy, reduces processing time, and enables a safer driving environment.

Figure 2: The TI AWRL684x mmWave sensor device employs FMCW radar technology to support multiple in-cabin applications. (Source: Texas Instruments Inc.)

Infineon Technologies AG offers a similar product, the XENSIV BGT60ATR24AIP 57.7- to 62.4-GHz radar sensor based on FMCW technology. Available in a compact, 8 × 8-mm2 package with antenna-in-package technology, the device features ultra‑low power consumption, high precision, and advanced sensing, making it suitable for contactless, high-accuracy in‑cabin monitoring.

LiDAR advances with better perception and identification

MicroVision Inc., a company specializing in advanced perception solutions that recently acquired the assets from Luminar Technologies, introduced its Tri-LiDAR architecture. This solution integrates two MOVIA S short-range sensors (placed on the front corners) with one forward-facing HALO long-range LiDAR, delivering continuous, 360° environmental coverage (Figure 3).

The company’s software platform performs the real-time fusion of the data coming from all the sensors and generates a single, high-fidelity point cloud. This enables accurate object detection, classification, and tracking, delivering a real-time perception system.

According to the company, Tri-LiDAR provides three main benefits: a reduction in the power consumption of each sensor, a reduction in the packaging of each sensor, and a cost reduction of the system.

Figure 3: Top view of the MicroVision Tri-LiDAR system (Source: MicroVision Inc.)

Aeva Inc., a company specializing in sensing and perception systems, has licensed Cadence Tensilica Vision DSP IP to support the signal-processing tasks of its 4D LiDAR systems.

Tensilica Vision DSPs’ low-power architecture and Tensilica Instruction Extension language make Tensilica DSPs suited for applications in which real-time signal processing, low latency, and high efficiency are mandatory. According to Aeva, the flexibility and performance of Cadence’s Vision DSP technology will improve the perception and scalability of its solutions, addressing automotive and industrial applications.

Hesai Technology, a company specializing in 3D perception, announced the Picasso 6D Full-Color LiDAR SPAD-SoC, a solution that natively captures 3D spatial geometry (X, Y, Z) and 3D color data (R, G, B) on a single chip, eliminating the need for fusion of separate camera and LiDAR data.

By performing the sensor data fusion directly at the silicon level (the single-photon avalanche-diode SoC), the Picasso chip produces high-resolution, colorized point clouds simultaneously, allowing for better identification of objects such as traffic lights, lane markings, and construction zones. Hesai’s ETX LiDAR, upgraded to support up to 4,320 channels, will integrate this technology and will be available in the second half of 2026.

Lumotive, a company specializing in programmable optical semiconductors, has introduced a solid-state LiDAR platform that combines its commercially available LM10 Light Control Metasurface (LCM) with the ADS6311 Hawk sensor from Adaps Photonics.

The solution (Figure 4) delivers a 180° horizontal field of view and operates at 30 fps, eliminating blind spots, improving the tracking of fast-moving objects, and reducing the number of sensors required. Lumotive’s LCM technology electronically steers light at semiconductor speed, without encountering the limitations associated with mechanical scanners and fixed-channel VCSEL arrays. In addition to 180° horizontal coverage, the sensor offers up to 140° vertical coverage, configurable through software to optimize range, resolution, and frame rate.

Figure 4: The architecture of Lumotive’s solid-state LiDAR system doubles the frame rate typically achieved by many direct ToF LiDAR systems while extending sensing distances to as much as 50 meters. (Source: Lumotive)

Cameras shift to 8-MP sensors

Cameras are rapidly migrating to 8-MP sensors, representing the new baseline for ADAS front and side cameras. The higher resolution directly increases the detection range at highway speeds, enabling confident object classification at distances that 2-MP and 5-MP sensors cannot reliably achieve.

Omnivision introduced the OX08D20 8‑MP CMOS automotive image sensor based on its proprietary TheiaCel technology. The device is an improved version of the OX08D10 sensor for exterior cameras widely used in ADAS and autonomous-driving systems.

The OX08D20 image sensor features a 60-fps frame rate, 2× higher than its predecessor, OX08D10, enabling dual-use cameras. With 60 fps, the video flows more smoothly. This allows car manufacturers to save money, space, and wiring by using one camera to handle both background autonomous-driving tasks and real-time visual displays for the driver. The sensor also supports the latest cybersecurity standard MIPI CSE 2.0 (Camera Service Extensions v2.0) developed by the MIPI Alliance.

Omnivision’s TheiaCel technology has been designed to capture high-quality images even in extreme lighting conditions. It achieves high dynamic range (HDR) using a single exposure. In this way, the LED flicker experienced in traditional HDR sensors is eliminated.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions introduced the IMX828, the industry’s first 8-MP CMOS image sensor for automotive cameras featuring a built-in MIPI A-PHY transmission interface. Traditional automotive camera systems require externally mounted serializer chips to transfer data safely to the vehicle’s electronic control unit. By embedding the MIPI A-PHY interface directly into the sensor, Sony eliminates the need for this additional hardware.

This feature enables a reduction in board size and module power consumption and limits heat generation. The chip also integrates a proprietary error-handling circuit that resists external noise disruptions.

NXP Semiconductors’ 4K MIPI CMOS camera module (IMX-OS08A20) is a high-performance development tool for consumer, industrial, and automotive vision systems. It is built on OmniVision’s 8-MP OS08A20 sensor and adopts PureCel and Nyxel technologies to capture 4K Ultra-HD video at 60 fps.

The development kit includes the 8-MP sensor module, a MINI-SAS interface cable, and an adapter board. It is designed to plug directly into the NXP i.MX 8M Plus Evaluation Kit. The module’s high-resolution performance makes it well-suited for automotive in-cabin applications, such as driver-monitoring systems and occupant-monitoring systems.

The post Designer’s guide: Radar, LiDAR, and cameras advance ADAS appeared first on EDN.

LED manufacturers continue to enhance their LED designs for automotive lighting, enabling greater differentiation in the car’s exterior and interior illumination as well as improving safety features. Many of the latest developments focus on several key areas: smaller form factors for space-constrained and sleeker designs, improved thermal performance, and flexible color control.

LED driver developments go hand in hand with these advances to support these next-generation LEDs, focusing on advancements in packaging, heat dissipation, and simpler designs for easier integration and space savings.

Here is a selection of LED and LED drivers introduced over the past year, targeting automotive exterior and interior lighting applications. They focus on a range of improvements that deliver smaller form factors, greater heat dissipation, higher system efficiency, enhanced light output, and precise color control.

Automotive LED innovations such as compact, high-luminance designs enable sleeker lighting systems while maintaining uniform, energy-efficient light output. (Source: Adobe Stock)

A new generation of LEDs

Some of the latest automotive LED designs address the demand for sleek front lighting. One example is ams Osram’s OSLON Compact RM for next-generation slim headlamp systems. It addresses design aesthetics in automotive lighting with its high luminance, compact form factor, homogeneous light, and color appearance, allowing for the creation of signature lighting elements for brand identity, the company said.

The Compact LED is a 0.5-mm2 rectangular high-current chip, housed in a compact ceramic package. The small size enables optical systems with heights as low as 10 mm, enabling ultra-slim headlamp designs that were previously difficult to achieve, according to ams Osram. The two-pad package design supports solder stability on aluminum boards, suiting it for a variety of automotive lighting applications.

The LED delivers improved optical efficacy through its adapted light-emitting area (LEA) of 0.6 × 0.9 mm with an aspect ratio of 1:1.5. It features high luminance and uniform light output, free from dark zones, while maintaining high energy efficiency, a key factor for EVs.

The OSLON Compact RM for advanced front-lighting applications targets three light functions: low beam, static high beam, and adaptive driving beam (ADB) LED matrix systems. Thanks to its rectangular LEA, vertically oriented within the package, the OSLON Compact RM enables precise pixel-to-pixel alignment and provides a greater vertical light spread in ADB systems. At a driving current of 1 A, it claims an impressive luminance of 209 Mnits, which ensures maximum optical performance even with small lens components, according to the company.

Ams Osram’s OSLON Compact RM (Source: ams Osram)

Ams Osram also enhanced its offerings for automotive interior applications with the launch of its OSIRE E3030 RGB LED with significantly enhanced light output. Aimed at next-generation ambient lighting solutions, the RGB LED pairs a high light output in the 0.5-W range with precisely controllable color variety, meeting both function and aesthetic requirements.

Depending on the selected color location, the OSIRE E3030 delivers typical luminous emissions for red and blue, ranging from 22.4 to 40 lumens or from 7.1 to 14 lumens at a binning current of 200 mA, and from 28 to 50 lumens for green at a binning current of 150 mA. It offers a wide range of available wavelengths for an expanded color gamut and individually addressable color channels for greater flexibility in terms of color selection and color mixing.

The OSIRE E3030 measures 3 × 3 × 0.6 mm, suiting it for applications with space constraints. In addition, the delta arrangement of the LED chips ensures exceptional color-over-angle performance, according to the company.

The OSIRE E3030 is also resistant to vibration and temperature fluctuations, meeting automotive standards. It is AEC-Q102-qualified.

Ams Osram’s OSIRE E3030 RGB LED (Source: ams Osram)

Also claiming ultra-small footprints and profiles, Lumileds has introduced two LED series—the LUXEON Versat 2016 and the LUXEON Altilon SMD-A—targeting a variety of automotive lighting applications.

The LUXEON Versat 2016 automotive LED is an AEC-Q-qualified LED portfolio with a broad color and performance range, measuring 2.0 × 1.6 mm with a z-height of only 0.52 mm. The LED not only offers standard direct and phosphor-converted colors but also LED-emission spectral tuning to match transmission characteristics of foils as used in car-body and grille illumination for superior color control, Lumileds said.

Targeting animated, personalized car-body lighting, the LUXEON Versat 2016 delivers features such as singular optical elements, backlit optical surfaces, and 3D illuminated structures for car illumination beyond traditional signaling into styling and communication lighting, the company said. The automotive LED can also be used in daytime running lights (DRLs), turn, stop, tail, and side-marker applications.

Lumileds also introduced the LUXEON Altilon SMD-A LED, claimed as the thinnest single-chip addressable LED, targeting high-performance automotive forward lighting. It has a z-height of only 433 µm, which allows for optical structures to be designed with greater accuracy and efficacy. This means the optics can be designed closer to the LED, which improves optical efficiency.

The advanced package is said to increase luminance, thermal capabilities, and robustness for demanding front fog, low/high beam, and ADB.

In addition, the small edges of the LUXEON Altilon SMD-A improve contrast, measuring 1:247, and produce a sharp, natural cutoff. Lumileds said reducing the gap between LEAs to 70 µm and achieving the optimal die-to-phosphor size increases luminance for further cost-performance improvements. The series is available in four configurations: 1×2, 1×3, 1×4, and 1×5.

Lumileds’ Altilon SMD-A LEDs (Source: Lumileds Holding B.V.)

For aftermarket automotive lighting applications, Cree LED, a Penguin Solutions brand, introduced the XLamp XE-B LEDs in an ultra-compact package for directional lighting applications. This latest XLamp Element LED extends the family into a smaller form factor, measuring 0.9 × 1.4 mm, while delivering high intensity in optical systems, whether used individually or in arrays, according to the company.

Claiming new levels of performance from an extremely small light source, the automotive LED delivers up to 60% higher intensity than existing LEDs with a larger, 1 × 1-mm light-emitting surface. While it is optimized for directional lighting applications that benefit from multi-color LED designs and suited for indoor directional lighting, architectural lighting, and entertainment lighting, it also targets aftermarket automotive lighting, in which compact size, high intensity, and precise color control are all key requirements.

The XE-B LED series is built on Cree’s advanced Element platform, enabling the smallest possible distance between the LED chip and the package edge, which allows tighter spacing, improved optical control, and seamless integration with secondary optics. It also features a large, electrically isolated thermal pad that supports advanced printed-circuit-board (PCB) designs, delivering a direct thermal path to the heat sink for excellent heat dissipation and long operating lifetimes, even at maximum current, the company said.

The XE-B LEDs enable precise and consistent color mixing with a consistent 1-A maximum current across all colors and a uniform package design. It offers 17 colors plus a full range of white options.

Cree LED’s XLamp XE-B LEDs (Source: Cree LED)

LED drivers optimize automotive lighting

Targeting improved safety, aesthetics, and personalization, Diodes Inc. offers the automotive-compliant AL5958Q matrix LED driver with a 48-channel constant-current source, capable of up to 32 scans. Suited for automotive dynamic lighting, the device targets narrow-pixel mini- and micro-LED displays, which require multiple RGB LEDs to produce animated, dynamic lighting with data and information. Applications include central information displays, cluster displays, head-up displays, grill and emblem lights, body LED panels, interior lights, and rear lights.

The AL5958Q features built-in intelligent matrix display command functions that reduce the processing overhead on the local microcontroller (MCU). Key functions include automatic black-frame insertion to mitigate blurs caused by scanning switches, reduction of last-scan- and next-scan-line ghost images to eliminate ghosting from parasitic capacitors, and suppression of short-LED caterpillars.

Other features include open-LED fail lines and staggered current output delay to minimize inrush current, as well as grayscale enhancement (also known as low-brightness uniformity compensation), a grayscale clock watchdog timer, and sleep mode for power savings.

Differentiated features include the integrated 16 N-MOSFETs, allowing support of both static and dynamic systems, and multiplex-pulse-density modulation technology that enhances the refresh rate of dynamic scanning systems without increasing the frequency of the grayscale clock. This mitigates electromagnetic interference (EMI) due to high clock frequencies, Diodes said.

The AL5958Q also features high, 16-bit resolution dimming, coupled with its RGB support, for highly precise brightness control and color mixing. The current output for each color group can be configured either through three external current-sensing resistors or by programming three 6-bit global current control registers.

The device also offers advanced diagnostic features and protection mechanisms for monitoring capabilities. These include error flag registers applied to LED open/short to read out each channel using open/short detection, undervoltage lockout (UVLO) protection, and a watchdog timer.

The AL5958Q is supplied in a wettable W-QFN9090-76/SWP (Type A1) package and operates in a –40°C to 125°C ambient temperature range. Multiple AL5958Q devices can be daisy-chained without limitation. Diodes also offers a standard compliance version, the AL5958, for industrial and commercial applications.

Diodes Inc.’s AL5958Q matrix LED driver (Source: Diodes Inc.)

Lumissil Microsystems recently introduced the IS32FL3776 matrix LED driver for software-defined exterior lighting module applications. Enabling a combination of expressive and thermally efficient exterior lighting, these systems use matrix LED patterns to communicate vehicle intent, safety status, and driver-assistance cues, as well as brand identity.

The IS32FL3776, housed in a QFN-60 package, supports compact, individually addressable LED designs used in RGB mini-LED displays, full-width front-light strips, grille lamps, automated-driving-system marker lamps, and other vehicle lighting functions.

The IS32FL3776 integrates 36 constant-current sink channels and six scanning supply-switch controls to support a 36 × 6 matrix of up to 216 individually addressable LEDs. The dense matrix architecture targets large, intelligent signal display (ISD) lighting surfaces with fewer external components.

For high-quality animations, the IS32FL3776 features high-resolution, high-frequency, dithered pulse-width-modulation (PWM) control for fine brightness adjustment and a reduction in visible flicker and camera banding. Other features that help maintain uniform, artifact-free illumination across dense LED arrays include integrated current adjustment, matrix de-ghosting, low-headroom operation, and synchronized scanning.

This LED driver offers high-speed SPI and LumiBus UART interfaces that allow multiple driver ICs or distributed lamp PCBs to operate in synchronization for large-area displays and coordinated lighting animations.

The IS32FL3776 packs features for improved system efficiency and thermal performance. DCFB adaptive control is used to optimize the LED supply rail while maintaining only the headroom needed for proper current regulation, and an internal ADC and FBO feedback pin works with an external DC/DC converter to reduce driver power dissipation in large or high-brightness matrix displays.

It also supports external PMOS operation for additional thermal optimization, which moves high-side switching dissipation outside the IC package into external FETs and PCB copper, Lumissil said.

Other features include spread-spectrum PWM clocking, phase-delay control, and staged switching to help reduce supply ripple, EMI emissions, and audible-noise risk in high-brightness or high-duty-cycle ISD lighting applications; and diagnostic, protection, and communication-integrity features including LED open/short detection, ADC-based monitoring, overcurrent protection, UVLO protection, thermal shutdown, and CRC error detection.

Lumissil Microsystems’ IS32FL3776 matrix LED driver (Source: Lumissil Microsystems)

Lumissil addresses 48-V automotive systems with the introduction of the IS32LT3962 dual-channel LED controller. By using the IS32LT3962, as automotive lighting shifts from 12-V to 48-V systems, lighting designers can achieve improved power efficiency, reduced thermal stress, and lower wiring harness cost and weight, according to the company.

The IS32LT3962 drives two independent high-voltage LED strings for automotive applications such as high-/low-beam headlights, DRLs, and turn signals and enables lamp driver modules to support two functions (e.g., high beam and low beam) with a single IC to reduce space. The dual-output channel enables independent channel brightness control, with combined analog and internal/external PWM dimming for more compact lighting solutions.

The LED controller supports a wide, 5-V to 80-V input/output range for 24-V to 48-V battery systems and delivers flexibility with buck, buck-boost, SEPIC, or boost topologies on each channel. Other features include dual analog dimming pins to enable LED binning and thermal current roll-off using an external NTC, programmable undervoltage current reduction, and spread-spectrum operation combined with 180° phase shifting to help reduce system-level EMI.

The IS32LT3962 is housed in a compact WFQFN-32 package with an exposed pad for enhanced thermal dissipation. The operating temperature range is –40°C to 125°C Automotive Temperature Grade 1.

Lumissil Microsystems’ IS32LT3962 LED controller (Source: Lumissil Microsystems)

Melexis recently announced the launch of the MLX81119, an 18-channel LIN RGB LED controller with an integrated DC/DC converter. This LED controller is designed to simplify and optimize automotive lighting systems.

The MLX81119, housed in a 5 × 5-mm QFN32 package, is powered by Melexis’s 16-bit MCU, with an integrated memory subsystem that includes 32 KB of flash, 13.5 KB of ROM, and 4 KB of RAM to support the application, LED calibration coefficients, and additional system data. It is designed to reduce power dissipation, external components, and space requirements in dense vehicle applications such as door panels, dashboards, and charge port lighting by generating the LED supply voltage locally on the chip.

Simplifying the external power stage, the LED controller operates with as few as two capacitors and a single inductor, eliminating the need for a separate DC/DC controller and associated passives. This design reduces component count and PCB area for more compact lighting modules and easier integration in space-constrained locations.

In conventional architectures, supplying LEDs via external DC/DC converters increases heat generation, component count, and layout complexity, making it harder to meet physical, efficiency, and thermal constraints as automakers increase lighting deployments to meet growing requirements for new functionality, personalization, and brand differentiation, according to Melexis.

The 18-channel MLX81119 addresses these challenges by integrating a 1-A DC/DC converter that generates an optimized local LED supply voltage, programmable between 2.5 V and 6 V. This means the LED controller does not dissipate excess voltage as heat. It dynamically adapts the LED supply to the active color mix and operating conditions to reduce power losses and thermal stress, according to the company, which is not achievable with fixed external DC/DC converter solutions.

The MLX81119 features 18 low-side current sources configurable up to 60 mA and independent 16-bit PWM control. It supports up to six RGB LEDs per device, enabling smooth color transitions and advanced lighting animations, and provides built-in direct and indirect temperature sensing that allows active compensation across all channels, so color points remain stable over the full automotive temperature range.

The MLX81119 integrates a complete LIN system, including transceiver and protocol handler, fully compliant with LIN 2.x and SAE J2602. Developed according to ISO 26262, the device supports up to ASIL-B implementations.

Melexis’s MLX81119 LIN RGB LED controller (Source: Melexis)

Novosense Microelectronics has expanded its portfolio of high-performance LED driver ICs for exterior and interior lighting with several new series. These devices feature high-side and low-side linear drivers, as well as integrated MCU solutions for RGB/RGBW ambient control, and deliver precise current regulation, advanced diagnostics, and robust thermal management for safer, more energy-efficient, and customizable lighting systems.

The lineup includes the NSL21912/16/24 12-, 16-, and 24-channel high-side linear LED drivers, NSL23716x 16-channel low-side linear LED driver, NSL2163x linear LED driver with thermal balancing, and NSUC1500 ambient lighting driver system-on-chip.

The NSL21912/16/24 series devices are automotive high-side LED drivers that deliver 100 mA per channel with 12-bit PWM dimming. They support automatic thermal sharing via VS shunt resistors for higher thermal performance. Other features include configurable LED fault detection, integrated E2PROM for fail-safe functions, a UART interface up to 2 Mbits/s, and optional ASIL-B functional-safety support.

The NSL23716x 16-channel automotive low-side LED driver delivers 100 mA per channel and 12-bit independent PWM dimming. It integrates programmable thermal derating, LED open-/short-circuit detection, and overheat protection with automatic shutdown. It also incorporates built-in OTP memory that supports fail-safe safety functions, and an optional CAN PHY interface eliminates the need for an external transceiver, simplifying design and improving system reliability.

The NSL2163x three-channel automotive linear LED driver provides up to 200 mA per channel and operates directly from a 5-V to 40-V battery supply. The device supports thermal sharing via external shunt resistors and integrates LED open-/short-circuit detection with thermal shutdown for enhanced system reliability. It offers an optional, low-power EN-pin version.

The highly integrated NSUC1500 IC for ambient lighting integrates an Arm Cortex-M3 core and four-channel high-precision current-mode LED drivers. The device provides 16-bit independent PWM dimming and 6-bit analog dimming capabilities. It enables more accurate dimming and color-mixing control while compensating for lumen depreciation, Novosense said. The NSUC1500 is compliant with the AEC-Q100 Grade 1 and CISPR 25 Class 5 EMC standards.

The post Automotive LEDs and drivers: Balancing performance with style appeared first on EDN.

With the increasing popularity of renewable energy and electric vehicles, the large-scale application of bidirectional isolated DC/DC converters is growing. This article will focus on energy storage systems (ESSs), with an overview of the isolated bidirectional topologies used in ESSs.

Figure 1 shows a typical residential ESS. A unidirectional DC/DC converter, also known as a maximum power-point tracker, converts the energy generated by solar panels and then feeds that energy to a high-voltage DC bus. An inverter may transfer this energy to the electric grid, or the energy may be stored in the battery system, where a bidirectional DC/DC converter charges and discharges the battery.

Figure 1 This block diagram shows the constituent pieces of a residential ESS system. Source: Texas Instruments

Because of safety considerations, residential ESSs use low-voltage batteries, such as 48V. Therefore, the DC/DC converter must provide galvanic isolation between the high-voltage DC bus and the battery. Because the DC bus and battery vary from the voltage ranges shown in Figure 1, one of the design priorities for the converter is to have a wide voltage-adjustment range.

The traditional solution is usually an open-loop inductor-inductor-capacitor (LLC) and a closed-loop buck/boost converter. The benefit of this solution is that it is easy to control and has a wide voltage-adjustment range, but a two-stage converter results in lower total system efficiency and higher costs.

To optimize the performance of the bidirectional DC/DC converter, a one-stage solution is preferable. Compared to a two-stage solution, a one-stage solution has higher efficiency and lower costs, but it also needs a more complex control scheme to achieve high performance. The most popular one-stage solutions are LLC, capacitor-inductor-inductor-inductor-capacitor (CLLLC), dual active bridge (DAB) and series resonant DAB (SR-DAB).

As shown in Figure 2, an LLC resonant converter can achieve very low switching losses. When operating near or below the resonant frequency, the LLC can achieve zero voltage switching (ZVS) on active bridges and zero current switching on rectifier bridges. When operating above the resonant frequency, an LLC can only achieve ZVS on active bridges.

Figure 2 A LLC resonant converter, shown in this schematic, can achieve very low switching losses. Source: Texas Instruments

Since this converter soft switches during turnon and turnoff, the electromagnetic interference emissions are comparatively low to other converters without soft switching. But designers generally only use the LLC resonant converter for unidirectional power transfer. It is not good for wide-gain-range applications such as ESSs because the voltage gain curve is flat when the switching frequency is higher than the resonant frequency, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 This LLC voltage gain curve is flat when the switching frequency is higher than the resonant frequency. Source: Texas Instruments

Adding resonant elements on the secondary side of the transformer will form a bidirectional CLLLC resonant converter. As shown in Figure 4, the converter resonance network is symmetrical and proportional to the transformer’s turns ratio, so this converter maintains the resonance law and functionalities, such as soft-switching features in both forward and reverse operation.

Figure 4 A bidirectional CLLLC, shown in this schematic, is symmetrical and proportional to the transformer’s turns ratio. Source: Texas Instruments

A major advantage of this topology is the ability to provide symmetrical bidirectional power transfer. The effect of the secondary resonant tank may cause the voltage gain curve to have multiple crests, however, as shown in Figure 5. Similar to an LLC converter, a CLLLC also has a narrow voltage adjustment range and consists of five resonant elements, which increases the size and cost of the system, while the additional inductor also introduces additional losses.

Figure 5 The effect of the secondary resonant tank, shown in this gain curve of a CLLLC, may cause the voltage gain curve to have multiple crests. Source: Texas Instruments

Figure 6 shows the basic DAB topology, which consists of a full bridge with active switches on both the primary and secondary sides. The main advantages of the DAB converter are its inherent bidirectional capability, faster dynamic response, and wider voltage-adjusted range compared to the LLC and CLLLC topologies.

Figure 6 The basic DAB topology, shown in this schematic, consists of a full bridge with active switches on both the primary and secondary sides. Source: Texas Instruments

Through the most basic single-phase-shift (SPS) control, it is possible to adjust the polarity and magnitude of the phase-shift angle between the primary and secondary bridges, thereby controlling the magnitude and direction of its transmission power. The peak current of transistors and the circulating current are large with SPS control, however, which results in high turnoff losses as well as circulation losses.

ZVS is also difficult to achieve at light loads. With advanced modulation schemes such as triple-phase shift, a DAB converter can theoretically achieve ZVS over the entire operating range and could optimize high peak current and circulating current, but will require significantly more complex system analysis.

Inserting a series resonant tank into the DAB converter forms an SR-DAB, as shown in Figure 7. Similar to a series resonant converter, an SR-DAB needs to operate above the resonant frequency in order to ensure that the converter is in the inductive region, which is a necessary condition to realize ZVS. Given the resonance features of the circuit, the inductor current of an SR-DAB is almost sinusoidal, which could have a smaller turnoff current and root-mean-square inductor current compared to a traditional DAB.

Figure 7 Inserting a series resonant tank into the DAB converter forms an SR-DAB, as shown in this schematic. Source: Texas Instruments

Table 1 summarizes the primary features of the four isolated bidirectional DC/DC topologies.

	LLC	CLLLC	DAB	SR-DAB
Voltage adjustment range	Narrow	Narrow	Wide	Wide
Transient response	Slow	Slow	Fast	Fast: phase shift plus fixed frequency Slow: phase shift plus variable frequency
ZVS range	Wide (full-range ZVS）	Wide (full-range ZVS）	Narrow (no ZVS at light loads)	Medium
Turnoff current	Low	Low	High (with SPS)	Medium (with SPS)
Control complexity	Moderate	Moderate	Simple (SPS) Complex (TPS)	Simple (SPS) Complex (TPS)

Table 1 This table summarizes various DC/DC topologies.

All four topologies provide isolation and bidirectional power transfer functions; however, DAB and SR-DAB are more suitable for ESS applications given their wide voltage-adjustment range and faster dynamic response. In addition, an SR-DAB has a lower turnoff current and a wider ZVS range compared to a DAB, with higher efficiency than a DAB as well.

For more details about the DAB topology, see the Texas Instruments Power Supply Design Seminar paper, “Dual Active Bridge Topology Overview.”

Guangzhi Cui is a power systems engineer at Texas Instruments. In this role, he handles industrial power system design and provides semiconductor power system solutions and customer technical support.

 

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The post Power Tips #155: How to choose the best topology for isolated energy storage systems appeared first on EDN.

Filters are circuits comprising resistors, inductors and capacitors that pass certain frequency bands and attenuate others. Active filters use operational amplifiers (op amps) with resistors and capacitors, whereas passive filters do not include an amplifier.

Active filters have an advantage over passive filters in that they can have gain. The gain factor in an active filter enables higher-order filters as well as a wider range of filter-response characteristics. For example, a band-pass filter with a narrow bandwidth would be challenging to implement with only passive components given the limited gain of passive filters.

The amplifier also allows the filter to drive a load impedance without affecting the filter response, whereas the passive filter response generally changes significantly with loading. Finally, a passive filter may require an inductor, which may add cost and PCB space, compared to an active filter that only requires the amplifier, resistors, and capacitors.

Generally, you can design active filters with simple software programs such as Filter Design Tool. This tool designs an active filter based on your filter specifications, type, response, and topology. The final output for the software tool is a schematic with all the necessary component values. Filter Design Tool does assume that the op amp is ideal, however, and its response can change when using a practical op amp.

This article covers the most common active filter nonidealities, with recommendations on how to mitigate the problem.

Gain-bandwidth limitations

As mentioned previously, the purpose of an active filter is to pass one range of frequencies (pass band) while attenuating another range of frequencies (stop band). The ability of an amplifier to achieve this goal depends heavily on the gain-bandwidth product specification. When using an op amp with insufficient gain bandwidth in an active filter, the stop-band attenuation will not match the expected ideal filter response; specifically, the gain will stop rolling off and will begin to increase rather than decrease.

Figure 1 shows the simulated gain response of a Sallen-Key active filter using three different op-amp models with gain bandwidths ranging from 1.2 MHz to 11 MHz. The term Sallen-Key describes the topology or the specific connections of circuit components. Here, Filter Design Tool recommends a minimum gain bandwidth of 7.1 MHz, so op amps like OPA170 and OPA340 don’t meet that requirement but OPA140 does.

Figure 1 Sallen-Key low-pass filter response is shown for different gain-bandwidth op amps. Source: Texas Instruments

The attenuation in the stop band should continue to roll off at –40dB/decade; however, once the amplifier reaches its gain-bandwidth limit, it stops attenuating. The larger the gain-bandwidth of the op amp, the better the stop-band attenuation.

The figure above showed the effects of insufficient gain bandwidth on a Sallen-Key topology. The Sallen-Key topology is a noninverting type of active filter, while the multiple-feedback topology is an inverting type of active filter. The multiple-feedback topology band-stop attenuation is better than the Sallen-Key topology for low-gain-bandwidth designs.

Figure 2 shows the multiple-feedback response for the same three op amps used in the Sallen-Key example. The multiple-feedback response continues to roll off even after the frequency exceeds the gain-bandwidth limitation of the op amp. For the multiple-feedback circuit, the rolloff transitions from 40dB/decade to 20dB/decade when reaching the bandwidth limitation.

Figure 2 Multiple-feedback low-pass filter response is shown for different gain-bandwidth op amps. Source: Texas Instruments

To summarize, it’s important for active filters to follow the gain-bandwidth limitation given by the filter design software. A higher gain bandwidth will improve the stop-band attenuation, so depending on the range of frequencies that you need to reject, it may be necessary to choose a gain bandwidth 10 or 100 times the recommended minimum.

In cases where it’s not practical to choose an amplifier with a high gain bandwidth, use the multiple-feedback topology because its response is less dependent on gain bandwidth than the Sallen-Key topology.

Source impedance effects

All signal sources have a finite output impedance. A signal source can be commercial test equipment, an amplifier output, or an analog sensor. The output impedance of test equipment or amplifiers is generally very low, while the output impedance of a sensor can be high. Sources with low output impedance will have a minimal effect on filter response.

Conversely, a signal source such as a bridge sensor can have a high output impedance, which may significantly affect the filter response. As with the gain-bandwidth limitations, some filter topologies will be more sensitive to source impedance than others.

Figure 3 compares and contrasts the impact of source impedance on the Sallen-Key and multiple-feedback topologies. In this case, Sallen-Key is much less sensitive to source impedance than multiple feedback. The example plots the response for a 250 Ω, 500 Ω and 1,000 Ω source impedance. The multiple-feedback topology gain is significantly affected by the source impedance, but the effect on the Sallen-Key topology is minimal.

Figure 3 Source-impedance effect on response is displayed for the Sallen-Key and multiple-feedback topologies. Source: Texas Instruments

Component tolerance

Resistor tolerance will affect the cutoff frequencies and gain of active filters. For a low- or high-pass filter, a small shift in the cutoff frequency will not be a significant problem for most applications. For example, if a low-pass filter has an ideal cutoff frequency of 1 kHz but the component tolerance sets the actual frequency to 1.1 kHz, that will not be an issue for most applications.

Band-pass and band-stop filters, conversely, often have very precise bandwidth and center frequency requirements. For example, if a band-stop filter is designed to attenuate a 60-Hz signal, then the center frequency of the stop band should be very close to 60 Hz in order to properly attenuate the 60-Hz signal.

Figure 4 illustrates how component tolerance can affect the center frequency of a band-pass filter. The filter has a center frequency of 1 kHz and a bandwidth of 100 Hz. The circuit was tested using Monte Carlo analysis with good and poor component tolerance (good tolerance: RTOL = 0.1%, CTOL = 1%; poor tolerance: RTOL = 1%, CTOL = 5%). Monte Carlo analysis randomizes the component values according to the assigned tolerance for a set number of runs.

Figure 4 Here is a view of component tolerance impact on band-pass center frequency. Source: Texas Instruments

In this example, you can see much better control of the band-pass center frequency for the more precise (good) tolerance case. For the poor tolerance case, the center frequency is between 932 Hz and 1.106 kHz. The goal of this filter is to pass 1 kHz and reject all other frequencies. For many of the poor-tolerance Monte Carlo runs, a 1-kHz signal would be significantly attenuated because of the shifted center frequency.

The problem with component tolerance is most significant on band-pass and band-stop filters. There are two ways to avoid tolerance issues for these filters. The obvious approach to minimize the error is to choose resistors and capacitors with good tolerance. Generally, precision resistors of 0.1% are easy to find and not that expensive compared to the amplifier cost.

For capacitors, the C0G or film type have the best tolerance, temperature coefficient, and distortion. Unfortunately, these capacitors can be expensive, and the best tolerance is typically 1%. Furthermore, the maximum capacitance for C0G capacitors is generally 100 nF.

Another approach to minimizing the effect of component tolerance is to widen the bandwidth of the filter. The example shown in Figure 4 uses a 100-Hz bandwidth. Running the same example with a 400-Hz bandwidth would show that both the poor and good tolerance cases would pass the 1-kHz center frequency. However, the disadvantage of increasing the bandwidth is that the stop-band attenuation would not be as effective for the wide-bandwidth case.

Noise gain in active filters

All amplifiers and resistors generate noise because of the random motion of electrons inside the resistors and the semiconductor material. It’s possible to calculate this noise mathematically based on the circuit components.

The noise for an op amp is defined as a noise signal source on the noninverting input of the op amp. The gain seen by the noise signal source is called the noise gain. For active filters, the noise gain and noise bandwidth can be significantly different than the signal gain and bandwidth of the filter.

Figure 5 illustrates a multiple-feedback low-pass filter signal gain and noise-gain response. The top schematic shows the signal gain of the filter, while the bottom schematic shows the noise-gain configuration. To simulate noise gain, you simply add a signal source to the noninverting input and short out other voltage sources.

Figure 5 See the noise gain vs. signal gain for a multiple-feedback low-pass filter. Source: Texas Instruments

Comparing the noise gain and signal gain on the Bode plot shows that the noise gain has a much wider and higher frequency response than the signal gain. Sometimes engineers conducting noise analysis of filters assume that the filter transfer function will limit the noise and are surprised that the noise is higher than expected.

This unexpected increase in noise is because the op amp’s intrinsic noise source is located at the noninverting input and not at the signal input. Thus, the increase in noise gain and noise bandwidth causes an increase in output noise that engineers often overlook because they are considering signal gain and not the noise gain.

As the above figure shows, a low-pass active filter has a higher and wider frequency noise gain than the signal gain. This effect is even more significant on band-pass and band-stop filters. Figure 6 compares the noise gain and signal gain of a band-pass filter with a 100-Hz bandwidth. In this case the noise gain is about 46dB (200 V/V) higher than the signal gain.

Figure 6 Noise gain vs. signal gain is shown for a band-pass filter. Source: Texas Instruments

This high noise gain will significantly boost the op-amp noise. But engineers who analyze the circuit by just looking at the signal gain may not expect the higher output noise because of the noise gain.

One way to reduce the impact of noise gain for band-pass and band-stop filters is to increase the filter bandwidth. This is counterintuitive because noise is usually larger for wide-bandwidth circuits. However, for bandpass filters, the noise gain is higher for narrow-bandwidth filters and lower for wide-bandwidth filters. Figure 7 shows how noise gain is higher for the narrow-bandwidth filter.

Figure 7 Noise gain vs. noise bandwidth is shown for band-pass filters. Source: Texas Instruments

Resources for active filters

Fully understanding active filters is a deep and relatively complex subject. You can use Filter Design Tool to design active filters, because this tool and other filter design tools generally assume ideal op-amp characteristics, but the best practice is to confirm your design using a SPICE simulator.

Art Kay is an application engineer in the precision amplifiers team at Texas Instruments. He specializes in support of low noise data acquisition systems and has published a book on intrinsic noise analysis. He also co-published a useful summary of analog engineering relationships and a companion software tool.

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The post Active filters: Design tips and tricks appeared first on EDN.

Agriculture has become one of the fastest-growing applications for autonomous systems. Self-driving tractors, robotic sprayers, autonomous mowers, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are helping growers address labor shortages while improving productivity and reducing operating costs.

Much of this progress has been enabled by satellite navigation. GPS, often combined with real-time kinematic (RTK) corrections, provides the centimeter-level positioning needed for planting, spraying, harvesting, and mapping. In open fields, these systems perform remarkably well.

However, not every agricultural environment offers an unobstructed view of the sky.

As autonomy expands into orchards, vineyards, and other crop operations, satellite navigation alone becomes increasingly unreliable. Dense tree canopies can block and attenuate GPS signals; branches and leaves create multipath reflections; and satellite visibility changes continuously as vehicles move through the rows. The result is inconsistent positioning precisely where autonomous machines must operate with the greatest precision.

For engineers developing autonomous agricultural equipment, maintaining accurate localization during periods of degraded GPS has become one of the industry’s most significant technical challenges.

The hidden challenge of tree canopies

Unlike row crops, orchards present a constantly changing navigation environment.

Vehicles repeatedly transition between open sky and dense canopy. GPS receivers may temporarily lose satellites or receive reflected signals instead of direct ones while traversing through the canopy. Even when the receiver maintains a position fix, accuracy can deteriorate significantly.

These errors quickly affect autonomous operation.

A tractor may slowly drift toward an adjacent row. A sprayer can apply chemicals outside the intended area or miss sections entirely. A robotic mower may require operator intervention after losing its planned trajectory. For UAVs performing inspection or precision spraying missions, degraded positioning can reduce mapping accuracy, compromise flight stability, and result in uneven or incomplete spray coverage.

Because these interruptions occur frequently—but not continuously—they are particularly difficult to manage. Autonomous systems must seamlessly maintain localization while GPS quality fluctuates throughout the mission.

Why sensor fusion matters

Modern autonomous platforms rarely depend on GPS alone. Instead, they combine information from multiple sensors, including cameras, LiDAR, radar, wheel odometry, and inertial measurement units (IMUs). Software continuously fuses these measurements into a single estimate of the vehicle’s position and orientation.

Among these sensors, the IMU plays a unique role because it measures motion directly. Accelerometers measure linear acceleration while gyroscopes measure angular rotation, allowing the navigation system to estimate vehicle movement regardless of external infrastructure.

When GPS becomes unreliable, the inertial system effectively bridges the gap until the satellite signal and positioning recover. The quality of that bridge, however, depends almost entirely on the quality of the inertial sensors themselves.

Not all IMUs perform the same

Most commercial agricultural equipment relies on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based IMUs because they are compact and relatively inexpensive. These sensors work well for many applications but are very sensitive to temperature, vibration, and electromagnetic interference (EMI). They also do not work under various environments and gradually accumulate bias errors that grow over time.

During a brief GPS interruption, the accumulated error may be negligible.

During longer outages beneath dense tree canopy, however, heading errors begin translating directly into position errors. As the vehicle continues moving, localization drift increases until GPS becomes available again.

Historically, engineers solved this problem using fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) or ring laser gyroscopes. While highly accurate and insensitive to temperature, vibration, and EMI, FOG-based solutions are generally too large, expensive, and power-hungry for widespread deployment into commercial and agricultural applications.

Recent advances in silicon photonics are beginning to change that tradeoff by making optical gyroscope technology available in much smaller and more practical form factors.

Optical navigation moves into agriculture

One example is Anello Photonics’ silicon photonic optical gyroscope (SiPhOG), which integrates optical gyroscope technology using silicon photonics manufacturing techniques. The technology delivers significantly improved heading stability compared with conventional MEMS-only solutions while remaining compact enough for commercial autonomous platforms.

SiPhOG technology, integrated into the Anello Ground INS system, delivers improved heading stability while meeting the size requirements of autonomous platforms. (Source: Anello Photonics)

Rather than replacing GPS, systems such as the Anello Ground INS combine optical inertial sensing with dual RTK-capable GNSS receivers and advanced sensor fusion. The inertial system maintains accurate motion estimates while GPS measurements fluctuate, allowing navigation performance to remain stable through temporary signal degradation.

The value of this approach becomes especially apparent in orchards.

In field testing conducted in a commercial walnut orchard near Fresno, California, an autonomous ground vehicle equipped with the Anello Ground INS operated beneath dense tree canopy, where satellite visibility was significantly reduced. While a conventional GPS-based navigation solution drifted often by more than 5 meters during the passage through the canopy, the Anello Ground INS maintained sub-half-meter positioning throughout the test.

Although performance always depends on operating conditions and vehicle integration, the demonstration illustrates how improving inertial heading directly improves overall localization when GPS quality deteriorates.

Performance of autonomous ground vehicle navigating beneath dense walnut orchard canopy using the Anello Ground INS. (Source: Anello Photonics)

The same challenge exists in the air

Ground vehicles are not the only agricultural platforms facing degraded GPS. UAVs performing crop scouting, precision spraying, multispectral imaging, and field mapping frequently operate at low altitude near trees, where satellite visibility can also become inconsistent. For these applications, high-quality inertial sensing contributes not only to navigation accuracy but also to flight stability.

For example, the Anello X3 IMU applies the same SiPhOG technology in a compact IMU designed for UAVs and other autonomous aerial systems. By providing more stable inertial measurements during temporary GPS degradation, the X3 supports reliable flight control and more consistent navigation in challenging agricultural environments. Learn more about the benefits of inertial technology for precision agriculture here.

Looking beyond GPS

Agricultural autonomy will continue to rely on GNSS, and RTK will remain an essential component of precision farming. However, as autonomous machines move beyond open fields into orchards, vineyards, forests, and other GPS-challenged environments, satellite positioning alone is no longer sufficient.

The future of autonomous agriculture will depend on resilient sensor fusion architectures that combine GNSS with increasingly capable inertial technologies. Advances in integrated silicon photonics, enabling new, small, integrated optical gyroscopes, are making navigation performance once reserved for high-end aerospace systems accessible to the commercial agricultural market.

While GPS has transformed precision agriculture, the next leap forward will be driven by technologies that enable autonomous machines to operate reliably when satellite signals are degraded or unavailable. As resilient inertial navigation becomes an integral part of modern sensor fusion architectures, autonomous tractors, robotic implements, and UAVs will deliver greater accuracy, reliability, and operational confidence, bringing agriculture one step closer to true, all-condition autonomy.

The post Why autonomous agriculture needs inertial navigation appeared first on EDN.

As OEMs in high-reliability industries, including automotive, industrial, and military/aerospace, move to next-generation designs, they are looking for interconnects that not only offer high reliability and ruggedness but also greater design flexibility and miniaturization. The availability of more product options and easier integration and installation are also key requirements.

The combination of greater flexibility and miniaturization is delivering space and cost savings across rugged designs while supporting next-generation systems, such as vehicle platforms that are packing more and more electronic components into space-constrained devices.

Here is a selection of connectors and cable assemblies introduced over the past year that meet the right balance of features for these application trends. These include software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and zonal electronic/electrical (E/E) architectures; next-generation military/aerospace systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); and industrial automation systems that need greater flexibility and adaptability.

Automotive connectors and cables

Molex recently expanded its HSAutoLink interconnect portfolio with the launch of the HSAutoLink G, comprised of terminals, connectors, PCB headers, and cables. It joins the existing rugged, high-speed HSAutoLink, HSAutoLink II, and HSAutoLink C families.

The connector system provides multi-gigabit Ethernet connections of up to 25 Gbits/s in a compact, USCAR-compatible interface, making it suited to address rising bandwidth demands driven by advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), radar, LiDAR, zonal architecture, immersive displays, and central compute modules.

By extending support with Ethernet connections up to 25 Gbits/s, these interconnects can meet the high bandwidth requirements in SDVs and autonomous mobility platforms, Molex said.

Fitting within existing USCAR Ethernet interfaces, the HSAutoLink G enables future-proof product designs that reduce space and weight in compact modules while streamlining system integration and upgrades. Key features include advanced electromagnetic-interference (EMI) shielding and controlled differential impedance to maintain signal integrity for high-speed communications in dense environments. This helps prevent signal failures, validation delays, and costly design changes, the company said.

Other features include an anti-stubbing design that protects the contacts during the mating process to reduce the risk of mis-mating, as well as the addition of multiple, uniform ground-contact points to enhance EMI suppression for higher reliability.

Molex’s HSAutoLink G automotive Ethernet connector system (Source: Molex)

As automakers shift to SDVs and zonal E/E architectures, TE Connectivity (TE) has introduced a portfolio of interconnects for automotive electronic control units (ECUs). The Inside Device Connectivity portfolio is designed to support the next generation of vehicle platforms. The purpose-built portfolio includes board-to-board, wire-to-board, flex-to-board, and wire-to-wire connector solutions for compact, high-performance applications.

The Inside Device Connectivity portfolio is tailored to the specific needs of SDVs, enabling scalable and standardized connector configurations while reducing weight, packaging space, and integration complexity, TE said.

At the same time, these interconnects are optimized for EMI-sensitive and vibration-intensive environments with high misalignment tolerance and ruggedness against vibration, contamination, temperature shifts, and humidity. Other features include current capacity up to 45 A for wire-to-board and up to 18 A for board-to-board; a pitch of 0.4 mm to 10.16 mm with up to 180 pins; and crimp, IDC, and mass terminations.

These connectors target different application areas in an SDV, including ECUs, power conversion (on-board charger inverters and DC/DC converters), battery systems (battery, cell module controller, and battery management system), high-performance computers, ADAS (radar and LiDAR), and black-box systems (such as lighting).

TE’s Inside Device Connectivity portfolio (Source: TE Connectivity)

Interconnects for military, aerospace, and UAVs

Samtec Inc. recently expanded its SMPM cable-to-board precision RF connector family with small-form-factor threaded cable-to-board-mated sets, targeting high-vibration environments. Suited for applications such as military, aerospace, and communication applications, the connector assemblies feature a threaded SMPM MIL-STD-348 interface with a retractable threaded coupling nut.

High-vibration environments can exceed the retention capabilities of traditional push-on RF interconnects, Samtec explained, requiring a more secure and robust connection.

The threaded SMPM cable-to-board-mated connector sets—including the RF047-A and RF086 millimeter-wave, low-loss cable assembly families handling up to 67 GHz, as well as the SMPMT threaded, SMPM millimeter-wave board-mount plugs available up to 60 GHz—are designed with enhanced mechanical strength. They feature full detent or smooth bore for varying retention forces and offer mixed technology board termination, which provides resistance to mechanical stress and supports high frequency.

The RF047-A is a 0.047-inch, low-loss, flexible microwave cable assembly (29 AWG) with an extremely small bend radius of 3.18 mm. The RF086 is a 0.086-inch, low-loss, flexible cable (23 AWG) with a bend radius of 8.9 mm. Both operate up to 125°C. A variety of end options are available for application-specific customization.

These precision RF connectors are available from stock. The RF047-A cable assembly and SMPMT threaded plugs are part of the Samtec Reserve program with one-day shipment.

Samtec’s threaded SMPM cable-to-board-mated connector sets (Source: Samtec Inc.)

For avionics and UAVs, Times Microwave Systems launched its Levitate cable assembly line for both military and commercial RF systems. Designed for efficiency, weight savings, and electrical performance, these ultra-lightweight cable assemblies with minimal loss are suited for avionics applications across UAV Groups 1 through 5.

Times Microwave Systems claims that the Levitate assemblies provide the lightest weight per unit of loss available on the market today, enabling engineers to reduce overall system mass without compromising RF performance. They cover a range of airborne applications, including flight control, communications, and surveillance.

Providing a balance between cost, performance, and availability, the Levitate cable assembly is available in multiple sizes, including the LVT047, LVT086, LVT141, LVT157, and LVT196. All assemblies are engineered for dual use in military and commercial RF systems. The flexible construction of the LVT047, LVT086, and LVT141 assemblies is suited for in-the-box applications, and the ultra-lightweight LVT157 and LVT196 support critical RF runs connecting antennas to LRUs.

Times Microwave Systems’ Levitate cable assembly line (Source: Times Microwave Systems)

Connectors for industrial automation

Aimed at delivering greater design flexibility and simplicity, binder USA LP, a subsidiary of binder Group, recently announced a new generation of hybrid connectors for industrial automation. The B23 series combines power supply and shielded data transmission in one compact connector and enables Ethernet transmission rates of up to 100 Mbits/s.

The B23 connector is built for one-cable-automation concepts, addressing key market requirements that call for a reduced cabling effort and increased data rates in industrial systems. This simplifies integration and system architectures.

The hybrid connector reduces cabling effort by enabling power and communication via a single interface, which also reduces installation times and potential sources of error, binder said. One example cited is drive technology, in which servo motors and drive systems can be connected with just one cable. It can also be used in modular machine and plant architectures, as well as robotics and flexible manufacturing systems.

The B23 connector also targets the trend toward decentralized automation that requires rugged, pluggable connections and a high degree of protection. Key specs include power transmission up to 28 A at up to 630 V and shielded Ethernet/EtherCAT (according to Cat 5) data transmission up to 100 Mbits/s. Other features include a bayonet quick-locking system for secure connections, screw-clamp termination for field use, and IEC 61076-2-118 standardization.

Meeting both field and device integration requirements, the B23 is available in a field-attachable version and as a panel-mount connector for device installation. Versions with single-wire termination and THT contacts are available.

Binder’s B23 connector (Source: binder USA LP)

Hirose Electric Co. Ltd. expanded its high-density BGA mezzanine connector portfolio with a COM-HPC standard-compatible version that supports PCIe Gen5 (32 GT/s), Gen6 (64 GT/s PAM4), and 100-Gb Ethernet (4 × 25 Gb). The IT18 Series can be used in industrial automation, medical imaging, and T&M equipment.

The BGA mezzanine connector features an ultra-high-density pin count of 400 positions in a 0.635-mm pitch, delivering high-speed transmission in a low profile. Stacking heights include 5 mm and 10 mm. It also features high crosstalk suppression, including far-end-crosstalk cancellation technology.

The open-field design (open pin-field grid array) of the connector is adaptable to various layouts, allowing for greater flexibility across different applications. Because pins are not locked into a fixed pattern, customers can route signals, grounds, and power to improve density and performance, which also helps with signal-integrity optimization, Hirose said.

Featuring a rugged design, the IT18 Series connector uses a metal cap to reduce warpage and protect contacts from flux. The cap minimizes reflow defects by suppressing deformation during heating and protecting against foreign particles in the environment, the company said. Other key features include a large guide to ensure proper mating and retention tabs that prevent cracks in solder balls.

Hirose’s IT18 Series BGA mezzanine connector (Source: Hirose Electric Co. Ltd.)

The post Optimize hi-rel designs with rugged, flexible interconnects appeared first on EDN.

Full-featured, high-priced products address many users’ needs. But free and low-cost options, sometimes for augmentation purposes, other times operating standalone, also have their place.

As regular readers may already have noticed, I regularly embed FCC certification IDs in my teardowns and other writeups, complete with links to the associated FCC website pages for additional documentation, images, and other information on the products I’m discussing. Long ago, so far in the past that I no longer remember where and when, I came across someone else (iFixit, mebbe?) who was using shortcut URLs of the following format instead of fuller URLs:

http://www.fcc.io/INSERT_FCC_CERTIFICATION_ID

You can tell how old the service is by the fact that it still works using the non-secure version of HTTP. In fact, for a long time, my potentially faulty recollection is that the “https” version of the URL didn’t work at all, although I just checked and it’s now supported, too.

I long assumed this shortcut interstitial URL service was run by the FCC itself. However, motivated by curiosity one day, I entered http://www.fcc.io standalone in my web browser. Here’s what I found on the home page:

FCC.io

What?

A simple search and URL shortener for FCC ID queries.

Why?

I can never find the search form on the FCC site, so fcc.io should be easy enough to remember. Fcc.io provides a way to share FCC ID searches with other people via links, email, IRC, or IM.

How?

The URL scheme is simple:

• https://fcc.io/”FCC ID”

Try these:

• https://fcc.io/NPI
• https://fcc.io/NPI71646
• https://fcc.io/grantee/lego

To-do

Other search suggestions?

Email to dominicgs@gmail.com

Disclaimer

Neither this site, nor its author, are affiliated with the FCC in any way.

Running on GitHub pages

Good for you, dominicdgs@gmail.com (who appears to be Dominic Spill, formerly “next door” to me in Evergreen, CO per his Github page and now with Apple in Cupertino, CA per LinkedIn)!

Another example, which I briefly introduced recently, are the open source FreeFileSync and related RealTimeSync utilities developed by the FreeFileSync project, and supporting Linux, MacOS and Windows systems alike. The ability to automatically backup or sync (the latter both uni- and bi-directionally) the contents of one or multiple directories to another storage device (a USB-C tethered RAID 1 external HDD array, in my case) became critical to my workflow when I added associate editor duties to my longstanding contributing editor relationship with EDN. The two-utility package has worked without a hitch in the two-plus months (as I write this) since I’ve installed them, and I anticipate further non-drama functionality in the future, too.

Per these and other examples to come, this post will therefore be a to-developer “love letter” regarding software packages and services that have become essential to me, and for personal and/or professional reasons. As you continue reading, think about what similar examples you can derive from your own life. You’ll have an opportunity to share them with us, too, at the end.

Enhanced text editors

MacOS comes bundled with the TextEdit graphical text editor, with others (Nano and Vim) also accessible via the Terminal command line. And if a beefier word processor is what you’re looking for, there’s always the also-gratis Pages. So why on earth would I pay $59.99 (new) or $29.99 (previous-version upgrade) for Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit? Check out this list of features. Or see what fellow fan John Gruber has to say about it, notably in a 30-year retrospective summary published four-plus years ago.

From my standpoint, the ability to automatically re-open one-to-multiple tabs’ worth of content, regardless of whether it’s/they’ve been saved recently (or at all, for that matter), after program shutdowns and restarts and even full operating system reboots, and as long as I haven’t manually closed a tab, is by itself worth the price tag. It’s “saved my bacon” on innumerable occasions.

If you’d like a free “taste” of the full-featured version, a 30-day evaluation time period is supported. And “Free Mode”, the successor to the original freeware TextWrangler software from the same company, will extend the gratis party to eternity if you don’t need access to any of the program’s paid-only capabilities.

What about Windows? Here the seemingly most common enhancement to the bundled graphical Notepad and command line Microsoft Edit editors is Notepad++ (Github link), which is free and open source (not to mention 20+ years old!). Its primary developer is Don Ho; another set of developers led by Andrey Letov recently ported it to MacOS while initially retaining the original name (and notably, without getting Ho’s permission first) and was subsequently compelled by both legal threats and broader community outrage to rename it to Nextpad++ (again, Github link).

And Linux? The already-bundled text editors are generally more robust in this case, befitting this operating system’s comparative “power user” community, but a diversity of add-on options unsurprisingly also exists. Linux users out there, I welcome your suggestions in the comments!

Networked TV services

Windows 7 reached End of Life (EOL) and officially lost extended support on January 14, 2020. Windows 8.1 followed it out the door on January 10, 2023. With them went official support for Media Center, a Microsoft-developed digital video recorder and media player application that first appeared within a special-purpose Windows XP edition in 2005.

I’ve been running various versions of Media Center since the very beginning, initially to ingest broadcast television coming over NTSC and (later) ATSC antenna feeds, later transitioning to cable television feeds in conjunction with a networked CableCARD receiver, and for subsequent display on televisions in conjunction with both Xbox game consoles and standalone Media Center Extender devices.

And I’ve continued doing so even though, as previously noted, the operating system foundations are no longer supported, not to mention the fact that the service’s built-in electronic program guide was discontinued on January 14, 2020. How? The alternative program guide data I’m tapping into is SchedulesDirect, a non-profit “community” (with, as far as know, exactly one active developer employee) and a $35 yearly membership fee.

And how do I get the SchedulesDirect-sourced data into Media Center? That’s where EPG123 (GitHub link), another one-person development project, comes in. Gary An has worked tirelessly for the past decade-plus (ever since Microsoft switched from Zap2it to Rovi as its guide data provider, even prior to shutting down its EPG service entirely) to create and maintain EPG123, fixing bugs, responding to SchedulesDirect service evolutions, and the like.

He’s also a regular support presence on the community forum at The Green Button website. And while he’s happy to accept donations, he doesn’t charge a penny for his software. Bless you, Gary!

An essential email add-on

Mozilla’s Thunderbird has been my personal email client of choice for nearing two decades now (just as the organization’s Firefox browser is for web access…and SeaMonkey is for HTML editing…), and I access email via POP3 so that I can exclusively retain an archive locally. So, you can probably imagine how voluminous my Thunderbird database is at this point. Everything’s (fairly) neatly organized into per-topic folders, mind you, but there are probably thousands of them at this point, in a multi-email account (plus RSS) and multi-level nested arrangement.

That’s why I heavily rely on an add-on called Nostalgy (GitHub link), which enables me to move (or copy) incoming emails from my inbox to a desired target folder, and more broadly from any source folder to another, using only convenient keystrokes. Why Nostalgy hasn’t been adopted by and natively included in Thunderbird by this point is baffling to me, both because of its inherent benefits and because the constant changes to the email client’s database structure and other factors make maintaining it a headache for a third-party developer alternative.

Speaking of which, the add-on was originally developed and maintained by Alain Frisch. Source code maintenance and enhancement duties were later taken up by Klaus Buecher, who renamed it Nostalgy++. It’s an oft-thankless task, as I gather from the commentary that accompanies both new-release notes and periodic requests for donations. But to that point, and as with EPG123, fiscal compensation is voluntary, not obligatory. Long may you continue to code, Klaus, and thank you for your software service!

Squashing a longstanding File Explorer bug

This last one’s a doozy. For decades now, through innumerable version updates small and large alike, Windows has proven itself incapable of permanently retaining user-requested changes to File Manager settings, either folder-specific or all-encompassing, and related to both file sorting and content display strategies.

I might, for example (and regularly do, in fact) tell it that I no longer want it to cluster together chronologically similar groups of files within a folder, instead displaying them solely in a basic alphabetized list format, and to more globally revise this particular setting. Or to tone down the displayed thumbnail size in image-related folders.

The requested changes “stick”…as long as I don’t move to a different folder, that is. Maybe, in fact, they remain as I’d previously requested the next time (or, pushing my luck, few times) I return to that folder. But usually, they immediately revert to defaults. And my random likelihood of ongoing settings-change-sticking success is even less if I quit and then re-open File Explorer, not to mention after a system reboot. Sooner or later, Microsoft insists that its default way is best.

Back in March, the company finally publicly acknowledged the problem (along with plenty of others) and promised that remedies were on the way. I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m not going to wait. I’d already found, and happily am still using, an independently developed “fix” for these and other File Explorer quirks called WinSetView:

WinSetView provides an easy way to set Windows File Explorer default folder views. For example, if you want Details view, with a particular selection of column headings enabled across all folders, then WinSetView will do that for you.

For more details, please see the extended summary.

WinSetView is open source. It’s inobtrusive, either running portably or fully installed. It does what it promises, nothing more or less, and changes are easily reversible. And it’s free. Kudos to you, developers LesFerch and Thysbelon. You’ve enabled me to (arguably) cling to my sanity.

Now it’s your turn

These are all just examples, apparently particularly notable ones, because they’ve risen to the top of the list brainstormed and assembled in, and subsequently coming out of, my noggin. I’m confident that the catalog as it currently exists isn’t comprehensive, for me (I may think of and add one-to-a-few more entries before this piece is published, in fact) and certainly more globally. Which is where you come in.

What software and services, specifically focused in function and freeware-or-low cost, have you come across that help simplify your life? Share your thoughts in the comments, please, for both your own resultant fame and others’ consideration, adoption and benefit. Thanks!

—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.

Related Content

• De-commingling (?) LAN equipment: It’s all in what you call it
• Open Source: Keep It Current Or Suffer The Consequences
• Open source: not always a successful course

The post Unsung software and services heroes ease our days appeared first on EDN.

Here’s a question your grandfather could have answered: Would you rather have a million dollars today or a penny that doubles every day for a month? Most people take the million. The penny reaches $5 million by day 30.

Human intuition is simply bad at exponential math. We think in straight lines, and compounding curves surprise us every time. Now run that intuition in reverse.

An AI coding agent that’s right 98% of the time sounds impressive. And 98% is a generous assumption, probably better than reality for most tasks. But apply that accuracy across 34 steps with no verification in the loop, and you’ve crossed the coin-flip line. More likely wrong than right. The math is 0.98^34 = 0.505.

The surprise is the same one your grandfather felt. And in a safety-critical development environment, the consequences are not a missed investment opportunity.

Sophisticated agentic systems don’t run open-loop. They compile, test, lint, and self-verify at each step, and the public record shows it works.

Andreas Kling ported Ladybird’s LibJS engine from C++ to Rust using AI agents across hundreds of human-directed prompts, producing 25,000 lines of Rust with zero regressions across 65,359 tests and byte-for-byte identical bytecode output. The human was in the loop at every decision point, which is precisely why it worked.

The Bun JavaScript runtime went further. AI Weekly highlighted that Claude agents rewrote roughly one million lines of Zig to Rust autonomously across 6,755 commits, passing 99.8% of its existing test suite. It also left 13,044 unsafe Rust blocks, where a comparable handwritten project would have 73. A passing test suite doesn’t surface this safety debt—it stops a safety-critical certification in its tracks.

Both of these projects succeeded because verification ran inside the loop at every step. They also illustrate exactly where the limits are. In most software development contexts, the floor is an efficiency problem. Verification catches it, the agent retries, and the process converges. Expensive in tokens and time, but recoverable.

In safety-critical development, the calculus is different. This is where functional correctness testing and safety-critical qualification part ways. Bun passed its own test suite. Ladybird produced byte-for-byte identical bytecode. Those are impressive results. But they are not safety cases. ISO 26262, DO-178C, and IEC 62304 don’t recognize self-generated test results as qualified verification evidence.

Your braking system software doesn’t get partial credit for passing tests it wrote for itself. Your insulin pump firmware isn’t certified on a curve. The standards assume deterministic tools producing verifiable evidence—qualified tools, documented configurations, and traceable outputs. An agentic workflow that self-verifies is better than one that doesn’t. But in safety-critical development, it still isn’t enough.

What safety-critical compliance actually requires isn’t vague.

ISO 26262 mandates a documented safety plan, requirements with bidirectional traceability from hazard analysis through to verified implementation, and evidence that coding guidelines—typically MISRA C or CERT C—were enforced by a qualified tool using a qualified configuration.

DO-178C adds structural coverage requirements. At the highest criticality levels, every statement, every branch, and every condition and its complement must be exercised by tests that are themselves traced to requirements.

IEC 62304 requires a software development lifecycle with documented verification activities at each phase. In every case, the evidence must be generated as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterward—and not self-certified by the tool that produced the artifact being evaluated.

The open-loop pipeline isn’t an edge case; it’s what every team promises to fix after the next release. A requirements review is handed to a code generator, a documentation tool, and a traceability updater with testing saved for the end. That’s not an agentic worst case. That’s a pipeline. At 98% per-step accuracy across 34 stages, you’ve crossed the coin-flip line before you’ve run a single test.

The answer isn’t a better model. It’s the same answer safety-critical engineers have always given to unreliable processes. You don’t improve your way to acceptable; you gate your way there.

Static analysis enforces expected coding patterns and flags dangerous anti-patterns like uninitialized memory, undefined behavior, and violations of MISRA or CERT rules that exist precisely because they’ve caused failures before.

Unit tests verify that individual components behave as specified under known conditions. And coverage in safety-critical development isn’t a spot-checking exercise. DO-178C requires 100% MC/DC coverage at DAL A, and ISO 26262 requires the same at ASIL D. Every line. Every branch. Every condition.

Each gate resets the accumulated uncertainty back toward zero before the next stage compounds it further. That’s not a new idea. It’s how you build software that people’s lives depend on.

The question AI raises isn’t whether to use gates. It’s whether the gates you already have are positioned to catch what an AI agent introduces and whether you’ve thought carefully about where in the workflow the uncertainty is actually accumulating.

The gates were designed for a world where code has an author who made deliberate choices. A human developer who writes an uninitialized variable made a mistake. A human developer who skips a boundary check made a tradeoff. Static analysis flags both—the developer understands the finding in context, and the correction is made by someone who knows what the code is supposed to do. The evidence trail is intact. The intent is recoverable.

An AI agent doesn’t make mistakes in that sense. It produces outputs that are statistically consistent with its training: plausible, often correct, and occasionally wrong in ways that look right.

The static analysis tool will still flag the MISRA violation. The unit test will still fail on the boundary condition. But the developer reviewing the finding is now one step removed from the original intent because there wasn’t original intent in the human sense. There was a probability distribution. And when you ask the agent why it made that choice, the answer is not recoverable in any form a certification auditor can use.

The gates catch the artifact. They don’t reconstruct the argument. In a safety case, you need both, and one of them must have been generated as the decisions were made, not reverse engineered from the output afterward.

The consumer technology press calls it “hallucination,” which means the AI confidently states something wrong. This term captures the symptom, but not the mechanism.

In safety-critical engineering the mechanism is what matters. ISO/PAS 8800, the emerging automotive standard for AI safety that the broader embedded industry is watching closely as a template, uses the term “functional insufficiency”: an unexpected error under specific conditions not adequately represented during development. As EDN noted, for engineers building software for medical devices, industrial automation, rail, aerospace, and defense, dismissing this document as “just for cars” would be a missed opportunity.

The distinction matters. Hallucination implies the system invented something from nothing. Functional insufficiency describes something more precise. The system performed exactly as its training data suggested it should, and the training data didn’t cover this case.

You can’t fix a hallucination by improving the model. You can’t fix a functional insufficiency that way either. What you can do is bound it, monitor it, and build an architecture that prevents it from propagating into a safety-critical decision unchecked.

None of this is an argument against AI in safety-critical development. These industries already have the architectural foundations to manage it responsibly. That argument is already lost, and it should be. AI tools are accelerating development, surfacing defects earlier, and handling the kind of repetitive verification work that exhausts engineers and introduces its own error rate.

The question was never whether AI would enter these industries. It’s here. The question is whether the engineering discipline surrounding it will keep pace.

Compound uncertainty doesn’t care about your intentions or your vendor’s benchmark scores. A 98% accurate agent in a 34-step open-loop workflow has already crossed the coin-flip line. Those numbers don’t improve because the use case is important or the schedule is tight.

Compound uncertainty in multi-step workflows. Even with 95% per-step accuracy, overall success rate declines sharply as the number of workflow steps (N) increases—not because model performance degrades, but because the workflow itself compounds error. Source: Parasoft

What does improve the outcome is treating AI in safety-critical development the way these industries have always treated unreliable components: with gates, evidence, and documented reasoning that survives an audit.

The standards that govern medical devices, aviation software, and automotive systems were written for a deterministic world. But the principles they encode—rigorous verification, traceable decisions, complete coverage, and structured safety arguments—turn out to be exactly the right response to a world where probabilistic behavior slipped into the development process before anyone checked its credentials.

ISO/PAS 8800 is the automotive industry’s first formal attempt to extend those principles into AI-specific territory. Other domains are watching. The framework outlined in the embedded world—manage uncertainty, bound it, argue it, and monitor it—applies whether you’re building firmware for a ventilator or a flight control system or an autonomous vehicle.

You will never eliminate functional insufficiency from an AI system. However, you can build an architecture that catches it before it becomes a safety event. That’s not a limitation of technology. It’s just engineering.

Arthur Hicken is a senior software evangelist at Parasoft.

Ricardo Camacho is director of product strategy for embedded and safety critical compliance at Parasoft.

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